Chapter 30 1994
Why won’t you make this easy? Al’s wife is brandishing the receiver like a weapon. The holding jingle for the travel agency tinkles over the line.
“Suze, please. They have to understand.”
But the only thing the producers on Susan’s show seem to understand is the desperate need to churn out seven and a half episodes a week. And when one of the episodes calls for a dark and stormy night, everyone is expected to turn their lives upside down. It’s absurd.
“Listen, Al, here’s the thing. The people you work with are dead, okay? They don’t mind if you show up late or—hell—if you don’t show up at all. But there are people who are counting on me. And if I can’t make it, well, then they’ll start asking if I really want to be doing this.”
He knows—she’s told him before—about the room full of look-alikes.
They populate her nightmares: an army of almost-Susans, differing only by a beauty mark, by the size of their nose.
For someone who seems to operate on such a high degree of faith in the universe, it surprises him how often her subconscious concerns itself with being replaced.
She tucks the phone into the crook of her neck, starts popping her fingers out of their sockets in that horrible way.
“I’m sure if you just said that it’s important…”
“Al, here is a list of what’s important: funerals, gunshot wounds, sudden violent illness. Nothing else will cut it.”
Upstairs, the children are sleeping. Downstairs, all the supplies for their two separate, simultaneous birthdays (astronauts for Viola, jungle for Sebastian), the giant cardboard spaceship Susan has painted, stacks of deflated palm fronds, paper plates, and small costumes.
On the refrigerator, the recipes for two separate cakes.
How is he supposed to make this all happen without her?
And she dares to look at him as though she’s powerless.
“You know, some people understand how difficult this is for me,” she says.
“Really? Who is that? Sadie? What are you trying to say?”
Somehow over three years, they have normalized the coming and going, the unpredictable departures, the unsustainable distance.
Somehow, the show has kept running and she has kept flying and performing and creating a parallel existence.
He tries not to think about her world over there, all her needs he cannot fill that are surely being met by other people.
Other men, perhaps. He’s seen her handsome costars, listened as she told him stories about their antics, never given them any permanence in his mind.
“Just that you are willfully ignoring what I want.”
Now she returns with a brazenness, like an animal rewilding.
The more estranged she makes him feel, the more he needs her.
He is desperate for the consistency with which she used to love him, their small, specific universe.
As the jingle begins for the twentieth exasperating time, he feels himself bargaining.
Just this once. If she can stay, just for this.
If she can bake these cakes. If we can get through tomorrow. If I can just get her to see the cost.
“Viola asked about your show last week,” he said. “She must have seen it at Sadie’s. She wants to watch it.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said it wasn’t appropriate.”
He didn’t expect her to start crying—bending onto the countertop, face in her hand, jagged, exhausted inhales. Gently, he moves closer. She’s too tired to go, he thinks, and it’s a good thought, She won’t.
“I mean, would you agree? They’re just so young, Susie…”
He traces his fingertips down her back. She shudders, recoils.
“No, you’re right. You’re always fucking right. They shouldn’t watch it. But I just hate it, Al, I hate it, I hate it, I can’t fucking stand it. She wanted to see me.”
“Susie, please stay for tomorrow. Just tomorrow.”
When she turns, her face is flushed and firm.
“No.”
He feels the bright, perilous urge to shake her. Instead, his foot connects with the painted cardboard box, the rocket launching and crashing into the leg of the table.
The jingle is playing on the receiver now down on the counter and she is saying words that he doesn’t quite understand: Your life has always come first and I’m losing them, and I don’t want to do this anymore.
All around him is the mess of her. Her scripts and magazines and trashy books and the peel of an orange that she ate earlier that she didn’t throw away and her shoes in a heap by the door.
Somehow, this conversation has metastasized, an expanding desperation—she’s just trying it out, just seeing how it sounds.
She’s tipsy from Sadie’s house. She’ll regret it.
He needs this, all these messy reminders that he has created a family, that his wife continues to find something in him worth coming home to.
“You don’t mean that.”
“I do mean it,” she says. “Just watch.”
A voice comes on at the other end of the phone, and she turns away from him to make arrangements.
“Go,” she says. “I’m not coming up.”
For hours, he doesn’t sleep. His senses are electrified.
He worries about the children. He worries about how to bake two cakes when he has never even baked one.
He worries about how to explain where she has gone.
He worries about what his mother will say or not say.
He worries about the upcoming tenure review, and whether he will say all the right things, whether the students will say all the right things.
He worries he will never hear her singing again.
That she will write him in her mind as the asshole who tried to constrain her.
That she will mistake his love for the opposite.
If she left, would he chase her? Would she still want him?
Would it all become a horrible bundle of lawyers and accusations?
Is he meant to make some gesture now, go downstairs and prostrate himself?
God, as long as she doesn’t go in the dead of the night.
Eventually, he hears Susan creaking around, and the sound calms him, knowing she is near.
He must drift off, because when he opens his eyes the sun is up and Viola is jumping on his bed.
Downstairs they discover two birthday cards, handmade on construction paper.
I love you more than anything, she has written to them both, and he wishes it were true.