Christopher Sorrentino - The Fugitives

Susannah and I began our affair shortly after her husband, a director, started running the undergraduate theater arts program at a small college in Vermont. One day I was receiving a mass e-mail from these two acquaintances, this solid couple, announcing the move as the newest phase of their lives together and seeking to sublet their Union Street apartment; the next, it seemed, I was fucking Susannah on their lumpy futon. She complained about the boring town adjacent to the rural campus, about the unfulfilling role of faculty wife, about how the move would thwart her own ambitions, about how it was time for her husband to carry the load for a while. Susannah was one of those intelligent and well-educated people who establish themselves at the place where art, fashion, and “lifestyle” have their vague intersection, and she had spent her career bouncing from one loosely (or closely, depending on your perspective) related field to another: from fashion merchandising, to sales, to editorial work at one of Condé Nast’s consumption-stimulus rags. The giant publisher had deposited her on the sidewalk that spring like last year’s swag, and Susannah had then met an agent who’d persuaded her — they’d persuaded each other, really — that if she could put together a good proposal for a memoir dealing with her time there they could earn a six-figure advance. This became her cover; the story was that Susannah had decided to remain in New York to “craft” this proposal; one of those forty-page fever dreams in which writers write about what they’ll be writing once someone pays them to write it. Each word must hang heavy from the lowest branches, ripe with the promise of money. But that wasn’t really the reason she’d stayed behind, she said.

“When did you decide you didn’t want to go?” I asked one afternoon in bed.

“It was after I went out there. Out there. I sound like it’s in Montana. It’s three hours’ drive. Super beautiful. But like a totally different planet. The students are all business majors who subscribe to The Wall Street Journal . They wear suits to class, for God’s sake. He’s expected to head the department and I was expected to be the department head’s wife. I just couldn’t.”

“But you were going to. You were going to sublet this place.”

“I just couldn’t.”

“Didn’t he get mad?”

“No. He was disappointed in me.”

“But you didn’t fight?”

“We didn’t fight.”

I didn’t bother to consider the possibility that I’d wandered onto a battlefield; that these two were interested primarily in damaging each other. It didn’t seem relevant that even a generous interpretation of the arrangement between them signified an approach to marriage to which I couldn’t have imagined reconciling my own sensibilities. I did conclude that the marriage was faltering because of some inherent flaw in Susannah’s husband’s makeup. He’d seemed like a stiff to me, frankly; always standing soberly to the side at parties with one eye on his watch, looking forward to leaving at a reasonable hour. Besides, even if he’d been the most wonderful and thoughtful husband, the most attentive and passionate of lovers, he would have been no match for me. Or so I convinced myself.

Reader, I was hooked. In retrospect, I can see all the understandable reasons why my marriage to Rae imperceptibly had grown fragile, why I would have been interested in pursuing an affair with Susannah, and why she would have returned my interest. We deserved each other. Certainly Rae didn’t deserve me. Even Susannah’s husband didn’t deserve me, though I think the affair struck him as immoderate more than anything else. What I can’t understand, even now, is the brutal and irreversible course things took. It would have been within my means to have left Rae; found my own apartment and begun my affair as a single man. Alternatively, I could have concealed my rapturous afternoons from her, taking care to isolate them from my emotional life. Instead, Susannah and I quickly fucked each other into that ecstatic, hallucinatory state in which we equated separation from each other with illness and being together with health. After making the diagnosis, I delivered the bad news to Rae, and then abruptly effected the cure. I ran to my lover.

HOW WELL CANwe know someone? is the question of the day. A worthy preoccupation. Each of my books considered questions of identity — its formation, its instability, its highly contingent state — but they were the happy abstractions of someone who took tremendous satisfaction in knowing what he could expect from his life and from the people sharing it. Live like a bourgeois so that you can be violent and original in your work: how many writers who find themselves choosing among brands of organic milk at the supermarket or mopping the hardwood floors grab ahold of that remark with all the figurative violence Flaubert intended? And I’d liked living like one. Stacking cans in the cupboard, watching manuscript pages accumulate. Clean towels for the kids to dry themselves, clean sheets for them to slip between, a story or two, and then lights out and back to reading and taking notes on a canary pad while Rae finished up the work she’d brought home or watched a movie on TV. Who needed the mannered chaos of “bohemia” when I had the output of my mind at its most focused and creative to show me again and again each day exactly who I uniquely was? Nothing like those twenty or forty or sixty lines each day, there to be refined, scraped out, rearranged, admired, tossed: no stamp in a passport, no photo in an album, no souvenir on a shelf, no notch on a bedpost that resonated with the same satisfying sense of having done, that preserved and carried forward the strain of life that went into having done it. The rest of existence was satisfying because it permitted me to do this in peace, without ambiguity or uncertainty: that was all on the page, where it belonged.

About Susannah, my beliefs were exactly the same as those magical ones I’d first formed about another human being when I was seventeen and the sun shone right out of the eyes of my beloved. But we are no longer high schoolers, casually blowing other people’s egos to pieces. As damaging or cruel as teenagers can be, the extent of the destruction is sharply limited by context. When we wake up each morning snug in a room in our parents’ house, we don’t hold one another’s lives in our hands. By the time we’re ready to take a crack at really fucking things up, we hope to have handy some experience — experience and judgment. I had them, I just chose not to draw on them. With everything at stake, I drew instead on a revival of the same magic faith I’d placed in Loralynn Bonacum during the summer between eleventh and twelfth grade.

What did that renewed faith get me? I’d been attracted to a self-possessed, ambitious, witty, well-put-together, sociable woman who didn’t bear the taint (as I probably saw it) of years of domestic stasis. As long as the cat was snoozing in the bag, I basked in my discernment, but then the beast was out, and Susannah began shedding her composure. At first I thought, Why not? There’s nothing in this situation to encourage calm. People who had next to nothing to do with our lives went completely apeshit, as if they themselves had been betrayed; they became filled with the persecuting spirit that has always drawn upon the wanting morals of the impious and the illicit for its fierce energy in this country. It overtook them as easily as lust had overtaken me. Who knew? Writers and artists, editors and journalists, knowing and sophisticated, clusterfucking away in whatever passed for literary New York, and I might as well have been living in Winesburg as imagined by Hawthorne. Welcome again, my children, to the communion of your race. It was the biggest party of the season. Did I get Crazy Artist credits? Not after crucifying myself on Flaubert’s Dictum for all those years, I didn’t. You’d think after Burroughs had put a bullet through his wife’s head, after Mailer had stabbed his, after Carl Andre had shoved his out the window, I’d catch a break, but Flaubert and I were expected decorously to keep our pricks in our pants.