Rusty’s obsession with Carolyn

Rusty’s obsession with Carolyn is the consuming force that turns an affair into a crisis of identity and judgment. Rusty Sabich understands, in retrospect, that he did not know Carolyn Polhemus loved him: he believed his passion pleased and flattered her, while his own need had become independent of what she wanted. The attachment gives him moments of exhilaration, but its defining condition is distress. When Carolyn withdraws, he discovers that the object of his longing matters less to him than the longing itself, a dependence that damages his marriage to Barbara and narrows his attention to the possibility of renewed access to Carolyn.

The Affair and Its Unequal Meanings

Rusty Sabich describes his love for Carolyn Polhemus as passionate but rarely joyful. He recalls recognizing that the attachment would continue and feeling himself overwhelmed by something old, deep, and difficult to control. Carolyn occupied his thoughts so persistently that the idea of her could matter even more than her actual presence. He presents this desire not as a considered choice but as an insistence that left him feeling divided and diminished.

The affair also offered a startling contrast with his established life. After seventeen years of faithful marriage, he experienced being with Carolyn as a release from the routines and responsibilities that shaped his domestic world. He describes her as a vivid, immediate presence, and their encounters made him feel that his familiar world had been split apart. That exhilaration did not amount to a stable partnership: Rusty did not believe Carolyn loved him, and he understood her willingness to see him as secondary to his own need.

Their meetings acquired a recognizable routine. Rusty visited Carolyn Polhemus three or four nights a week; she left her apartment door unlocked, and the news was often on when he arrived. Carolyn might be cleaning, drinking, or opening her mail, while her attention remained on her work and on office or local political developments. Rusty followed her lead as their evening unfolded, waiting for her to turn toward him. The pattern matters because it places his anticipation alongside her independent schedule: he treated access to her as the center of his life, while she continued to attend to concerns beyond the affair.

Withdrawal and Pursuit

The relationship ended badly. Carolyn Polhemus first saw Rusty less often, then stopped seeing him altogether: lunches, calls, and visits ceased. Rusty tried to interpret the silence as a display of independence and told himself not to resist it. But knowing that Carolyn was only one floor away sharpened his fixation. He went to a restaurant where he knew she sometimes had lunch, returning three days in a row. On the third visit he saw her with Raymond Horgan, but at the time he did not imagine him as a rival. Rusty describes himself as blind to that possibility, absorbed instead in watching Carolyn from a distance and in the physical force of his own longing.

By the third week, restraint gave way to impulse. Rusty went directly to Carolyn’s office without bringing work as a pretext. She told him that the relationship was not right for her then, returned to her desk, and resumed working. Rusty remained briefly before leaving. He later insists that he did not experience her refusal as ordinary heartbreak or jealousy. He wanted what he had previously had with her, and he could not accept that her willingness was essential to its continuation. That distinction exposes the imbalance at the heart of the obsession: Rusty wanted the experience of devotion and release, even as Carolyn withdrew from the relationship.

Repetition, Shame, and Domestic Strain

After the breakup, Rusty tried to regain contact through repeated, carefully imagined conversations. He planned jokes that might ease Carolyn’s indifference and sincere declarations for an opening that never came. When he called, he could not make himself speak. He listened, waited through the shame of silence, and felt relief when Carolyn ended the call. He then put the office directory away. The repeated calls and their failure show desire turning into a private ritual: preparation, silence, and retreat replace the conversation Rusty hopes to have.

The fixation also altered Rusty’s behavior at work and at home. He watched the hallways for a glimpse of Carolyn and struggled to attend to his duties. At home, he made what he later calls an absurd confession to Barbara, crying at the dinner table and hoping for sympathy. Barbara would not accept his visible suffering as a claim on her care. Rusty describes the marriage as newly constrained by the danger that his neediness could bring family life to an end. He began taking long walks through the cold winter, while his thoughts remained fixed on whether the distress would end and whether he could recover what he had lost.

The Bar Encounter and the Obsession’s Limit

Late in March, Rusty saw Carolyn Polhemus at Gil’s while finishing a drink he had begun with Dan Lipranzer. He noticed her watching him in the mirror behind the bar and read anger in her expression. Rather than address her directly, he ordered her an Old-Fashioned; she refused it, though the bartender did not hear. Rusty eventually admitted that he felt uncomfortable sitting near her and that speaking with her seemed to be what he wanted most. Carolyn responded by putting a hand on his shoulder, telling him to grow up, and walking away.

The encounter did not restore intimacy. Instead, it condensed the difference between Rusty’s inward intensity and Carolyn’s refusal to reopen the relationship. Rusty later recalled that, for a moment, he desperately wished Carolyn were dead. The thought marks an alarming edge to the obsession, not a reported action or a resolution of the affair. In his account to Dr. Robinson, Rusty makes the attachment visible through its repeated failures: he cannot speak when Carolyn answers, cannot stop seeking her when she withdraws, and cannot make desire end simply by understanding that it is not mutual. The episode’s significance lies in that gap between recognition and control. Rusty can name his dependence in retrospect, but the account shows how thoroughly it had once organized his attention, his marriage, and his sense of what he needed.