Christopher Sorrentino - The Fugitives

These crises come to an end, though. The world turned and there was someone else’s misery to use as currency. The toxic aura faded, the sense of imminent entrapment that seemed to emanate from every encounter. Nobody was interested for long. Certainly I wasn’t. We had a new life to get on with, Susannah and I! What a perfect imbecile I was. It may as well have been only the month before that Loralynn Bonacum and I had sat in the park behind Town Hall and discussed the future. I’d gone inside and asked the town clerk about the rules for getting married — supercasual, as if I’d just happened by and, spotting her office, decided to put to rest some academic questions that had been on my mind. With gravely concealed amusement, she told me that with parental consent one could be married at sixteen. It was necessary to wait three days from the time of application. Blood tests were required. I took all this in and then answered her own questions, put to me without a trace of irony, about my plans for college. Then I hustled out to where Loralynn was waiting for me on a bench shaded by sycamores. We had it all figured out: I could keep my summer job at the Creamery and Loralynn could work at her dad’s law office. There were cheap apartments around. You could get a pretty good car for about five hundred bucks, and besides, we both had bikes. It would be a breeze. Turned out there was also the matter of giving Mark Egan a blow job (that special sacrament which, to my mind, had bound Loralynn and me to each other) for Loralynn to attend to, at a Labor Day pool party the next month — but who was thinking three weeks ahead when there was the vast abyss of life stretching before us to consider from where we sat under the spreading trees?

Evidently my way of thinking hadn’t evolved a whole lot in the intervening quarter century. I had plaques and medals. Sat on learned panels and talked about the future of the American sentence. Distinguished Visiting Writer at Columbia. I stood in front of people seeking advanced degrees and they wrote down what I said. All I’d added to my reasoning, though, was the perverse touch that allowed me to consider all my mature achievements — wife, kids, home, reputation — as evidence that I was making a rational decision, notwithstanding that I was going to chuck them aside in order to keep fucking Susannah, that voodoo drumming that was going to pound its magic right into the conjugal structure I was already yearning for.

Susannah didn’t want any conjugal structure, though. She’d mostly needed an accomplice to get rid of her husband. For years, Rae and I had soldiered on, vaguely dissatisfied with each other while never really questioning the basis of the arrangement to which we’d submitted, but the premise of marriage itself made Susannah feel trapped and panicky (she’d been married for less than a year when I first peeled off her clothes: something else I decided to chalk up to my own irresistibility). Vermont had just been the earliest manifestation of For Better or For Worse. And now here I was, asking her what time she thought she’d be home. The excitement in an illicit affair derives from the things that circumstances don’t permit: the pointed irony in seeing this familiar appendage in that banned orifice, in seeing the secret face, lit by orgasm, of someone else’s spouse, and knowing that you can’t hold hands in public, or eat breakfast together. Then suddenly it was one breakfast after another, unfailingly, every ho-hum day — and washing the breakfast dishes, and taking out the breakfast garbage, and grocery shopping to get more breakfast. And Susannah hadn’t even gotten a celebration out of it: no photos, no gifts, no gathering of loved ones, no toasts to her happiness. Just a lot of hokey sanctimony from people she’d enjoyed seeing around at parties, and me hemming her in with the same old domesticating shit. It bored her silly, and the very fact of me on her doorstep, proof that the worst things people were saying about her were true, drove her crazy: on some level, having kept those things secret meant that none of them could be true. Enormous flakes began to scale off her. The person beneath wasn’t around enough for me to realize at first that she had completely replaced the alluring sightseer who had joined me in trashing our lives like a pair of adjoining hotel rooms. This Susannah was forever going out for a couple of hours and then vanishing until late in the evening. This Susannah was obsessively secretive; could sit in silence for twenty minutes, composing the perfect noncommittal answer to a direct question. This Susannah viewed empathy as an attempt at one-upmanship, equated conflict with abuse. Every analytical instrument I had at my disposal as an intelligent and reasonably observant human being registered the same terrible potential, but as with the other Susannah, when this one removed her clothes, when I felt the warm pressure of her body against mine, I forgot everything. The implication of magic in the destruction of men stopped being the expression of a metaphor. What else could it have been but magic? I knew everything I needed to know and it didn’t matter. I understood everything I needed to understand and it didn’t matter.

One evening soon after the affair was disclosed, at the height of the bedlam, I found myself in Rae’s bedroom, in my old bedroom, in Rae’s and my old bedroom, looking in my old bureau for an old sweater that I could wear instead of the one that had been soaked with whiskey when Rae had thrown her drink at me. Even by the standards of that period it had been a bad night. Susannah was AWOL. In one of the bureau drawers I found Rae’s panties. They were women’s cotton briefs of the most workaday sort, faded and plain, white or in solid colors. Impulsively, I removed a pair from the drawer and held them up, noting how sturdy and thick the material was — light didn’t even penetrate. Panties to sit at the kitchen table and pay bills in, panties to wash a sinkful of dishes in, panties to shift uncomfortably on a hard auditorium seat at the PTA meeting in, panties to clean a house in, panties to build a house in; and I thought, with the thumb and forefinger of either hand hooked through the elastic waistband and pulling the fabric taut, that I surely had left my wife, my children, my home, and my belongings in order to trade these drab garments for a drawer full of lacy, diaphanous, dramatically cut lingerie. I could, in fact, after being dumped by Susannah, simply take her underwear as my severance. I could consult with it about my problems, I could ask its advice, I could wait, and wait, for it to declare its love for me, I could ask it to keep me company when I was lonely, I could relate to it all that had happened to me during the day, I could take it to dinner, to the movies, to parties, and afterward I could fuck it and then tightly hold it while I slept. Her underwear at least wouldn’t drive me nuts. Her underwear would never decide that it wanted to be returned to the shop where it had been bought, or that it needed to spend a week alone in the dresser thinking things over; her underwear would never disappear for hours at a time and then return home and without a word fling itself into the washing machine. Her underwear would never change its mind and decide that it would prefer to be cut more conservatively, or that what it really wanted was not to be underwear at all but a smock or blazer. Of all of life’s demands requiring the collaboration and support of a trusted and reliable partner, there were none that a drawer full of foundation garments couldn’t fulfill at least as well as Susannah could. It was a bitter and terrifying revelation.

N ABLESwas annoyed with her. His annoyance had a restraint to it that made it expansive, boundless. It became oceanic, tidally repetitive. If Kat had worked for a different man, she might have taken such patiently resolute irritation for a leadership technique picked up in some management seminar at the Marriott conference center, not a personality trait. He laboriously shored up the point he was making, shored it up in sonorous tones, shored it up until it was obscured behind the support he’d provided the argument. She listened to him while she drove from the rental car lot at the Cherry City airport. It did not ebb. It was like listening to a radio preacher.