“Don’t we all,” I said.
“I was brought up in a well-related suburb by affluent parents. My father went to business, my mother stayed home with the children. My father’s consuming passion was business; my mother’s was homemaking. I was expected to marry a man who went to business and loved it, to stay home with the children, and make a home.”
I didn’t say anything. Pearl lay still on the couch, her back legs stretched straight out, her head on her front paws, motionless except for her eyes, which watched us carefully.
“And I did,” Susan said. She drank another swallow of champagne, and put the glass back on the counter and looked into the glass where the bubbles drifted toward the surface.
“Except that the marriage was awful and there were no children, and I got divorced and had to work and met you.”
“‘Bye-’bye, Miss American Pie,” I said.
Susan smiled.
“Most of the rest you know,” she said. “We both know. When I left Sunnybrook Farm I left with a vengeance the job, then the Ph.D., moving to the city. Part of your charm at first was that you were so unsuburban. You were dangerous, you were your own and not someone else’s. And you gave me room.”
I poured some more champagne in her glass, carefully, so it wouldn’t foam up and overflow.
“But always I was failing. I wasn’t keeping house, I wasn’t raising children. I wasn’t doing it right. It’s one of the reasons I left you.”
“For a while,” I said.
“And it’s the reason I wanted you to live with me.
“Not because I am cuter than a bug’s ear?”
“That too,” Susan said. “But mostly I wanted to pretend to be what I had never been.”
“Which is to say, your mother,” I said.
Susan smiled again.
“I’ll bet you can claim the thickest neck of any Freudian in the country,” she said.
“I’m not sure that’s a challenge,” I said. “Joyce Brothers is probably second.”
“And I strong-armed you into moving in, and it hasn’t been any fun at all.”
“Except maybe last Sunday morning after I let Pearl out,” I said.
“Except for that.”
We were quiet while we each had some more champagne.
“So what’s your plan?” I said.
“I think we should live separately,” Susan said. “Don’t misunderstand me. I think we should continue to live intimately, and monogamously… but not quite so proximate.”
“Proximate,” I said.
Susan laughed, though only a little.
“Yes,” she said, “proximate. I do, after all, have a Ph.D. from Harvard.”
“Nothing to be ashamed of,” I said.
“How do you feel about it, living apart again?” Susan said.
“I agree with your analysis and share your conclusion.”
“You don’t mind?”
“No, I like it.”
“It’ll be the way it was.”
“Maybe better,” I said. “You won’t be wishing we could live together.”
“Where will you go?” Susan said.
“I kept my apartment,” I said.
Susan widened her eyes at me.
“Did you really?” she said.
I nodded and drank some more champagne and offered to pour some more in her glass; she shook her head, still looking at me.
“Not quite a ringing endorsement of the original move,” she said.
I couldn’t think of an answer to that, so I kept quiet. I have rarely regretted keeping quiet. I promised myself to work on it.
“You knew I was a goddamned fool,” she said.
“I knew it was important to you. I trusted you to work it out.”
She reached out and patted my hand.
