by Jeffrey Meyers
As a college student I’d been traveling alone for a month through Greece, Yugoslavia and Germany, where I didn’t know the languages, and had scarcely spoken to anyone all that time. When I boarded the Rhine River boat in Heidelberg I saw a stunning girl, almost a divine vision. She had golden hair, clear green eyes, almost translucent skin and a luscious figure. And there were even more pleasant surprises. I was amazed to discover that she was American, traveling on a recuperative journey with her mother, Grace, a handsome well-dressed woman with fair hair perfectly parted in the middle. Grace questioned me about my recent wanderings and (rather vague) future plans, and encouraged my approach. At an opportune moment, she whispered that the frail, vulnerable Susie was recovering from a mental breakdown.
I was going back to Edinburgh University for the last term of my junior year abroad and would complete my senior year at the University of Michigan. The last serendipitous twist to this magical encounter, with the stars placed in their favorable conjunction, was that the 18-year old Susie was going to be a freshman at Michigan in September. We talked about our recent travels, and I told her about the pristine Greek islands, with their whitewashed houses and phosphorescent sea. She asked me about which courses and teachers to choose. I urged her to get into the Honors Program, take classes in Great Books, and read Heart of Darkness and Death in Venice during the summer. Our future seemed to unfold like a view of paradise.
It was a warm sunny day, with wispy clouds blowing across the sky. The scenery was spectacular and intensely romantic, but I found it difficult to take my eyes away from her. The narrow boat, low enough to pass under the stone bridges, had an open deck. We drank a bottle of Riesling in tall green-stemmed glasses as the narrow river, in sweeping curves, allowed us to see both sides of the landscape, which Susie vividly sketched as we passed by. We floated down river past castles with pointed roofs, high square towers and fortified walls, all built on hills surrounded by vineyards, with villages below them and spread along the shore. With the enemy long gone, the castles now seemed to protect the people from the invading tourists. I felt like Richard Wagner’s Siegfried, seductively beckoned by Susie the Rhine maiden. I had planned to leave the boat to see some of the towns along the way. But I stayed close to her as we delightfully navigated the 300 miles and approached Amsterdam by water. As darkness fell we leaned on the railing, held tight to each other and watched the stars come out. Grace and Susie had a room overnight, while I got a blanket and slept in a long chair on the deck as sexual newsreels flashed through my head.
In Amsterdam Susie and Grace stayed in an expensive hotel, and I got a cheap attic room near Dam Square. Grace left us alone and I met Susie every day. We spent a lot of time floating dreamily around on canal boats, and looking at the Rembrandts and Vermeers in the Rijksmuseum. We bought postcards of Vermeer’s The Art of Painting, and imagined that I was the seated artist dressed in black and she the inspiring blue-gowned model holding a trumpet. The Anne Frank house had recently opened, and Susie strongly identified with that delicate, talented and tragic victim, deeply attached to her father, who had been unwillingly confined for several years. Susie, who tactfully paid her share of expenses, saw me as her experienced guide and mentor, and I eagerly assumed the role of dragoman.
Susie needed affection, was sensually responsive and whispered, “I’ve been waiting all my life for you to come.” She took my hand when we walked, leaned her head on me when we floated and kissed me whenever we found a secluded doorway or dark alley. She confessed, with a mixture of curiosity and pure lust, “I’m tired of being a virgin. I’d like to have sex as much as you would.” “Oh, no, not nearly as much.” “Oh, yes, just as much, maybe even more.” She kept whispering, “later” and I wondered “but when?” When our time came I’d be the sickle and she the rake, and what prodigious music we would make.
It was quite impossible to sneak her past my vigilant landlady and into my depressing room. I tried to slip up the back stairs in her hotel, but was stopped by the equally vigilant “guests only” house detective. I should have taken a room for one night in her hotel and recovered the expense by skipping a meal every day. Instead, we had a cheap lunch of sausages and beer from a stand in the street. On our last night Grace treated us to an Indonesian rijsttafel with small dishes of pork, duck, meat patties, coconut curries, satay with peanut sauce, fiery sambal and a lot of mysterious dishes I didn’t recognize. In the restaurant Susie took off her shoe and rubbed her foot against me like a cat.
She never mentioned her illness except to say that she resented her harsh treatment in the Swiss clinic. “The shock treatments were cruel,” she said, “but jolted me out of my deep depression. I’m almost a real person again.” I didn’t dare inquire about details, but when I asked what she liked best about Switzerland, she said, “leaving it.” When Susie left to change her clothes, Grace explained, that her breakdown had been caused by the suicide of her alcoholic and deeply depressed father, to whom she was deeply attached. A brilliant lawyer, caught up in a scandal, he shot himself at home.
Susie identified with the mentally unstable Sylvia Plath and was riveted by her most savage poem, “Daddy.” Plath portrays her German father as a Nazi and herself as his Jewish victim, and kills Otto in her poem for killing himself in life:
There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.
But Susie was now calm but frail, with no visible signs of her tragic past, and seemed absolutely perfect to me: beautiful, charming, clever, cheeky and flirtatious. Her virginity made her even more appealing, and I wanted to protect and ravish her at the very same time.
Four months later, as soon as I got back to Michigan, I rang Susie. As I approached her room I thought: the greater the obstacles to sex, the greater the satisfaction when those obstacles are finally overcome. “Later” had become “now!” I dreamed of the ecstasy she had promised in Amsterdam, the endless fantasies of pleasures to come. But I was shocked by her horrible transformation and tried to hide my feelings. She smoked, nervously bit her nails and scratched her bare arms; she hadn’t bathed and smelled miasmic. Her blouse was stained, hair was lank, her skin was blotchy. Her clothes, though expensive, looked cheap and trashy. She wore a theatrical pair of red leather pixie shoes with pointed toes and a sad little gold chain wrapped around them.
Susie didn’t seem to remember me and was almost catatonically unresponsive. I tried hard to rouse her by recalling our joyous time together in Europe, but got only blank stares. I couldn’t believe that the girl I’d once found so passionately attractive was now repulsive. I had no experience with mental illness, and didn’t know how to deal with the depression and breakdown of that infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing. So I rather shamefully retreated as soon as possible, and called Grace in Detroit to say that Susie desperately needed help.
Looking back, I should have tried harder to break through her carapace and reach her emotional core. Since she was completely passive and probably drugged, I could have bathed her as if she were a baby, entered the tub with her and touched all her secret places. That, at least, would have cleaned her up and might have led to more sexual adventures. I called Grace a few more times, heard that Susie had left the university, been confined to another clinic and had more shock treatments. I never saw her again. My sad encounter with Susie answered Yeats’ crucial question in “The Tower”: “Does the imagination dwell the most / Upon a woman won or woman lost?”
Jeffrey Meyers will publish both James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist and Parallel Lives: From Freud and Hitler to Arbus and Plath with Louisiana State University Press in 2024.