Rusty Sabich’s obsessive attachment to Carolyn Polhemus

Rusty Sabich’s obsessive attachment to Carolyn Polhemus persists after their affair begins to collapse, turning desire into a private crisis that reaches into his marriage, work, and sense of himself. The relationship is not described as a secure or mutually loving bond: Rusty believes Carolyn is pleased by his devotion, but he does not believe she loves him. What he cannot bear to lose is both Carolyn and the state of longing she has come to embody.

The Shape of the Attachment

Rusty recalls his passion as intense but seldom joyful. Once he understands that his desire will continue, he imagines himself as a mandrake torn screaming from the earth: the image makes his attachment seem less like a choice than a violent uprooting. He describes losing a coherent vision of himself, groping like a blind ghost through a castle and moaning for love. Carolyn’s idea, as much as her physical image, occupies his thoughts. He recognizes the desire as insistent and obsessive, and even as debasing; in retrospect, he compares its release of misery to Pandora opening her box.

That account complicates any simple picture of romantic devotion. Rusty says he does not think Carolyn loved him; he thinks his passion flattered and enlarged her. Nor does he imagine destroying a successor when he eventually suspects there may be one. He would, in his own account, have agreed to share. The injury is denial: he wants the intimacy and release he had before, and cannot accept their removal. His fixation attaches not only to Carolyn but to his own worship of her and to the exultant intensity that worship gives him. Without it, he feels in some sense dead.

Withdrawal and Pursuit

The relationship ends by degrees. Carolyn sees Rusty less for a week and then stops seeing him altogether: no lunches, calls, office visits, or drinks. He knows she values independence, but initially tells himself that her silence is a display of freedom and that resisting it would be a mistake. The explanation does not quiet his panic. He knows she is only one floor below and longs simply to occupy the same room with her.

He goes three days in a row to Morton's Third Floor, where she likes to have lunch. On the third visit, she appears with Raymond Horgan. Rusty does not yet imagine Raymond as a rival. He sits alone, pushing lettuce around his bowl and watching the distant table; the sight of Carolyn and the remembered feel of her skin overwhelm him. By the third week, he stops trying to restrain the impulse and walks into her office without a file or other pretext. Carolyn tells him that the relationship is not right for her at that time. She returns to her desk, resumes working, and turns on the radio while he remains briefly in the room. Her composure and his inability to leave make the separation visible in their opposing uses of the same space.

A Private Crisis Becomes a Wider One

Rusty’s longing consumes more than his hours near Carolyn. He recalls lying beside Barbara after almost twenty years of marriage while his attention was crowded by memories of other bodies and worries about their shared life: corroding rain gutters, their son Nat’s reluctance to study mathematics, Raymond’s increasingly critical response to his work, and the arrogance he perceives in his mother-in-law. Even in bed, he reaches toward Barbara through these accumulated distractions. The affair does not simply replace his marriage; it exposes how far his attention has already drifted from it.

At work, he does little and watches the hallways for Carolyn. His emotional proportions become grotesquely distorted. While reading reports and attending meetings about the abduction and abuse of a fourteen-year-old girl, he thinks of his own pain as pain for Carolyn. The juxtaposition reveals how thoroughly his fixation has appropriated his inner life: a case involving a child’s suffering becomes, in his private perception, another occasion to experience his longing.

At home, Rusty makes what he later regards as an absurd confession to Barbara, crying at the dinner table and in his drink because he wants her sympathy. He understands that the appeal is egoistic, but it worsens his distress. Barbara will not endure seeing him openly suffer and threatens the imminent end of family life if he displays his neediness. Rusty consequently feels there is nowhere to put his pain. From December into January, as temperatures remain near zero, he walks for hours through town, his scarf across his face and his parka’s fur trim burning against his exposed skin. He calls the landscape his own tundra, his Siberia, making winter a measure of emotional exile rather than an escape from it.

Repetition, Shame, and Significance

His attempts to regain contact become repetitive and humiliating. Rusty plans possible conversations in advance, imagining jokes that might loosen Carolyn’s indifference or sincere declarations that might give him another chance. When he calls and she answers, he cannot make himself speak. He waits in shame until she hangs up, then puts the office directory back in the hallway bureau. The gesture closes the small cycle of compulsion without ending it: the desire remains, while each attempt makes his helplessness more apparent.

One Friday night in late March, at Gil’s, Rusty sees Carolyn looking at him through the long beveled mirror behind the bar. Her anger is unmistakable to him. Rather than meet the moment directly, he orders her an Old-Fashioned; she refuses, but the bartender does not hear her and brings the drink. Around them, the noisy bar continues as Rusty sits and finishes his beer. At last he admits how uncomfortable he is and how much of his life seems reduced to wanting to talk to her. The scene returns the attachment to its defining imbalance: he is intensely oriented toward Carolyn, while her refusal and anger establish the limits of what she will offer.

The episode’s force lies in that difference between love as a relationship and desire as Rusty experiences it. He can recognize that Carolyn’s willingness was secondary to his own fixation, yet recognition does not free him from it. His recollections trace how the affair’s withdrawal becomes a continuing attachment, one that turns ordinary settings—a lunchroom, an office, a family bed, a winter street, a bar mirror—into stages for the same unresolved longing.