Christopher Sorrentino - The Fugitives

Dr. Heinz’s prescription involved rigid accounting, argument and rebuttal restricted to narrowly drawn subjects and constrained by inflexible time limitations. He directed us to extend this metered form of interchange beyond his office, urging us to trump spontaneity by actually scheduling these arguments, no less frequently than three times a week, to take place at appointed, mutually convenient times.

I felt — well, what I said to Rae one afternoon as we walked from his office to the subway was “It would be more constructive if he told us to fuck every other day.” She smiled at me sadly, and took my hand in hers. “You should tell Dr. Heinz that,” she said, in perfect seriousness.

I nodded: of course we would need his permission. Susannah was supposed to have been my break for the open space beyond the everyday; now I felt — reflexively, and without Heinz ever having suggested such a thing — that I required approval for the smallest and most personal decisions. In the white light of disclosure, I believed that I didn’t care what other people thought. But it had turned out they thought so many things about my affair, about my marriage, about me; and in the end I had cared, and after Susannah and I disintegrated I returned to a marriage that had become public property.

Despite my doubts about Heinz’s strategy — his demands that we become conditioned to behaving in a way remote from our instincts; that we pretend to be angry when we weren’t, and pretend not to be angry when we were; that we behave with restraint when we wanted to scream, and that we confront each other when all was tranquil — it actually wasn’t a stupid plan. I don’t consider myself a man who yields automatically to convention, but I stop at the crosswalk when the light is red. If there’s any greater exhibit of the malleability of human nature than the sight of someone standing, absently waiting for the light to change at a deserted intersection, I don’t know what it is. Yet that someone never is run over. Heinz made a kind of sense.

Unfortunately, for all the sense made by his plan to teach us to talk reasonably to each other, the only person I thought about making it work with was Susannah, with whom I’d been disastrously unable to discuss anything of significance and with whom I could now discuss nothing at all. I kept it to myself: Heinz had taken each of us aside during our first session to ask if either of us had any secrets from the other and I knew instantly that I would have to exempt thought-crimes from disclosure. My rehabilitation depended on the complete repudiation of Susannah. I knew, anyway, that Heinz didn’t want any complexifying confidences to deal with. “I don’t do breakup counseling,” he’d advised from the outset, like a lawyer who takes on only the cases that he can win. Rae had chosen him carefully. Everyone was pulling for us; now even our doctor was insisting that we had no choice but to be cured. And so I claimed to have left Susannah behind, reciting to myself, and to anyone who’d listen, all the good reasons why I couldn’t possibly love her. It’s a familiar ruse, a good idea, never entirely convincing. But it tortured me to erase e-mails and photos from my hard drive. I never got around to deleting her number from my cell phone. Plus the sheer physical difficulty of making people’s traces vanish as completely as they themselves have. Here’s this blue T-shirt that Susannah gave me. A stupid keychain that I’d bought in a stall on the Ponte Vecchio with her. A car rental receipt falling from between the pages of a Graham Greene novel. Make, Pontiac. Model, Grand Prix. Odometer out, 13,556 miles. Destination, some motel in Santa Barbara where I fucked Susannah day and night, getting her smell into my pores, her taste into my mouth. The book was The Power and the Glory . I actually finished it on that trip, though I have no idea when I made the time. I fucked her like I wanted to climb inside her. I fucked her like I wanted to smash through the atomic structures dividing us into two separate beings. I fucked her like tomorrow they were coming to flay me, eviscerate me, castrate me, and nail my genitals to a board in the town square. The power and the glory indeed. What was this response? Biochemistry? Obsession? I played along with Dr. Heinz when he suggested, with smug self-assurance, that strong bonds grew from mutual respect, mutual communication, mutual goals, mutual commitment to compromise. There he was, delivering the mission statement of the Working Families Party, and all I could think about was Susannah’s pussy: her pussy cradled in lace; her pussy framed inside the rectangle formed by garter belt, stocking tops, and garter belt fasteners; her pussy gaping and wet; her pussy when my face was pushed into it. I thought about the way her pussy felt when it was tightly gripping my cock and the way her pussy felt when I reached over the hump of her perfect ass to stick my fingers in it while she went down on me. I knew I couldn’t speak rationally about any of it. One reason for bodily taboos is simply to restrain people from trying to express themselves on subjects such as these. It would have been possible to form a cult of one around Susannah’s pussy, with all of a fringe theology’s gorgeous blind-alley symmetries. There will never be a utopia on earth as long as each of us may be transported to the heaven of our hidden manias. Susannah could have humiliated me in any way she wished, as long as she allowed me to venerate and adore her awesome erotic supremacy. Her mistake — or, rather, her strategy — was in withholding her dominance over me; allowing me to come to myself long enough to panic, and flee to Rae.

Heinz said that however it had ended, Susannah and I had been doomed to fail from the outset of the affair. I was happy to go along and agree that in the limited sense that he intended — the sense of two of us, Susannah and I, working shoulder to shoulder in furtherance of a common purpose, like partners in a well-run small business — he was certainly right. In the sense that he refused to acknowledge, the unassimilable combination of unending desire and perfect gratification that defined the whole thing, we had failed only in that the balanced suspension of the two was impossible to maintain, and its disintegration left me, unhappily, with only the desire.

I STAYED ATthe Holiday Inn while I looked for a place to live. I had a room with a view of the bay. The calm surface and moderate breeze attracted windsurfers and Sunfish in the shallows just off the narrow strand of beach, and, farther out, larger boats moved slowly through the blue water, or rocked gently at anchor. A postcard view, though this is the grittiest and least attractive part of the region. Grandview, the street fronting the bay, is lined with motels, gas stations, and drive-thru restaurants, and the area is, if not exactly seedy, a little shopworn. A half hour’s drive up into Manitou County will get you to places that are frequently described as unspoiled ; while they’re hardly that (the lakeshore and adjacent towns are tourist destinations, after all), they are beautiful, quiet, clean. I didn’t want the isolation of Manitou, though, or acres of wooded land looming at my back requiring me to be mindful of bears, hunters, and snowmobilers, and apart from the motel strip the town itself is very appealing.

The bungalow turned out to be easy to find. The owner lived in Grand Rapids, and the place had sat vacant for months, its rent slipping to a level at which I was able to believe that this was a larky and temporary adventure, rather than one of those anxiously groping relocations, a wandering through a maze of alternatives toward an imagined absence of pain.