CHAPTER 8

The following evening, Susan kissed her father good-bye at her mother’s bedside, then walked home to meet Chris, but he didn’t come. When he was almost two hours late, she considered giving him a call. She didn’t want to; it would come across as nagging. But when it was nearly 11:00 P.M., she called anyway, first trying his apartment, then, repeatedly, his cell phone, which he finally answered at midnight.

“I’m tied up. Not for another hour at least,” Chris said. He sounded tolerant, not at all apologetic. In fact, he sounded as though Susan had called with an unexpected and not very welcome invitation instead of questions about a broken date. This was the third time Chris had done this sort of thing.

Last week for his birthday, Susan, who was an excellent cook, had made a special dinner and given him two tickets to a Yankees game, which she tucked into a card with a note that made it clear she herself did not expect to accompany him. She knew he’d rather go with someone who really understood baseball and rooted for the Yankees. But Chris had not shown up for his birthday dinner, and Susan, Sylvie, and Alcott had had to eat it without him. Susan’s humiliation on this occasion was amplified by each compliment Sylvie and Alcott paid to one of the many tokens of special trouble, expense, and skill that appeared on Susan’s table, even though their appreciation was offered sensitively, in a cool, understated style. It pained Susan almost as much as their unfriendly opinion of Chris. She herself found it impossible to take what had happened at face value and refused to judge him harshly. Chris’s behavior was so appalling that she had to assume some mitigating circumstance—psychological or physical.

“This is just Chris being Chris,” she finally told Sylvie and Alcott, to forestall any expression of their almost tender sympathy, which she couldn’t help seeing despite their attempts to hide it. But this little speech—so nerdy and dumb, so gauche—made it only harder for them all to hang on to a civilized realism. For the rest of the evening, Susan laughed too much, smiled too politely, and never lost that horrible, wide-eyed, goofy-intellectual expression. By the time they left, Sylvie and Alcott were exhausted with the strain of pretending not to see through her.

When Susan saw Chris the following day, he didn’t apologize and showed no interest in the tickets—although she knew he was a fanatical fan and she had consulted experts who told her that this was an important game. On Sunday, he didn’t go to the game. He felt too lazy to go, he said on the phone, or to come uptown to see Susan.

“This sort of behavior,” she said, stiffly neutral, when several days later they sat down for an awkward talk, “is calculated to alienate. Wouldn’t it be more efficient just to tell me what you’re thinking? Why bother playing out all these scenes, these set pieces, and make me guess?”

That comment roused Chris from a resentful torpor. “Scenes? You mean like from a play, literally dramatizing? Instead of just telling you . . . That’s interesting. That’s what I like about you, Susan. You say things like that.” He had been exceptionally pleased with her, admiring even, and the threatening breach was healed. But now he’d done it again.

“Let’s cancel, then, Chris,” Susan said. “It’s late. I have an early class, and I want to visit my mother before that.”

“All right,” he said. “Whatever. I’m starting—” He clicked off in the middle of some final phrase that she couldn’t make out. She had noticed that people often did that at the end of cell phone conversations.

After they met in March, Chris pursued Susan for weeks. He invited her to dinners, movies, plays, and parties, but she often turned him down to spend time with her mother instead. Susan had had doubts about Chris. She was attracted to him but mistrustful, and she held something back even after they became lovers. Perceiving this and feeling frustrated and vulnerable, Chris courted her more urgently than ever—marveling that sexual intimacy hadn’t ended his interest, as it always had before. He inferred from his own behavior that he was more serious about her than he had ever been about a woman before. When he wasn’t with her, he called constantly, looking for reassurances that, finally, just before his birthday, she shyly offered and he eagerly received. But that very night, within half an hour of her confession of love, Chris began to back off. She knew that his indifference when she set up the birthday dinner had augured bad things.

Her father might be right that she shouldn’t be mixed up with someone as ambivalent as Chris. Susan had been shocked when she realized that he was interested only in chasing her, not in catching her. How could someone as original as Chris engage in such clichéd behavior? But she had told him that she loved him. Those were words that an adult could not go back on; they were a promise, binding even though he hadn’t yet said he loved her. You couldn’t base love on a quid pro quo.

Susan had never told any man but Chris that she loved him, although she had said it to two boys: the first when she was nine and the second when she was nineteen. Apparently it was a ten-year cycle. She had little doubt that without Chris she’d be alone for another ten years, perhaps forever. She’d probably never have children—with or without Chris, who sounded unenthusiastic about both kids and marriage. That was all right, because Susan had her own doubts about all that. For one thing, she would surely make any child of hers miserable. She couldn’t even make herself happy. And all marriages were dangerously prone to make everyone miserable. To be unambivalent about marriage, you needed to be one of those bland, oblivious people who never expect trouble and never think anything is their fault—like her mother, a great believer in marriage. Or at least you needed to be less like Susan and more like Mallory, who always assumed she made her boyfriends happy, whereas Susan always assumed the contrary.

Susan thought, on the whole, balancing the reality of Chris against the unknowns, that she could be content with Chris, whatever the problems, if she could only be sure of him. After all, she and Chris, with their shared commitments to the arts and their similar educations, were far better suited to each other than her father and mother had been. What a mismatched pair they were, with opposed tastes, values, and temperaments. But her father had never left her mother or quarreled with her perfect right to live out her life with him at her side, doing his best to make her happy. Susan concluded her reverie by deciding to let Chris rely on her and see what happened. This, at least, was a course of action that didn’t make her feel guilty.

Susan went to bed and awoke at 1:00 A.M. with a sense of foreboding, her heart beating haphazardly with accelerated riffs. It was hours before she could fall asleep again, and when the alarm sounded at 7:00, she woke feeling doomed and resigned. She walked to St. Luke’s, gathering herself so as to be able to appear harmless and happy before her father, her unconscious mother, and the nurses. She resolved to talk to Chris despite her fear of exposing the undercurrents of their present situation.

But when she called him after visiting the hospital and going to class, he seemed surprised to hear from her.

“Of course we can talk,” said Chris after a disconcerting pause. It was terrible the way his voice, when he finally spoke, was affably intimate and nonplussed. It made her yearn with love for him. She perceived her own emotions as wacky, off. Yet he was behaving differently. Susan was now desperate for him to acknowledge the reality of this—if it was a reality. It was more painful losing him this way, with his tolerant distance and decent, mannerly denial, she thought, than if he’d announced openly that he didn’t love her or if he’d actually died.

When he finally showed up at her apartment the following night, in high spirits, full of quips and anecdotes and affection, she found it impossible to tell him any of her doubts. They seemed lunatic and distorted. Susan told herself that she had to accept the reality that with no man of her own generation was she going to have the kind of merger of lives that their parents had had. That was all dead. My whole mentality, thought Susan, is an anachronism. If I’m not careful, I’ll end up with no one just because I insist on leading the kind of life that made my parents miserable.