Carolyn Breaks Things Off with Rusty

Carolyn Polhemus breaks things off with Rusty Sabich by withdrawing from their affair and refusing his attempt to resume it. Her decision is clear in its effect, if not explained in its reasons: the lunches, calls, office visits, and drinks stop. Rusty experiences that separation not as a settled ending but as a deprivation he cannot accept. His recollection, told to Dr. Robinson, traces how her boundary becomes the occasion for an increasingly consuming pursuit.

Withdrawal and refusal

Carolyn’s withdrawal happens in stages. Rusty recalls that first she saw him less, and then, the following week, not at all. There are no more lunches, calls, visits to his office, or drinks. He knows she values independence, and at first tells himself that her silence is merely an assertion of it, something best left unchallenged. But the absence sharpens rather than quiets his longing: he knows she is only one floor below, and wants simply to be in the same room with her.

After three days of going to Morton’s Third Floor, where he knows she likes to lunch, Rusty sees her there with Raymond Horgan. He does not then think of Raymond as a rival. Instead, he sits alone, moving lettuce around his salad bowl and staring across the dining room at Carolyn. The scene reveals the gap between his attention to her and his understanding of what is happening: he can hardly look away from her, yet does not imagine that someone else may have taken his place.

By the third week, he stops trying to master the impulse. One morning at eleven, he walks directly to Carolyn’s office without a file, memo, or other work-related excuse. When she returns, she greets him brightly, passes him, and gets a file from her desk. Rusty watches her work before asking to see her again. Carolyn closes the door briefly, tells him, “I don't think that's a very good idea. Not now. It's not right for me now, Rusty.” Then she opens it, returns to her desk, turns on the radio, and continues working without looking toward him. Her refusal is explicit; her immediate return to work gives it a practical finality that Rusty does not manage to accept.

Longing after the break

Rusty’s account distinguishes his longing from grief over a mutual love. He does not think Carolyn loved him; he believes instead that his passion pleased and flattered her. He says he did not experience her refusal as ordinary rejection or imagine destroying a successor. What devastates him is the loss of what he had, and of the release he found in desiring her. In his own description, the affair’s ending does not end the passion: Carolyn’s willingness had been secondary to his need for the experience of worship and enthrallment.

That distinction makes his pursuit less a struggle to restore a shared relationship than an effort to recover an inward state. He sits awake at night in his rocking chair, imagining Carolyn and feeling sorry for himself. He also calls her repeatedly. Before each call, he plans jokes to break through her indifference or sincere declarations for the moment when she might give him a chance to speak. When she answers, however, he cannot say what he has prepared. He waits in shame, with tears in his eyes and his heart feeling squeezed, and is relieved when she hangs up. He then returns the office directory to the hallway bureau. Rusty believes Carolyn knows the caller is him, recognizing something forlorn and beseeching in his breathing; the calls bring neither a conversation nor a renewed relationship.

The separation also distorts his sense of proportion at work. During these weeks, he reads reports and attends meetings about a case involving a fourteen-year-old girl who was abducted, held in a defendant’s trunk, sexually assaulted over three days, beaten, blinded, and left for dead. Rusty tells himself that he hurts for Carolyn. His recollection places his private fixation alongside his professional attention to a brutal case, showing how thoroughly his emotional life has unsettled his judgment without claiming that the two situations are the same.

The encounter at Gil’s

One Friday night late in March, Rusty sees Carolyn in the long mirror behind the bar at Gil’s. Her hair is newly done, and her reflected expression is angry. He looks away and orders her an Old-Fashioned; she says no, but the bartender does not hear her, and she waits until he brings the drink. Rusty is seated and Carolyn is standing amid the bar’s Friday-night noise. The public setting allows him to begin speaking, but it does not soften her distance.

Rusty tells her that he feels like a child and is uncomfortable sitting there; most of all, he wants to talk to her. He looks up expecting to read her response, but finds her expression largely abstracted. He acknowledges that for months she has been walking past him. When he indicates that even this limited contact is all he can get, Carolyn sets down her drink, places a hand on his shoulder, looks directly at him, and says, “Grow up.” She then walks away. The gesture makes the exchange briefly physical, but it does not offer reconciliation: her words and departure reaffirm the boundary he has been trying to evade.

Consequence and narrative significance

Rusty recalls that, for a moment after Carolyn leaves, he desperately wishes she were dead. The thought is not presented as a plan or an action; it is the starkest measure of how his unreciprocated longing has turned into rage. He has insisted that he does not imagine destroying a rival, but the wish exposes a darker edge in his response to being denied access to Carolyn.

Because Rusty tells this history to Dr. Robinson after the events have taken place, the break is presented through his retrospective account of both Carolyn’s actions and his own obsession. He can identify her refusal and describe the humiliating behavior that follows, yet his explanation repeatedly returns to the intensity of his desire. The decisive change is therefore not a mutual farewell but a separation Carolyn enforces while Rusty remains emotionally caught in the affair. Her withdrawal ends their meetings; it does not, for him, end the attachment.