Free Everything Happened to Susan by Barry Malzberg Page B

roles and are coming back from a hard day’s work promoting sexual liberalism and an extended consciousness. The tall man carrying a suitcase and mumbling to himself at the edge of the car is a whipmaster in a sadistic film; the heavy old lady banging intermittently on her left elbow is a seamstress for a pornographic film company and makes occasional appearances in perverse segments. Three adolescent girls, chewing gum have performed as a triumvirate in someone’s extended fantasy; the conductor, almost invisible his damp cell, specializes in buggery. It is much easier for her to come to terms with the world in this fashion; it may even be true, for all she knows. The car rockets in darkness through the thin, spreading tube of the underground opening before them; it is all lights and mystery, signals flickering in the void, workmen scuttling like technicians on the tracks to clear-the way for the train as it surges uptown.

CHAPTER XXX
    At home she finds Timothy in an ugly mood, eager to talk. They are, it seems, on the verge of an emotional crisis. He has done some serious thinking during the day and has decided that they must define their relationship to make some commitment to one another once and for all. Also, he has arrived at the decision that he does not want her acting in the pornographic film business after all; for reasons, which he will not go into, he finds it threatening to his masculinity. “I won’t have it any more,” he says gesturing rather wildly, knocking some manuscript pages of his novel from the desk top behind which he has been sitting. “We can’t just drift and drift! We have to decide right now what we’re going to do for the rest of our lives and whether these lives involve one another.”
    “I’m tired, Timothy,” she says. “Can’t we talk about it later on or tomorrow?”
    “No, we can’t talk about it later on or tomorrow. I know why you’re tired; I can imagine exactly what you’ve been doing today. We have to make decisions, Susan, decisions! We must come to grips with our lives.”
    “Do you want to get married?”
    “Married? Who said anything about getting married? Marriage is an archaism; it’s only a device through which society entraps us by putting a label on a natural state. I don’t think there have been any marriages between intelligent people for five years. I’m talking about an emotional commitment, a commitment to oneness, a feeling of union — ”
    “I thought we could just go along this way, couldn’t
we? You were the one who said that we had to maintain our freedom of choices.
I don’t want to discuss it, really Timothy,” Susan says. “I
should be relaxing and trying to concentrate on my roles. I’ve got to
prove that I can bring conviction — ”
    “Conviction! I know what kind of conviction you’re bringing! Don’t look at me that way, I’m not naive. I deal with the most dispossessed, demoralized, alienated, dangerous, and asocial segment of the population: I have their case records right in front of me and I read things that would turn you white. I used to go to their homes and try to rehabilitate them! I want you to get out of that film, Susan. Emotional commitment is one thing and the film is another. I won’t have it! You have to get out of that business.”
    “You said it was perfectly all right for me to go. You said that each of us was entitled to lead his separate life.”
    “Well,” Timothy says, “that was before I had to come to terms with the effect of this upon my psyche. It’s shattering. Tell me what you did today. No, I take it back, don’t tell me what you did. It would upset me terribly. Just stop doing it.”
    Susan looks around Timothy’s apartment carefully. She knows it very well; furthermore, every corner of it seems to lurk with sexual memory. There is not a single area of this apartment, it seems, where in one form or another they have not had sex. Say what you will of Timothy, things have been