Everything Happened to Susan

by Malzberg, Barry

  But there was that feeling of something lacking and it complicated everything. Reading the advertisements, Susan, past her initial shock, had begun to feel a sense of regret, even loss, probing through the delicate parts of her, fine tendrils which almost touched the quivering, dirty pages of the newspaper: here at least were people possessed of certainty. They had their lacks, they had their losses, but one thing was clear: they knew exactly what they needed to make themselves complete and they could put it into words, send their prayer through newsprint out into the world. It would be very simple if you only knew of one thing in the world which would ease your needs; coprophilia or Greek culture would be a small price to pay for the knowledge that dreams could be made flesh through simple connection. Susan had not had that certainty for a long time; ever since she had turned against her father for failing to understand her many years ago, she had given up the belief in easy answers. Of course this had nothing to do with the newspapers which made everything very easy indeed. She toyed for a while with the idea of placing her own advertisement under a box number: YOUNG ATTRACTIVE GIRL, NYMPHOMANIACAL, DESPERATELY SEEKS SEXUAL INTERCOURSE, PARTICULARLY WITH INEXPERIENCED OR UGLY MEN, just to see what kind of replies she would get. The responses would be very interesting and amusing and she could discuss them with her friends but finally she decided against it. In the first place, very few women seemed to advertise in the sex newspapers and, in the second, the monomania and desperation of the kind of man who placed advertisements made her feel that she would be getting in beyond her depth, even to release so much as a box number. So she had begun to lose interest in the sex newspapers which, shocking and amusing at first, turned out to be the same old stuff, week in and week out. The advertisers became familiar to say nothing of the editorial content and meanwhile her money had seriously begun to run out and she could not bear the idea of having gone through everything she had to become a receptionist-typist in New York City. So she had begun to read the advertisements with something else in view, maybe a job, maybe a real contact, and the movie thing, when she had seen it, had been not unlike hundreds of similar ads that she had passed over. But this time it was different because she really wanted to get work related in some way to the field of her talent and she had had a bad fight with Timothy the previous evening — a raw, ugly one having to do with the kind of neighborhood in which he was living which could not, like some of the other arguments, be sealed with sex. So she had gone for an interview and was eventually selected to star in a pornographic film. It was simple, really. She wondered if people who enlisted in the Army and wound up in really serious trouble in the war zone had found it as easy and inevitable to get into the situation as she had. There was nothing consequential to it at all. The most complicated or unspeakable acts could occur in broad daylight, in expressionless buildings, surrounded by people leading unknowing routine lives. She knows that she must think about this as well as the compromises Phil’s offer will lead her to in her artistic career but there is time enough for that later.

  CHAPTER XVI

  Not too much later Timothy awakens and comes into the kitchen, finds her sitting solemnly, stirring a cup of coffee and asks her about her day. Did she actually get some work? His demeanor seems to shift between trepidation and excitement; he wants to know what has happened to her but, on the other hand, is afraid to find out. She says that it was nothing much — mostly nude posing and posturing and that there was no physical contact with any of the other actors, all of whom were unattractive. Timothy nods and shrugs, shakes his head, and says that he will not discuss it anymore. Even though they are living together, they are entitled to lead their separate lives, at least up until a point of real commitment, and therefore she has the right to her privacy. He says that he has had a terrible day at the office. There is a new state investigation beginning in the area of Manhattan covered by his welfare center and all of the unit supervisors must submit complete reports to the auditing committee describing the efforts at rehabilitation made for clients and telling what percentage within the last six months have been fully restored to a normal way of life. Timothy says that he is not quite sure what the state means by “rehabilitated” but supposes that, if they are using the word in the financial sense, they want to know how many clients are actually off relief which, he says, is too small a percentage to make the very nervous administrative head happy. The administrative head, therefore, in a full meeting with the supervisors, has instructed them to interpret “rehabilitation” as meaning those welfare clients who have been led to a higher and deeper and more fundamental understanding of their lives due to the efforts of caseworkers, which would be a very large percentage indeed. “Under the new social casework procedures, over eighty-five percent of our client-load is showing some genuine capacity for enlightenment as well as a high deceleration of the level of decompensation in terms of unnatural mores,” the administrator has said and Timothy had spent the remainder of the day putting together charts and statistical studies indicating that four hundred and fifteen of the five hundred and twelve families carried by his case unit have shown a high deceleration of the level of decompensation. “I can’t stand it any more,” he says to her, pouring a cup of coffee and running a hand absently down her shoulder, “I simply can’t stand it any more, it’s too insane,” and then his fingers become insistent, the cup of coffee is forgotten, falling with a clatter to the table, and he presses his groin against her. “Let’s do it,” he says, “let’s make love,” always showing at the moment of insistence a delicacy in his language and bearing which Susan finds amusing; he seems incapable of using the word fuck in talking about sex although in other contexts he uses it all the time. “Let’s put ourselves together,” he says stammering and she sees as always the core of vulnerability in him, the thing which has always excited her about Timothy. Never has she seen a man so needful who does more outside the context of sex to deny that need. “Oh God,” he says, “I want you so much,” and moves toward her, puts himself against her. She can feel him arching, rising. All of this takes place outside a core of fundamental detachment in her because Susan has already had quite a bit of sex today. “Please,” she says, pushing gently against him and trying to disengage herself, “please, not now, I’m tired,” but Timothy will have none of that. “Why,” he says, “what’s wrong? Have you had sex already today, is that why you don’t want it?” There is nothing she can say to that at all. Having sex with him now is a matter of pride, a matter of showing him that she has not been touched, not been used, and so she permits herself to come against him. Her clothes are falling away from her; she is sore inside; she feels now as if her body is closing down heavily against the pain in her center but she must show him that she can react, can participate, and so, falling onto the kitchen floor, she allows him to work on her. As always he is quick, forceful (unlike the characters in his novel who always take a great deal of time to have sex and then think about it endlessly afterwards), grinding himself into her and she feels the spurt of his come surrounded by his groans, closing her eyes, turning inward, shutting it all off from herself. She has proven herself to Timothy, she thinks as he lies heavily on top of her, has proven that she can meet him on his own ground and then it occurs to her, almost for the first time, that she is not sure that she even cares enough for Timothy to make this proving valuable to her. In fact she is not sure that she cares for Timothy at all, but, in its strangeness and complexity, this becomes a thought with which she is utterly unable to deal and so she lets it pass, sliding from various levels of consciousness, down the roof, into the eaves, through the sidings, into the basement, and sleep overcomes her like rainfall.

  CHAPTER XVII

  The next morning she sees Phil again. He is very detached; it is as if nothing at all has passed between them. The film, as he explains it to her, is a massive documentary; the most important pornographic film to date, not that it is dirty at all but rather that it will merely use pornography to involve an audience in some very serious ins
ights into the quality of their lives. The film, Phil tells her, will be a sexual history of the world from the time of the Garden of Eden to the present; major and minor historical figures will be portrayed along with hundreds of the common people, people whose names are now unknown, and startling insights will be gained into the present condition of the world through this view. Some of the characters will be as famous as Abraham Lincoln or Saul of Tarsus; others as obscure as the eighteenth-century Italian composer Clementi or the nineteenth-century American poet Brett Harte. The sweep and scope of the film, Phil says, will be enormous; it will encompass some seven thousand years of recorded history within a period of eleven or twelve playing hours. The overall theme of the movie is that sexuality is the driving force of mankind and that all of the disasters and cataclysms of modern day Americans can be seen as the outcome of sexual frustrations. Through a frank look at the sexual lives of these historical figures, Phil says, the film will function as a purgative to the audience which will come to see that if Abraham Lincoln had wanted sex, sex could not have been that bad. “You have a nation that is terrified of sex, terrified of relationships, terrified of human connection,” Phil says, “and the audience that comes to this type of deal is the most terrified of all. Let’s face facts, most of them are using it as a substitute for the prostitutes they don’t even have the guts to get. They come into these theatres and are filled with fear and then their fantasies are exploited in a private way. I’m a very realistic man; I’ve done a lot of thinking about this as you can see and I ain’t got no illusions about the audience, but I do believe that you can do something with them. You can say this about them, at least they’re there. They are willing to take a chance on themselves which is more than you can say about the million others who would love to see dirties but don’t have the guts so the dirties got to be dressed up for them. We’re going to do James Knox Polk in this one; we’re going to do Hitler; we’re going to have Napoleon and the three Wise Men and Marie Antoinette and Clara Bow and Amelia Earhart and Jean Harlow and Shakespeare and almost anyone you can think of, as long as they’re dead because there’s no point in crossing with the slander laws. But otherwise there are no holds barred. There’s even going to be some stuff in there about the Kennedys, because you’ve got to lay it on the line, but, of course, you watch your step with those people. The director is a guy from Europe, did a few films over there. This is his first in the States and he’s going to get the biggest budget they ever put up for such a film. If it works out the way we think it’s going, it’s a career break. This isn’t only a sex film, you see, this is a major statement.”

  “It seems to me,” Susan says, adjusting her hands over her lap and trying to look sexually inaccessible, “that you’re going to have hundreds of people in this film. How big can any part be? Not that I would mind getting one, of course.” She adds this hastily, with a ragged sense of timing; knowing that an edge of anxiety may be penetrating but unable to catch it. She wants a part in this film desperately; Timothy and she ended the evening with a serious fight in which he accused her of being a dilettante with no serious interest in acting who was perfectly willing to continue calling herself an actress because “it’s a profession where if you’re not doing anything, you can just say that you’re out of work. While a serious writer has to keep on working all the time.” She had not liked this at all; it had, in fact been very painful and she had resolved that she was going to be able to go back to him this evening and say that she had a serious role in a big production. A substantial part. Weeks of employment. “But I don’t really know how good the parts can be,” she adds rather lamely and then drops the whole line of approach, seeing the glint recede from Phil’s eyes, his forehead moving parallel now to the floor. He has not really listened to a word she has said.

  “You don’t understand,” he says after a pause. “That’s why it’s such a desirable thing to get, that’s why people are begging for a shot in this picture. There’s going to be a lot of doubling up here; only five or six actors are really going to play all the big parts; the same guy playing Beethoven, for instance, is going to be Benjamin Harrison and then William Jennings Bryan; the girl that plays Eve will play all the sensual, seductive parts like Dolly Madison or Tallulah Bankhead and so on. There’s a terrific need for versatility and artistic range if you follow what I mean. And that’s really part of the hidden meaning of the picture too; the point is that people are always the same when you come right down to the sexual basis of reality and all the differences are just external. I’ve done a lot of thinking about this; I think that they’ve got hold of something really important here and personally I’m a little excited to be affiliated with it.” Despite his claims of elation, Phil’s eyes are dull; his gestures seem strangely out of kilter. “Filming is going to begin tomorrow,” he says. “That’s when the whole thing starts.”

  “Tomorrow? You’re starting this tomorrow and you’re still interviewing for parts?”

  “I’m not starting this tomorrow,” Phil says. “They’re starting it tomorrow; I told you, I just work for them. I’m only an employee; I have nothing to do with the way things go on; I just try to tend shop. The reason that they’re still interviewing is that they want to go right down to the wire and make sure that they have absolutely the right people. They need a strong cast, there’s no question about it. Of course, once they get going, they work pretty fast. It’s all a question of overhead; the business works on a tight margin.”

  “Do I get a part?”

  “They’re going to shoot it in the same place you were working yesterday. They’re going to clear out all the other productions and just run this one straight through in the whole area. It’ll take about a week to get the whole thing down.”

  “Just a week? You said it was a long-term production.”

  “You don’t understand,” Phil says, his eyes darkening and his hands coming together in a subtle wringing gesture. “Most of these films are made in a day. A week is a terrific project in this business. I never knew a film that took a week. Of course there’s never been a production quite like this in the whole history of the business; so that’s an important point too.”

  “I’ll take it,” Susan says. “I’d like to go to work.” She has resolved to be businesslike, determined; she will let no personal factors intrude between her and the job and, if this is the way in which Phil wants things to be done, she will cooperate. She looks at him with what she hopes is great positiveness and detachment and says, “You want me to come down tomorrow morning and get started?”

  “I’m not sure yet. I don’t want you to take this personally but you showed a certain, uh, reluctance, in the sex scenes. You aren’t really experienced in this kind of thing, I can tell. Of course that isn’t too bad; the less experience you have, the more conviction with which you can play. But you didn’t flow with the action; I heard complaints that you were working against the action and making problems for the others. Of course,” Phil says vaguely, “you got to admit that that’s a point too; an absence of professionalism in this kind of film can sometimes be just the ticket. You got to take all these things into account. I been in the business for them a long time and you learn that there ain’t no easy answers; you got to swing with it and take the long view. They can offer you fifty dollars a day if you want a part in the picture.”

  “You’re going to give me a job?”

  “For fifty dollars a day.”

  “But I thought — ”

  “I told you it would be less, sweetheart. It’s nothing personal but when you get away from the one-shot deals and into extended work there’s a tighter budget and you got to bring these things into scale. It’s not that I wouldn’t like to offer you more but they’re businessmen; they got to operate on a margin and anyway you’re dealing with a very ambitious film here. It’s much more expensive than anything they’ve ever done before. And it could be a career break. Let me tell you something if you promise not to get too excited and to keep it a secre
t; this may break right out of the sex houses. The director has some very exciting ideas and this is a film which might eclipse the circuit altogether and even become a road show. Of course I can’t make no promises but this could be an important step — ”

  “All right,” Susan says. “I’ll take the job. I’ll do it.”

  “There’s going to be some pretty wild stuff here, you know, the director has ideas about what he wants to put in and altogether you’ll have to keep an, uh, open mind,” Phil says and fades off into inarticulately; at the moment out of words he looks at her bleakly across the expanse of desk, his palms open, his forehead parallel to the surfaces. He seems to have lost his faculty of speech for the time being or maybe it is merely forgetfulness; in any event, a small series of shudders and tremors seem to pass through him and he reassembles himself slowly. Susan wonders if he is a sick man, if it is a characteristic of people in this business to be highly neurotic, or whether he merely feels guilty about the sexual relationship which he has imposed upon her. She feels like reaching out to him, touching him gently, almost maternally, and telling him that it is all right, she expects nothing further from him, there is no reason for him to feel guilty, but then she understands that this would probably be very silly because sex does not seem to be what is on his mind now. “I guess they could make it fifty-five a day,” he says. “But for fifty-five a day you might have to get into some pretty weird stuff. I tell you frankly, this director has a lot of ideas which he wants to try and they may strike you as a little bit strange. Fifty-five would be the top rate and for that they would expect real cooperation. Your back would be to the camera most of the time though. You’ll notice there are very few full faces in this kind of stuff; that’s for the protection of the actors because you never know who’ll end up where in fifty years. Fifty-five a day and that’s the top. You get five days guaranteed at that rate; if there’s any more filming after that, it drops to forty-five. That has to be to protect against a cost-overload but it shouldn’t go more than five days.”