This paragraph from A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, which won the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award (ETA: AND the 2011 Pulitzer Prize!) for fiction, is one of the most hauntingly vivid descriptions of a marriage that I have ever read. At the same time the description sounds clinical, meticulous, it strikes me as one of the saddest things I have ever read.
Yet each disappointment Ted felt in his wife, each incremental deflation, was accompanied by a seizure of guilt; many years ago, he had taken the passion he felt for Susan and folded it in half, so he no longer had a drowning, helpless feeling when he glimpsed her beside him in bed: her ropy arms and soft, generous ass. Then he’d folded it in half again, so when he felt desire for Susan, it no longer brought with it an edgy terror of never being satisfied. Then in half again, so that feeling desire entailed no immediate need to act. Then in half again, so he hardly felt it. His desire was so small in the end that Ted could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it, and this gave him a feeling of safety and accomplishment, of having dismantled a perilous apparatus that might have crushed them both. Susan was baffled at first, then distraught; she’d hit him twice across the face; she’d run from the house in a thunderstorm and slept at a motel; she’d wrestled Ted to the bedroom floor in a pair of black crotchless underpants. But eventually a sort of amnesia had overtaken Susan; her rebellion and hurt had melted away, deliquesced into a sweet, eternal sunniness that was terrible in the way that life would be terrible, Ted supposed, without death to give it gravitas and shape. He’d presumed at first that her relentless cheer was mocking, another phase in her rebellion, until it came to him that Susan had forgotten how things were between them before Ted began to fold up his desire; she’d forgotten and was happy — had never not been happy — and while all of this bolstered his awe at the gymnastic adaptability of the human mind, it also made him feel that his wife had been brainwashed. By him.
I read this book over the winter holidays and till this day, I am still haunted by this passage. From time to time I would take this book off from the bookshelf, flip to this page and read this passage again, word by word, while caressing the rough edge on the side of the book as if it were an adequate substitute for human warmth.
Of course, per usual, I identify with the wrong character. I want to jump in and rescue Susan.
Wake up, Susan. Wake up. Remember what it was like. Remember what you were like. I want to give her a blog.
Here’s to being decidedly alive even if at the risk of being miserable. Here’s to kicking and screaming. Here’s to never be folded up into a tiny pocket.
Here’s to never forget.
This post is dedicated to a dear friend who is standing arms akimbo in defiance in the land of lotus eaters.
