Obsession and Desire

Obsession and Desire traces the transformation of Rusty Sabich’s attraction to Carolyn Polhemus into a force that overwhelms professional concentration, marital restraint, and even his response to her death. The novel gives desire a bodily and recurring form: a rising hum, a racing pulse, music turned up against the world, and a fixation that persists after its object has become a murder victim. Rusty can recognize the force and name it, but recognition does not release him from it.

From attraction to fixation

Rusty first describes Carolyn as the most exciting woman he has known, while also judging her too bold, self-impressed, and unable to keep a sense of proportion. Dr. Robinson supplies the direct conclusion Rusty has not yet said aloud: he fell in love with her. Rusty falls silent before acknowledging it. The pause matters. His feeling has been powerful well before he can make himself state it plainly, and naming it does not make it easier to understand.

The attraction develops through repeated moments of attention at work. Carolyn watches Rusty during witness interviews and meetings; her steady gaze and rueful smile turn ordinary professional encounters into charged exchanges. Rusty responds with a wink or smile, then loses his train of thought. He describes the resulting fantasy as an uninterrupted movie in which Carolyn is amused by and appreciative of him. The emphasis is not only on her presence but on the imagined confirmation she offers: he is captivated by being seen by her.

His fixation soon occupies time and attention beyond their encounters. He thinks of Carolyn in the shower and while driving, and finds himself unable to finish phone calls or concentrate on prosecution documents. Resistance does not stop the cycle. He expects to wake the next morning restored to his former self, but the feeling remains; being near Carolyn brings giddiness and pleasure, while being alone brings desperation and shame. The same attachment that makes proximity exquisite also makes his ordinary life feel as if it is slipping away.

The hum of desire

The Brownian-Motion Hum Motif gives Rusty a model for the way temptation can be present before it becomes impossible to ignore. He remembers hearing, as a child, a high-pitched ringing that he could choose to attend to or disregard; as he understands it, the sound eventually ceased to be audible as his inner-ear bones hardened at puberty. During most of his married life, he treats attraction to other women as a comparable daily hum, something he can will himself not to hear. Working around Carolyn weakens that discipline: the pitch rises, vibrates, and sings. The image makes the affair less a sudden decision than the intensification of a susceptibility he had presumed controlled.

That inward change takes conspicuously physical forms. Rusty seeks a private fifty-minute drive to work with the windows closed and WNOF blasting New Wave music, loud enough for the bass to rattle the windshield. He insists the music is not Carolyn’s taste and not a return to the rock of his youth. Its value lies in the state it lets him inhabit: he is strung out, sweating, pulse racing, and anticipating the next chance to see her. His visions of Carolyn intrude in the middle of calls and conferences with such immediacy that he loses his sense of time and place.

The contrast between the two people is sharp. Rusty spends hours wondering what their next meeting will bring; Carolyn, after their first night together, kisses his hand at her apartment door and says simply that she will see him. He has no plan for resisting and is prepared to accept whatever she permits. On Monday, he approaches her office with a file and a carefully rehearsed pose, while the Jupiter Symphony plays. Desire makes him deliberate in the performance of casualness even as it has already taken command of his attention.

Inheritance, secrecy, and marriage

Rusty measures his conduct against the example of his father, Ivan Sabich, whose Friday-night departures to taverns and the Hotel Delaney were a familiar feature of family life. Rusty and his mother knew where Ivan was going; before leaving, Ivan ate dinner with them and hummed. Rusty says he despised his father’s philandering and considers himself a person of values. The affair therefore violates not only his marriage but the moral identity he has built in opposition to his father. His account offers no easy explanation for the contradiction: he tells Dr. Robinson that he cannot really say why he gave way.

Rusty does not confess to Barbara Sabich while he is seeing Carolyn. Only after the affair has ended, and after he has resolved that it is past, does he break down at an early dinner. He has been absent from home on the pretext of preparing for a trial, though he later claimed that the trial was continued. A highball tumbler in his hand recalls one of Carolyn’s glasses, and the association overwhelms him. Barbara recognizes that he is crying from loss rather than shame and asks who the woman is. Rusty tells her; he says the affair is over and minimizes its duration. The delayed confession exposes the gap between the brief span he claims and the emotional force that still governs him.

The affair gives the marriage a named cause for its existing anger, and Rusty sees a shadowy possibility that the couple might recover by getting past it. But Carolyn’s death reverses that prospect. In Rusty’s description, she had been a demon the household was slowly exorcising; death brings her back to life in his mind. When he resumes involvement in the case, he presents the commitment as limited to two and a half weeks, until the primary, after which it would become another routine unsolved homicide. Barbara sees through that explanation. She tells him that he wants to go through everything again and that he is still obsessed. His insistence that he cannot give up what she asks him to leave alone makes the fixation a present conflict within the marriage, not merely a past affair.

Desire after Carolyn’s death

The photographs of Carolyn’s body reveal the most disturbing persistence of Rusty’s desire. He begins by urging himself to maintain professional composure. As he studies the images, that effort gives way to excitement and to an eroticized perception of her body, even in death. The photographs also show bruising, the rope binding her limbs and neck, and the visible effects of strangulation. Rusty recognizes the horror of what he sees, but horror does not displace his private response: beneath shame and fear, he discovers a lightness he identifies as satisfaction. His recognition of this feeling is not a defense of it; it exposes how desire has become entangled with the violence and the aftermath.

The scene also shifts the meaning Rusty assigns to Carolyn’s image. He sees her expression as one she never had in life and finally imagines that she wants his pity and needs his help. The movement from erotic attention to pity does not end his attachment. Instead, it gives his continued involvement a new emotional language: he can understand himself as responding to her need even while Barbara understands the same persistence as obsession.

The concept therefore joins longing to compromised self-knowledge. Rusty can observe his own bodily agitation, recognize the satisfaction he feels before the photographs, and admit to Dr. Robinson that he loved Carolyn; none of these recognitions restores control. The Brownian hum that once stood for a temptation he could ignore becomes a sound that rises through work, marriage, memory, and grief. After Carolyn’s death, the object of desire is absent, but the need to return to her remains active, and the private force of that need becomes one of the pressures shaping Rusty’s choices.