I. Useful Fictions

Salad Days
Courting Disaster (or, Serious in the Fifties)

II. My True Story

1. Peppy
2. Susan: 1963-1966
3. Marriage A la Mode
4. Dr. Spielvogel
5. Free




I could be his Muse, if only he’d let me.
　　　—Maureen Johnson Tarnopol, from her diary

　　　　　　　　　I

　　　　　Useful Fictions



Salad Days



First, foremost, the puppyish, protected upbringing above his father's shoe
store in Camden. Seventeen years the adored competitor of that striving,
hot-headed shoedog (that's all, he liked to say, a lowly shoedog, but just
you wait and see), a man who gave him Dale Carnegie to read so as to
temper the boy's arrogance, and his own example to inspire and strengthen
it. "Keep up that cockiness with people, Natie, and you'll wind up a hermit,
a hated person, the enemy of the world—" Meanwhile, downstairs in his
store, Polonius displayed nothing but contempt for any employee whose
ambition was less fierce than his own. Mr. Z.—as he was called in the store,
and at home by his little son when the youngster was feeling his oats—Mr.
Z. expected, demanded., that by the end of the workday his salesmen and
his stock boy should each have as stupendous a headache as he did. That
the salesmen, upon quitting, invariably announced that they hated his guts,
always came to him as a surprise: he expected a young fellow to be grateful
to a boss who relentlessly goaded him to increase his commissions. He
couldn't understand why anyone would want less when he could have more,
simply, as Mr. Z. put it, "by pushing a little." And if they wouldn't push, he
would do it for them: "Don't worry," he admitted proudly, "I'm not proud,"
meaning by that apparently that he had easy access to his wrath when
confronted with another's imperfection.

And that went for his own flesh and blood as well as the hired help. For
example, there was the time (and the son would never forget it—in part it
may even account for what goaded him to be "a writer"), there was the time
the father caught a glimpse of his little Nathan's signature across the face
of a booklet the child had prepared for school, and nearly blew their house
down. The nine-year-old had been feeling self-important and the signature
showed it. And the father knew it. "This is the way they teach you to sign
your name, Natie? This is supposed to be the signature that somebody on
the other end is supposed to read and have respect for? Who the hell can
read something that looks like a train wreck! Goddam it, boy, this is your
name. Sign it right!" The self-important child of the self-important shoedog
bawled in his room for hours afterward, all the while strangling his pillow
with his bare hands until it was dead. Nonetheless, when he emerged in his
pajamas at bedtime, he was holding by its topmost corners a sheet of white
paper with the letters of his name, round and legible, engraved in black ink
at the center. He handed it over to the tyrant: "Is this okay?" and in the
next instant was lifted aloft into the heaven of his father's bristly evening
stubble. "Ah, now that's a signature! That's something you can hold your
head up about! This I'm going to tack up over the counter in the store!" And
he did just that, and then led the customers (most of whom were Negroes)
all the way around behind the register, where they could get a really close
look at the little boy's signature. "What do you think of that!" he would
ask, as though the name were in fact appended to the Emancipation
Proclamation.

And so it went with this bewildering dynamo of a protector. Once when
they were out fishing at the seashore, and Nathan's Uncle Philly had seen
fit to give his nephew a good shake for being careless with his hook, the
shoedog had threatened to throw Philly over the side of the boat and into
the bay for laying a hand on the child. "The only one who touches him is
me, Philly!" "Yeah, that'll be the day…" Philly mumbled. "Touch him
again, Philly," his father said savagely, "and you'll be talking to the
bluefish, I promise you! You'll be talking to eels!" But then back at the
rooming house where the Zuckermans were spending their two-week vaca-
tion, Nathan, for the first and only time in his life, was thrashed with a
belt for nearly taking his uncle's eye out while clowning around with that
goddam hook. He was astonished that his father's face, like his own, should
be wet with tears when the three-stroke beating was over, and then—more
astonishing—he found himself crushed in the man's embrace. "An eye,
Nathan, a person's eye—do you know what it would be like for a grown
man to have to go through life without eyes?"

No, he didn't; any more than he knew what it would be like to be a small
boy without a father, or wanted to know, for all that his ass felt on
fire.

Twice his father had gone bankrupt in the years between the wars: Mr.
Z.'s men's wear in the late twenties, Mr. Z.'s kiddies' wear in the early
thirties; and yet never had a child of Z.'s gone without three nourishing
meals a day, or without prompt medical attention, or decent clothes, or a
clean bed, or a few pennies "allowance" in his pocket. Businesses
crumbled, but never the household, because never the head of the house.
During those bleak years of scarcity and hardship, little Nathan hadn't the
faintest idea that his family was trembling on the brink of anything but
perfect contentment, so convincing was the confidence of that volcanic
father.

And the faith of the mother. She certainly didn't act as though she was
married to a businessman who'd been bankrupt and broke two times over.
Why, the husband had only to sing a few bars of "The Donkey Serenade"
while shaving in the bathroom, for the wife to announce to the children at
the breakfast table, "And I thought it was the radio. For a moment I actually
thought it was Allan Jones." If he whistled while washing the car, she
praised him over the gifted canaries who whistled popular songs (popular
maybe, said Mr. Z., among other canaries) on WEAF Sunday mornings;
dancing her across the kitchen linoleum (the waltz spirit oftentimes seized
him after dinner) he was "another Fred Astaire"; joking for the children at
the dinner table he was, at least to her way of thinking, funnier than anyone
on "Can You Top This"—certainly funnier than that Senator Ford. And
when he parked the Studebaker—it never failed—she would look out at the
distance between the wheels and the curbstone, and announce—it never
failed—"Perfect!" as though he had set a sputtering airliner down into a
cornfield. Needless to say, never to criticize where you could praise was a
principle of hers; as it happened, with Mr. Z. for a husband, she couldn't
have gotten away with anything else had she tried.

Then the just deserts. About the time Sherman, their older son, was
coming out of the navy and young Nathan was entering high school,
business suddenly began to boom in the Camden store, and by 1949, the
year Zuckerman entered college, a brand new "Mr. Z." shoe store had
opened out at the two-million-dollar Country Club Hills Shopping Mall.
And then at last the one-family house: ranch style, with a flagstone
fireplace, on a one-acre lot—the family dream come true just as the
family was falling apart.

Zuckerman's mother, happy as a birthday child, telephoned Nathan at
college the day the deed was signed to ask what "color scheme" he wanted
for his room.

"Pink," Zuckerman answered, "and white. And a canopy over my bed and
a skirt for my vanity table. Mother, what is this 'your room' crap?"
"But—but why did Daddy even buy the house, if not for you to have a
real boy's room, a room of your own for you and all your things? This
is something you've wanted all your life."

"Gee whiz, could I have pine paneling, Mother?"

"Darling, that's what I'm telling you—you can have anything."

"And a college pennant over my bed? And a picture on my dresser of
my mom and my girl?"

"Nathan, why are you making fun of me like this? I was so looking
forward to this day, and all you have for me when I call with such
wonderful news is—sarcasm. College sarcasm!"

"Mother, I'm only trying very gently to break it to you—you just
cannot delude yourself into thinking there is something called 'Nathan's
room' in your new house. What I wanted at the age of ten for all 'my
things,' I don't necessarily want any longer."

"Then," she said weakly, "maybe Daddy shouldn't pay your tuition and
send you a check for twenty-five dollars a week, if you're that independent
now. Maybe it works both ways, if that's the attitude…"

He was not much impressed, either by the threat or the tone in which it
was delivered. "If you want," said he in the grave, no-nonsense voice one
might adopt to address a child who is not acting his age, "to discontinue
paying for my education, that is up to you; that is something you and Dad
will have to decide between you."

"Oh darling, what's turned you into this cruel person—you, who were
always so so sweet and considerate—?"

"Mother," replied the nineteen-year-old, now a major in English lan-
guage and literature, "try to be precise. I'm not cruel. Only direct."

Ah, the distance he had traveled from her since that day in 1942 when
Nathan Zuckerman had fallen in love with Betty Zuckerman the way men
seemed to fall in love with women in the movies—yes, smitten by her, as
though she weren't his mother but a famous actress who for some incredible
reason happened also to cook his meals and keep his room in order. In her
capacity as chairwoman of the war bond drive at his school, she had been
invited to the assembly hall that morning to address the entire student body
on the importance of saving war stamps. She arrived dressed in the clothes
she ordinarily wore only when she and her "girl friends" went in to
Philadelphia to see the matinee performance of a stage show: her tailored
gray suit and a white silk blouse. To top it off, she delivered her talk
(without notes) from back of a lectern luxuriantly draped with red, white,
and blue bunting. For the rest of Nathan's life, he was to find himself
unduly susceptible to a woman in a gray suit and a white blouse, because of
the glamor his slender, respectable, well-mannered mother radiated from
the stage that day. Indeed, Mr. Loomis, the principal (who may have been
somewhat smitten himself), compared her demeanor as chairwoman of the
bond drive and president of the PTA to that of Madame Chiang Kai-shek.
And in shyly acknowledging his compliment, Mrs. Zuckerman had conced-
ed from the platform that Madame Chiang was in fact one of her idols.
So too, she told the assembled students, were Pearl Buck and Emily
Post. True enough. Zuckerman's mother had a deep belief in what she
called "graciousness," and a reverence, such as is reserved in India for
the cow, toward greeting cards and thank you notes. And while they were in
love, so did he. One of the first big surprises of Zuckerman's life was see-
ing the way his mother carried on when his brother Sherman entered the navy
to serve his two-year hitch in 1945. She might have been some young girl
whose fiancé was marching off to the in the front lines, while the fact of
thematter was that America had won World War Two in August and Sherman
was only a hundred miles away, in boot camp in Maryland. Nathan did
everything he could possibly think of to cheer her up: helped with the
dishes, offered on Saturdays to carry the groceries home, and talked
nonstop, even about a subject that ordinarily embarrassed him, his little
girlfriends. To his father's consternation he invited his mother to come
and look over his shoulder at his hand when "the two men" played gin rummy
on Sunday nights at the bridge table set up in the living room. "Play the
game," his father would warn him, "concentrate on my discards, Natie, and
not on your mother. Your mother can take care of herself, but you're the
one who's going to get schneidered again." How could the man be so heart-
less? His mother could not take care of herself—something had to be done.
But what?

It was particularly unsettling to Nathan when "Mamselle" was played
over the radio, for against this song his mother simply had no defense
whatsoever. Along with "The Old Lamplighter," it had been her favorite
number in Sherman's entire repertoire of semiclassical and popular songs,
and there was nothing she liked better than to sit in the living room after
dinner and listen to him play and sing (at her request) his "interpretation."
Somehow she could manage with "The Old Lamplighter," which she had
always seemed to love equally well, but now when they began to play
"Mamselle" on the radio, she would have to get up and leave the room.
Nathan, who was not exactly immune to "Mamselle" himself, would follow
after her and listen through the door of her bedroom to the muffled sounds
of weeping. It nearly killed him.

Knocking softly, he asked, "Mom…you all right? You want anything?"

"No, darling, no."

"Do you want me to read you my book report?"

"No, sweetheart."

"Do you want me to turn off the radio? I'm finished listening, really."

"Let it play, Nathan dear, it'll be over in a minute."

How awful her suffering was--also, how odd. After all, for him to miss
Sherman was one thing--Sherman happened to be his only older brother.
As a small boy Nathan's attachment to Sherman had been so pronounced
and so obvious that the other kids used to make jokes about it--they used to
say that if Sherman Zuckerman ever stopped short, his kid brother's nose
would go straight up Sherm's ass. Little Nathan could indeed be seen
following behind his older brother to school in the morning, to Hebrew
school in the afternoon, and to his Boy Scout meetings at night; and when
Sherman's five-piece high-school band used to go off to make music for bar
mitzvahs and wedding parties, Nathan would travel with them as "a
mascot" and sit up in a chair at the corner of the stage and knock two sticks
together during the rumbas. That he should feel bereft of his bother and in
their room at night grow teary at the sight of the empty twin bed to his right,
that was to be expected. But what was his mother carrying on like this
about? How could she miss Sherman so, when he was still around--and
being nicer, really, than ever. Nathan was thirteen by this time and already
an honor student at the high school, but for all his intelligence and maturity
he could not figure that one out.

When Sherman came home on his first liberty after boot camp, he had
with him a ditty bag full of dirty photographs to show to Nathan as they
walked together around the old neighborhood; he also had a pea jacket and
a sailor cap for his younger brother, and stories to tell about whores who sat
on his lap in the bars around Bainbridge and let him stick his hand right up
their dresses. And for nothing. Whores fifty and sixty years old. Sherman
was eighteen then and wanted to be a jazz musician à la Lenny Tristano; he
had already been assigned to Special Services because of his musical talent,
and was going to be MCing shows at the base, as well as helping the chief
petty officer organize the entertainment program. He was also that rarity in
show business, a marvelous comic tap dancer, and could give an impression
of Bojangles Robinson that would cause his younger brother to double over
with laughter. Zuckerman, at thirteen, expected great things from a brother
who could do all this. Sherman told him about pro kits and VD films and let
him read the mimeographed stories that the sailors circulated among
themselves during the nights they stood guard duty. Staggering. It seemed
to the adolescent boy that his older brother had found access to a daring and
manly life.

And when, upon being discharged, Sherman made directly for New York
and found a job playing piano in a bar in Greenwich Village, young
Zuckerman was ecstatic; not so, the rest of the family. Sherman told them
that his ambition was to play with the Stan Kenton band, and his father, if
he had had a gun, would probably have pulled it out and shot him. Nathan,
in the meantime, confided to his high-school friends stories about his
brother's life "in the Village." They asked (those bumpkins), "What
village?" He explained, scornfully; he told them about the San Remo bar on
MacDougal Street, which he himself had never seen, but could imagine.
Then one night Sherman went to a party after work (which was four in the
morning) and met June Christie, Kenton's blonde vocalist. June Christie.
That opened up a fantasy or two in the younger brother's head. Yes, it
began to sound as though the possibilities for someone as game and
adventurous as Sherman Zuckerman (or Sonny Zachary, as he called
himself in the cocktail lounge) were going to be just about endless.

And then Sherman was going to Temple University, taking pre-dent. And
then he was married, not to June Christie but to some girl, some skinny
Jewish girl from Bala-Cynwyd who talked in baby talk and worked as a
dental technician somewhere. Nathan couldn't believe it. Say it ain't so,
Sherm! He remembered those cantaloupes hanging from the leering women
in the dirty pictures Sherman had brought home from the navy, and then he
thought of flat-chested Sheila, the dental technician with whom Sherman
would now be going to bed every night for the rest of his life, and he
couldn't figure the thing out. What had happened to his glamorous brother?
"He saw the light, that's what," Mr. Z. explained to relatives and friends,
but particularly to young Nathan, "he saw the handwriting on the wall and
came to his goddam senses."

Seventeen years then of family life and love such as he imagined
everyone enjoyed, more or less--and then his four years at Bass College,
according to Zuckerman an educational institution distinguished largely for
its lovely pastoral setting in a valley in western Vermont. The sense of
superiority that his father had hoped to temper in his son with Dale
Carnegie's book on winning friends and influencing people flourished in
the Vermont countryside like a jungle fungus. The apple-cheeked students
in their white buck shoes, the Bastion pleading weekly in its editorial
column for "more school spirit," the compulsory Wednesday morning
chapel sermons with visiting clergy from around the state, and the Monday
evening dormitory "bull sessions" with notables like the dean of men--the
ivy on the library walls, the dean told the new freshmen boys, could be
heard on certain moonlit nights to whisper the word "tradition"--none of
this did much to convince Zuckerman that he ought to become more of a
pal to his fellow man. On the other hand, it was the pictures in the Bass
catalogue of the apple-cheeked boys in white bucks crossing the sunlit New
England quadrangle in the company of the apple-cheeked girls in white
bucks that had in part drawn Zuckerman to Bass in the first place. To him,
and to his parents, beautiful Bass seemed to partake of everything with
which the word "collegiate" is so richly resonant for those who have not
been beyond the twelfth grade. Moreover, when the family rode up in the
spring, his mother found the dean of men--who three years later was to tell
Zuckerman that he ought to be driven from the campus with a pitchfork for
the so-called parody he had written in his literary magazine about the
homecoming queen, a girl who happened to be an orphan from Rutland--
this same dean of men, with briar pipe and football shoulders swathed in
tweed, had seemed to Mrs. Zuckerman "a perfectly gracious man," and that
about sewed things up--that and the fact that there was, according to the
dean, "a top-drawer Jewish fraternity" on the campus, as well as a sorority
for the college's dirty "outstanding" Jewish girls, or "gals," as the dean
called them.

Who knew, who in the Zuckerman family knew, that the very month he
was to leave for his freshman year of college, Nathan would read a book
called Of Time and the River that was to change not only his attitude toward
Bass, but toward Life Itself?

After Bass he was drafted. Had he continued into advanced ROTC he would
have entered the service as a second lieutenant in the Transportation
Corps, but almost alone among the Bass undergraduates, he disapproved of
the skills of warfare being taught and practiced at a private educational
institution, and so after two compulsory years of marching around the
quadrangle once a week with a rifle on his shoulder, he had declined an
invitation from the colonel in charge to proceed further with his military
training. This decision had infuriated his father, particularly as there was
another war on. Once again, in the cause of democracy, American young
men were leaving this world for oblivion, this time at a rate of one every
sixty minutes, and twice as many each hour were losing parts of themselves
in the snowdrifts and mud-fields of Korea. "Are you crazy, are you nuts to
turn your back on a deal in the Transportation Corps that could mean life or
death? You want to get your ass shot off in the infantry, instead? Oh, you
are looking for trouble, my son, and you are going to find it, too! The shit is
going to hit the fan, buddy, and you ain't going to like it one bit! Especially
if you are dead!" But nothing the elder Zuckerman could think to shout at
him could change his stubborn son's mind on this matter of principle. With
somewhat less intensity (but no less befuddlement) Mr. Zuckerman had
responded to his son's announcement in his freshman year that he intended
to drop out of the Jewish fraternity to which he had begun to pledge only
the month before. "Tell me, Nathan, how do you quit something you don't
even belong to yet? How can you be so goddam superior to something
when you don't even know what it's like to belong to the thing yet? Is this
what I've got for a son all of a sudden--a quitter?"

"Of some things, yes," was the undergraduate's reply, spoken in that
tone of cool condescension that entered into his father's nervous system
like an iron spike. Sometimes when his father began to seethe, Zuckerman
would hold the telephone out at arm's distance and just look at it with a
poker face, a tactic he had seen people resort to, of course, only in the
movies and for comic effect. Having counted to fifty, he would then try
again to address the entrepreneur: "It's beneath my dignity, yes, that's
correct." Or: "No, I am not against things to be against them, I am against
them on matters of principle." "In other words," said --seethed--Mr. Zuck-
erman, "you are right, if I'm getting the idea, and the rest of the world
is wrong. Is that it, Nathan, you are the new god around here, and the rest of
the world can just go to hell!" Coolly, coolly, so coolly that the most
sensitive seismograph hooked into their long-distance connection would not
have recorded the tiniest quaver in his voice: "Dad, you so broaden the
terms of our discussion with a statement like that--" and so on, temperate,
logical, eminently "reasonable," just what it took to bring on the volcano in
New Jersey.

"Darling," his mother would plead softly into the phone, "did you talk
to Sherman? At least did you think to talk this over with him first?"
"Why should I want to talk it over with 'him'?" "Because he's your
brother!" his father reminded him. "And he loves you," his mother said.
"He watched over you like a piece of precious china, darling, you
remember that—he brought you that pea jacket that you wore till it was
rags you loved it so, oh Nathan, please, your father is right, if you won't
listen to us, listen to him, because, when he came out of the navy, Sherman
went through an independent stage exactly like the one you're going
through now. To the T."

"Well, it didn't do him very much good, Mother, did it?"

"WHAT!" Mr. Zuckerman, flabbergasted yet again. "What kind of way
is that to talk about your brother, damn it? Who aren't you better than—
please just tell me one name, for the record book at least. Mahatma Gandhi
maybe? Yehudi? Oh, do you need some humility knocked into you! Do you
need a good stiff course in Dale Carnegie! Your brother happens to be a
practicing orthodontist with a wonderful practice and also he is your
brother."

"Dad, brothers can have mixed feelings about one another. I believe
you have mixed feelings about your own."

"But the issue is not my brothers, the issue is yours, don't confuse
the issue, which is your KNOW-IT-ALL ARROGANCE ABOUT LIFE THAT
DOESN'T KNOW A GODDAM THING!"

Then Fort Dix: midnights on the firing range, sit-ups in the rain,
mounds of mashed potatoes and Del Monte fruit cup for "dinner"—and
again, with powdered eggs, at dawn—and before even four of the eight
weeks of basic infantry training were over, a graduate of Seton Hall College
in his regiment dead of meningitis. Could his father have been right? Had
his position on ROTC been nothing short of insane, given the realities of
army life and the fact of the Korean War? Could he, a summa cum laude,
have made such a ghastly and irreversible mistake? Oh God, suppose he
were to come down now with spinal meningitis from having to defecate
each morning with a mob of fifty! What a price to pay for having principles
about ROTC! Suppose he were to contract the disease while scrubbing out
the company's hundred stinking garbage cans—the job that seemed always
to fall to him on his marathon stints of KP. ROTC (as his father had
prophesied) would get on very nice without him, ROTC would flourish, but
what about the man of principle, would he keel over in a garbage pail,
dead before he'd even reached the front lines?

But like Dilsey (of whom Zuckerman alone knew, in his platoon of
Puerto Ricans), he endured. Basic training was no small trial, however,
particularly coming as quickly as it did upon that last triumphant year at
Bass, when his only course but one, taken for nine hours' credit, was the
English honors seminar conducted by Caroline Benson. Along with Bass's
two other most displaced Jews, Zuckerman was the intellectual powerhouse
of "The Seminar," which assembled every Wednesday from three in the
afternoon until after six—dusk in the autumn and spring, nightfall in the
winter—on Queen Anne dining chairs pulled around the worn Oriental rug
in the living room of Miss Benson's cozy house of books and fireplaces.
The seven Christian critics in The Seminar would hardly dare to speak
when the three dark Jews (all refugees from the top-drawer Jewish fra-
ternity and founders together of Bass's first literary magazine since—ah,
how he loved to say it—the end of the nineteenth century), when these three
Jews got to shouting and gesticulating at one another over Sir Gawain and
the Green Knight. A spinster (who, unlike his mother, happened not to look
half her age), Caroline Benson had been born, like all her American
forebears, over in Manchester, then educated at Wellesley and "in England."
As he would learn midway through his college career, "Caroline Benson
and her New York Jew" was very much a local tradition, as much a part of
Bass as the "hello spirit" the dean of men was so high on, or the football
rivalry with the University of Vermont that annually brought the ordinarily
respectable campus to a pitch of religious intensity only rarely to be seen in
this century beyond the Australian bush. Tire wittier New Englanders on the
faculty spoke of "Caroline's day-vah Jew experience, it always feels like
something that's happened to her in a previous semester…" Yes, he was, as
it turned out, one of a line—and didn't care. Who was Nathan Zuckerman
of Camden, New Jersey, to turn his untutored back on the wisdom of a
Caroline Benson, educated in England? Why, she had taught him, within the
very first hour she had found him in her freshman literature class, to
pronounce the g in "length"; by Christmas vacation he had learned to
aspirate the h in "whale"; and before the year was out he had put the word
"guy" out of his vocabulary for good. Rather she had. Simple to do, too.
"There are no 'guys,' Mr. Zuckerman, in Pride and Prejudice." Well, he
was glad to learn that, delighted to, in fact. She could singe him to scarlet
with a line like that, delivered in that clipped Vermont way of hers, but vain
as he was he took it without so much as a whimper-every criticism and
correction, no matter how minute, he took unto himself with the exaltation
of a martyred saint.

"I think I should learn to get along better with people," he explained to
Miss Benson one day, when she came upon him in the corridor of the
literature building and asked what he was doing wearing a fraternity pledge
pin (wearing it on the chest of the new V-neck pullover in which his mother
said he looked so collegiate). Miss Benson's response to his proposed
scheme for self-improvement was at once so profound and so simply put
that Zuckerman went around for days repeating the simple interrogative
sentence to himself; like Of Time and the River, it verified something he had
known in his bones all along, but in which he could not place his faith until
it had been articulated by someone of indisputable moral prestige and
purity: "Why," Caroline Benson asked the seventeen-year-old boy, "should
you want to learn a thing like that?"

The afternoon in May of his senior year when he was invited—not
Osterwald who had been invited, not Fischbach, but Zuckerman, the chosen
of the Chosen—to take tea with Caroline Benson in the "English" garden
back of her house, had been, without question, the most civilized four hours
of his life. He had been directed by Miss Benson to bring along with him
the senior honors paper he had just completed, and there in a jacket and tie,
amid the hundreds of varieties of flowers, none of whose names he knew (ex-
cept for the rose), sipping as little tea as he could politely get away with
(he was unable as yet to dissociate hot tea with lemon from the childhood
sickbed) and munching on watercress sandwiches (which he had never even
heard of before that afternoon—and wouldn't miss, if he didn't hear of
them again), he read aloud to Miss Benson his thirty-page paper entitled,
"Subdued Hysteria: A Study of the Undercurrent of Agony in Some Novels
of Virginia Woolf." The paper was replete with all those words that now
held such fascination for him, but which he had hardly, if ever, uttered back
in the living room in Camden: "irony" and "values" and "fate," "will" and
"vision" and "authenticity," and, of course, "human," for which he had a
particular addiction. He had to be cautioned repeatedly in marginal notes
about his relentless use of that word. "Unnecessary," Miss Benson would
write. "Redundant." "Mannered." Well, maybe unnecessary to her, but not
to the novice himself: human character, human possibility, human error,
human anguish, human tragedy. Suffering and failure, the theme of so many
of the novels that "moved" him, were "human conditions" about which he
could speak with an astonishing lucidity and even gravity by the time he
was a senior honors student—astonishing in that he was, after all, someone
whose own sufferings had by and large been confined up till then to the
dentist's chair.

They discussed first the paper, then the future. Miss Benson expected
him after the army to continue his literary studies at either Oxford or
Cambridge. She thought it would be a good idea for Nathan to spend a
summer bicycling around England to see the great cathedrals. That sounded
all right to him. They did not embrace at the end of that perfect afternoon,
but only because of Miss Benson's age, position, and character. Zuckerman
had been ready and willing, the urge in him to embrace and be embraced all
but overpowering.

His eight unhappy weeks of basic infantry training were followed by
eight equally unhappy weeks of military police training with a herd of
city roughnecks and southern hillbillies under the equatorial sun at Fort
Benning, Georgia. In Georgia he learned to direct traffic so that it flowed
"through the hips" (as the handbook had it) and to break a man's larynx, if
he should wish to, with a swat of the billy club. Zuckerman was as alert
and attentive at these army schools as he had been earning his summa cum
laude degree from Bass. He did not like the environment, his comrades, or
"the system," but he did not wish to be in Asia either, and so applied
himself to every detail of his training as if his life depended upon it—as it
would. He did not pretend, as did some of the other college graduates in his
training company, to be offended or amused by the bayonet drill. One thing
to be contemptuous of soldierly skills while an undergraduate at Bass,
another when you were a member of an army at war. "KILL!" he screamed,
"KILL!" just as "aggressively" as he was instructed to, and drove the
bayonet deep into the bowels of the sandbag; he would have spat upon the
dying dummy too if he had been told that that was standard operating
procedure. He knew when to be superior and when not to be —or was
beginning at least to find out. "What are you?" Sergeant Vinnie Bono
snarled at them from the instructor's platform (a jockey before Korea,
Sergeant Bono was reputed to have slain a whole North Korean platoon
with nothing but an entrenching tool)—"What are you with your stiff steel
pricks, you troopers—pussycats or lions?" "LIONS!" roared Zuckerman,
because he did not wish to be in Asia, or anywhere for that matter, ever.

But he would, and, he feared, sooner rather than later. At those Georgia
reveille formations, the captain, a difficult man to please, would be giving
the troopers their first dressing down of the long day—"I guaran-fuckin-tee
you gentlemen, not one swingin' dick will be leavin' this fiddle-fuckin' area
to so much as chew on a nanny goat's tittie—" and Zuckerman, ordinarily a
cheery, a dynamic morning riser, would suddenly have a vision of himself
falling beneath the weight of some drunken redneck in an alley back of a
whorehouse in Seoul. He would expertly crack the offending soldier in the
larynx, in the groin, on the patella, in all the places where he had crip-
pled the dummy in the drill, but the man face-down in the mud would be
Zuckerman, crushed beneath the drunken lawbreaker's brute strength—and
then from nowhere, his end would come, by way of the knife or the razor
blade. Schools and dummies were one thing—the world and the flesh
something else: How would Zuckerman find the wherewithal to crack his
club against a real human patella, when he had never been able to do so
much as punch somebody's face with his fist in a schoolyard fight? And yet
he had his father's short fuse, didn't he? And the seething self-righteousness
to go with it. Nor was he wholly without physical courage. After all, as a
boy he had never been much more than skin and bones beneath his shoulder
pads and helmet, and yet in the sandlot football games he played in weekly
every fall, he had not flinched or cried aloud when the stampede had come
sweeping around his end of the line; he was fast, he was shifty—"wiry" was
the word with which he preferred to describe himself at that time, "Wiry
Nate Zuckerman"—and he was "smart," and could fake and twist and fight
his way through a pack of thirteen-year-old boys built like hippos, for all
that he was a boy built like a giraffe. He had in fact been pretty fearless on
the football field, so long as everybody flayed, according to the rules and
within the spirit of the game. But when (to his surprise) that era of good
fellowship came to an end, Wiry Nate Zuckerman retired. To be smashed to
the ground because he was the left end streaking for the goal line with the
ball had always been all right with him; indeed he rather liked the
precarious drama of plucking a spiral from the air one moment, and then in
the next, tasting dirt, as the pounds piled up above him. However, on a
Saturday morning in the fall of 1947, when one of the Irish kids on the
Mount Holly Hurricanes came flying onto the pileup (at the bottom of
which lay Zuckerman, with the ball) screaming, "Cream that Yid!" he knew
that his football career was over. Henceforth football was no longer to be a
game played by the rules, but a battle in which each of the combatants
would try to get away with as much as he could, for whatever "reasons" he
had. And Zuckerman could get away with nothing—he could not even hit
back when attacked. He could use what strength he had to try to restrain
somebody else from going at him, he would struggle like hell to prevent
damage or disfigurement to himself, but when it came to bringing his own
knuckles or knees into violent contact with another, he just could not make
it happen. Had never been up to it on the neighborhood playground, would
be paralyzed for sure on the mainland of Asia. An attentive and highly
motivated student, he had earned the esteem of a trained killer for the
manner in which he disemboweled the sandbag in basic training— "That's
it, Slim," Sergeant Bono would megaphone down to his favorite college
graduate, "that's grabbin' that gook by his gizzard, that's cuttin' off the
Commie bastard's cock!"—but face to face with a real live enemy, he might
just as well be carrying a parasol and wearing a bustle for all the good his
training as a warrior was going to do himself or the Free World.

So, it looked as though he would not be taking that pilgrimage to
Canterbury Cathedral after all, nor would he get to see the Poets' Corner in
Westminster Abbey, or the churches where John Donne had preached, or the
Lake District, or Bath, the setting of Persuasion (Miss Benson's favorite
novel), or the Abbey Theatre, or the River Liffey, nor would he live to be a
professor of literature some day, with a D. Litt. from Oxford or Cambridge
and a house of his own cozy with fireplaces and walled with books; he
would never see Miss Benson again, or her garden, or those fortunate 4FS,
Fischbach and Osterwald —and worse, no one, ever again, would see him.
It was enough to make him cry; so he did, invariably after being hero-
ically lighthearted on the telephone with his worried mother and father
in New Jersey. Yes, outside the phone booth, within hearing distance of the
PX jukebox—"Oh, the red we want is the red we got in th' old red, white,
and blue"—he would find himself at the age of twenty-one as tearful and
panic-stricken as he had been at four when he had finally had to learn to
sleep with all the lights off in his room. And no less desperate for his
mommy's arms and the feel of his daddy's unshaven cheek.

Telephoning Sharon, being brave with her, would also reduce him to
tears afterward. He could hold up all right during the conversations, while
she cried, but when it came time to give up the phone to the soldier standing
next in the line, when he left the phone booth where he had been so good at
cheering her up and started back through the dark across that alien post
—"Yes, the red we want is the red we got in th' old red, white, and blue" —
he had all he could do not to scream out against the horrible injustice of his
impending doom. No more Sharon. No more Sharon! NO MORE
SHARON! What proportions the loss of Sharon Shatzky assumed in young
Zuckerman's mind. And who was she? Who was Sharon Shatzky that the
thought of leaving her forever would cause him to clap a hand over his
mouth to prevent himself from howling at the moon?

Sharon was the seventeen-year-old daughter of Al "the Zipper King"
Shatzky. With her family she had recently moved into Country Club Hills,
the development of expensive ranch-type houses where his own parents
now lived, on the outskirts of Camden, in a landscape as flat and treeless as
the Dakota badlands. Zuckerman had met her in the four weeks between his
graduation from Bass and his induction into the army in July. Before their
meeting his mother had described Sharon as "a perfect little lady," and his
father had said she was "a lovely lovely child," with the result that
Zuckerman was not at all prepared for the rangy Amazon, red-headed and
green-eyed, who arrived in short shorts that night, trailing sullenly behind
Al and Minna. All four parents present fell over themselves treating her like
a baby, as though that might convince the college graduate to keep his eyes
from the powerful curve of haunch beneath the girl's skimpy summer outfit.
Mrs. Shatzky had just that day taken Sharon shopping in Philadelphia for
her "college wardrobe." "Mother, please," Sharon said, when Minna began
to describe how "adorable" Sharon looked in each of her new outfits. Al
said (proudly) that Sharon Shatzky here now owned more pairs of shoes
than he owned undershorts. "Daddy," moaned Sharon, closing her jungle
eyes in exasperation. Zuckerman's father said that if Sharon had any
questions about college life she should ask his son, who had been editor
up at Bass of "the school paper." It had been the literary magazine that
Zuckerman had edited, but he was by now accustomed to the inaccuracies
that accompanied his parents' public celebration of his achievements.
Indeed, of late, his tolerance for their failings was growing by leaps and
bounds. Where only the year before he might have been incensed by some
line of his mother's that he knew came straight out of McCall's (or by the
fact that she did not know what an "objective correlative" was or in what
century Dryden had lived), now he was hardly perturbed. He had also given
up trying to educate his father about the ins and outs of the syllogism; to be
sure, the man simply could not get it through his head that an argument in
which the middle term was not distributed at least once was invalid—but
what difference did that make to Zuckerman any more? He could afford to
be generous to parents who loved him the way they did (illogical and
uneducated though they were). Besides, if the truth be known, in the past
four years he had become more Miss Benson's student than their
offspring…So he was kind and charitable to all that night, albeit "amused"
by much of what he saw and heard; he answered the Shatzkys' questions
about "college life" without a trace of sarcasm or snobbishness (none, at
any rate, that he could hear), and all the while (without success) tried to
keep his eyes from their daughter's perky breasts beneath her shrunken polo
shirt, and the tempting cage of her torso rising from that slender, mobile
waist, and the panthery way she moved across the wall-to-wall carpet on the
balls of her bare feet…After all: what business did a student of English
letters who had taken tea and watercress sandwiches only a few weeks
earlier in the garden of Caroline Benson have with the pampered middle
class daughter of Al "the Zipper King" Shatzky? By the time Zuckerman
was about to graduate (third in his class, same rank as at Bass) from MP
school, Sharon was a freshman at Juliana Junior College, near Providence.
Every night she wrote him scandalous letters on the monogrammed pink
stationery with the scalloped edges that Zuckerman's mother had given the
perfect young lady for a going-away present: "dearest dearest all I could
think about while playing tennis in gym class was getting down on my
hands and knees and crawling across the room toward your prick and then
pressing your prick against my face i love it with your prick in my face just
pressing your prick against my cheeks my lips my tongue my nose my eyes
my ears wrapping your gorgeous prick in my hair—" and so on. The word,
which (among others) he had taught her and encouraged her to use during
the sex act and also, for titillation's sake, on the phone and through the
mails—had a strong hold over the young girl locked up in the dormitory
room in Rhode Island: "every time the ball came over the net," wrote
Sharon, "i saw your wonderful prick on top of it." This last, of course, he
didn't believe. If Sharon had a fault as a student of carnality, it was a
tendency to try a little too hard, with the result that her prose (to which
Zuckerman, trained by Miss Benson in her brand of the New Criticism, was
particularly attuned) often offended him by a too facile hyperbole. Instead
of acting upon him as an aphrodisiac, her style frequently jarred him by its
banal insistence, reminding him less of Lawrence than of those
mimeographed stories his brother used to smuggle home to him from the
navy. In particular her use of "cunt" (modified by "hot") and "prick"
(modified by "big" or "gorgeous" or both) could be as mannered and
incantatory, in a word, as sentimental, as his own use, or misuse, in college
of the adjective "human." Nor was he pleased by her refusal to abide by the
simple rules of grammar; the absence of punctuation and capitalization in
her obscene letters was not exactly an original gesture of defiance (or an
interesting one either, to Zuckerman's mind, whether the iconoclast was
Shatzky or cummings), and as a device to communicate the unbridled flow
of passion, it seemed to him, a votary not only of Mrs. Dalloway and To the
Lighthouse, but also of Madame Bovary and The Ambassadors (he really
could not read Thomas Wolfe any more), to have been conceived at a rather
primitive level of imagination.

However, as for the passion itself, he had no criticism to make.

Practically overnight (correction: overnight), the virgin whose blood
had stained his thighs and matted his pubic hair when he had laid her on
a blanket in the back seat of his father's new Cadillac, had developed into
the most licentious creature he'd ever known. Nobody like Sharon had been
in attendance at Bass, at least nobody he had ever undressed, and he had
traveled with the college's half dozen bohemians. Even Barbara Cudney,
leading lady of the Bass Drama Society and Zuckerman's companion during
his final year of success and celebrity at college, a girl who had thrown
herself all over the stage in Medea and was now studying at the Yale
Drama School, had nothing like Sharon's sensual adventurousness or the-
atricality, nor had it ever occurred to Zuckerman to ask of Barbara, free
and uninhibited spirit that she was, such favors as Sharon virtually begged
to bestow upon him. Actually the teacher was not so far out in front of his
pupil as he led her to think he was, though of course his surprise at her
willingness to satisfy his every whim and farfetched desire was something
he kept to himself. In the beginning it exceeded all understanding, this
bestiality he had awakened in her simply by penetration, and recalled to
mind those other startling and baffling metamorphoses he had witnessed—
his mother's transformation into the Maiden Bereft when Sherman left
home for the navy, and the descent of Sherman himself from glamor boy to
orthodontist. With Sharon, he had only to allude to some sexual antic or
other, give the slightest hint of an interest—for he was not without
inhibitions—for her to fall into the appropriate posture or turn up with the
necessary equipment. "Tell me what you want me to say, Nathan, tell me
what you want me to do—" As Zuckerman was a highly imaginative boy,
and Sharon so anxious to please, there was, that June, very nearly
something new and exciting to do every night.

The sense of adventure that surrounded their lovemaking (if such is the
term that applies here) was heightened further by the presence often of the
four parents in some other part of the house, or out on the back terrace,
drinking iced tea and gabbing. While buggering Sharon on the floor beneath
the ping-pong table in the basement of her parents' house, Zuckerman
would call out from time to time, "Nice shot," or "Nice return, Sharon" —
even as the feverish young girl whispered up from the canine position, "Oh
it's so strange. It hurts, but it doesn't hurt. Oh Nathan, it's so strange."

Very spicy stuff; more reckless than made him comfortable (Al Shatzky
hadn't risen to the top of the zipper industry by being a gentle or forgiving
fellow), but irresistible. At the suggestion of the adults, they would go off to
the kitchen late at night and there like good little children eat oversized
syrup-covered portions of ice cream out of soup bowls. Out on the terrace
the adults would laugh about the appetite on those two kids—yes, those
were his father's very words—while beneath the table where they sat,
Zuckerman would be bringing Sharon to orgasm with his big toe.

Best of all were "the shows." For Zuckerman's pleasure and at his
instigation, Sharon would stand in the bathroom with the door open and the
overhead light on, performing for him as though she were on a stage, while
he would be seated in the dark living room at the other end of the corridor,
seemingly looking in the direction of the television set. A "show" consisted
of Sharon unfastening her clothes (very slowly, deftly, very much the
teasing pro) and then, with the little underthings at her feet, introducing
various objects into herself. Transfixed (by the Phillies game, it would
appear), Zuckerman would stare down the hallway at the nude girl writhing,
just as he had directed her to, upon the plastic handle of her hairbrush, or
her vaginal jelly applicator, or once, upon a zucchini purchased for that
purpose earlier in the day. The sight of that long green gourd (uncooked, of
course) entering into and emerging from her body, the sight of the Zipper
King's daughter sitting on the edge of the bathtub with her legs flung apart,
wantonly surrendering all five feet nine inches of herself to a vegetable, was
as mysterious and compelling a vision as any Zuckerman had ever seen in
his (admittedly) secular life. Almost as stirring as when she crawled to him
across the length of her parents' living room that night, her eyes leveled on
his exposed member and her tongue out and moving. "I want to be your
whore," she whispered to him (without prompting too), while on the back
terrace her Mother told his mother how adorable Sharon looked in the
winter coat they'd bought for her that afternoon.

It was not, it turned out, a complicated sort of rebellion Sharon was
engaged in, but then she wasn't a complicated girl. If her behavior
continued to exceed understanding it was now because it seemed so
pathetically transparent. Sharon hated her father. One reason she hated him
—so she said—was because of that ugly name of theirs which he refused to
do anything about. Years and years ago, when she was still an infant in the
crib, all five brothers on the Shatzky side had gotten together to decide to
change the family name, "for business reasons." They had decided on
Shadley. Only her father, of the five, refused to make the improvement. "I
ain't ashamed," he told the other four—and went on from there, he
informed his daughter, to become the biggest success of them all. As if,
Sharon protested to Zuckerman, that proved anything! What about the sheer
ugliness of that name? What about the way it sounded to people? Especially
for a girl! Her cousin Cindy was Cindy Shadley, her cousin Ruthie was
Ruthie Shadley—she alone of the girls in the family was still Shatzky!
"Come on, will you please—I'm a trademark," her father told her, "I'm
known nationwide. What am I supposed to become all of a sudden, Al 'the
Zipper King' Shadley? Who's he, honey?" Well, the truth was that by the
time she was fifteen she couldn't bear that he called himself "the Zipper
King" either. "The Zipper King" was as awful as Shatzky—in ways it was
worse. She wanted a father with a name that wasn't either a joke or an
outright lie; she wanted a real name; and she warned him, some day when
she was old enough, she would hire a lawyer and go down to the county
courthouse and get one. "You'll get one, all right—and you know how? The
way all the other nice girls do. You'll get married, and why I'll cry at the
wedding is out of happiness that I won't have to hear any more of this name
business—" and so on, in this vein, for the five tedious years of Sharon's
adolescence. Which wasn't quite over yet. "What is Shatzky," she cried
sorrowfully to Zuckerman, "but the past tense of Shitzky? Oh why won't he
change it! How stubborn can a person be!"

In her denunciations of the family name, Sharon was as witty as she
would ever be—not that the wit was intentional. The truth was that when
she was not putting on a three-ring circus for him, Sharon was pretty much
of a bore to Zuckerman. She didn't know anything about anything. She did
not pronounce the g in "length," nor did she aspirate the h in "when" or
"why," nor would she have in "whale" had the conversation ever turned to
Melville. And she had the most Cockney Philadelphia o he had ever heard
on anyone other than a cabdriver. If and when she did get a joke of his, she
would sigh and roll her eyes toward heaven, as though his subtleties were
on a par with her father's—Zuckerman, who had been the H. L. Mencken of
Bass College! whose editorials (on the shortcomings of the administration
and the student body) Miss Benson had likened in their savage wit to
Jonathan Swift! How could he ever take Sharon up to Bass with him to visit
Miss Benson? What if she started telling Miss Benson those pointless and
interminable anecdotes about herself and her high-school friends? Oh, when
she started talking, she could bury you in boredom! Rarely in conversation
did Sharon finish a sentence, but rather, to Zuckerman's disgust, glued her
words together by a gummy mixture of "you knows" and "I means," and
with such expressions of enthusiasm as "really great," "really terrific," and
"really neat"…the last usually to describe the gang of kids she had traveled
with at Atlantic City when she was fifteen, which, to be sure, had only been
the summer before last.

Coarse, childish, ignorant, utterly lacking in that exquisiteness of
feeling and refinement of spirit that he had come to admire so in the novels
—in the person—of Virginia Woolf, whose photograph had been tacked
above his desk during his last semester at Bass. He entered the army after
their feverish, daredevil month together secretly relieved at having left
behind him (seemingly as he had found her) Al and Minna's five-foot nine
inch baby girl; she was a tantalizing slave and an extraordinary lay, but
hardly a soul mate for someone who felt as he did about great writers and
great books. Or so it seemed, until that day they issued him his Mi rifle, and
he found he needed everyone he had.

"I love your prick," the girl wept into the phone. "I miss your prick so
much. Oh, Nathan, I'm touching my cunt, I'm touching my cunt and
making believe it's you. Oh, Nathan, should I make myself come on the
phone? Nathan—?"

In tears, in terror, he went reeling from the phone booth: think of it,
both he and his genitals would shortly be extinct! Oh what if just the
genitals went, and he lived on—suppose a land mine were to explode be-
neath his boots, and he was returned to a girl like Sharon Shatzky, a blank
between the legs. "No!" he told himself. "Stop having such thoughts! Lay
off! Use your brains! That is only irrational guilt over Sharon and the
zucchini —it is only fear of punishment for buggering the daughter right
under the father's nose! Casebook fantasies of retribution! No such thing
can happen!" To him, was what he meant, because of course in warfare
such things do happen, they happen every day.

And then, after the eight weeks of infantry training followed by eight
more at MP school, he was assigned as a clerk-typist to a quartermaster unit
at Fort Campbell, in the southwestern corner of Kentucky, sixty miles east
of Paducah, eight thousand east of the land mines. Lucky Zuckerman!
Beneficiary of one of those administrative errors by which doomed men are
suddenly pardoned, and the happy-go-lucky are, overnight, earmarked for
death. These things also happen every day.

Zuckerman could type only with his index fingers, and he knew
nothing about filing or making out forms, but fortunately for him, the
captain in charge of the supply room to which he was assigned was so
pleased to have a Jew around to bait--and that too has been known to
happen--that he was willing to make do with an inept assistant. He did not
--as the inept assistant continuously feared he would--report the error in
classification that had sent Zuckerman to Fort Campbell instead of to his
bloody demise in the mud behind a brothel in Seoul, nor did he request a
replacement for him from personnel. Instead, each afternoon before de-
parting for the links over by the air base, Captain Clark would tune up for
his game by driving cotton golf balls out of his office in the direction of
the cubicle occupied by the clerk-typist manqué. Zuckerman did his best to
look unperturbed when the golf balls glanced off his shirt."On target, sir,"
said he with a smile."Not kwat," replied his superior, all concentration,
"not kwat…" and would continue to swat them out through the open door
of his office until at last he'd found the mark."Ah, they we go,
Zuckuhmun, rat on the nose."

Sadistic bully! Southern bigot! Zuckerman left the supply room at the
end of each day bound for the office of the adjutant general, where he
intended to bring charges against Captain Clark (who, for all he knew,
held secret membership in the KKK). But since actually Zuckerman was not
even supposed to be in Kentucky, but had been allocated for destruction
in Korea (and might wind up there yet, if he gave Clark any trouble), he
invariably saw fit to suppress his indignation and proceed on over to the
mess hall for dinner, and then on to the post library, to continue to read
his way through the Bloomsbury group, with time out every hour or so for
another look at the day's bawdy letter from the teenage debauchee he hadn't
been able to bring himself to relinquish quite yet. But, oh Christ, was he
mad! His human dignity! His human rights! His religion! Oh, each time a
golf ball caromed softly off his flesh, how he seethed with indignation…
which isn't, however (as Private Zuckerman well knew), the same as run-
ning with blood. Nor is it what is meant in literature, or even in life for
that matter, by suffering or pain.

Though pain would come to Zuckerman in time--in the form of estrange-
ment, mortification, fierce and unremitting opposition, antagonists
who were not respectable deans or loving fathers or dimwitted officers
in the Army Quartermaster Corps; oh yes, pain would enter his life soon
enough, and not entirely without invitation. As the loving father had warned
him, looking for trouble, he would find it--and what a surprise that would
be. For in severity and duration, in sheer painfulness, it would be like
nothing he had known at home, in school, or in the service, nor would it be
like anything he had imagined while contemplating the harrowed, soulful
face of Virginia Woolf, or while writing his A+ honors paper on the
undercurrent of agony in her novels. Only a short time after having been
shipped by providential error--his last big dose, as it turned out, of
beginner's luck--to the rural American southland instead of the Korean
slaughter, adversity was to catch up with the young conquistador. He would
begin to pay…for the vanity and the ignorance, to be sure, but above all for
the contradictions: the stinging tongue and the tender hide, the spiritual
aspirations and the lewd desires, the softy boyish needs and the manly, the
magisterial ambitions. Yes, over the next decade of his life he was to learn
all that his father might have wished Dale Carnegie to teach him about
humility, and then some. And then some more.

But that is another story, and one whose luridness makes the small-time
southern Jew-baiter lofting cotton golf balls toward his nose, makes even
seventeen-year-old Sharon Shatzky, performing for him on a gourd like a
Pigalle whore at an exhibition, seem as much a part of his idyllic and
innocent youth as that afternoon he once spent sipping tea and eating
watercress in Caroline Benson's garden. The story of Zuckerman's suffering
calls for an approach far more serious than that which seems appropriate to
the tale of his easeful salad days. To narrate with fidelity the misfortunes
of Zuckerman's twenties would require deeper dredging, a darker sense of
irony, a grave and pensive voice to replace the amused, Olympian point of
view…or maybe what that story requires is neither gravity nor complexity,
but just another author, someone who would see it too for the simple five
thousand-word comedy that it very well may have been. Unfortunately, the
author of this story, having himself experienced a similar misfortune at
about the same age, does not have it in him, even yet, midway through his
thirties, to tell it briefly or to find it funny."Unfortunate" because he
wonders if that isn't more the measure of the man than of the misfortune.




Courting Disaster

(or, Serious in the Fifties)



No, I did not marry for conventional reasons; no one can accuse me of
that. It was not for fear of loneliness that I chose my wife, or to have "a
helpmate," or a cook, or a companion in my old age, and it certainly was
not out of lust. No matter what they may say about me now, sexual desire
had nothing to do with it. To the contrary: though she was a pretty enough
woman-square, strong Nordic head; resolute blue eyes that I thought of
admiringly as "wintry"; straight wheat-colored hair worn in bangs; a
handsome smile; an appealing, openhearted laugh--her short, heavy-legged
body struck me as very nearly dwarfish in its proportions and was, from
first to last, unremittingly distasteful. Her gait in particular displeased me:
mannish, awkward, it took on a kind of rolling quality when she tried to
move quickly, and in my mind associated with images of cowhands and
merchant seamen. Watching her run to meet me on some Chicago street--
after we had become lovers--I would positively recoil, even at a distance,
at the prospect of holding that body against me, at the idea that voluntar-
ily I had made her mine.

Lydia Ketterer was a divorced woman, five years my senior, and mother
of a ten-year-old girl who lived with Lydia's former husband and his
second wife in a new suburban housing development south of Chicago.
During their marriage, whenever Lydia dared to criticize or question her
husband's judgment he would lift her from the floor--a massive man twice
her weight and a foot taller--and heave her against the nearest wall; in the
months following the divorce he abused her through her child, who was
then six and in Lydia's custody; and when Lydia broke down, Ketterer took
the child to live with him, and subsequently, after Lydia had been released
from the hospital and was back in her apartment, refused to return the little
girl.

He was the second man nearly to destroy her; the first, Lydia's father,
had seduced her when she was twelve. The mother had been bedridden
since Lydia's birth, a victim it would seem of nothing more than lumbago,
but perpetually weak unto dying. After the father fled, Lydia had been taken
to be raised in the home of two spinster aunts in Skokie; until she ran off
with Ketterer at the age of eighteen, she and her mother shared a room at
the rear of this haven whose heroes were the aviator Lindbergh, the senator
Bilbo, the cleric Coughlin, and the patriot Gerald L. K. Smith. It had been
a life of little but punishment, humiliation, betrayal, and defeat, and it
was to this that I was drawn, against all my misgivings.

Of course, the contrast to my own background of familial devotion and
solidarity was overwhelming: whereas Lydia remembered a thousand and
one nights of rubbing Sloan's liniment into her mother's back, I could not
remember a single hour of my childhood when my mother was incapable of
performing the rites of her office. If indeed she ever had been indisposed,
it seemed not even to interfere with her famous whistling, that continuous
medley of "show tunes" she chirped melodiously away at through her day
of housework and family chores. The sickly one in our home was me: suf-
focating diphtheria, subsequent annual respiratory infections, debilitating
glandular fevers, mysterious visitations of "allergies." Until puberty, I
spent as much time at home in my bed or under a blanket on a sofa in the
living room as I did in my seat in the classroom, all of which makes the
disposition of my mother, the whistler--"Mrs. Zuckerbird" the postman
called her--even more impressive. My father, though not so sunny in his
indestructibility, and constitutionally a much more solemn person than my
peppy peasant of a mother, was no less equal to the hardships our family
endured: specifically, the Depression, my ailments, and my older sister
Soma's inexplicable marriages, twice to the sons of Sicilians: the first an
embezzler and in the end a suicide; the second, honest in his business but
otherwise "common as dirt" --in the Yiddish word, which alone seemed to
carry the weight of our heartbreak and contempt, prust.

We ourselves were not elegant, but surely we were not coarse. Dignity,
I was to understand, had nothing to do with one's social station: charac-
ter, conduct, was everything. My mother used to laugh and make cracks about
the ladies around who had secret dreams of mink coats and Miami Beach
vacations. "To her," she would say disparagingly of some silly neighbor,
"the be-all and end-all is to put on a silver fox and go gallivanting with
the hoi polloi." Not until I got to college and misused the word myself did I
learn that what my mother took to mean the elite--perhaps because "hoi
polloi" sounded like another of her disdainful expressions for people who
put on airs, "the hoity-toity"--actually referred to the masses.
So much for the class struggle as a burning issue in my house, or social
resentment or ambitiousness as a motive for action. A strong character, not
a big bankroll, was to them the evidence of one's worth. Good, sensible
people. Why their two offspring should have wasted themselves as they did,
why both children should have wed themselves to disaster, is difficult to
understand. That my sister's first husband and my only wife should both
have taken their own lives would seem to suggest something about our
common upbringing. But what? I have no theories. If ever a mother and
father were not responsible for the foolishness of their children, it
was mine.

My father was a bookkeeper. Because of his excellent memory and his
quickness with figures, he was considered the local savant in our
neighborhood of hardworking first-generation Jews and was the man most
frequently consulted by people in trouble. A thin, austere, and humorless
person, always meticulous in a white shirt and a tie, he communicated his
love for me in a precise, colorless fashion that makes me ache with
tenderness for him, especially now that he is the bedridden one, and I
live in self-exile thousands of miles from his bed.

When I was the sickly, feverish patient, I felt something more like
mystification, as though he were a kind of talking electrical toy come to
play with me promptly each evening at six. His idea of amusing me was to
teach me to solve the sort of arithmetical puzzles at which he himself was
a whiz. "'Marking Down,'" he would say, not unlike a recitation student
announcing the tide of a poem. "A clothing dealer, trying to dispose of an
overcoat cut in last year's style, marked it down from its original price of
thirty dollars to twenty-four. Failing to make a sale, he reduced the price
still further to nineteen dollars and twenty cents. Again he found no takers,
so he tried another price reduction and this time sold it." Here he would
pause; if I wished I might ask him to repeat any or all of the details. If
not, he proceeded. "All right, Nathan; what was the selling price, if the
last markdown was consistent with the others?" Or: "'Making a Chain.' A
lumberjack has six sections of chain, each consisting of four links. If the
cost of cutting open a link--" and so on. The next day, while my Mother
whistled Gershwin and laundered my father's shirts, I would daydream in
my bed about the clothing dealer and the lumberjack. To whom had the
haberdasher finally sold the overcoat? Did the man who bought it realize it
was cut in last year's style? If he wore it to a restaurant, would people
laugh? And what did "last year's style" look like anyway? " 'Again he
found no takers,'" I would say aloud, finding much to feel melancholy
about in that idea. I still remember how charged for me was that word
"takers." Could it have been the lumberjack with the six sections of chain
who, in his rustic innocence, had bought the overcoat cut in last year's
style? And why suddenly did he need an overcoat? Invited to a fancy ball?
By whom? My mother thought the questions I raised about these puzzles
were "cute" and was glad they gave me something to think about when she
was occupied with housework and could not take the time to play go fish or
checkers; my father, on the other hand, was disheartened to find me
intrigued by fantastic and irrelevant details of geography and personality
and intention instead of the simple beauty of the arithmetical solution. He
did not think that was intelligent of me, and he was right.

I have no nostalgia for that childhood of illness, none at all. In early
adolescence, I underwent daily schoolyard humiliation (at the time, it
seemed to me there could be none worse) because of my physical timidity
and hopelessness at all sports. Also, I was continually enraged by the
attention my parents insisted upon paying to my health, even after I had
emerged, at the age of sixteen, into a beefy, broad-shouldered boy who, to
compensate for his uncoordinated, ludicrous performances in right field or
on the foul line, took to shooting craps in the fetid washroom of the corner
candy store and rode out on Saturday nights in a car full of "smoking wise
guys"--my father's phrase--to search in vain for that whorehouse that was
rumored to be located somewhere in the state of New Jersey. The dread I
felt was of course even greater than my parents': surely I would awaken one
morning with a murmuring heart, or gasping for air, or with one of my
fevers of a hundred and four…These fears caused my assault upon them
to be particularly heartless, even for a teenager, and left them dazed and
frightened of me for years thereafter. Had my worst enemy said, "I hope
you the, Zuckerman," I could not have been any more provoked than I was
when my well-meaning father asked if I had remembered to take my vitamin
capsule, or when my Mother, to see if a cold had made me feverish, did so
under the guise of giving my forehead a lingering kiss at the dinner table.
How all that tenderness enraged me! I remember that it was actually a relief
to me when my sister's first husband got caught with his fist in the till
of his uncle's heating-oil firm, and Sonia became the focus of their concern.
And of my concern. She would sometimes come back to the house to cry on
my seventeen-year-old shoulder, after having been to visit Billy in jail
where he was serving a year and a day; and how good it felt, how uplifting
it was, not to be on the receiving end of the solicitude, as was the case when
Sonia and I were children and she would entertain the little shut-in by the
hour, and without complaint.

A few years later, when I was away at Rutgers, Billy did my parents the
favor of hanging himself by a cord from the drapery rod in their bedroom. I
doubt that he expected it would hold him; knowing Billy, I guess he wanted
the rod to give under his weight so that he might be found, still breathing,
in a heap on the floor when my parents came back from their shopping. The
sight of a son-in-law with a sprained ankle and a rope around his neck was
supposed to move my father to volunteer to pay Billy's five-thousand-dollar
debt to his bookie. But the rod turned out to be stronger than Billy had
thought, and he was strangled to death. Good riddance, one would think.
But no; the next year Sunny married (in my father's phrase) "another one."
Same wavy black hair, same "manly" cleft in his chin, same repellent
background. Johnny's weakness was not horses but hookers. The marriage
has flourished, nonetheless. Each time my brother-in-law gets caught, he
falls to his knees and begs Sunny's forgiveness; this gesture seems to go a
long way with my sister--not so with our father: "Kisses her shoes," he
would say, closing his eyes in disgust; "actually kisses shoes, as though
that were a sign of love, of respect--of anything!" There are four handsome
wavy-haired children, or were when last I saw them all in 1962: Donna,
Louis, John Jr., and Marie (that name the unkindest cut of all). John Sr.
builds swimming pools and brings in enough each week to be able to
spend a hundred dollars on a New York call girl without feeling a thing,
financially speaking. When last I saw it, their summer house in the Italian
Catskills had even more pink "harem" pillows in the living room than the
one in Scotch Plains, and an even grander pepper mill; in both "homes," the
silver, the linens, and the towels are monogrammed SZR, my sister's
initials.

How come? I used to be plagued by that question. How could it be that
the sister of mine who had rehearsed for hours on end in our living room,
over and over again singing to me the songs from Song of Norway and The
Student Prince until I wished I were Norwegian or nobility; the sister who
took "voice" from Dr. Bresslenstein in his studio in North Philadelphia and
at fifteen was already singing "Because" for money at weddings; a sister
who had the voluptuous, haughty airs of a prima donna when the other little
girls were still fretting over boys and acne --how could she wind up in a
house with a harem "motif," mothering children taught by nuns, and playing
"Jerry Vale Sings Italian Hits" on the stereo to entertain our silent
parents when they come for a Sunday visit? How? Why?

I used to wonder, when Sonia married for the second time, if perhaps
she were involved in a secret and mysterious religious rite: if she had not
deliberately set out to mortify herself, so as to sound to the depths her
spiritual being. I would imagine her in bed at night (yes, in bed), her
pretty-boy slob of a husband asleep beside her, and Sonia exultant in the
dark with the knowledge that unbeknownst to everyone--everyone being the
bewildered parents and incredulous college-boy brother--she continued to
be the very same person who used to enchant us from the stage of the Y
with what Bresslenstein (a poor refugee from Palestine, but according to
himself formerly the famous impresario of Munich) described to my mother
as "a beautiful beautiful coloratura quality--the beginnings of another Lily
Pons." I could imagine her one evening at dinnertime knocking on the back
door to our apartment, her black hair to her shoulders again, and wearing
the same long embroidered dress in which she had appeared in The Student
Prince--my graceful and vivacious sister, whose appearance on a stage
would cause tears of pride to spring to my eyes, our Lily Pons, our Galli
Curci, returning to us, as bewitching as ever and uncorrupted: "1 had to do
it," she explains, when we three rush as one to embrace her, "otherwise it
meant nothing."

In brief: I could not easily make peace with the fact that I had a sister
in the suburbs, whose pastimes and adornments--vulgar to a snobbish
college sophomore, an elitist already reading Allen Tate on the sublime and
Dr. Leavis on Matthew Arnold with his breakfast cereal--more or less
resembled those of millions upon millions of American families. Instead I
imagined Sonia Zuckerman Ruggieri in Purgatorio.

Lydia Jorgenson Ketterer I imagined in Hell. But who wouldn't have, to
hear those stories out of her lurid past? Beside hers, my own childhood,
frailty, fevers, and all, seemed a version of paradise; for where I had been
the child served, she had been the child servant, the child slave, round-the
clock nurse to a hypochondriacal mother and fair game to a benighted
father.

The story of incest, as Lydia told it, was simple enough, so simple that
it staggered me. It was simply inconceivable to me at the time that an act I
associated wholly with a great work of classical drama could actually have
taken place, without messengers and choruses and oracles, between a
Chicago milkman in his Bloomfield Farms coveralls and his sleepy little
blue-eyed daughter before she went off to school. Yet it had. "Once upon a
time," as Lydia liked to begin the story, early on a winter morning, as he
was about to set off to fetch his delivery truck, her father came into her
room and lay down beside her in the bed, dressed for work. He was tremb-
ling and in tears. "You're all I have, Lydia, you're all Daddy has. I'm
married to a corpse." Then he lowered his coveralls to his ankles, all
because he was married to a corpse. "Simple as that," said Lydia. Lydia the
child, like Lydia the adult, did not scream out, nor did she reach up and sink
her teeth into his neck once he was over her. The thought of biting into his
Adam's apple occurred to her, but she was afraid that his screams would
awaken her mother, who needed her sleep. She was afraid that his screams
would awaken her mother. And, moreover, she did not want to hurt him: he
was her father. Mr. Jorgenson showed up for work that morning, but his
truck was found abandoned later in the day in the Forest Preserve. "And
where he went," said Lydia, in mild storybook fashion, "nobody knew,"nei-
ther the invalid wife whom he had left penniless nor their horrified little
child. Something at first made Lydia believe that he had run away "to the
North Pole," though simultaneously she was convinced that he was lurking
in the neighborhood, ready to crush her skull with a rock if she should tell
any of her little friends the dring he had done to her before disappearing.
For years afterward—even as a grown woman, even after her breakdown—
whenever she went to the Loop at Christmastime, she would wonder if he
might not be one of the Santa Clauses standing outside the department
stores ringing a little bell at the shoppers. In fact, having decided in
the December of her eighteenth year to run away from Skokie with Ketterer,
she had approached the Santa Claus outside Goldblatt's and said to him,
"I'm getting married. I don't care about you any more. I'm marrying a man
who stands six feet two inches tall and weighs two hundred and twenty-five
pounds and if you ever so much as follow me again he'll break every bone
in your body."

"I still don't know which was more deranged," said Lydia, "pretending
that that poor bewildered Santa Claus was my father, or imagining that the
oaf I was about to marry was a man."

Incest, the violent marriage, then a what she called her "flirtation" with
madness. A month after Lydia had divorced Ketterer on grounds of physical
cruelty, her mother finally managed to have the stroke she had been
readying herself for all her life. During the week the woman lay under the
oxygen tent in the hospital, Lydia refused to visit her. "I told my aunts that
I had put in all the hours I owed to the cause. If she were dying, what help
could I be in preventing it? And if she were faking again, I refused to
participate." And when the mother did expire at long last, Lydia's grief, or
relief, or delight, or guilt, took the form of torpor. Nothing seemed worth
bothering to do. She fed and clothed Monica, her six-year-old daughter, but
that was as far as she went. She did not change her own clothes, make the
bed, or wash the dishes; when she opened a can to eat something she
invariably discovered that she was eating the cat's tinned food. Then she
began to write on the walls with her lipstick. The Sunday after the funeral,
when Ketterer came to take Monica away for the day, he found the child in
a chair, all dressed and ready to go, and the walls of the apartment covered
with questions, printed in big block letters with a lipstick: WHY NOT? YOU
TOO? WHY SHOULD THEY? SAYS WHO? WE WILL? Lydia was still at her
breakfast, which consisted that morning of a bowl full of kitty litter, covered
with urine and a sliced candle.

"Oh, how he loved that," Lydia told me. "You could just see his mind,
or whatever you'd call what he's got in there, turning over. He couldn't
bear, you see, that I had divorced him, he couldn't bear that a judge in a
courtroom had heard what a brute he was. He couldn't bear losing his little
punching bag. 'You think you're so smart, you go to art museums and you
think that gives you a right to boss your husband around—' and then he'd
pick me up and throw me at the wall. He was always telling me how I ought
to be down on my knees for saving me from the houseful of old biddies,
how I ought to worship him for taking somebody who was practically an
orphan and giving her a nice home and a baby and money to spend going to
art museums. Once, you see, during the seven years, I had gone off to the
Art Institute with my cousin Bob, the bachelor high-school teacher. He took
me to the art museum and when we were all alone in one of the empty
rooms, he exposed himself to me. He said he just wanted me to look at him,
that was all. He said he didn't want me to touch it. So I didn't; I didn't
do anything. Just like with my father—I felt sorry for him. There I was,
married to an ape, and here was Cousin Bob, the one my father used to
call 'the little grind.' Quite a distinguished family I come from. Anyway:
Ketterer broke down the door, saw the handwriting on the wall was mine,
and couldn't have been happier. Especially when he noticed what I was
pretending to be eating for my breakfast. Because it was all pretense, you
see. I knew exactly what I was doing. I had no intention of drinking my
own urine, or eating a candle and kitty litter. I knew he was coming to call,
that was the reason I did it. You should have heard how solicitous he was:
'You need a doctor, Lydia, you need a doctor real bad.' But what he called
was a city ambulance. I had to smile when two men came into my apartment
actually wearing white coats. I didn't have to smile, that is, but I did.
I said: 'Won't you gentlemen have some kitty litter?' I knew that was
the kind of thing you were supposed to say if you were mad. Or at least
that's what everybody else thought. What I really say when I'm insane are
things like 'Today is Tuesday,' or 'I'll have a pound of chopped meat,
please.' Oh, that's just cleverness. Strike that. I don't know what I say
if I'm mad, or if I've even been mad. Truly, it was just a mild flirtation."

But that was the end of motherhood, nonetheless. Upon her release
from the hospital five weeks later, Ketterer announced that he was
remarrying. He hadn't planned on "popping the question" so soon, but now
that Lydia had proved herself in public to be the nut he had had to endure in
private for seven miserable years, he felt duty bound to provide the child
with a proper home and a proper mother. And if she wanted to contest his
decision in court, well, just let her try. It seemed he had taken photographs
of the walls she had defaced and had lined up neighbors who would testify
to what she had looked like and smelted like in the week before "you
flipped your Lydia, kid," as it pleased Ketterer to describe what had
happened to her. He did not care how much it would cost him in legal fees;
he would spend every dime he had to save Monica from a crazy woman who
ate her own filth. "And also," said Lydia, "to get out of paying support
money in the bargain."

"I ran around frantically for days, begging the neighbors not to testify
against me. They knew how much Monica loved me, they knew that I loved
her—they knew it was only because my mother had died, because I was ex-
hausted, and so on and so forth. I'm sure I terrified them, telling them all
they 'knew' that they didn't begin to know about my life. I'm sure I wanted
to terrify them. I even hired a lawyer. I sat in his office and wept, and he
assured me that I was within my rights to demand the child back, and that it
was going to be a little harder for Mr. Ketterer than he thought, and so on
and so forth, very encouraging, very sympathetic, very optimistic. So I left
his office and walked to the bus station and took a bus to Canada. I went
to Winnipeg to look for an employment agency—I wanted to be a cook in a
logging camp. The farther north the better. I wanted to be a cook for a
hundred strong, hungry men. All the way to Winnipeg in the bus I had
visions of myself in the kitchen of a big mess hall up in the freezing wilds,
cooking bacon and eggs and biscuits and pots and pots of coffee for the
morning meal, cooking their breakfast while it was still dark—the only
one awake in the logging camp, me. And then the long sunny mornings,
cleaning up and beginning preparations for the evening meal, when they'd
all come in tired from the heavy work in the forest. It was the simplest and
most girlish little daydream you can imagine. I could imagine. I would be a
servant to a hundred strong men, and they in return would protect me from
harm. I would be the only woman in the entire camp, and because there was
only one of me, no one would ever dare to take advantage of my situation. I
stayed in Winnipeg three days. Going to movies. I was afraid to go to a
logging camp and say I wanted work there—I was sure they would think I
was a prostitute. Oh, how banal to be crazy. Or maybe just banal being me.
What could be more banal than having been seduced by your own father
and then going around being 'scarred' by it forever? You see, I kept
thinking all the while, 'There's no need for me to be behaving in this way.
There is no need to be acting crazy—and there never was. There is no need
to be running away to the North Pole. I'm just pretending. All I have to do
to stop is to stop.' I would remember my aunts telling me, if I so much as
uttered a whimper in objection to anything: 'Pull yourself together, Lydia,
mind over matter.' Well, it couldn't be that I was going to waste my life
defying those two, could it? Because making myself their victim was sillier
even than continuing to allow myself to be my father's. There I sat in the
movies in Canada, with all these expressions I used to hate so, going
through my head, but making perfect sense. Pull yourself together, Lydia.
Mind over matter, Lydia. You can't cry over spilled milk, Lydia. If you
don't succeed, Lydia—and you don't—try, try again. Nothing could have
been clearer to me than that sitting in the movies in Winnipeg was as
senseless as anything I could do if I ever hoped to save Monica from her
father. I could only conclude that I didn't want to save her from him. Dr.
Rutherford now tells me that that was exactly the case. Not that it requires a
trained therapist to see through somebody like me. How did I get back to
Chicago? According to Dr. Rutherford, by accomplishing what I set out to
do. I was staying in a two-dollar-a-night hotel on what turned out to be
Winnipeg's skid row. As if Lydia didn't know, says Dr. Rutherford. The
third morning that I came down to pay for the room, the desk clerk asked
me if I wanted to pick up some easy cash. I could make a lot of money
posing for pictures, especially if I was blonde all over. I began to howl. He
called a policeman, and the policeman called a doctor, and eventually
somehow they got me home. And that's how I managed to rid myself of my
daughter. You would have thought it would have been simpler to drown her
in the bathtub."

To say that I was drawn to her story because it was so lurid is only the
half of it: there was the way the tale was told. Lydia's easy, familiar,
even cozy manner with misery, her droll acceptance of her own madness,
greatly increased the story's appeal—or, to put it another way, did much
to calm whatever fears one might expect an inexperienced young man of a
conventional background to have about a woman bearing such a ravaged
past. Who would call "crazy" a woman who spoke with such detachment of
her history of craziness? Who could find evidence of impulses toward
suicide and homicide in a rhetorical style so untainted by rage or vengeful
wrath? No, no, this was someone who had experienced her experience, who
had been deepened by all that misery. A decidedly ordinary looking person,
a pretty little American blonde with a face like a million others, she
had, without benefit of books or teachers, mobilized every ounce of her
intelligence to produce a kind of wisdom about herself. For surely it
required wisdom to recite, calmly and with a mild, even forgiving irony,
such a ghastly narrative of ill luck and injustice. You had to be as cruelly
simpleminded as Ketterer himself, I thought, not to appreciate the moral
triumph this represented—or else you just had to be someone other than
me. I met the woman with whom I was to ruin my life only a few months
after arriving back in Chicago in the fall of 1956, following a premature
discharge from the army. I was just short of twenty-four, held a master's
degree in literature, and prior to my induction into the service had been
invited to return to the College after my discharge as an instructor in the
English composition program. Under any circumstances my parents would
have been thrilled by what they took to be the eminence of that position;
as it was, they looked upon this "honor" as something like divine com-
pensation for the fate that had befallen their daughter. Their letters were
addressed, without irony, to "Professor Nathan Zuckerman"; I'm sure many
of them, containing no more than a line or two about the weather in New
Jersey, were mailed solely for the sake of addressing them.

I was pleased myself, though not so awestruck. In fact, the example of
my own tireless and resolute parents had so instilled in me the habits that
make for success that I had hardly any understanding at all of failure. Why
did people fail? In college, I had looked with awe upon those fellows who
came to class unprepared for examinations and who did not submit their
assignments on time. Now why should they want to do it that way, I
wondered. Why would anyone prefer the ignobility of defeat to the genuine
pleasures of achievement? Especially as the latter was so easy to effectuate:
all you had to be was attentive, methodical, thorough, punctual, and
persevering; all you had to be was orderly, patient, self-disciplined,
undiscourageable, and industrious--and, of course, intelligent. And that
was it. What could be simpler?

What confidence I had in those days! What willpower and energy! And
what a devourer of schedules and routines! I rose every weekday at six
forty-five to don an old knit swimsuit and do thirty minutes of pushups, sit
ups, deep knee bends, and half a dozen other exercises illustrated in a
physical-fitness guide that I had owned since adolescence and which still
served its purpose; of World War Two vintage, it was titled How To Be
Tough as a Marine. By eight I would have bicycled the mile to my office
overlooking the Midway. There I would make a quick review of the day's
lesson in the composition syllabus, which was divided into sections, each
illustrating one of a variety of rhetorical techniques; the selections were
brief--the better to scrutinize meticulously--and drawn mostly from the
work of Olympians: Aristotle, Hobbes, Mill, Gibbon, Pater, Shaw, Swift, Sir
Thomas Browne, etc. My three classes of freshman composition each met
for one hour, five days a week. I began at eight thirty and finished at eleven
thirty, three consecutive hours of hearing more or less the same student
discussion and offering more or less the same observations myself--and yet
never with any real flagging of enthusiasm. Much of my pleasure, in fact,
derived from trying to make each hour appear to be the first of the day.
Also there was a young man's satisfaction in authority, especially as that
authority did not require that I wear any badge other than my intelligence,
my industriousness, a tie, and a jacket. Then of course I enjoyed, as I
previously had as a student, the courtesy and good-humored seriousness of
the pedagogical exchange, nearly as much as I enjoyed the sound of the
word "pedagogical." It was not uncommon at the university for faculty and
students eventually to call one another by their given names, at least outside
the classroom. I myself never considered this a possibility, however, any
more than my father could have imagined being familiar in their offices
with the businessmen who had hired him to keep their books; like him, I
preferred to be thought somewhat stiff, rather than introduce considerations
extraneous to the job to be done, and which might tempt either party to the
transaction to hold himself less accountable than was "proper." Especially
for one so close to his students in age, there was a danger in trying to appear
to be "a good guy" or "one of the boys"--as of course there was equally the
danger of assuming an attitude of superiority that was not only in excess of
my credentials, but distasteful in itself.

That I should have to be alert to every fine point of conduct may seem
to suggest that I was unnatural in my role, when actually it was an
expression of the enthusiasm with which I took to my new vocation and of
the passion I had in those days to judge myself by the strictest standard in
every detail.

By noon I would have returned to my small quiet apartment, eaten a
sandwich I had prepared for myself, and already have begun work on my
own fiction. Three short stories I had written during the evenings when I
was in the army had all been accepted for publication in a venerable literary
quarterly; they were, however, no more than skillful impersonations of the
sort of stories I had been taught to admire most in college--stories of "The
Garden Party" variety--and their publication aroused in me more curiosity
than pride. I owed it to myself, I thought, to find out if I might have a
talent that was my own. "To owe it to oneself," by the way, was a notion
entirely characteristic of a man like my father, whose influence upon my
thinking was more pervasive than might have been apparent to anyone--myself
included--who had listened to me, in the classroom, discussing the
development of a theory in Aristotle or a metaphor in Sir Thomas Browne.
At six P.M., following five hours of working at my fiction and an hour
brushing up on my French--I planned to travel to Europe during the
summer vacation--I bicycled back to the university to eat dinner in the
Commons, where I had formerly taken my meals as a graduate student. The
dark wood tones of the paneled hall, and the portraits of the university's
distinguished dead hanging above the refectory tables, satisfied a strong
taste in me for institutional dignity. In such an environment I felt perfectly
content to eat alone; indeed, I would not have considered myself unblessed
to have been told that I would be dining off a tray in this hall, eating these
stews and Salisbury steaks, for the rest of my days. Before returning to my
apartment to mark one seventh of my weekly stack of sixty-odd freshman
essays (as many as I could take in a sitting) and to prepare the next day's
lesson, I would browse for half an hour or so in the secondhand bookstores
in the neighborhood. Owning my own "library" was my only materialistic
ambition; in fact, trying to decide which two of these thousands of books to
buy that week, I would frequently get so excited that by the time the
purchase was accomplished I had to make use of the bookseller's toilet
facilities. I don't believe that either microbe or laxative has ever affected me
so strongly as the discovery that I was all at once the owner of a slightly
soiled copy of Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity in the original English
edition.

At ten o'clock, having completed my classroom preparation, I would
go off to a local graduate-student hangout, where generally I ran into
somebody I knew and had a glass of beer-one beer, one game of pinball
soccer, and then home, for before I went to sleep, there were still fifty
pages to be underlined and annotated in some major work of European
literature that either I hadn't yet read or had misread the first time around.
I called this "filling in the gaps." Reading--and noting--fifty pages a night,
I could average three books a month, or thirty-six a year. I also knew
approximately how many short stories I might expect to complete in a year,
if I put in thirty hours at it a week; and approximately how many students'
essays I could mark in an hour; and how large my "library" would be in a
decade, if I were to continue to be able to make purchases in accordance
with my present budget. And I liked knowing all these things, and to this
day like myself for having known them.

I seemed to myself as rich as a young man could be in spiritual goods;
as for worldly goods, what could I possibly need that I didn't have? I owned
a bicycle to get around the neighborhood and provide me with exercise, a
Remington portable (my parents' gift for my graduation from high school),
a briefcase (their gift for my grade-school graduation), a Bulova watch
(their gift for my bar mitzvah); I had still from my undergraduate days a
favorite well-worn tweed jacket to teach my classes in, complete with
leather elbow patches, my army khakis to wear while writing and drinking
my beer, a new brown glen plaid suit for dressing up, a pair of tennis
sneakers, a pair of cordovan shoes, a ten-year-old pair of slippers, a V-neck
sweater, some shirts and socks, two striped ties, and the kind of jockey
shorts and ribbed undershirts that I had been wearing since I had graduated
from diapers, Fruit of the Loom. Why change brands? They made me happy
enough. All I wanted to be happier still were more books to inscribe my
name in. And to travel to Europe for two months to see the famous cultural
monuments and literary landmarks. Two times each month I would be
surprised to find in my mailbox a check from the university for one hundred
and twenty-five dollars. Why on earth were they sending me money? It was
I, surely, who should be paying them for the privilege of leading such a full,
independent, and honorable life.

In the midst of my contentment there was one difficulty: my headaches.
While a soldier I had developed such severe migraines that I had fin-
ally to be separated with a medical discharge after serving only eleven
months of my two-year term. Of course, I didn't miss the tedium and
boredom of peacetime army life; from the day I was drafted I had been
marking off the time until I could return to a life no less regimented and
disciplined than a soldier's, but overseen by me and for the sake of serious
literary studies. However, to have been released back into a studious
vocation because of physical incapacity was disconcerting to one who had
spent nearly ten years building himself, by way of exercise and diet, into a
brawny young man who looked as though he could take care of himself out
in the harsh world. How doggedly I had worked to bury the frail child who
used to lie in his bed musing over his father's puzzles, while the other little
children were out on the streets learning to be agile and fearless! I had even
been pleased, in a way, when I had found myself assigned by the army to
military police school in Georgia: they did not make sissy invalids into
MPs, that was for sure. I was to become a man with a pistol on his hip and
starch in the knifelike creases of his khakis: a humanist with a swagger, an
English teacher with a billy club. The collected stories of Isaac Babel had
not appeared yet in the famous paperback edition, but when I read them five
years later, I recognized in Babel's experience as a bespectacled Jew with
the Red cavalry something like a highly charged version of what I had
experienced during my brief tour of duty as an MP in the state of Georgia.
An MP, until those headaches knocked me off my spit-shined boots…and I
lay mummified on my bed for twenty-four hours at a stretch, the most
ordinary little sound outside the barracks window--a soldier scratching at
the grass with a rake, some passerby whistling a tune between his teeth--as
unbearable as a spike being driven in my brain; even a beam of sunlight,
filtering through the worn spot in the drawn green shade back of my bunk, a
sunbeam no larger than the head of a pin, would be, in those circumstances,
intolerable.

My "buddies," most of them without a twelfth-grade education, assumed
that the college genius (and Jewboy) was malingering, especially when I
discovered that I could tell the day before that one of my disabling head-
aches was on its way. It was my contention that if only I were allowed to
retire to my bed prior to the onset of the headache, and to remain there in
the dark and quiet for five hours or so, I could ward off an otherwise
inevitable attack. "Look, I think you could too," said the wise sergeant,
while denying me permission to do so, "I have often thought the same thing
about myself. You can't beat a day in the sack for making you feel good all
over." Nor was the doctor on sick call much more sympathetic; I convinced
no one, not even myself. The "floating" or "ghostly" sensation, the aura of
malaise that served as my warning system was, in truth, so unsubstantial, so
faint, that I too had to wonder if I wasn't imagining it; and then
subsequently "imagining" the headache to justify the premonition.
Eventually, when headaches began to flatten me regularly every ten or
twelve days, I was admitted to the post hospital for "observation," which
meant that, except if I was actually in pain, I was to walk around in a pair of
blue army pajamas pushing a dry mop. To be sure, when the aura of a
headache came upon me, I could now retire immediately to my bed; but
that, as it turned out, worked only to forestall the headache for another
twelve hours or so; on the other hand, if I were to remain continually in
bed…But I couldn't; in the words of Bartleby the Scrivener (words that
were with me frequently in the hospital, though I had not read the story for
several years), I preferred not to. I preferred instead to push my mop from
one ward to another and wait for the blow to fall.

Rather quickly I came to understand that my daily work routine had
been devised as a combination punishment and cure by the hospital
authorities. I had been assigned my mop so as to be brought into contact
with those who were truly ill, irreversibly and horribly so. Each day, for
instance, I went off to mop between the beds of patients in "the burn ward,"
young men so badly disfigured by fire that in the beginning either I had to
turn away at the sight of them or else could not withdraw my gaze at all.
Then there were amputees who had lost limbs in training accidents, in
automobile collisions, in operations undertaken to arrest the spread of
malignancies. The idea seemed to be that I would somehow be shamed out
of my alleged illness by the daily contact that I made on my rounds with
these doomed mortals, most of them no older than myself. Only after I was
called before a medical board and awarded a discharge did I learn that no
such subtle or sadistic therapy had been ordered in my case. My internment
in the hospital had been a bureaucratic necessity and not some sly form
of purifying and healing imprisonment. The "cure" had been wholly of my
own devising, my housecleaning duties having been somewhat less ex-
tensive than I had imagined. The nurse in charge of my section, an
easygoing and genial woman, was amused to learn from me, on the day of
my discharge, that I had been wandering through the hospital from nine
to five every day, cleaning the floors of all the open wards, when the
instructions she had given me had been only to clean up each morning
around my own bed. After that I was to have considered myself free to
come and go as I wished, so long as I did not leave the hospital. "Didn't
anyone ever stop you?" she asked. "Yes," I said, "in the beginning. But I
told them I'd been ordered to do it." I pretended to be as amused as she was
by the "misunderstanding," but wondered if bad conscience was not leading
her to lie now about the instructions she had given me on the day I had
become her patient.

In Chicago, a civilian again, I was examined by a neurologist at Bill-
ings Hospital who could offer no explanation for the headaches, except
to say that my pattern was typical enough. He prescribed the same drugs
that the army had, none of which did me any good, and told me that
migraines ordinarily diminish in intensity and frequency with time,
generally dying out around the age of fifty. I had vaguely expected that
mine would die out as soon as I was my own man again and back at the
university; along with my sergeant and my envious colleagues, I continued
to believe that I had induced this condition in myself in order to provide
me with grounds for discharge from an army that was wasting my valuable
time. That the pain not only continued to plague me, but in the months
following my discharge began to spread until it had encompassed both
halves of my skull, served to bolster, in a grim way, a faltering sense of
my own probity.

Unless, of course, I was covering my tracks, "allowing" the headaches
a somewhat longer lease on my life than might be physically desirable, for
the sake of my moral well-being. For who could accuse me of falling ill as a
means of cutting short my tour of army duty when it was clear that the
rewarding academic life I had been so anxious to return to continued to be
as marred by this affliction as my purposeless military existence had been?
Each time I had emerged from another twenty-four-hour session of pain, I
would think to myself, "How many more, before I've met my obligation?" I
wondered if it was not perhaps the "plan" of these headaches to visit
themselves upon me until such time as I would have been discharged from
the service under ordinary conditions. Did I, as it were, owe the army a
migraine for each month of service I had escaped, or was it for each week,
or each day, or each hour? Even to believe that they might die out by the
time I was fifty was hardly consolation to an ambitious twenty-four-year
old with as strong a distaste for the sickbed as I had developed in my
childhood; also to one made buoyant by fulfilling the exacting demands of
schedules and routines, the prospect of being dead to the world and to my
work for twenty-four hours every ten days for the next thirty-six years, the
thought of all that waste, was as distressing as the anticipation of the pain
itself. Three times a month, for God only knew how long, I was to be sealed
into a coffin (so I described it to myself, admittedly in the clutch of self
pity) and buried alive. Why?

I had already considered (and dismissed) the idea of taking myself to a
psychoanalyst, even before the neurologist at Billings informed me that a
study in psychosomatic medicine was about to be initiated at a North Shore
clinic, under the direction of an eminent Freudian analyst. He thought it
was more than likely that I might be taken on as a patient at a modest fee,
especially as they were said to be interested particularly in the ailments
that manifested themselves in "intellectuals" and "creative types." The
neurologist was not suggesting that migraines were necessarily sympto-
matic of a neurotic personality disturbance; rather he was responding,
he said, to what he took to be "a Freudian orientation" in the questions
I asked him and in the manner in which I had gone about presenting the
history of the disorder.

I did not know that it was a Freudian orientation so much as a literary
habit of mind which the neurologist was not accustomed to: that is to say,
I could not resist reflecting upon my migraines in the same supramedical
way that I might consider the illnesses of Milly Theale or Hans Castorp or
the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, or ruminate upon the transformation of
Gregor Samsa into a cockroach, or search out the "meaning" in Gogol's
short story of Collegiate Assessor Kovalev's temporary loss of his nose.
Whereas an ordinary man might complain, "I get these damn headaches"
(and have been content to leave it at that), I tended, like a student of high
literature or a savage who paints his body blue, to see the migraines as
standing for something, as a disclosure or "epiphany," isolated or accidental
or inexplicable only to one who was blind to the design of a life or a book.
What did my migraines signify?

The possibilities I came up with did not satisfy a student as "soph-
isticated" as myself; compared with The Magic Mountain or even "The
Nose," the texture of my own story was thin to the point of transpar-
ency. It was disappointing, for instance, to find myself associating
the disability that had come over me when I had begun to wear a pistol
on my hip with either my adolescent terror of the physical life or some
traditional Jewish abhorrence of violence--such an explanation seemed too
conventional and simplistic, too "easy." A more attractive, if in the end no
less obvious, idea had to do with a kind of psychological civil war that had
broken out between the dreamy, needy, and helpless child I had been, and
the independent, robust, manly adult I wanted to be. At the time I recalled
it, Bartleby's passive but defiant formula, "I would prefer not to," had
struck me as the voice of the man in me defying the child and his tempt-
ation to helplessness; but couldn't it just as well be the voice of the
frail and sickly little boy answering the call to perform the duties of a
man? Or of a policeman? No, no, much too pat--my life surely must be more
complex and subtle than that; The Wings of the Dove was. No, I could not
imagine myself writing a story so tidy and facile in its psychology, let
alone living one.

The stories I was writing--the fact of the writing itself--did not escape
my scrutiny. It was to keep open the lines to my sanity and intelligence, to
engage in a solitary, thoughtful activity at the end of those mindless days of
directing traffic and checking passes at the gate into town, that I had taken
up writing for three hours each evening at a table in the corner of the post
library. After only a few nights, however, I had put aside my notes for the
critical article I had planned on some novels of Virginia Woolf (for an issue
of Modern Fiction Studies to be devoted entirely to her work) to begin what
was to turn out to be my first published short story. Shortly thereafter, when
the migraines began, and the search for a cause, a reason, a meaning, I
thought I saw in the unexpected alteration the course of my writing had
taken something analogous to that shift in my attention that used to
disconcert my father when he presented the little boy in the sickbed with
those neat arithmetical puzzles of his--the movement from intellectual or
logical analysis to seemingly irrelevant speculation of an imaginary nature.
And in the hospital, where in six weeks' time I had written my second and
third stories, I could not help wondering if for me illness was not a nec-
essary catalyst to activate the imagination. I understood that this was not
an original hypothesis, but if that made it more or less applicable to my
situation I couldn't tell; nor did I know what to do with the fact that the
illness itself was the one that had regularly afflicted Virginia Woolf and to
some degree contributed to the debilitation that led to suicide. I knew about
Virginia Woolf's migraines from having read her posthumous book, A
Writer's Diary, edited by her husband and published in my senior year of
college. I even had the book with me in my footlocker, for the essay I had
been going to write on her work. What was I to think then? No more than a
coincidence? Or was I imitating the agony of this admirable writer, as in my
stories I was imitating the techniques and simulating the sensibilities of
still other writers I admired?

Following my examination by the neurologist, I decided to stop
worrying about the "significance" of my condition and to try to consider
myself, as the neurologist obviously did, to be one hundred and eighty
pounds of living tissue subject to the pathology of the species, rather than
a character in a novel whose disease the reader may be encouraged to
diagnose by way of moral, psychological, or metaphysical hypotheses. As I
was unable to endow my predicament with sufficient density or originality
to satisfy my own literary tastes--unable to do "for" migraines what Mann
had done in The Magic Mountain for TB or in Death in Venice for cholera
--I had decided that the only sensible thing was to have my migraine and
then forget about it till the next time. To look for meaning was fruitless as
well as pretentious. Though I wondered: Couldn't the migraines themselves
be diagnosed as "pretentious" in origin?

I also withstood the temptation to take myself for an interview to the
North Shore clinic where the study of psychosomatic ailments was getting
under way. Not that I was out of sympathy with the theories or techniques
of psychotherapy as I had grasped them through my reading. It was, rather,
that aside from these headaches, I was as vigorous in the execution of my
duties, and as thrilled with the circumstances of my life, as I could ever
have dreamed of being. To be sure, to try to teach sixty-five freshmen to
write an English sentence that was clear, logical, and precise was not
always an enchanting experience; yet, even when teaching was most ted-
ious, I maintained my missionary spirit and with it the conviction that
with every clichéd expression or mindless argument I exposed in the mar-
gins of my students' essays, I was waging a kind of guerrilla war against
the army of slobs, philistines, and barbarians who seemed to me to con-
trol the national mind, either through the media or the government. The
presidential press conference provided me with material for any number of
classroom sessions; I would have samples of the Eisenhower porridge mim-
eographed for distribution and then leave him to the students to correct
and grade. I would submit for their analysis a sermon by Norman Vincent
Peale, the president's religious adviser; or an ad for General Motors; or
a "cover story" from Time. What with television quiz shows, advertising
agencies, and the Cold War all flourishing, it was a period in which a
composition teacher did not necessarily have to possess the credentials or
doctrines of a clergyman to consider himself engaged in the business of
saving souls.

If the classroom caused me to imagine myself to be something of a
priest, the university neighborhood seemed to me something like my parish
--and of course something of a Bloomsbury--a community of the faithful,
observing the sacraments of literacy, benevolence, good taste, and social
concern. My own street of low, soot-stained brick apartment buildings was
on the grim side, and the next one over, run-down only the year before, was
already in rubble--leveled as though by blockbusters for an urban renewal
project; also, in the year I had been away, there had been a marked increase
of random nighttime violence in the neighborhood. Nonetheless, within an
hour of my return, I felt as comfortable and at home as someone whose
family had dwelled in the same small town for generations. Simultaneously
I could never forget that it was not in such a paradise of true believers
that I had been born and raised; and even if I should live in the Hyde Park
neighborhood for the next fifty years--and why should I ever want to live
elsewhere?--the city itself, with streets named for the prairie and the
Wabash, with railroad trains marked "Illinois Central" and a lake bearing
the name "Michigan," would always have the flavor of the faraway for one
whose fantasies of adventure had been nurtured in a sickbed in Camden,
New Jersey, over an aeon of lonely afternoons. How could I be in
"Chicago"? The question, coming at me while shopping in the Loop, or
watching a movie at the Hyde Park Theatre, or simply opening a can of
sardines for lunch at my apartment on Drexel, seemed to me unanswerable.
I suppose my wonderment and my joy were akin to my parents', when they
would address those envelopes to me in care of Faculty Exchange. How
could he be a professor, who could barely breathe with that bronchitis? All
this by way of explaining why I did not betake myself to that clinic for the
study of psychosomatic ailments and offer up my carcass and unconscious
for investigation. I was too happy. Everything that was a part of getting
older seemed to me to be a pleasure: the independence and authority, of
course, but no less so the refinement and strengthening of one's moral
nature--to be magnanimous where one had been selfish and carping, to be
forgiving where one had been resentful, to be patient where one had been
impetuous, to be generous and helpful where one had previously been
needful…It seemed to me at twenty-four as natural to be solicitous of my
sixty-year-old parents as to be decisive and in command with my eighteen
and nineteen-year-old students. Toward the young girls in my classes, some
as lovely and tempting as the junior at Pembroke College with whom I had
just concluded a love affair, I behaved as I was expected to; it went without
saying that as their teacher I must not allow myself to take a sexual interest
in them or to exploit my authority for personal gratification. No difficulty I
encountered seemed beyond my powers, whether it was concluding a love
affair, or teaching the principles of logic to my dullest composition
students, or rising with a dry mouth to address the Senate of the Faculty, or
writing a short story four times over to get it "right"…How could I turn
myself over to a psychoanalyst as "a case"? All the evidence of my life
(exclusive of the migraines) argued too strongly against that, certainly to
one to whom it meant so much never to be classified as a patient again.
Furthermore, in the immediate aftermath of a headache, I would experience
such elation just from the absence of pain that I would almost believe that
whatever had laid that dose of suffering upon me had been driven from my
body for good--that the powerful enemy (yes, more feeble interpretation,
or superstition) who had unleashed upon me all his violence, who had
dragged me to the very end of my endurance, had been proved unable in the
end to do me in. The worse the headache the more certain I was when it
was over that I had defeated the affliction once and for all. And was a better
man for it. (And no, my body was not painted blue in these years, nor did I
otherwise believe in angels, demons, or deities.) Often I vomited during the
attacks, and afterward, not quite daring to move (for fear of breaking), I lay
on the bathroom floor with my chin on the toilet bowl and a hand mirror to
my face, in a parody perhaps of Narcissus. I wanted to see what I looked
like having suffered so and survived; in that feeble and euphoric state, it
would not have frightened me--might even have thrilled me--to have
observed black vapors, something like cannon smoke, rolling out of my
ears and nostrils. I would talk to my eyes, reassuring them as though they
were somebody else's: "That's it, the end, no more pain." But in point of
fact there would be plenty more; the experiment which has not ended was
only beginning.

In the second semester of that--no other word will do; if it smacks of
soap opera, that is not unintentional--of that fateful year, I was asked if I
should like to teach, in addition to my regular program, the night course in
"Creative Writing" in the downtown division of the university, a single
session each Monday night running for three consecutive hours, at a salary
of two hundred and fifty dollars for the semester. Another windfall it
seemed to me--my round-trip tourist-class fare on the Rotterdam. As for
the students, they were barely versed in the rules of syntax and spelling, and
so, I discovered, hardly able to make head or tail of the heady introductory
lecture that, with characteristic thoroughness, I had prepared over a period
of a week for delivery at our first meeting. Entitled "The Strategies and
Intentions of Fiction," it was replete with lengthy (and I had thought)
"salient" quotations from Aristotle's Poetics, Flaubert's correspondence,
Dostoevsky's diaries, and James's critical prefaces--I quoted only from
masters, pointed only to monuments: Moby Dick, Anna Karenina, Crime
and Punishment, The Ambassadors, Madame Bovary, Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man, The Sound and the Fury. " 'What seems to me the highest
and most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to
rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-- that is, fill us with
wonderment. The most beautiful works have indeed this quality. They are
serene in aspect, incomprehensible…pitiless.'" Flaubert, in a letter to
Louise Colet ("1853," I told them, in responsible scholarly fashion, "a year
into the writing of Madame Bovary"). "'The house of fiction has in short
not one window but a million…every one of which is pierced, or is still
pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the
pressure of the individual will…' " James, the preface to The Portrait of
a Lady. I concluded with a lengthy reading from Conrad's inspirational
introduction to The Nigger of the "Narcissus" (1897): "'…the artist
descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he
be deserving and fortunate, he finds the terms of his appeal. His appeal is
made to our less obvious capacities: to that part of our nature which,
because of the warlike conditions of existence, is necessarily kept out of
sight within the more resisting and hard qualities--like the vulnerable body
within a steel armor. His appeal is less loud, more profound, less distinct,
more stirring--and sooner forgotten. Yet its effect endures forever. The
changing wisdom of successive generations discards ideas, questions facts,
demolishes theories. But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is
not dependent on wisdom: to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition
-- and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity
for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our
sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with
all creation--to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits
together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in
joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men
to each other, which binds together all humanity--the dead to the living and
the living to the unborn…'"

When I finished reading my twenty-five pages and asked for questions,
there was to my surprise and disappointment, just one; as it was the only
Negro in the class who had her hand raised, I wondered if it could be that
after all I had said she was going to tell me she was offended by the title of
Conrad's novel. I was already preparing an explanation that might turn her
touchiness into a discussion of frankness in fiction--fiction as the secret
and the taboo disclosed--when she rose to stand at respectful attention, a
thin middle-aged woman in a neat dark suit and a pillbox hat: "Professor, I
know that if you're writing a friendly letter to a little boy, you write on
the envelope 'Master.' But what if you're writing a friendly letter to a
little girl? Do you still say 'Miss'--or just what do you say?"

The class, having endured nearly two hours of a kind of talk none of
them had probably ever heard before outside of a church, took the occasion
of her seemingly ludicrous question to laugh uproariously--she was the kid
who had farted following the principal's lecture on discipline and decorum.
Their laughter was pointedly directed at student, not teacher; nonetheless,
I flushed with shame and remained red all the while Mrs. Corbett, dogged
and unperturbed in the face of the class's amusement, pursued the
knowledge she was there for.

Lydia Ketterer turned out to be by far the most gifted writer in the class
and, though older than I, still the youngest of my students--not so young,
however, as she looked in the bleak heart of a Chicago winter, dressed in
galoshes, knee stockings, tartan skirt, "reindeer" sweater, and the tasseled
red wool hat, from which a straight curtain of wheat-colored hair dropped
down at either side of her face. Outfitted for the ice and cold, she seemed,
amid all those tired night-school faces, a junior-high-school girl-in fact,
she was twenty-nine and mother of a lanky ten-year-old already budding
breasts more enticing than her own. She lived not far from me in Hyde Park,
having moved to the university neighborhood four years earlier, following
her breakdown --and in the hope of changing her luck. And indeed when
we met in my classroom, she probably was living through what were to be
the luckiest months of her life: she had a job she liked as an interviewer
with a university-sponsored social science research project at two dollars an
hour, she had a few older graduate students (connected to the project) as
friends, she had a small bank account and a pleasant little apartment with a
fireplace from which she could see across the Midway to the Gothic facades
of the university. Also at that time she was the willing and grateful patient
of a lay psychoanalyst, a woman named Rutherford, for whom she dressed
up (in the most girlish dress-up clothes I'd seen since grade school, puffed
sleeves, crinolines, etc.) and whom she visited every Saturday morning in
her office on Hyde Park Boulevard. The stories she wrote were inspired
mostly by the childhood recollections she delivered forth to Dr. Rutherford
on these Saturdays and dealt almost exclusively with the period after her
father had raped her and run, when she and her mother had been taken on as
guests--her mother as guest, Lydia as Cinderella--by the two aunts in their
maidenly little prison house in Skokie.

It was the accumulation of small details that gave Lydia's stories such
distinction as they had. With painstaking diligence she chronicled the ha-
bits and attitudes of her aunts, as though with each precise detail she was
hurling a small stone back through her past at those pinch-faced little
persecutors. From the fiction it appeared that the favorite subject in
that household was, oddly enough, "the body." "The body surely does not
require that much milk on a bowl of puffed oats, my dear." "The body will
take only so much abuse, and then it will balk." And so on. Unfortunately,
small details, accurately observed and flatly rendered, did not much interest
the rest of the class unless the detail was "symbolic" or sensational. Those
who most hated Lydia's stories were Agniashvily, an elderly Russian émigré
who wrote original "Ribald Classics" (in Georgian, and translated into
English for the class by his stepson, a restaurateur by trade) aimed at the
Playboy "market"; Todd, a cop who could not go two hundred words into a
narrative without a little something running in the gutter (blood, urine,
"Sergeant Darling's dinner") and was a devotee (I was not--we clashed) of
the O. Henry ending; the Negro woman, Mrs. Corbett, who was a file clerk
with the Prudential during the day and at night wrote the most transparent
and pathetic pipe dreams about a collie dog romping around a dairy farm in
snow-covered Minnesota; Shaw, an "ex-newspaperman" with an adjectival
addiction, who was always quoting to us something that "Max" Perkins had
said to "Tom" Wolfe, seemingly in Shaw's presence; and a fastidious male
nurse named Wertz, who from his corner seat in the last row had with his
teacher what is called "a love-hate" relationship. Lydia's most ardent
admirers, aside from myself, were two "ladies," one who ran a religious
bookshop in Highland Park and rather magnified the moral lessons to be
drawn from Lydia's fiction, and the other, Mrs. Slater, an angular, strik-
ing housewife from Flossmoor, who wore heather-colored suits to class and
wrote "bittersweet" stories which concluded usually with two characters
"inadvertently touching." Mrs. Slater's remarkable legs were generally
directly under my nose, crossing and uncrossing, and making that whishing
sound of nylon moving against nylon that I could hear even over the
earnestness of my own voice. Her eyes were gray and eloquent: "I am forty
years old, all I do is shop and pick up the children. I live for this class.
I live for our conferences. Touch me, advertently or inadvertently. I won't
say no or tell my husband."

In all there were eighteen of them and, with the exception of my
religionist, not one who seemed to smoke less than a pack a night. They
wrote on the backs of order forms and office stationery; they wrote in
pencil and in multicolored inks; they forgot to number pages or to put them
in order (less frequently, however, than I thought). Oftentimes the first sheet
of a story would be stained with food spots, or several of the pages would
be stuck together, in Mrs. Slater's case with glue spilled by a child, in the
case of Mr. Wertz, the male nurse, with what I took to be semen spilled by
himself.

When the class got into a debate as to whether a story was "universal"
in its implications or a character was "sympathetic," there was often no
way, short of gassing them, of getting them off the subject for the rest
of the night. They judged the people in one another's fiction not as though
each was a collection of attributes (a mustache, a limp, a southern drawl)
to which the author had arbitrarily assigned a Christian name, but as
though they were discussing human souls about to be consigned to Hades or
elevated to sainthood--depending upon which the class decided. It was the
most vociferous among them who had the least taste or interest in the low
keyed or the familiar, and my admiration for Lydia's stories would prac-
tically drive them crazy; invariably I raised somebody's hackles, when I
read aloud, as an example they might follow, something like Lydia's simple
description of the way in which her two aunts each had laid out on a doily
in the bedroom her hairbrush, comb, hairpins, toothbrush, dish of Lifebuoy,
and tin of dental powder. I would read a passage like this: "Aunt Helda,
while listening to Father Coughlin reasoning with the twenty thousand
Christians gathered in Briggs Stadium, would continually be clearing her
throat, as though it were she who was to be called upon to speak next."
Such sentences were undoubtedly not so rich and supple as to deserve the
sort of extensive, praiseful exegesis I would wind up giving them, but by
comparison with most of the prose I read that semester, Mrs. Ketterer's
line describing Aunt Helda listening to the radio in the 1940s might have
been lifted from Mansfield Park.

I wanted to hang a sign over my desk saying ANYONE IN THIS CLASS
CAUGHT USING HIS IMAGINATION WILL BE SHOT. I would put it more
gently when, in the parental sense, I lectured them. "You just cannot de-
liver up fantasies and call that 'fiction.' Ground your stories in what you
know. Stick to that. Otherwise you tend, some of you, toward the
pipe dream and the nightmare, toward the grandiose and the romantic--and
that's no good. Try to be precise, accurate, measured…" "Yeah? What about
Tom Wolfe," asked the lyrical ex-newspaperman Shaw, "would you call
that measured, Zuckerman?" (No Mister or Professor from him to a kid half
his age.) "What about prose-poetry, you against that too?" Or Agniashvily,
in his barrel-deep Russian brogue, would berate me with Spillane--"And so
how come he's gotten million in print, Professor?" Or Mrs. Slater would
ask, in conference, inadvertently touching my sleeve, "But you wear a
tweed jacket, Mr. Zuckerman. Why is it 'dreamy'--I don't understand--if
Craig in my story wears--" I couldn't listen. "And the pipe, Mrs. Slater:
now why do you think you have him continually puffing on that pipe?"
"But men smoke pipes." "Dreamy, Mrs. Slater, too damn dreamy." "But--"
"Look, write a story about shopping at Carson's, Mrs. Slater! Write about
your afternoon at Saks!" "Yes?" "Yes! Yes! Yes!"

Oh, yes, when it came to grandiosity and dreaminess, to all manifest-
ations of self-inflating romance, I had no reservations about giving
them a taste of the Zuckerman lash. Those were the only times I lost my
temper, and of course losing it was always calculated and deliberate:
scrupulous.

Pent-up rage, by the way--that was the meaning the army psychiatrist
had assigned to my migraines. He had asked whether I liked my father
better than my mother, how I felt about heights and crowds, and what I
planned to do when I was returned to civilian life, and concluded from
my answers that I was a vessel of pent-up rage. Another poet, this one
in uniform, bearing the rank of captain.

My friends (my only real enemy is dead now, though my censurers are
plentiful)--my friends, I earned those two hundred and fifty dollars
teaching "Creative Writing" in a night school, every penny of it. For
whatever it may or may not "mean," I didn't once that semester get a
migraine on a Monday, not that I wasn't tempted to take a crack at it when a
tough-guy story by Patrolman Todd or a bittersweet one by Mrs. Slater was
on the block for the evening…No, to be frank, I counted it a blessing of
sorts when the headaches happened to fall on the weekend, on my time off.
My superiors in the college and downtown were sympathetic and assured
me that I wasn't about to lose my job because I had to be out ill "from time
to time," and up to a point I believed them; still, to be disabled on a
Saturday or a Sunday was to me far less spiritually debilitating than to have
to ask the indulgence of either my colleagues or students.

Whatever erotic curiosity had been aroused in me by Lydia's pretty,
girish, Scandinavian block of a head--and odd as it will sound to some,
by the exoticism of the blighted middle western Protestant background
she wrote about and had managed to survive in one piece--was decidedly
outweighed by my conviction that I would be betraying my vocation, and
doing damage to my self-esteem, if I were to take one of my students to
bed. As I have said, suppressing feelings and desires extraneous to the
purpose that had brought us together seemed to me crucial to the success of
the transaction--as I must have called it then, the pedagogical transaction--
allowing each of us to be as teacherly or as studently as was within his
power, without wasting time and spirit being provocative, charming, du-
plicitous, touchy, jealous, scheming, etc. You could do all that out in the
street; only in the classroom, as far as I knew, was it possible to approach
one another with the intensity ordinarily associated with love, yet cleansed
of emotional extremism and free of base motives having to do with profit
and power. To be sure, on more than a few occasions, my night class was as
perplexing as a Kafka courtroom, and my composition classes as wearisome
as any assembly line, but that our effort was characterized at bottom by
modesty and mutual trust, and conducted as ingenuously as dignity would
permit, was indisputable. Whether it was Mrs. Corbett's innocent and ardent
question about how to address a friendly letter to a little girl or my own no
less innocent and ardent introductory lecture to which she was responding,
what we said to one another was not uttered in the name of anything vile or
even mundane. At twenty-four, dressed up like a man in a clean white shirt
and a tie, and bearing chalk powder on the tails of my worn tweed jacket,
that seemed to me a truth to be held self-evident. Oh, how I wanted a soul
that was pure and spotless!

In Lydia's case, professorial discretion was helped along some, or I
should have thought it would be, by that rolling, mannish gait of hers.
The first time she entered my class I actually wondered if she could be
some kind of gymnast or acrobat, perhaps a member of a women's track and
field association; I was reminded of those photographs in the popular mag-
azines of the strong blue-eyed women athletes who win medals at the Olympic
games for the Soviet Union. Yet her shoulders were as touchingly narrow as
a child's, and her skin pale and almost luminously soft. Only from the waist
to the floor did she seem to be moving on the body of my sex rather than
her own.

Within the month I had seduced her, as much against her inclination
and principles as my own. It was standard enough procedure, pretty much
what Mrs. Slater must have had in mind: a conference alone together in my
office, a train ride side by side on the IC back to Hyde Park, an invita-
tion to a beer at my local tavern, the flirtatious walk to her apartment,
the request by me for coffee, if she would make me some. She begged me
to think twice about what I was doing, even after she had returned from the
bathroom where she had inserted her diaphragm and I had removed her
underpants for the second time and was hunched, unclothed, over her small,
ill-proportioned body, preparatory to entering her. She was distressed,
she was amused, she was frightened, she was mystified.

"There are so many beautiful young girls around, why pick on me?
Why choose me, when you could have the cream of the crop?

I didn't bother to answer. As though she were the one being coy or
foolish, I smiled.

She said: "Look, look at me."

"I'm doing that."

"Are you? I'm five years older than you. My breasts sag, not that they
ever amounted to much to begin with. Look, I have stretch marks. My
behind's too big, I'm hamstrung--'Professor,' listen to me, I don't
have orgasms. I want you to know that beforehand. I never have."

When we later sat down for the coffee, Lydia, wrapped in a robe, said
this: "I'll never know why you wanted to do that. Why not Mrs. Slater,
who's begging you for it? Why should anyone like you want me?"

Of course I didn't "want" her, not then or ever. We lived together for
almost six years, the first eighteen months as lovers, and the four years
following, until her suicide, as husband and wife, and in all that time her
flesh was never any less distasteful to me than she had insistently adver-
tised it to be. Utterly without lust, I seduced her on that first night,
the next morning, and hundreds of times thereafter. As for Mrs. Slater, I
seduced her probably no more than ten times in all, and never anywhere
but in my imagination.

It was another month before I met Monica, Lydia's ten-year-old daughter,
so it will not do to say that, like Nabokov's designing rogue, I endur-
ed the uninviting mother in order to have access to the seductive and
seducible young daughter. That came later. In the beginning Monica was
without any attraction whatsoever, repellent to me in character as well as
appearance: lanky, stringy-haired, undernourished, doltish, without a trace
of curiosity or charm, and so illiterate that at ten she was still unable to
tell the time. In her dungarees and faded polo shirts she had the look of some
mountain child, the offspring of poverty and deprivation. Worse, when she
was dressed to kill in her white dress and round white hat, wearing her little
Mary Jane shoes and carrying a white handbag and a Bible (white too), she
seemed to me a replica of those over-dressed little Gentile children who
used to pass our house every Sunday on their way to church, and toward
whom I used to feel an emotion almost as strong as my own grandparents'
aversion. Secretly, and despite myself, I came close to despising the stupid
and stubborn child when she would appear in that little white churchgoing
outfit--and so too did Lydia, who was reminded by Monica's costume of
the clothes in which she had had to array herself each Sunday in Skokie,
before being led off to Lutheran services with her aunts Helda and Jessie.
(As the story had it: "It did a growing body good to sit once a week in a
nice starched dress, and without squirming.")

I was drawn to Lydia, not out of a passion for Monica--not yet--but
because she had suffered so and because she was so brave. Not only that
she had survived, but what she had survived, gave her enormous moral
stature, or glamor, in my eyes: on the one hand, the puritan austerity, the
prudery, the blandness, the xenophobia of the women of her clan; on the
other, the criminality of the men. Of course, I did not equate being raped by
one's father with being raised on the wisdom of the Chicago Tribune; what
made her seem to me so valiant was that she had been subjected to every
brand of barbarity, from the banal to the wicked, had been exploited,
beaten, and betrayed by every last one of her keepers, had finally been
driven crazy-- and in the end had proved indestructible: she lived now in a
neat little apartment within earshot of the bell in the clock tower of the
university whose atheists, Communists, and Jews her people had loathed,
and at the kitchen table of that apartment wrote ten pages for me every
week in which she managed, heroically I thought, to recall the details of
that brutal life in the style of one a very long way from rage and madness.
When I told the class that what I admired most in Mrs. Ketterer's fiction
was her "control," I meant something more than those strangers could
know.

Given all there was to move me about her character, it seemed to me cur-
ious that I should be so repelled by her flesh as I was that first night. I
was able myself to achieve an orgasm, but afterward felt terrible for the
"achievement" it had had to be. Earlier, caressing her body, I had been
made uneasy by the unexpected texture of her genitals. To the touch, the
fold of skin between her legs felt abnormally thick, and when I looked, as
though to take pleasure in the sight of her nakedness, the vaginal lips
appeared withered and discolored in a way that was alarming to me. I could
even imagine myself to be staring down at the sexual parts of one of
Lydia's maiden aunts, rather than at a physically healthy young woman not
yet into her thirties. I was tempted to imagine some connection here to the
childhood victimization by her father, but of course that was too literary,
too poetic an idea to swallow--this was no stigma, however apprehensive it
might make me.

The reader may by now be able to imagine for himself how the twenty
four-year-old I was responded to his alarm: in the morning, without very
much ado, I performed cunnilingus upon her.

"Don't," said Lydia. "Don't do that."

"Why not?" I expected the answer: Because I'm so ugly there.

"I told you. I won't reach a climax. It doesn't matter what you do."

Like a sage who'd seen everything and been everywhere, I said, "You
make too much of that."

Her thighs were not as long as my forearm (about the length, I thought,
of one of Mrs. Slater's Pappagallos) and her legs were open only so far as
I had been able to spread them with my two hands. But where she was dry,
brownish, weatherworn, I pressed my open mouth. I took no pleasure in the
act, she gave no sign that she did; but at least I had done what I had been
frightened of doing, put my tongue to where she had been brutalized, as
though--it was tempting to put it this way--that would redeem us both.

As though that would redeem us both. A notion as inflated as it was
shallow, growing, I am certain, out of "serious literary studies." Where
Emma Bovary had read too many romances of her period, it would seem
that I had read too much of the criticism of mine. That I was, by "eating"
her, taking some sort of sacrament was a most attractive idea--though one
that I rejected after the initial momentary infatuation. Yes, I continued to
resist as best I could all these high-flown, prestigious interpretations,
whether of my migraines or my sexual relations with Lydia; and yet it
surely did seem to me that my life was coming to resemble one of those
texts upon which certain literary critics of that era used to enjoy venting
their ingenuity. I could have done a clever job on it myself for my senior
honors thesis in college: "Christian Temptations in a Jewish Life: A Study
in the Ironies of 'Courting Disaster.'"

So: as often during a week as I could manage it, I "took the sacrament,"
conquering neither my fearful repugnance nor the shame I felt at being
repelled, and neither believing nor disbelieving the somber reverberations.


During the first months of my love affair with Lydia, I continued to receive
letters and, on occasion, telephone calls from Sharon Shatzky, the junior
at Pembroke with whom I had concluded a passionate romance prior to my
return to Chicago. Sharon was a tall, handsome, auburn-haired girl,
studious, enthusiastic, and lively, an honor student in literature, and the
daughter of a successful zipper manufacturer with country-club affiliations
and a hundred-thousand-dollar suburban home who had been impressed
with my credentials and entirely hospitable to me, until I began to suffer
from migraines. Then Mr. Shatzky grew fearful that if he did not intervene,
his daughter might one day find herself married to a man she would have to
nurse and support for the rest of her life. Sharon was enraged by her father's
"lack of compassion." "He thinks of my life," she said, angrily, "as a
business investment." It enraged her even more when I came to her father's
defense. I said that it was as much his paternal duty to make clear to a
young daughter what might be the long-range consequences of my ailment
as it had been years before to see that she was inoculated against smallpox;
he did not want her to suffer for no reason. "But I love you," Sharon said,
"that's my 'reason.' I want to be with you if you're ill. I don't want to run
out on you then, I want to take care of you." "But he's saying that you don't
know all that 'taking care of' could entail." "But I'm telling you--I love
you."

Had I wanted to marry Sharon (or her family's money) as much as her
father assumed I did, I might not have been so tolerant of his opposition.
But as I was just into my twenties then, the prospect of marriage, even to
a lovely young woman toward whom I had so strong an erotic attachment, did
not speak to the range of my ambitions. I should say, particularly because
of this strong erotic attachment was I suspicious of an enduring union.
For without that admittedly powerful bond, what was there of consequence,
of importance, between Sharon and myself? Only three years my junior,
Sharon seemed to me vastly younger, and to stand too much in my shadow,
with few attitudes or interests that were her own; she read the books I
recommended to her, devouring them by the dozen the summer we met, and
repeated to her friends and teachers, as hers, judgments she had borrowed
from me; she had even switched from a government to a literature major
under my influence, a satisfaction to me at first, in the fatherly stage of
my infatuation, but afterward a sign, among others, of what seemed to me an
excess of submissiveness and malleability.

It did not, at that time, occur to me to find evidence of character,
intelligence, and imagination in the bounteousness of her sexuality or in the
balance she managed to maintain between a bold and vivacious animality
and a tender, compliant nature. Nor did I begin to understand that it was in
that tension, rather than in the sexuality alone, that her appeal resided.
Rather, I would think, with something like despair, "That's all we really
have," as though unselfconsciously fervent lovemaking, sustained over a
period of several years, was a commonplace phenomenon.

One night, when Lydia and I were already asleep in my apartment, Sharon
telephoned to speak with me. She was in tears and didn't try to hide
it. She could not bear any longer the stupidity of my decision. Surely I
could not hold her accountable for her father's cold-blooded behavior, if
that was the explanation for what I was doing. What was I doing anyway?
And how was I doing? Was I well? Was I ill? How was my writing, my
teaching --I had to let her fly to Chicago…But I told her she must stay
where she was. I remained throughout calm and firm. No, I did not hold her
accountable for anybody's behavior but her own, which was exemplary. I
reminded her that it was not I who had judged her father "cold-blooded."
When she continued to appeal to me to come to "my senses," I said that it
was she who had better face facts, especially as they were not so unplea-
sant as she was making them out to be: she was a beautiful, intelligent,
passionate young woman, and if she would stop this theatrical grieving
and make herself available to life once again--

"But if I'm all those things, then why are you throwing me away like
this? Please, I don't understand--make it clear to me! If I'm so exemplary,
why don't you want me? Oh, Nathan," she said, now openly weeping again,
"you know what I think? That underneath all that scrupulousness and
fairness and reasonableness, you're a madman! Sometimes I think that
underneath all that 'maturity' you're just a crazy little boy!"

When I returned from the kitchen phone to the living room, Lydia was sit-
ting up in my sofa bed. "It was that girl, wasn't it?" But without a trace of
jealousy, though I knew she hated her, if only abstractly. "You want to go
back to her, don't you?"

"No."

"But you know you're sorry you ever started up with me. I know it.
Only now you can't figure how to get out of it. You're afraid you'll
disappoint me, or hurt me, and so you let the weeks go by--and I can't
stand the suspense, Nathan, or the confusion. If you're going to leave me,
please do it now, tonight, this minute. Send me packing, please, I beg you--
because I don't want to be endured, or pitied, or rescued, or whatever it is
that's going on here! What are you doing with me--what am I doing with
someone like you! You've got success written all over--it's in every breath
you take! So what is this all about? You know you'd rather sleep with that
girl than with me--so stop pretending otherwise, and go back to her, and do
it!"

Now she cried, as hopeless and bewildered as Sharon. I kissed her, I
tried to comfort her. I told her that nothing she was saying was so, when of
course it was true in every detail: I loathed making love to her, I wished to
be rid of her, I couldn't bear the thought of hurting her, and following the
phone call, I did indeed want more than ever to go back to the one Lydia
referred to always as "that girl." Yet I refused to confess to such feelings or
act upon them.

"She's sexy, young, Jewish, rich--"

"Lydia, you're only torturing yourself--"

"But I'm so hideous. I have nothing."

No, if anyone was "hideous," it was I, yearning for Sharon's sweet lewd-
ness, her playful and brazen sensuality, for what I used to think of as
her perfect pitch, that unfailingly precise responsiveness to whatever our
erotic mood--wanting, remembering, envisioning all this, even as I labored
over Lydia's flesh, with its contrasting memories of physical misery. What
was "hideous" was to be so queasy and finicky about the imperfections of a
woman's body, to find oneself an adherent of the most Hollywoodish, cold
blooded notions of what is desirable and what is not; what was "hideous"--
alarming, shameful, astonishing--was the significance that a young man of
my pretensions should attach to his lust.

And there was more which, if it did not cause me to feel so peculiarly
desolated as I did by what I took to be my callow sexual reflexes, gave
me still other good reasons to distrust myself. There were, for instance,
Monica's Sunday visits--how brutal they were! And how I recoiled from
what I saw! Especially when I remembered--with the luxurious sense of
having been blessed--the Sundays of my own childhood, the daylong
round of visits, first to my two widowed grandmothers in the slum where
my parents had been born, and then around Camden to the households of
half a dozen aunts and uncles. During the war, when gasoline was rationed,
we would have to walk to visit the grandmothers, traversing on foot five
miles of city streets in all--a fair measure of our devotion to those two
queenly and prideful workhorses, who lived very similarly in small apart-
ments redolent of freshly ironed linen and stale coal gas, amid an ac-
cumulation of antimacassars, bar mitzvah photos, and potted plants, most
of them taller and sturdier than I ever was. Peeling wallpaper, cracked
linoleum, ancient faded curtains, this nonetheless was my Araby, and I their
little sultan…what is more, a sickly sultan whose need was all the great-
er for his Sunday sweets and sauces. Oh how I was fed and comforted,
washerwoman breasts for my pillows, deep grandmotherly laps, my throne!

Of course, when I was ill or the weather was bad, I would have to stay
at home, looked after by my sister, while my father and mother made the
devotional safari alone, in galoshes and under umbrellas. But that was not
so unpleasant either, for Sonia would read aloud to me, in a very actressy
way, from a book she owned entitled Two Hundred Opera Plots; intermit-
tently she would break into song. "'The action takes place in India,'"
she read, "'and opens in the sacred grounds of the Hindoo priest,
Nilakantha, who has an inveterate hatred for the English. During his
absence, however, a party of English officers and ladies enter, out of
curiosity, and are charmed with the lovely garden. They soon depart, with
the exception of the officer, Gerald, who remains to make a sketch, in spite
of the warning of his friend, Frederick. Presently the priest's lovely
daughter, Lakme, enters, having come by the river…'" The phrase "having
come by the river," the spelling of Hindu in Sunny's book with those final
twin o's (like a pair of astonished eyes; like the middle vowels in "hoot"
and "moon" and "poor"; like a distillation of everything and anything I
found mysterious), appealed strongly to this invalid child, as did her
performing so wholeheartedly for an audience of one…Lakme is taken by
her father, both of them disguised as beggars, to the city market: "'He
forces Lakme to sing, hoping thus to attract the attention of her lover,
should he be amongst the party of English who are buying in the bazaars.'"
I am still barely recovered from the word "bazaars" and its pair of a's (the
sound of "odd," the sound of a sigh), when Sunny introduces "The Bell
Song," the aria "De la fille du faria," says my sister in Bresslenstein's
French accent: the ballad of the pariah's daughter who saves a stranger in
the forest from the wild beasts by the enchantment of her magic bell. After
struggling with the soaring aria, my sister, flushed and winded from the
effort, returns to her highly dramatic reading of the plot: "'And this cun-
ning plan succeeds, for Gerald instantly recognizes the thrilling voice of the
fair Hindoo maiden--'" And is stabbed in the back by Lakme's father; and is
nursed back to health by her "'in a beautiful jungle'"; only there the fellow
"'remembers with remorse the fair English girl to whom he is betrothed'";
and so decides to leave my sister, who kills herself with poisonous herbs,
"'the deadly juices of which she drinks.'" I could not decide whom to hate
more, Gerald, with his remorse for "the fair English girl," or Lakme's crazy
father, who would not let his daughter love a white man. Had I been "in
India" instead of at home on a rainy Sunday, and had I weighed something
more than sixty pounds, I would have saved her from them both, I thought.

Later, at the back landing, my Mother and father shake the water off
themselves like dogs--our loyal Dalmatians, our life-saving Saint Bernards.
They leave their umbrellas open in the bathtub to dry. They have carried
home to me--two and a half miles through a storm, and with a war on--a
jar of my grandmother Zuckerman's stuffed cabbage, a shoe box containing
my grandmother Ackerman's strudel: food for a starving Nathan, to enrich
his blood and bring him health and happiness. Later still, my exhibitionistic
sister will stand exactly in the center of the living-room rug, on the
"oriental" medallion, practicing her scales, while my father reads the
battlefront news in the Sunday Inquirer and my mother gauges the temper-
ature of my forehead with her lips, each hourly reading ending in a kiss.
And I, all the while, an Ingres odalisque languid on the sofa. Was there
ever anything like it, since the day of rest began?

How those rituals of love out of my own antiquity (no nostalgia for
me!) return in every poignant nostalgic detail when I watch the unfolding of
another horrific Ketterer Sunday. As orthodox as we had been in performing
the ceremonies of familial devotion, so the Ketterers were in the
perpetuation of their barren and wretched lovelessness. To watch the cycle
of disaster repeating itself was as chilling as watching an electrocution--
yes, a slow electrocution, the burning up of Monica Ketterer's life, seemed
to me to be taking place before my eyes Sunday after Sunday. Stupid,
broken, illiterate child, she did not know her right hand from her left, could
not read the clock, could not even read a slogan off a billboard or a cereal
box without someone helping her over each syllable as though it were an
alp. Monica. Lydia. Ketterer. I thought: "What am I doing with these
people?" And thinking that, could see no choice for myself but to stay.
Sundays Monica was delivered to the door by Eugene Ketterer, just as
unattractive a man as the reader, who has gotten the drift of my story, would
expect to find entering the drama at this point. Another nail in Nathan's
coffin. If only Lydia had been exaggerating, if only I could have said to her,
as it isn't always impossible to say to the divorced of their former spouses,
"Come on now, he isn't nearly so bad as all that." If only, even in a joking
way, I could have teased her by saying, "Why, I rather like him." But I
hated him.

The only surprise was to discover him to be physically uglier than
Lydia had even suggested. As if that character of his wasn't enough. Bad
teeth, a large smashed nose, hair brilliantined back for church, and, in his
dress, entirely the urban yokel…Now how could a girl with a pretty face
and so much native refinement and intelligence have married a type like
this to begin with? Simple: he was the first to ask her. Here was the knight
who had rescued Lydia from that prison house in Skokie.

To the reader who has not just "gotten the drift," but begun to balk at
the uniformly dismal situation that I have presented here, to the reader
who finds himself unable to suspend his disbelief in a protagonist who
voluntarily sustains an affair with a woman sexless to him and so disaster-
ridden, I should say that in retrospect I find him nearly impossible to
believe in myself. Why should a young man otherwise reasonable, far-
sighted, watchful, judicious, and self-concerned, a man meticulously
precise in the bread-and-butter concerns of life, and the model of husband-
ry with his endowment, why should he pursue, in this obviously weighty en-
counter, a course so defiantly not in his interest? For the sake of defiance?
Does that convince you? Surely some protective, life-sustaining instinct—
call it common sense, horse sense, a kind of basic biological alarm system
should have awakened him to the inevitable consequences, even as a glass
of cold water thrown in his face will bring the most far-gone sleepwalker
back from the world of stairwells without depth and boulevards without
traffic. I look in vain for anything resembling a genuine sense of reli-
gious mission—that which sends missionaries off to convert the savages or
to minister to lepers—or for the psychological abnormality pronounced
enough to account for this preposterous behavior. To make some sort of
accounting, the writer emphasizes Lydia's "moral glamor" and develops,
probably with more thoroughness than is engrossing, the idea of Zuck-
erman's "seriousness," even going so far, in the subtitle, as to describe
that seriousness as something of a social phenomenon; but to be frank, it
does not seem, even to the author, that he has, suggestive subtitle and
all, answered the objection of implausibility, any more than the young man
Zuckerman's own prestigious interpretations of his migraines seemed to
him consonant with the pain itself. And to bring words like "enigmatic" and
"mysterious" into the discussion not only goes against my grain, but hardly
seems to make things any less inconceivable.

To be sure, it would probably help some if I were at least to mention in
passing the pleasant Saturday strolls that Lydia and Nathan used to take
together down by the lake, their picnics, their bicycle rides, their visits
to the zoo, the aquarium, the Art Institute, to the theater when the Bristol
OldVic and Marcel Marceau came to town; I could write about the friendships
they made with other university couples, the graduate-student parties they
occasionally went to on weekends, the lectures by famous poets and critics
they attended at Mandel Hall, the evenings they spent together reading by
the fire in Lydia's apartment. But to call up such memories in order to make
the affair more credible would actually be to mislead the reader about the
young man Nathan Zuckerman was; pleasures and comforts of the ordinary
social variety were to him inconsequential, for they seemed without moral
content. It wasn't because they both enjoyed eating Chinese food on Sixty
third Street or even because both admired Chekhov's short stories that he
married Lydia; he could have married Sharon Shatzky for that, and for
more. Incredible as it may seem to some—and I am one of them—it was
precisely "the uniformly dismal situation" that did more for Lydia's cause
than all the companionable meals and walks and museum visits and the
cozy fireside conversations in which he corrected her taste in books.

To the reader who "believes" in Zuckerman's predicament as I describe it,
but is unwilling to take such a person as seriously as I do, let me say that
I am tempted to make fun of him myself. To treat this story as a species of
comedy would not require more than a slight alteration in tone and attitude.
In graduate school, for a course titled "Advanced Shakespeare," I once
wrote a paper on Othello proposing just such a shift in emphasis. I
imagined, in detail, several unlikely productions, including one in which
Othello and Iago addressed each other as "Mr. Interlocutor" and "Mr.
Bones," and another, somewhat more extreme, in which the racial situation
was entirely reversed, with Othello acted by a white man and the rest of the
cast portrayed by blacks, thus shedding another kind of light (I concluded)
on the "motiveless malignity."

In the story at hand, it would seem to me that from the perspective of
this decade particularly, there is much that could be ridiculed having to do
with the worship of ordeal and forbearance and the suppression of the
sexual man. It would not require too much ingenuity on my part to convert
the protagonist here into an insufferable prig to be laughed at, a character
out of a farce. Or if not the protagonist, then the narrator. To some, the
funniest thing of all, or perhaps the strangest, may not be how I conducted
myself back then, but the literary mode in which I have chosen to narrate
my story today: the decorousness, the orderliness, the underlying sobriety,
that "responsible" manner that I continue to affect. For not only have
literary manners changed drastically since all this happened ten years ago,
back in the middle fifties, but I myself am hardly who I was or wanted to
be: no longer am I a member in good standing of that eminently decent and
humane university community, no longer am I the son my parents proudly
used to address by mail as "professor." By my own standards, my private
life is a failure and a disgrace, neither decorous, nor sober, and surely not
"responsible."

Or so it seems to me: I am full of shame and believe myself to be a
scandalous figure. I can't imagine that I shall ever have the courage to
return to live in Chicago, or anywhere in America. Presently we reside in
one of the larger Italian cities; "we" are myself and Monica, or Moonie, as I
eventually came to call her in our intimacy. The two of us have been alone
together now since Lydia gouged open her wrists with the metal tip of a can
opener and bled to death in the bathtub of our ground-floor apartment on
Woodlawn, where the three of us were living as a family. Lydia was thirty
five when she died, I was just thirty, and Moonie sixteen. After Ketterer's
second divorce, I had gone to court, in Lydia's behalf, and sued to regain
custody of her daughter—and I won. How could I lose? I was a respectable
academic and promising author whose stories appeared in serious literary
quarterlies; Ketterer was a wife beater, two times over. That was how
Moonie came to be living with us in Hyde Park—and how Lydia came to
suffer her final torment. For she could not have been any more excluded
from their lives by the aunts in Skokie, or more relegated to the position of
an unloved Cinderella, than she was by what grew up between Moonie and
myself and constituted during those years my only sexual yearning. Lydia
used to awaken me in the middle of the night by pounding on my chest with
her fists. And nothing Dr. Rutherford might do or say could stop her. "If
you ever lay a finger on my daughter," she would cry, "I'll drive a knife into
your heart!" But I never did sleep with Moonie, not so long as her mother
was alive. Under the guise of father and daughter, we touched and fondled
one another's flesh; as the months went by we more and more frequently
barged in upon one another—unknowingly, inadvertently—in the midst of
dressing or unclothed in the bathtub; raking leaves in the yard or out
swimming off the Point we were playful and high-spirited, as a man and his
young mistress might be expected to be…but in the end, as though she were
my own offspring or my own sister, I honored the incest taboo. It was not
easy.

Then we found Lydia in the tub. Probably none of our friends or my
colleagues assumed that Lydia had killed herself because I had been
sleeping with her daughter—until I fled with Moonie to Italy. I did not
know what else to do, after the night we finally did make love. She was
sixteen years old—her mother a suicide, her father a sadistic ignoramus,
and she herself, because of her reading difficulties, still only a freshman
in high school: given all that, how could I desert her? But how ever could
we be lovers together in Hyde Park?

So I at last got to make the trip to Europe that I had been planning
when Lydia and I first met, only it wasn't to see the cultural monuments
and literary landmarks that I came here.

I do not think that Moonie is as unhappy in Italy as Anna Karenina was
with Vronsky, nor, since our first year here, have I been anything like so
bewildered and disabled as was Aschenbach because of his passion for
Tadzio. I had expected more agony; with my self-dramatizing literary turn
of mind, I had even thought that Moonie might go mad. But the fact is that
to our Italian friends we are simply another American writer and his pretty
young girl friend, a tall, quiet, somber kid, whose only distinction, outside
of her good looks, appears to them to be her total devotion to me; they tell
me they are unused to seeing such deference for her man in a long-legged
American blonde. They rather like her for this. The only friend I have who
is anything like an intimate says that whenever I go out of a room, leaving
her behind, Moonie seems almost to cease to exist. He wonders why. It isn't
any longer because she doesn't know the language; happily, she became flu-
ent in Italian as quickly as I did and, with this language, suffers none of
those reading difficulties that used to make her nightly homework assign-
ments such hell for the three of us back in Chicago. She is no longer
stupid; or stubborn; though she is too often morose.

When she was twenty-one, and legally speaking no longer my "ward,"
I decided to marry Moonie. The very worst of it was over by then, and I
mean by that, voracious, frenzied lust as well as paralyzing fear. I thought
marriage might carry us beyond this tedious second stage, wherein she
tended to be silent and gloomy, and I, in a muted sort of way, to be
continually anxious, as though waiting in a hospital bed to be wheeled
down to the operating room for surgery. Either I must marry her or leave
her, take her upon me forever or end it entirely. So, on her twenty-first
birthday, having firmly decided which was the choice for me, I proposed.
But Moonie said no, she didn't ever want to be a wife. I lost my temper, I
began to speak angrily in English—in the restaurant people looked our way.
"You mean, my wife!" "E di chi altro potrei essere?" she replied. Whose
could I ever be anyway?

That was that, the last time I attempted to make things "right." Con-
sequently, we live on together in this unmarried state, and I continue to
be stunned at the thought of whom my dutiful companion is and was and
how she came to be with me. You would think I would have gotten over
that by now, but I seem unable, or unwilling, to do so. So long as no one
here knows our story, I am able to control the remorse and the shame.

However, to stifle the sense I have that I am living someone else's life
is beyond me. I was supposed to be elsewhere and otherwise. This is not the
life I worked and planned for! Was made for! Outwardly, to be sure, I am as
respectable in my dress and manner as I was when I began adult life as an
earnest young academic in Chicago in the fifties. I certainly appear to have
no traffic with the unlikely or the unusual. Under a pseudonym, I write
and publish short stories, somewhat more my own by now than Katherine
Mansfield's, but still strongly marked by irony and indirection. To my
surprise, reading through the magazines at the USIS library one afternoon
recently, I came upon an article in an American literary journal, in which
"I" am mentioned in the same breath with some rather famous writers as
one whose literary and social concerns are currently out of date. I had not
realized I had ever become so well known as now to be irrelevant. How can
I be certain of anything from here, either the state of my pseudonymous
reputation or my real one? I also teach English and American literature at a
university in the city, to students more docile and respectful than any I have
ever had to face. The U. of C. was never like this. I pick up a little extra
cash, very little, by reading American novels for an Italian publishing house
and telling them what I think; in this way I have been able to keep abreast
of the latest developments in fiction. And I don't have migraines any more.
I outgrew them some twenty years before the neurologist said I might—
make of that what you wish…On the other hand, I need only contemplate a
visit to my aging and ailing father in New Jersey, I have only to pass the
American airline offices on the Via ——, for my heart to go galloping off
on its own and the strength to flow out of my limbs. A minute's serious
thought to being reunited with those who used to love me, or simply knew
me, and I am panic-stricken…The panic of the escaped convict who
imagines the authorities have picked up his scent—only I am the authority
as well as the escapee. For I do want to go home. If only I had the where-
withal to extradite myself! The longer I remain in hiding like this, the
more I allow the legend of my villainy to harden. And how do I even know
from here that such a legend exists any longer outside my imagination? Or
that it ever did? The America I glimpse on the TV and read about once a
month in the periodicals at the USIS library does not strike me as a place
where people worry very much any more about who is sleeping with whom.
Who cares any longer that this twenty-four-year-old woman was once my
own stepdaughter? Who cares that I took her virginity at sixteen and
"inadvertently" fondled her at twelve? Who back there even remembers the
late Lydia Zuckerman or the circumstances surrounding her suicide and my
departure in 1962? From what I read it would appear that in post-Oswald
America a man with my sort of record can go about his business without
attracting very much attention. Even Ketterer could cause us no harm, I
would think, now that his daughter is no longer a minor; not that after we
ran off he felt much of anything anyway, except perhaps relief at no longer
having to fork over the twenty-five bucks a week that the court had ordered
him to pay us for Moonie's support.

I know then what I must do. I know what must be done. I do know! Either
I must bring myself to leave Moonie (and by this action, rid myself of
all the confusion that her nearness keeps alive in me); either I must leave
her, making it clear to her beforehand that there is another man somewhere
in this world with whom she not only could survive, but with whom she
might be a gayer, more lighthearted person--I must convince her that when
I go she will not be left to dwindle away, but will have (as she will) half
a hundred suitors within the year, as many serious men to court a sweet and
statuesque young woman like herself as there are frivolous ones who follow
after her here in the streets, hissing and kissing at the air, Italians imagin-
ing she is Scandinavian and wild--either I must leave Moonie, and now (even
if for the time being it is only to move across the river, and from there to
look after her like a father who dwells in the same city, instead of the lover
who lies beside her in bed and to whose body she clings in her sleep), either
that, or return with her to America, where we will live, we two lovers, like
anybody else--like everybody else, if I am to believe what they write about
"the sexual revolution" in the newsmagazines of my native land.

But I am too humiliated to do either. The country may have changed, I
have not. I did not know such depths of humiliation were possible, even
for me. A reader of Conrad's Lord Jim and Mauriac's Therese and Kafka's
"Letter to His Father," of Hawthorne and Strindberg and Sophocles--of
Freud!--and still I did not know that humiliation could do such a job on a
man. It seems either that literature too strongly influences my ideas about
life, or that I am able to make no connection at all between its wisdom and
my existence. For I cannot fully believe in the hopelessness of my predic-
ament, and yet the line that concludes The Trial is as familiar to me as
my own face: "it was as if the shame of it must outlive him"! Only I am not
a character in a book, certainly not that book. I am real. And my humiliation
is equally real. God, how I thought I was suffering in adolescence when fly
balls used to fall through my hands in the schoolyard, and the born athletes
on my team would smack their foreheads in despair. What I would give now
to be living again back in that state of disgrace. What I would give to be
living back in Chicago, teaching the principles of composition to my lively
freshmen all morning long, taking my simple dinner off a tray at the
Commons at night, reading from the European masters in my bachelor bed
before sleep, fifty monumental pages annotated and underlined, Mann,
Tolstoy, Gogol, Proust, in bed with all that genius--oh to have that sense of
worthiness again, and migraines too if need be! How I wanted a dignified
life! And how confident I was!

To conclude, in a traditional narrative mode, the story of that
Zuckerman in that Chicago. I leave it to those writers who live in the
flamboyant American present, and whose extravagant fictions I sample
from afar, to treat the implausible, the preposterous, and the bizarre in
something other than a straightforward and recognizable manner.

In my presence Eugene Ketterer did his best to appear easygoing, un-
ruffled, and nonviolent, just a regular guy. I called him Mr. Ketterer, he
called me Nathan, Nate, and Natie. The later he was in delivering Monica to
her mother, the more offhand and, to me, galling was his behavior; to Lydia
it was infuriating, and in the face of it she revealed a weakness for vitri-
olic rage which I'd seen no evidence of before, not at home or in class or
in her fiction. It did not help any to caution her against allowing him to
provoke her; in fact, several times she accused me--afterward, tearfully ask-
ing forgiveness--of taking Ketterer's side, when my only concern had been
to prevent her from losing her head in front of Monica. She responded to
Ketterer's taunting like some animal in a cage being poked with a stick, and
I knew, the second Sunday that I was on hand to witness his cruelty and her
response, that I would shortly have to make it clear to "Gene" that I was not
just some disinterested bystander, that enough of his sadism was enough.

In the beginning, before Ketterer and I finally had it out, if Lydia
demanded an explanation from him for showing up at two P.M. (when he
had been due to arrive with Monica at ten thirty in the morning) he would
look at me and say, fraternally, "Women." If Lydia were to reply, "That's
idiotic! That's meaningless! What would a thug like you know about
‘women,' or men, or children! Why are you late with her, Eugene?" he
would just shrug and mumble, "Got held up." "That will not do--!" "Have
to, Lyd. ‘Fraid that's the way the cookie crumbles." Or without even
bothering to give her an answer, he would say, again to me, "Live ‘n' learn,
Natie." A similarly unpleasant scene would occur in the evening, when he
arrived to pick Monica up either much too early or too late. "Look, I ain't a
clock. Never claimed to be." "You never claimed to be anything --because
you're not anything!" "Yeah, I know, I'm a brute and a slob and a real bad
thug, and you, you're Lady Godiva. Yeah, I know all that." "You're a
tormentor, that's what you are! That you torture me is not even the point
any more--but how can you be so cruel and heartless as to torture your own
little child! How can you play with us like this, Sunday after Sunday, year
after year--you caveman! you hollow ignoramus!" "Let's go, Harmonica
--his nickname for the child--"time to go home with the Big Bad Wolf."

Usually Monica spent the day at Lydia's watching TV and wearing her hat.
Ready to go at a moment's notice.

"Monica," Lydia would say, "you really can't sit all day watching TV."

Uncomprehending: "Uh-huh."

"Monica, do you hear me? It's three o'clock. Maybe that's enough TV
for one day--do you think? Didn't you bring your homework?"

Completely in the dark: "My what?"

"Did you bring your homework this week, so we can go over it?"

A mutter: "Forgot."

"But I told you I'd help you. You need help, you know that."

Outrage: "Today's Sunday."

"And?"

Law of Nature: "Sundays I don't do no homework."

"Don't talk like that, please. You never even spoke like that when you
were a little six-year-old girl. You know better than that."

Cantankerous: "What?"

"Using double negatives. Saying I don't do no--the way your father
does. And please don't sit like that."

Incredulous: "What?"

"You're sitting like a boy. Change into your dungarees if you want to
sit like that. Otherwise sit like a girl your age."

Defiant: "I am."

"Monica, listen to me: I think we should practice your subtraction.
We'll have to do it without the book, since you didn't bring it"

Pleading: "But today's Sunday."

"But you need help in subtraction. That's what you need, not church,
but help with your math. Monica, take that hat off! Take that silly hat
off this minute! It's three o'clock in the afternoon and you just can't
wear it all day long!"

Determined. Wrathful: "It's my hat--I can too!"

"But you're in my house! And I'm your mother! And I'm telling you to
take it off! Why do you insist on behaving in this silly way! I am your
Mother, you know that! Monica, I love you and you love me--don't you
remember when you were a little girl, don't you remember how we used to
play? Take that hat off before I tear it off your head!"

Ultimate Weapon: "Touch my head and I'll tell my dad on you!

"And don't call him ‘Dad'! I cannot stand when you call that man who
tortures the two of us ‘Dad'! And sit like a girl! Do as I tell you!
Close your legs!"

Sinister: "They're close."

"They're open and you're showing your underpants and stop it! You're
too big for that--you go on buses, you go to school, if you're wearing a
dress then behave as though you're wearing one! You cannot sit like this
watching television Sunday after Sunday--not when you cannot even add
two and two."

Philosophical: "Who cares."

"I care! Can you add two and two? I want to know! Look at me--I'm
perfectly serious. I have to know what you know and what you don't know,
and where to begin. How much is two and two? Answer me."

Dumpish: "Dunno."

"You do know. And pronounce your syllables. And answer me!

Savage: "I don't know! Leave me alone, you!"

"Monica, how much is eleven minus one? Eleven take away one. If
you had eleven cents and someone took away one of them, how many
would you have left? Dear, please, what number comes before eleven? You
must know this."

Hysterical: "I don't know it!"

"You do!"

Exploding: "Twelve!"

"How can it be twelve? Twelve is more than eleven. I'm asking you
what's less than eleven. Eleven take away one--is how much?"

Pause. Reflection. Decision: "One."

"No! You have eleven and you take away one."

Illumination: "Oh, take away."

"Yes. Yes."

Straight-faced: "We never had take-aways."

"You did. You had to."

Steely: "I'm telling you the truth, we don't have take-aways in James
Madison School."

"Monica, this is subtraction-- they have it everywhere in every school,
and you have to know it. Oh darling, I don't care about that hat--I don't
even care about him, that's over. I care about you and what's going to
happen to you. Because you cannot be a little girl who knows nothing. If
you are you'll get into trouble and your life will be awful. You're a girl
and you're growing up, and you have to know how to make change of a dollar
and what comes before eleven, which is how old you'll be next year, and
you have to know how to sit--please, please don't sit like that, Monica,
please don't go on buses and sit like that in public even if you insist
on doing it here in order to frustrate me. Please. Promise me you won't."

Sulky, bewildered: "I don't understand you."

"Monica, you're a developing girl, even if they do dress you up like a
kewpie doll on Sundays."

Righteous indignation: "This is for church."

"But church is beside the point for you. It's reading and writing--oh, I
swear to you, Monica, every word I say is only because I love you and I
don't want anything awful to happen to you, ever. I do love you--you must
know that! What they have told you about me is not so. I am not a crazy
woman, I am not a lunatic. You mustn't be afraid of me, or hate me--I was
sick, and now I'm well, and I want to strangle myself every time I think
that I gave you up to him, that I thought he could begin to provide you
with a mother and a home and everything I wanted you to have. And now you
don't have a mother--you have this person, this woman, this ninny who
dresses you up in this ridiculous costume and gives you a Bible to carry
around that you can't even read! And for a father you have that man. Of
all the fathers in the world, him!"

Here Monica screamed, so piercingly that I came running from the kitchen
where I had been sitting alone over a cup of cold coffee, not even
knowing what to think.

In the living room all Lydia had done was to take Monica's hand in her
own; yet the child was screaming as though she were about to be murdered.

"But," wept Lydia, "I only want to hold you--"

As though my appearance signaled that the real violence was about to
begin, Monica began to froth at the mouth, screaming all the while,
"Don't! Don't! Two and two is four! Don't beat up on me! It's four!"

Scenes as awful as this could be played out two and three times over in
the course of a single Sunday afternoon--amalgams, they seemed to me,
of soap opera (that genre again), Dostoevsky, and the legends of Gentile
family life that I used to hear as a child, usually from my immigrant
grandmothers, who had never forgotten what life had been like amid the
Polish peasantry. As in the struggles of soap opera, the emotional ferocity of
the argument exceeded by light-years the substantive issue, which was
itself, more often than not, amenable to a little logic, or humor, or a dose of
common sense. Yet, as in the scenes of family warfare in Dostoevsky, there
was murder in the air on those Sundays, and it could not be laughed or
reasoned away: an animosity so deep ran between those two females of the
same blood that though they were only having that standard American feud
over a child's schoolwork (the subject not of The Possessed or The Brothers
Karamazov but of Henry Aldrich and Andy Hardy) it was not impossible
(from another room) to imagine them going about it with firebrand, pistol,
hanging rope, and hatchet. Actually, the child's cunning and her destructive
stubbornness were nothing like so distressing to me as Lydia's persistence. I
could easily envision, and understand, Monica's pulling a gun--bang bang,
you're dead, no more take-aways-- but it was imagining Lydia trying to
bludgeon the screaming child into a better life that shocked and terrified
me.

Ketterer was the one who brought to mind those cautionary tales about Gen-
tile barbarity that, by my late adolescence, I had rejected as irrelevant to
the kind of life that I intended to lead. Exciting and gripping as they were
to a helpless child--hair-raising tales of "their" alcoholism, "their" vio-
lence, "their" imperishable hatred of us, stories of criminal oppressors and
innocent victims that could not but hold a powerful negative attraction for
any Jewish child, and particularly to one whose very body was that of the
underdog--when I came of age and began the work of throwing off the
psychology and physique of my invalid childhood, I reacted against these
tales with all the intensity my mission required. I did not doubt that
they were accurate descriptions of what Jews had suffered; against the
background of the concentration camps I hardly would dare to say, even in
my teenage righteousness, that these stories were exaggerated. Nonetheless
(I informed my family), as I happened to have been born a Jew not in
twentieth-century Nuremberg, or nineteenth-century Lemberg, or fifteenth
century Madrid, but in the state of New Jersey in the same year that
Franklin Roosevelt took office, et cetera, et cetera. By now that diatribe
of second-generation American children is familiar enough. The vehemence
with which I advanced my position forced me into some ludicrous
positions: when my sister, for instance, married her first husband, a man
who was worthless by most anyone's standards (and certainly repulsive to
me at fifteen, with his white shirt cuffs rolled back twice, his white
calfskin loafers, his gold pinkie ring, and the way he had with his well-
tanned hands of touching everything, his cigarette case, his hair, my sis-
ter's cheek, as though it were silk--the whole effeminate side of hooligan-
ism), I nonetheless berated my parents for opposing Sunny's choice of a mate
on the grounds that if she wished to marry a Catholic that was her right. In
the anguish of the moment they missed my point, as I, with my high-minded
permissiveness, missed theirs; in the end it was they of course who turned
out to be prophetic, and with a vengeance. Only a few years later, at last
a free agent myself, I was able to admit that what was so dismal and
ridiculous about my sister's marriages wasn't her penchant for Italian boys
from South Philly, but that both times out she chose precisely the two who
confirmed, in nearly every detail, my family's prejudice against them.

Dim-witted as it may seem in retrospect--as much does, in my case--it
was not until Ketterer and Monica came into my life that I began to wonder
if I was being any less perverse than my sister; more so, because unlike
Sunny, I was at least alert to what I might be up to. Not that I had ever
been unaware of all there was in Lydia's background to lend support to my
grandmothers' observations about Gentile disorder and corruption. As a
child, no one of course had mentioned incest to me, but it went without
saying that if either of these unworldly immigrants had been alive to hear
the whole of Lydia's horror story, they would not have been so shocked as
was I, their college-professor grandson, by the grisliest detail of all. But
even without a case of incest in the family, there was more than enough
there for a Jewish boy to break himself upon: the unmotherly mother, the
un-fatherly father, the loveless bigoted aunts--my grandmothers could not
themselves have invented a shiksa with a more ominous and, to their way of
thinking, representative dossier than the one their fragile Nathan had
chosen. To be sure, Dr. Goebbels or Air Marshal Goering might have a
daughter wandering around somewhere in the world, but as a fine example
of the species, Lydia would do nicely. I knew this; but then the Lydia I had
chosen, unlike Sunny's elect, detested this inheritance herself. In part what
was so stirring about her (to me, to me) was the price she had paid to
disown it--it had driven her crazy, this background; and yet she had lived
to tell the tale, to write the tale, and to write it for me.

But Ketterer and his daughter Monica, who as it were came with Lydia,
in the same deal, were neither of them detached chroniclers or interpreters
or enemies of their world. Rather, they were the embodiment of what my
grandparents, and great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents, had
loathed and feared: shagitz thuggery, shiksa wiliness. They were to me like
figures out of the folk legend of the Jewish past--only they were real, just
like my sister's Sicilians.

Of course I could not stand around too long being mesmerized by this
fact. Something had to be done. In the beginning this consisted mostly of
comforting Lydia in the aftermath of one of her tutorial disasters; then I
tried to get her to leave Monica alone, to forget about saving her on
Sundays and just try to make her as happy as she could for the few hours
they had together. This was the same sort of commonsense advice that she
received from Dr. Rutherford, but not even the two of us together, with the
considerable influence we had over her, could prevent her from collapsing
into frantic instruction before the day was out and bombarding Monica with
a crash course in math, grammar, and the feminine graces before Ketterer
arrived to spirit her back to his cave in the Chicago suburb of Home-wood.
What followed, followed. I became the child's Sunday schoolteacher,
unless I was down with a migraine. And she began to learn, or to try to. I
taught her simple take-aways, I taught her simple sums, I taught her the
names of the states bordering Illinois, I taught her to distinguish between
the Atlantic and the Pacific, Washington and Lincoln, a period and a
comma, a sentence and a paragraph, the little hand and the big hand. This
last I accomplished by standing her on her feet and having her pretend hers
were the arms of the clock. I taught her the poem I had composed when I
was five and in bed with one of my fevers, my earliest literary achievement,
according to my family: "Tick tock, Nathan is a clock." "Tick tock," she
said, "Monica is a clock," and thrust her arms into the nine fifteen position,
so that her white church dress, getting tighter on her by the month, pulled
across the little bubbles of her breasts. Ketterer came to hate me, Monica
to fall in love with me, and Lydia to accept me at last as her means of
salvation. She saw the way out of her life's misery, and I, in the service of
Perversity or Chivalry or Morality or Misogyny or Saintliness or Folly or
Pent-up Rage or Psychic Illness or Sheer Lunacy or Innocence or Ignorance
or Experience or Heroism or Judaism or Masochism or Self-Hatred or
Defiance or Soap Opera or Romantic Opera or the Art of Fiction perhaps, or
none of the above, or maybe all of the above and more--I found the way
into mine. I would not have had it in me at that time to wander out after
dinner at the Commons and spend a hundred dollars on the secondhand
books that I wanted to fulfill my dream of a "library" as easily and simply
as I squandered my manhood.




　　　　　　　　　II

　　　　　My True Story





Peter Tarnopol was born in Yonkers, New York, thirty-four years
ago. He was educated in public schools there, and was graduated
summa cum laude from Brown University in 1954. He briefly attend-
ed graduate school, and then served for two years as an MP with
the U.S. Army in Frankfurt, Germany, the setting for A Jewish Fa-
ther, the first novel for which in 1960 he received the Prix de
Rome of the American Academy of Arts and Letters as well as a Gug-
genheim Fellowship.

Since then he has published only a handful of stories, devoting him-
self almost exclusively in the intervening years to his nightmarish
marriage to the former Maureen Johnson of Elmira, New York. In her
lifetime, Mrs. Tarnopol was a barmaid, an abstract painter, a sculp-
tress, a waitress, an actress (and what an actress), a short-story
writer, a liar, and a psychopath. Married in 1959, the Tarnopols were
legally separated in 1962, at which time Mrs. Tarnopol accused the au-
thor, before Judge Milton Rosenzweig of the Supreme Court of the County
of New York, of being "a well-known seducer of college girls." (Mr.
Tarnopol has taught literature and creative writing at the University
of Wis-consin and lately at Hofstra College on Long Island.) The mar-
riage was dissolved in 1966 by Mrs. Tarnopol's violent death. At the
time of her demise she was unemployed and a patient in group therapy
in Manhattan; she was receiving one hundred dollars a week in alimony.

From 1963 to 1966, Mr. Tarnopol conducted a love affair with Susan Sea-
bury McCall, herself a young widow residing in Manhattan; upon the conclu-
sion of the affair, Mrs. McCall attempted unsuccessfully to kill herself
and is currently living unhappily in Princeton, New Jersey, with a mother
she cannot abide, hike Mr. Tarnopol, Mrs. McCall has no children, but
would very much like to before time runs out, sired preferably by Mr.
Tarnopol. Mr. Tarnopol is frightened of remarrying, among other things.

From 1962 until 1967, Mr. Tarnopol was the patient of the psychoanalyst
Dr. Otto Spielvogel of New York City, whose articles on creativity and neu-
rosis have appeared in numerous journals, most notably the American Forum
for Psychoanalytic Studies, of which he is a contributing editor. Mr.
Tarnopol is considered by Dr. Spielvogel to be among the nation's top
young narcissists in the arts. Six months ago Mr. Tarnopol terminated his
analysis with Dr. Spielvogel and went on leave from the university in or-
der to take up temporary residence at the Quahsay Colony, a foundation-
supported retreat for writers, painters, sculptors, and composers in rural
Vermont. There Mr. Tarnopol keeps mostly to himself, devoting nights as well
as days to considering what has become of his life. He is confused and in-
credulous much of the time, and on the subject of the late Mrs. Tarnopol,
he continues to be a man possessed.

Presently Mr. Tarnopol is preparing to forsake the art of fiction for a
while and embark upon an autobiographical narrative, an endeavor which he
approaches warily, uncertain as to both its advisability and usefulness.
Not only would the publication of such a personal document raise serious
legal and ethical problems, but there is no reason to believe that by keep-
ing his imagination at bay and rigorously adhering to the facts, Mr. Tarn-
opol will have exorcised his obsession once and for all. It remains to be
seen whether his candor, such as it is, can serve any better than his art
(or Dr. Spielvogel's therapeutic devices) to demystify the fast and miti-
gate his admittedly uncommendable sense of defeat.

　　　P. T.
　　　Quahsay, Vt.
　　　September 1967




　　　　　　　　　1. PEPPY



Has anything changed?

I ask, recognizing that on the surface (which is not to be disparaged--
I live there too) there is no comparing the thirty-four-year-old man able
today to manage his misfortunes without collapse, to the twenty-nine-year-
old boy who back in the summer of 1962 actually contemplated, however
fleetingly, killing himself. On the June afternoon that I first stepped
into Dr. Spielvogel's office, I don't think a minute elapsed before I had
given up all pretense of being an "integrated" personality and begun to
weep into my hands, grieving for the loss of my strength, my confidence,
and my future. I was then (miraculously, I am no longer) married to a wom-
an I loathed, but from whom I was unable to separate myself, subjugated
not simply by her extremely professional brand of moral blackmail--by that
mix of luridness and corn that made our life together resemble something
serialized on afternoon TV or in the National Enquirer--but by my own
childish availability to it. Just two months back I had learned of the
ingenious strategy by which she had deceived me into marrying her three
years earlier; instead of serving me as the weapon with which finally to
beat my way out of our bedlam, what she had confessed (in the midst of her
semiannual suicide attempt) seemed to have stripped me of my remaining
defenses and illusions. My mortification was complete. Neither leaving nor
staying meant anything to me any more.

When I came East that June from Wisconsin, ostensibly to participate
as a staff member in a two-week writing workshop at Brooklyn College, I
was as bereft of will as a zombie--except, as I discovered, the will to be
done with my life. Waiting in the subway station for an approaching train,
I suddenly found it advisable to wrap one hand around the links of a chain
that anchored a battered penny weighing machine to the iron pillar beside
me. Until the train had passed in and out of view, I squeezed that chain with
all my strength. "I am dangling over a ravine," I told myself. "I am being
hoisted from the waves by a helicopter. Hang on!" Afterward I scanned the
tracks, to be certain that I had in fact succeeded in stifling this wholly
original urge for Peter Tarnopol to be transformed into a mangled corpse;
amazed, terrified, I had also, as they say, to laugh: "Commit suicide? Are
you kidding? You can't even walk out the door." I still don't know how near
I may actually have come that day to springing across the platform and, in
lieu of taking my wife head-on, taking on that incoming IRT train. It could
be that I didn't have to cling to anything, that too could have been so much
infantile posturing; then again I may owe my survival to the fact that when
I heard blessed oblivion hurtling my way, my right hand fortunately found
something impressively durable to hang on to.

At Brooklyn College over a hundred students were present in the audi-
torium for the opening session; each member of the workshop staff of
four was to give a fifteen-minute address on "the art of fiction." My turn
came, I rose--and couldn't speak. I stood at the lectern, notes before me--
audience before me-- without air in my lungs or saliva in my mouth. The
audience, as I remember it, seemed to me to begin to hum. And all I wanted
was to go to sleep. Somehow I didn't close my eyes and give it a try.
Neither was I entirely there. I was nothing but heartbeat, just that drum.
Eventually I turned and left the stage…and the job…Once, in Wisconsin,
after a weekend of quarreling with my wife (she maintained, over my object-
ions, that I had talked too long to a pretty graduate student at a party
on Friday night; much discussion on the relativity of time), she had
presented herself at the door of the classroom where I taught my
undergraduate fiction seminar from seven to nine on Monday evenings. Our
quarrel had ended at breakfast that morning with Maureen tearing at my
hands with her fingernails; I had not been back to our apartment since.
"It's an emergency!" Maureen informed me--and the seminar. The ten middle
western undergraduates looked first at her, standing so determinedly there
in the doorway, and then with comprehension at my hands, marked with
mercurochrome--"The cat," I had explained to them earlier, with a
forgiving smile for that imaginary beast. I rushed out into the corridor
before Maureen had a chance to say more. There my sovereign delivered
herself of that day's manifesto: "You better come home tonight, Peter! You
better not go back to some room somewhere with one of those little
blondes!" (This was the semester before I went ahead and did just that.)
"Get out of here!" I whispered. "Go, Maureen, or I'll throw you down those
fucking stairs! Go, before I murder you!" My tone must have impressed her
--she took hold of the banister and retreated a step. I turned back to the
seminar room to find that in my haste to confront Maureen and send her
packing, I had neglected to shut the door behind me. A big shy farm girl
from Appleton, who had spoken maybe one sentence all semester, was star-
ing fixedly at the woman in the corridor behind me; the rest of the class
stared into the pages of Death in Venice--no book had ever been so
riveting. "All right," said the quavering voice that entered the room--an
arm had violently flung the door shut in Maureen's face, I'm not wholly
sure it was mine--"why does Mann send Aschenback to Venice, rather than
Paris, or Rome, or Chicago?" Here the girl from Appleton dissolved into
tears, and the others, usually not that lively, began answering the question
all at once…I did not recall every last detail of this scene as I stood
yearning for sleep before my expectant audience at Brooklyn College, but it
accounts, I think, for the vision that I had as I stepped to the lectern to
deliver my prepared address: I saw Maureen, projected like a bullet through
the rear door of the auditorium, and shouting at the top of her lungs
whatever revelation about me had just rolled off the presses. Yes, to that
workshop audience that took me to be an emerging literary figure, a first
novelist whose ideas about writing were worth paying tuition to hear,
Maureen would reveal (without charge) that I was not at all as I would
present myself. To whatever words, banal or otherwise, that I spoke from
the platform, she would cry, "Lies! Filthy, self-serving lies!" I could (as I
intended to) quote Conrad, Flaubert, Henry James, she would scream all the
louder, "Fraud!" But I spoke not a syllable, and in my flight from the stage,
seemed to be only what I was--terrified, nothing any longer but my fears.

My writing by this time was wholly at the mercy of our marital confusion.
Five and six hours a day, seven days a week, I went off to my office at
the university and ran paper through the roller of my typewriter; the
fiction that emerged was either amateurishly transparent--I might have
been drawing up an IOU or writing the instructions for the back of a
detergent box for all the imagination I displayed--or, alternately, so
disjointed and opaque that on rereading, I was myself in the dark, and
manuscript in hand, would drag myself around the little room, like some
burdened figure broken loose from Rodin's "Bourgeois of Calais," crying
aloud, "Where was I when this was written?" And I asked because I didn't
know.

These pounds and pounds of pages that I accumulated during the marriage
had the marriage itself as the subject and constituted the major part of
the daily effort to understand how I had fallen into this trap and why
I couldn't get out. Over the three years I had tried easily a hundred dif-
ferent ways to penetrate that mystery; every other week the whole course
of the novel would change in midsentence, and within any one month the
surface of my desk would disappear beneath dozens of equally dissatisfy-
ing variants of the single unfinished chapter that was driving me mad.
Periodically I would take all these pages--"take" is putting it mildly--and
consign them to the liquor carton filling up with false starts at the bottom of
my closet, and then I would begin again, often with the very first sentence
of the book. How I struggled for a description. (And, alas, struggle still.)
But from one version to the next nothing of consequence ever happened:
locales shifted, peripheral characters (parents, old flames, comforters,
enemies, and allies) came and went, and with about as much hope for
success as a man attacking the polar ice cap with his own warm breath, I
would attempt to release a flow of invention in me by changing the color of
her eyes or my hair. Of course, to give up the obsession would surely have
made the most sense; only, obsessed, I was as incapable of not writing
about what was killing me as I was of altering or understanding it.

So: hopeless at my work and miserable in my marriage, with all the
solid achievements of my early twenties gone up in smoke, I walked off the
stage, too stupefied even for shame, and headed like a sleepwalker for the
subway station. Fortunately there was a train already there receiving
passengers; it received me--rather than riding over me--and within the
hour I was deposited at the Columbia campus stop only a few blocks from
my brother Morris's apartment.

My nephew Abner, surprised and pleased to see me in New York,
offered me a bottle of soda and half of his salami sandwich. "I've got a
cold," he explained, when I asked in a breaking voice what he was doing
home from school. He showed me that he was reading Invisible Man with
his lunch. "Do you really know Ralph Ellison, Uncle Peppy?" "I met him
once," I said, and then I was bawling, or barking; tears streamed from my
eyes, but the noises that I made were novel even to me. "Hey, Uncle Pep,
what's the matter?" "Get your father." "He's teaching." "Get him, Abbie."
So the boy called the university--"This is an emergency; his brother is very
sick!"--and Morris was out of class and home in minutes. I was in the
bathroom by this time; Moe pushed right on in, and then, big two-hundred
pounder though he is, kneeled down in that tiny tiled room beside the toilet,
where I was sitting on the seat, watery feces running from me, sweating and
simultaneously trembling as though I were packed in ice; every few minutes
my head rolled to the side and I retched in the direction of the sink. Still,
Morris pressed his bulk against my legs and held my two limp hands in his;
with a rough, rubbery cheek he wiped the perspiration from my brow.

"Peppy, ah, Peppy," he groaned, calling me by my childhood nickname and
kissing my face. "Hang on, Pep, I'm here now."

A word about my brother and sister, very different creatures from
myself.

I am the youngest of three, always "the baby" in everyone's eyes, right
down to today. Joan, the middle child, is five years my senior and has
lived most of her adult life in California with her husband Alvin, a land
developer, and their four handsome children. Says Morris of our sister:
"You would think she'd been born in a Boeing jet instead of over the store
in the Bronx." Alvin Rosen, my brother-in-law, is six foot two and
intimidatingly handsome, particularly now that his thick curls have turned
silvery ("My father thinks he dyes it that color," Abner once told me in
disgust) and his face has begun to crease like a cowboy's; from all the
evidence he seems pretty much at one with his life as Californian,
yachtsman, skier, and real estate tycoon, and utterly content with his wife
and his children. He and my trim stylish sister travel each year to places
slightly off the main tourist route (or just on the brink of being
"discovered"); only recently my parents received postcards from their
granddaughter, Melissa Rosen, Joannie's ten-year-old, postmarked Africa (a
photo safari with the family) and Brazil (a small boat had carried friends
and family on a week-long journey up the Amazon, a famous Stanford
naturalist serving as their guide). They throw open their house for an annual
benefit costume party each year in behalf of Bridges, the West Coast literary
magazine whose masthead lists Joan as one of a dozen advisory editors--
frequently they are called upon to bail the magazine out of financial trouble
with a timely donation from the Joan and Alvin Rosen Foundation; they are
also generous contributors to hospitals and libraries in the Bay Area and
among the leading sponsors of an annual fund drive for California's migrant
workers ("Capitalists," says Morris, "in search of a conscience. Aristocrats
in overalls. Fragonard should paint ‘em."); and they are good parents, if the
buoyancy and beauty of their children are any indication. To dismiss them
(as Morris tends to) as vapid and frivolous would be easier if their pursuit
of comfort, luxury, beauty, and glamor (they number a politically active
movie star among their intimates) weren't conducted with such openness
and zest, with a sense that they had discovered the reason for being. My
sister, after all, was not always so fun loving and attractive or adept at
enjoying life. In 1945, as valedictorian of Yonkers High, she was a hairy,
hawk-nosed, undernourished-looking little "grind" whose braininess and
sallow homeliness had made her just about the least popular girl in her
class; the consensus then was that she would be lucky to find a husband, let
alone the rich, lanky, Lincolnesque Wharton School graduate, Alvin Rosen,
whom she carried away from the University of Pennsylvania along with her
A.B. in English. But she did it--not without concentrated effort, to be sure.
Electrolysis on the upper lip and along the jawbone, plastic surgery on the
nose and chin, and the various powders and paints available at the drugstore
have transformed her into a sleek, sensual type, still Semitic, but rather
more the daughter of a shah than a shopkeeper. Driving around San
Francisco in her Morgan, disguised as a rider off the pampas one day and a
Bulgarian peasant the next, has gained her in her middle years something
more than mere popularity--according to the society page of the San
Francisco paper (also sent on to my mother by little Melissa) Joan is "the
most daring and creative tastemaker" alive out there. The photograph of
her, with Alvin in velvet on one bare arm and the conductor of the San
Francisco Symphony on the other (captioned, by Melissa, "Mom at a
party"), is simply staggering to one who remembers still that eight-by-ten
glossy of the ‘45 senior prom crowd at Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe in
New York--there sits Joan, all nose and shoulder blades, adrift in a taffeta
"strapless" into which it appears she will momentarily sink out of sight, her
head of coarse dark hair (since straightened and shined so that she glows
like Black Beauty) mockingly framed by the Amazonian gams of the chorus
girl up on the stage behind her; as I remember it, sitting beside her, at their
"ringside" table, was her date, the butcher's large shy son, bemusedly
looking down into a glass with a Tom Collins in it…And this woman today
is the gregarious glamor girl of America's most glamorous city. To me it is
awesome: that she should be on such good terms with pleasure, such a
success at satisfaction, should derive so much strength and confidence from
how she looks, and where she travels, and what she eats and with whom…
well, that is no small thing, or so it seems to her brother from the confines
of his hermit's cell.

Joan has recently written inviting me to leave Quahsay and come out to
California to stay with her and her family for as long as I like. "We won't
even bother you with our goatish ways, if you should just want to sit around
the pool polishing your halo. If it pleases you, we will do everything we can
to prevent you from having even a fairly good time. But reliable sources in
the East tell me that you are still very gifted at that yourself. My dearest
Alyosha, between 1939, when I taught you to spell antidisestablishmentarian-
ism,' and now, you've changed. Or perhaps not-- maybe what sent you into ec-
stasy over that word was how difficult it was. Truly, Pep, if your appetite
for the disagreeable should ever slacken, I am here and so is the house.
Your fallen sister, J."

For the record, my reply:

Dear Joan: What's disagreeable isn't being where I am or
living as I do right now. This is the best place for me, probably for
some time to come. I can't stay on indefinitely of course, but there
are approximations to this sort of life. When Maureen and I lived
in New Milford, and I had that twelve-by-twelve shack in the
woods behind the house—and a bolt to throw on the door—I could
be content for hours on end. I haven't changed much since 1939: I
still like more than anything to sit alone in a room spelling things
out as best I can with a pencil and paper. When I first got to New
York in ‘62, and my personal life was a shambles, I used to dream
out loud in my analyst's office about becoming again that
confident and triumphant college ldd I was at twenty; now I find
the idea of going back beyond that even more appealing. Up here I
sometimes imagine that I am ten—and treat myself accordingly. To
start the day I eat a bowl of hot cereal in the dining room as I did
each morning in our kitchen at home; then I head out here to my
cabin, at just about the time I used to go off to school. I'm at work
by eight forty-five, when "the first bell" used to ring. Instead of
arithmetic, social studies, etc., I write on the typewriter till noon.
(Just like my boyhood idol, Ernie Pyle; actually I may have grown
up to become the war correspondent I dreamed of being in 1943 —
except that the front-line battles I report on aren't the kind I'd had
in mind.) Lunch out of a lunch pail provided by the dining hall
here: a sandwich, some carrot sticks, an oatmeal cookie, an apple,
a thermos of milk. More than enough for this growing boy. After
lunch I resume writing until three thirty, when "the last bell" used
to ring at school. I straighten up my desk and carry my empty
lunch pail back to the dining hall, where the evening's soup is
cooling. The smell of dill, mother's perfume. Manchester is three
miles from the Colony by way of a country road that curves down
through the hills. There is a women's junior college at the edge of
town, and the girls are down there by the time I arrive. I see them
inside the laundromat and at the post office and buying shampoo in
the pharmacy—reminding me of the playground "after school,"
aswarm with long-haired little girls a ten-year-old boy could only
admire from afar and with wonder. I admire them from afar and
with wonder in the local luncheonette, where I go for a cup of
coffee. I have been asked by one of the English professors at the
college to speak to his writing class. I declined. I don't want them
any more accessible than they would be if I were back in the fifth
grade. After my coffee I walk down the street to the town library
and sit for a while leafing through the magazines and watching the
schoolkids at the long tables copying their book reports off the
jacket flaps. Then I go out and hitch a ride back up to the Colony; I
couldn't feel any more trusting and innocent than when I hop out
of the car and say to the driver, "Thanks for the ride—s'long!"

I sleep in a room on the second floor of the big three-story
farmhouse that houses the guests; on the main floor are the
kitchen, dining hall, and the living room (magazines, record player,
and piano); there's a ping-pong table on a side porch, and that's
just about it. On the floor of my room, in my undershorts, I do half
an hour of calisthenics at the end of each afternoon. In the last six
months, through dint of exercise and very little appetite, I have
become just about as skinny as I was when you used to pretend to
play the xylophone on my ribs. After "gym" I shave and shower.
My windows are brushed by the needles of an enormous spruce;
that's the only sound I hear while shaving, outside of the water
running into the sink. Not a noise I can't account for. I try each
evening to give myself a "perfect" shave, as a shaving ten-year-old
might. I concentrate: hot water, soap, hot water, coat of Rise, with
the grain, coat of Rise, against the grain, hot water, cold water,
thorough investigation of all surfaces…perfect. The vodka martini
that I mix for myself at six, I sip alone while listening to the news
on my portable radio. (I am on my bed in my bathrobe: face ivory
smooth, underarms deodorized, feet powdered, hair combed—
clean as a bridegroom in a marriage manual.) The martini was of
course not my habit at ten, but something like Dad's when he came
home with his headache (and the day's receipts) from the store:
looking as though he were drinking turpentine, he would toss
down his shot of Schenley's, and then listen in "his" chair to "Lyle
Van and the News." Dinner is eaten at six thirty here, in the
company of the fifteen or so guests in residence at the moment,
mostly novelists and poets, a few painters, one composer.
Conversation is pleasant, or annoying, or dull; in all, no more or
less taxing than eating night after night with one's family, though
the family that comes to mind isn't ours so much as the one
Chekhov assembled in Uncle Vanya. A young poetess recently
arrived here mired in astrology; whenever she gets going on
somebody's horoscope I want to jump up from the table and get a
pistol and blow her brains out. But as we are none of us bound by
blood, law, or desire (as far as I can tell), forbearance generally
holds sway. We drift after dinner into the living room, to chat and
scratch the resident dog; the composer plays Chopin nocturnes; the
New York Times passes from hand to hand…generally within the
hour we have all drifted off without a word. My understanding is
that with only five exceptions, all those in residence right now
happen to be in flight, or in hiding, or in recovery—from bad
marriages, divorces, and affairs. I have overheard tag ends of
conversation issuing from the phone booth down in the kitchen to
support this rumor. Two teacher-poets in their thirties who have
just been through the process of divesting themselves of wives and
children and worldly goods (in exchange for student admirers)
have struck up a friendship and compare poems they're writing
about the ordeal of giving up little sons and daughters. On the
weekends when their dazzling student girl friends come to visit,
they disappear into the bedsheets at the local motel for forty-eight
hours at a clip. I recently began to play ping-pong again for the
first time in twenty years, two or three fierce games after dinner
with an Idaho woman, a stocky painter in her fifties who has been
married five times; one night last week (only ten days after her
arrival) she drank everything she could find on the premises,
including the vanilla extract in the cook's pantry, and had to be
taken away the next morning in a station wagon by the mortician
who runs the local AA. We all left our typewriters to stand glumly
out on the steps and wave goodbye. "Ah, don't worry," she called
to us out the car window, "if it wasn't for my mistakes I'd still be
back on the front porch in Boise." She was our only "character"
and far and away the most robust and spirited of the survivors
hereabouts. One night six of us went down into Manchester for a
beer and she told us about her first two marriages. After she
finished, the astrologist wanted to know her sign: the rest of us
were trying to figure out how come she wasn't dead. "Why the hell
do you keep getting married, Mary?" I asked her. She chucked me
on the chin and said, "Because I don't want to the shriveled up."
But she's gone now (probably to marry the mortician), and except
for the muffled cries rising from the phone booth at night, it's as
quiet here as a hospital zone. Perfect for homework. After dinner
and the Times, I walk back out to my studio, one of twenty cabins
scattered along a dirt road that winds through the two hundred
acres of open fields and evergreen woods. In the cabin there's a
writing desk, a cot, a Franklin stove, a couple of straight-backed
chairs painted yellow, a bookcase painted white, and the wobbly
wicker table where I eat lunch at noon. I read over what I've
written that day. Trying to read anything else is useless; my mind
wanders back to my own pages. I think about that or nothing.

Walking back to the main house at midnight I have only a
flashlight to help me make my way along the path that runs
between the trees. Under a black sky by myself, I am no more
courageous at thirty-four than I was as a boy: there is the urge to
run. But as a matter of fact invariably I will turn the flashlight off
and stand out there in the midnight woods, until either fear
subsides or I have achieved something like a Mexican standoff
between me and it. What frightens me? At ten it was only oblivion.
I sed to pass the "haunted" Victorian houses on Hawthorne
Avenue on my way home from Cub Scout meetings, reminding
myself, There are no ghosts, the dead are dead, which was, of
course, the most terrifying thought of all. Today it's the thought
that the dead aren't that turns my knees to water. I think: the
funeral was another trick—she's alive! Somehow or other, she will
reappear! Down in town in the late afternoon, I half expect to look
into the laundromat and see her stuffing a machine with a bag of
wash. At the luncheonette where I go for my cup of coffee, I
sometimes sit at the counter waiting for Maureen to come charging
through the door, with finger pointed—"What are you doing in
here! You said you'd meet me by the bank at four!" "By the bank?
Four? You?" And we're at it. "You're dead," I tell her, "you cannot
meet anyone by any bank if you are, as you are, dead!" But still,
you will have observed, I keep my distance from the pretty young
students buying shampoo to wash their long hair. Who ever
accused a shy ten-year-old of being "a well-known seducer of
college girls"? Or, for that matter, heard of a plaintiff who was
ashes? "She's dead," I remind myself, "and it is over." But how
can that be? Defies credulity. If in a work of realistic fiction the
hero was saved by something as fortuitous as the sudden death of
his worst enemy, what intelligent reader would suspend his
disbelief? Facile, he would grumble, and fantastic. Fictional wish
fulfillment, fiction in the service of one's dreams. Not True to Life.
And I would agree. Maureen's death is not True to Life. Such
things simply do not happen, except when they do. (And as time
passes and I get older, I find that they do with increasing
frequency.)

I'm sending along Xerox copies of two stories I've written up
here, both more or less on the Subject. They'll give you an idea as
to why I'm here and what I'm doing. So far no one has read the
stories but my editor. He had encouraging things to say about both
of them, but of course what he would like to see is that novel for
which my publisher advanced twenty thousand dollars back when I
was a boy wonder. I know how much he would like to see it
because he so scrupulously and kindly avoided mentioning it. He
gave the game away, however, by inquiring whether "Courting
Disaster" (one of the two stories enclosed) was going "to develop
into a longer work about a guilt-ridden Zuckerman and his
beautiful stepdaughter in Italy—a kind of post-Freudian meditation
on themes out of Anna Karenina and Death in Venice. Is that what
you're up to, or are you planning to continue to write Zuckerman
variations until you have constructed a kind of full-length fictional
fugue?" Good ideas all right, but what I am doing, I had to tell the
man standing there holding my IOU, is more like trying to punch
my way out of a paper bag. "Courting Disaster" is a post
cataclysmic fictional meditation on nothing more than my
marriage: what if Maureen's personal mythology had been
biographical truth? Suppose that, and suppose a good deal more—
and you get "CD." From a Spielvogelian perspective, it may even
be read as a legend composed at the behest and under the influence
of the superego, my adventures as seen through its eyes—as
"Salad Days" is something like a comic idyll honoring a Pannish
(and as yet unpunished) id. It remains for the ego to come forward
then and present its defense, for all parties to the conspiracy-to
abscond-with-my-life to have had their day in court. I realize now,
as I entertain this idea, that the nonaction narrative that I'm
currently working on might be considered just that: the "I" owning
up to its role as ringleader of the plot. If so, then after all testimony
has been heard and a guilty verdict swiftly rendered, the
conspirators will be consigned to the appropriate correctional
institution. You suggest your pool. Warden Spielvogel, my former
analyst (whose job, you see, I am now doing on the side), would
suggest that the band of desperados be handed back over to him
for treatment in the cell block at Eighty-ninth and Park. The
injured plaintiff in this action does not really care where it
happens, or how, so long as the convicted learn their lesson and
NEVER DO IT AGAIN. Which isn't likely: we are dealing with a
treacherous bunch here, and that this trio has been entrusted with
my well-being is a source of continuous and grave concern.
Having been around the track with them once already, I would as
soon consign my fate to the Marx Brothers or the Three Stooges;
buffoons, but they at least like one another. P.S. Don't take
personally the brother of "Salad Days" or the sister of "Courting
Disaster." Imaginary siblings serving the design of the fiction. If I
ever felt superior to you and your way of life, I don't any longer.
Besides, it's to you that I may owe my literary career. Trying on a
recent afternoon walk to figure out how I got into this line of work,
I remembered myself at age six and you at age eleven, waiting in
the back seat of the car for Mother and Dad to finish their Saturday
night shopping. You kept using a word that struck me as the
funniest thing I'd ever heard, and once you saw how much it
tickled me, you wouldn't stop, though I begged you to from the
floor of the car where I was curled up in a knot from pure hilarity. I
believe the word was "noodle," used as a synonym for "head." You
were merciless, somehow you managed to stick it somewhere into
every sentence you uttered, and eventually I wet my pants. When
Mother and Dad returned to the car I was outraged with you and in
tears. "Joannie did it," I cried, whereupon Dad informed me that it
was a human impossibility for one person to pee in another
person's pants. Little he knew about the power of art.

Joan's prompt reply:

Thanks for the long letter and the two new stories, three artful
documents springing from the same hole in your head. When that
one drilled she really struck pay dirt. Is there no bottom to your
guilty conscience? Is there no other source available for your art?
A few observations on literature and life—i. You have no reason to
hide in the woods like a fugitive from justice. 2. You did not kill
her, in any way, shape, or form. Unless there is something I don't
know. 3. To have asked a pretty girl to have intercourse with a
zucchini in your presence is morally inconsequential. Everybody
has his whims. You probably made her day (if that was you). You
announce it in your "Salad Days" story with all the bravado of a
naughty boy who knows he has done wrong and now awaits with
bated breath his punishment. Wrong, Peppy, is an ice pick, not a
garden vegetable; wrong is by force or with children. 4. You do
disapprove of me, as compared with Morris certainly; but that, as
they say, is your problem, baby. (And brother Moe's. And whoever
else's. Illustrative anecdote: About six weeks ago, immediately
after the Sunday supplement here ran a photo story on our new
ski house at Squaw Valley, I got a midnight phone call from a
mysterious admirer. A lady. "Joan Rosen?" "Yes." "I'm going to
expose you to the world for what you are." "Yes? What is that?"
"A Jewish girl from the Bronx! Why do you try to hide it, Joan?
It's written all over you, you phony bitch!") So then, I don't take
either of those make-believe siblings for myself. I know you can't
write about me—you can't make pleasure credible. And a working
marriage that works is about as congenial to your talent and
interests as the subject of outer space. You know I admire your
work (and I do like these two stories, when I can ignore what they
imply about your state of mind), but the fact is that you couldn't
create a Kitty and a Levin if your life depended on it. Your
imagination (hand in hand with your life) moves in the other
direction. 5. Reservation ("Courting Disaster"): I never heard of
anyone killing herself with a can opener. Awfully gruesome and
oddly arbitrary, unless I am missing something. 6. Idle curiosity:
was Maureen seduced by her father? She never struck me as
broken in that way. 7. After the "nonfiction narrative" on the
Subject, what next? A saga in heroic couplets? Suggestion: Why
don't you plug up the well and drill for inspiration elsewhere? Do
yourself a favor (if those words mean anything to you) and
FORGET IT. Move on! Come West, young man! P.S. Two
enclosures are for your edification (and taken together, right up
your fictional alley—if you want to see unhappiness, you ought to
see this marriage in action). Enclosed note #1 is to me from Lane
Coutell, Bridges' new, twenty-four-year-old associate editor (good
looking and arrogant and, in a way, brilliant; more so right now
than is necessary), who was here with his wife for supper and read
the stories. He and the magazine would (his "reservations"
notwithstanding) give anything (except money, of which there's
none) to publish them, though I made it clear that he'd have to
contact you about that. I just wanted to know what someone
intelligent who didn't know your true story would make of what
you've made out of it here. Enclosed note #2 is from Frances
Coutell, his wife, who runs Bridges' office now. A delicate,
washed-out beauty of twenty-three, bristling with spiritual needs;
also a romantic masochist who, as you will surmise, has developed
a crush on you, not least because she doesn't like you that much.
Fiction does different things to different people, much like
matrimony.

#1

Dear Joan: As you know I wasn't one of those who was taken
by your brother's celebrated first novel. I found it much too proper
a book, properly decorous and constrained on the formal side, and
properly momentous (and much too pointed) in presenting its
Serious Jewish Moral Issue. Obviously it was mature for a first
novel—too obviously: the work of a gifted literature student strait
jacketed by the idea that fiction is the means for proving
righteousness and displaying intelligence; the book seems to me
very much a relic of the fifties. The Abraham and Isaac motif, rich
with Kierkegaardian overtones, reeks (if I may say so) of those
English departments located in the upper reaches of the Himalayas.
What I like about the new stories, and why to my mind they
represent a tremendous advance over the novel, is that they seem
to me a deliberate and largely conscious two-pronged attack upon
the prematurely grave and high-minded author of A Jewish Father.
As I read it, in "Salad Days" the attack is frontal, head-on, and
accomplished by means of social satire, and, more notably, what
I'd call tender pornography, a very different thing, say, from the
pornography of a Sade or a Terry Southern. For the author of that
solemn first novel, a story like "Salad Days" is nothing less than
blasphemous. He is to be congratulated heartily for triumphing (at
least here) over all that repressive piety and fashionable Jewish
angst. "Courting Disaster" is a more complicated case (and as a
result not so successful, in a purely literary sense). As I would
like to read it, the story is actually a disguised critical essay by
Tarnopol on his own overrated first book, a commentary and a
judgment on all that principledness that is A Jewish Father's
subject and its downfall. Whether Tarnopol intended it or not, I see
in Zuckerman's devotion to Lydia (its joylessness, its sexless-ness,
its scrupulosity, its madly ethical motive) a kind of allegory of
Tarnopol and his Muse. To the degree that this is so, to the degree
that the character of Zuckerman embodies and represents the
misguided and morbid "moral" imagination that produced A
]ewish Father, it is fascinating; to the degree that Tarnopol is back
on the angst kick, with all that implies about "moving" the reader,
I think the story is retrograde, dull, and boring, and suggests that
the conventional (rabbinical) side of this writer still has a
stranglehold on what is reckless and intriguing in his talent. But
whatever my reservations, "Courting Disaster" is well worth
publishing, certainly in tandem with "Salad Days," a story that
seems to me the work of a brand new Tarnopol, who, having
objectified the high-minded moralist in him (and, hopefully,
banished him to Europe forevermore, there to dwell in noble
sadness with all the other "cultural monuments and literary
landmarks"), has begun at last to flirt with the playful, the
perverse, and the disreputable in himself. If Sharon Shatzky is
your brother's new Muse, and a zucchini her magic wand, we may
be in for something more valuable than still more fiction that is
"moving." Lane.

#2

Joan: My two cents worth, only because the story L. admires
most seems to me smug and vicious and infuriating, all the more
so for being so clever and winning. It is pure sadistic trash and I
pray (actually) that Bridges doesn't print it. Art is long, but the
life of a little magazine is short, and much too short for this. I
hate what he does with that suburban college girl—and I don't even
mean what Zuckerman (the predictable prodigal son who majors in
English) does but what the author does, which is just to twist her
arm around behind her back and say, "You are not my equal, you
can never be my equal—understand?" Who does he think he is,
anyway? And why would he want to be such a thing? How could
the man who wrote "Courting Disaster" want to write a heartless
little story like that? And vice versa? Because the long story is
absolutely heartrending and I think (contrary to L.'s cold-blooded
analysis) that this is why it works utterly. I was moved to tears by
it (but then I didn't perform brain surgery on it) and moved to the
most aching admiration for the man who could just conceive such
a story. The wife, the daughter, the husband are painfully true (I'm
sure because he made me sure), and I shall never forget them. And
Zuckerman here is completely true too, sympathetic, interesting, a
believable observer and center of feeling, all the things he has to
be. In a strange way they were all sympathetic to me, even the
awful ones. Life is awful. Yours, Franny. P.S. I apologize for
saying that something your brother wrote is hateful. I don't know
him. And I don't think I want to. There are enough Jekyll and
Hydes around here as it is. You're an older woman, tell me
something. What's the matter with men? What do they want?

My brother Morris, to whom copies of my latest stories were also sent
in response to a letter inquiring about my welfare, had his own trenchant
comments to make on "Courting Disaster-comments not so unlike Joan's.

What is it with you Jewish writers? Madeleine Herzog, Deb-
orah Rojack, the cutie-pie castrator in After the Fall, and isn't
the desirable shiksa of A New Life a kvetch and titless in the
bargain? And now, for the further delight of the rabbis and the
reading public, Lydia Zuckerman, that Gentile tomato. Chicken
soup in every pot, and a Grushenka in every garage. With all the
Dark Ladies to choose from, you luftmenschen can really pick
‘em. Peppy, why are you still wasting your talent on that Dead
End Kid? Leave her to Heaven, okay? I'm speaking at Boston
University at the end of the month, not that far from you. If you're
still up on the mountain, come down and stay at the Commander
with me. My subject is "Rationality, Planning, and Gratification
Deferral." You could stand hearing about a and b; as for c, would
you, a leading contender for the tide in the highly competitive
Jewish Novelist Division, agree to give a black belt demonstration
in same to the assembled students of social behavior? Peppy,
enough with her already!

Back in 1960, following a public lecture I had delivered (my first) at
Berkeley, Joan and Alvin gave a party for me at the house they had then up
on a ridge in Palo Alto. Maureen and I had just returned to the U.S. from
our year at the American Academy in Rome, and I had accepted a two-year
appointment as "writer-in-residence" at the University of Wisconsin. In the
previous twelve months I had become (according to an article in the Sunday
Times book section) "the golden boy of American literature"; for A Jewish
Father, my first novel, I had received the Prix de Rome of the American
Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim grant of thirty-eight hundred
dollars, and then my invitation to teach at Wisconsin. I myself had expected
no less, back then; it was not my good fortune that surprised me at the age
of twenty-seven.

Some sixty or seventy of their friends had been invited by Joan and
Alvin to meet me; Maureen and I lost sight of one another only a few
minutes after our arrival, and when she turned up at my side some time later
I was talking rather self-consciously to an extremely seductive looking
young beauty of about my own age, self-conscious precisely for fear of the
scene of jealous rage that proximity to such a sexpot would inevitably
provoke.

Maureen pretended at first that I was talking to no one; she wanted to
go, she announced, all these "phonies" were more than she could take. I
decided to ignore the remark—I did not know what else to do. Draw a
sword and cut her head off? I didn't carry a sword at the time. I carried a
stone face. The beautiful girl—from her décolletage it would have appeared
that she was something of a daring tastemaker herself; I was too ill at ease,
however, to make inquiries of a personal nature—the girl was asking me
who my editor was. I told her his name; I said he happened also to be a
good poet. "Oh, how could you!" whispered Maureen, and, her eyes all at
once flooded with tears; instantly she turned and disappeared into a
bathroom. I found Joan within a few minutes and told her that Maureen
and I had to go—it had been a long day and Maureen wasn't feeling well.
"Pep," said Joan, taking my hand in hers, "why are you doing this to
yourself?" "Doing what?" "Her," she said. I pretended not to know what
she was talking about. Just presented her with my stone face. In the taxi
to the hotel, Maureen wept like a child, repeatedly hammering at her knees
(and mine) with her little fists. "How could you embarrass me like that—
how could you say that, with me right there at your side!" "Say what?"
"You know damn well, Peter! Say that Walter is your editor!" "But he is."
"What about me?" she cried. "You?" "I'm your editor—you know very well
I am! Only you refuse to admit it! I read every word you write, Peter. I
make suggestions. I correct your spelling." "Those are typos, Maureen."
"But I correct them! And then some rich bitch sticks her tits in your face
and asks who your editor is and you say Walter! Why must you demean me
like this—oh, why did you do that in front of that empty-headed girl? Just
because she was all over you with those tits of hers? Mine are as big as hers
—touch them some day and you'll see!" "Maureen, not this, not again—!"
"Yes, again! And again and again! Because you will not change!" "But she
meant my editor at my publishing house!" "But I'm your editor!" "You're
not!" "I suppose I'm not your wife either! Why are you so ashamed of me!
In front of those phonies, no less! People who wouldn't look twice at you
if you weren't this month's cover boy! Oh, you baby! You infant! You
hopeless egomaniac! Must you always be at the center of everything?" The
next morning, before we left for the airport, Joan telephoned to the hotel
to say goodbye. ‘We're always here," she told me. "I know." "If you want to
come out and stay." ‘Well, thank you," I said, as formally as if I were
acknowledging an offer from a perfect stranger, "maybe we'll take you up
on it sometime." "I'm talking about you. Just you. You don't have to suffer
like this, Peppy. You're proving nothing by being miserable, nothing at all."
As soon as I hung up, Maureen said, "Oh, you could really have all the
beautiful girls, couldn't you, Peter—with your sister out procuring for you.
Oh, she would really enjoy that, I'm sure." ‘What the hell are you talking
about now?" "That deprived little look on your face—'Oh, if I wasn't
saddled with this witch, couldn't I have a time of it, screwing away to my
heart's content at all the vapid twittering ingénues!'" "Again, Maureen?
Again? Can't you at least let twenty-four hours go by?" ‘Well, what about
that girl last night who wanted to know who your editor was? Oh, she really
cared about that, I'm sure. Well, be honest, Peter, didn't you want to fuck
her? You couldn't take your eyes off those tits of hers." "I suppose I noticed
them." "Oh, I suppose you did." "Though apparently not so much as you,
Maureen." "Oh, don't use your sardonic wit on me! Admit it! You did want
to fuck her. You were dying to fuck her." "The fact of it is, I was close to
catatonic in her presence." "Yes, suppressing all that goddam lust! How
hard you have to work to suppress it—with everybody but me! Oh, admit it,
tell the truth for once—if you had been alone, you know damn well you
would have had her back here in this hotel! On this very bed! And she at
least would have gotten laid last night! Which is more than I can say for
me! Oh, why do you punish me like this—why do you lust after every
woman in this whole wide world, except your own wife."

My family…In marked contrast to Joan and Alvin and their children
Mab, Melissa, Kim, and Anthony, are my elder brother Morris, his wife
Lenore, and the twins, Abner and Davey. In their home the dominant social
concern is not with the accumulation of goods, but the means by which
society can facilitate their equitable distribution. Morris is an authority
on underdeveloped nations; his trips to Africa and the Caribbean are conduct-
ed under the auspices of the UN Commission for Economic Rehabilitation, one
of several international bothes to which Moe serves as a consultant. He
is a man who worries over everything, but nothing (excluding his family),
nothing so much as social and economic inequality; what is now famous as
"the culture of poverty" has been a heartbreaking obsession with him since
the days he used to come home cursing with frustration from his job with
the Jewish Welfare Board in the Bronx—during the late thirties, he worked
there days while going to school nights at N.Y.U. After the war he married
an adoring student, today a kindly, devoted, nervous, quiet woman, who
some years ago, when the twins went off to kindergarten, enrolled at the
School of Library Service at Columbia to take a master's degree. She is
now a librarian for the city of New York. The twins are fifteen; last year
both refused to leave the local upper West Side public school to become
students at Horace Mann. On two consecutive days they were roughed up
and robbed of their pennies by a Puerto Rican gang that has come to
terrorize the corridors, lavatories, and basketball courts back of their
school —nonetheless, they have refused to become "private school hypocrites,"
which is how they describe their neighborhood friends, the sons and dau-
ghters of Columbia faculty who have been removed from the local schools
by their parents. To Morris, who worries continuously for their safety,
the children shout indignantly, "How can you, of all people, suggest
Horace Mann! How can you betray your own ideals! You're just as bad as
Uncle Alvin! Worse!"

Moe has, as he says, only himself to congratulate for their moral
heroics; ever since they could understand an English sentence, he has been
sharing with them his disappointment with the way this rich country is run.
The history of the postwar years, with particular emphasis upon continuing
social injustice and growing political repression, has been the stuff of their
bedtime stories: instead of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the strange
adventures of Martin Dies and the House Un-American Activities
Committee; instead of Pinocchio, Joe McCarthy; instead of Uncle Remus,
tales of Paul Robeson and Martin Luther King. I can't remember once
eating dinner at Moe's, that he was not conducting a seminar in left-wing
politics for the two little boys wolfing down their pot roast and kasha—the
Rosenbergs, Henry Wallace, Leon Trotsky, Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas,
Dwight Macdonald, George Orwell, Harry Bridges, Samuel Gompers, just a
few whose names are apt to be mentioned between appetizer and dessert—
and, simultaneously, looking to see that everybody is eating what is best for
him, pushing green vegetables, cautioning against soda pop gulped too
quickly, and always checking the serving bowls to be sure there is Enough.
"Sit!" he cries to his wife, who has been on her feet all day herself, and like
an enormous lineman going after a loose fumble, rushes into the kitchen to
get another quarter pound of butter from the refrigerator. "A glass of ice
water, Pop!" calls Abner. "Who else for ice water? Peppy? You want
another beer? I'll bring it anyway." His big paws full, he returns to the
table, distributes the goods, waving for the boys to go on with what they
were saying—intently he listens to them both, the one little boy arguing that
Alger Hiss must have been a Communist spy, while the other (in a voice
even louder than his brother's) tries to come to grips with the fact that Roy
Cohn is a Jew.

It was to this household that I went to collapse. Moe, at my request,
telephoned Maureen the first night after the Brooklyn College episode to
say that I had been taken ill and was resting in bed at his apartment. She
asked to speak to me; when Moe said, "He just can't talk now," she replied
that she was getting on the next plane and coming East. Moe said, "Look,
Maureen, he can't see anybody right now. He's in no condition to." "I'm his
wife!" she reminded him. "But he cannot see anybody." "What is going on
there, Morris, behind my back? He is not a baby, no matter how you people
think of him. Are you listening to me? I demand to speak to my husband! I
will not be put off by somebody who wants to play big brother to a man
who has won the Prix de Rome!" But he was not intimidated, my big
bother, and hung up.

At the end of two days of hiding behind his bulk, I told Moe I was
"myself" again; I was going back to the Midwest. We had rented a cabin for
the summer in the upper peninsula of Michigan, and I was anxious to get
out of the apartment in Madison and up to the woods. I said I had to get
back to my novel. "And to your beloved," he reminded me.

Moe made no secret ever of how much he disliked her; Maureen maintain-
ed that it was because, unlike his own wife, she, one, was a Gentile,
and, two, had a mind of her own. I tried to give him the same stone face
that I had given my sister when she had criticized my marriage and my
mate. I hadn't yet told Moe, or anyone, what I had learned from Maureen
two months earlier about the circumstances under which we had married—
or about my affair with an undergraduate that Maureen had discovered. I
just said, "She's my wife." "So you spoke to her today." "She's my wife,
what do you expect me to do!" "She telephoned and so you picked it up and
talked to her." "We talked, right." "Ah, you jerk-off! And do me a favor,
will you, Peppy? Stop telling me she's your ‘wife.' The word does not
impress me to the extent it does you two. She's ruining you, Peppy! You're
a wreck! You had a nervous breakdown here only two mornings ago! I don't
want my kid brother cracking up—do you understand that?" "But I'm fine
now." "Is that what your ‘wife' told you you were on the phone?" "Moe,
lay off. I'm not a frail flower." "But you are a frail flower, putz. You are
a frail flower if I ever saw one! Look, Peppy—you were a very gifted boy. That
should be obvious. You stepped out into the world like a big, complicated,
hypersensitive million-dollar radar system, and along came Maureen, flying
her four-ninety-eight model airplane right smack into the middle of it, and
the whole thing went on the fritz. And it's still on the fritz from all I can
see!" "I'm twenty-nine now, Moey." "But you're still worse than my fifteen-
year-old kids! They're at least going to get killed in behalf of a noble
ideal! But you I don't understand—trying to be a hero with a bitch who
means nothing. Why, Peppy? Why are you destroying your young life for
her? The world is full of kind and thoughtful and pretty young girls who
would be delighted to keep a boy with your bella figura company. Peppy,
you used to take them out by the dozens!"

I thought (not for the first time that week) of the kind and thoughtful
and pretty young girl, my twenty-year-old student Karen Oakes, whose
mistake it had been to involve herself with a Bluebeard like me. Maureen
had just that afternoon—during the course of our fifth phone conversation
of the hour; if I hung up, she just called back, and I felt duty bound to
answer—Maureen had threatened once again to create a scandal at school
for Karen—"that sweet young thing, with her bicycle and her braids,
blowing her creative writing teacher!"—if I did not get on a plane and come
home "instantly." But it wasn't to prevent the worst from happening that I
was returning; no, whatever reckless act of revenge I thought I might
forestall by doing as I was told and coming home, I was not so deluded as
to believe that life with Maureen would ever get better. I was returning to
find out what it would be like when it got even worse. How would it all
end? Could I imagine the grand finale? Oh, I could, indeed. In the woods of
Michigan she would raise her voice about Karen, and I would split her
crazy head open with an ax—if, that is, she did not stab me in my sleep or
poison my food, first. But one way or another, I would be vindicated. Yes,
that was how I envisioned it. I had by then no more sense of reasonable
alternatives than a character in a melodrama or a dream. As if I ever had,
with her.

I never made it to Wisconsin. Over my protests, Moe went down in the
elevator with me, got in the taxi with me, and rode with me all the way out
to LaGuardia Airport; he stood directly behind me in the Northwest ticket
line, and when his turn came, bought a seat on the same plane I was to take
back to Madison. "You going to sleep in bed with us too?" I asked, in anger.
"I don't know if I'll sleep," he said, "but I'll get in there if I have to."
Whereupon I collapsed for the second time. In the taxi back to Manhattan I
told him, through my tearful blubbering, about the deception that Maureen
had employed to get me to marry her. "Good Christ," he moaned, "you
were really up against a pro, kiddo." "Was I? Was I?" I had my face pressed
into his chest, and he was holding me in his two arms. "And you were still
going back to her," he said, now with a groan. "I was going to kill her,
Moey!" "You? You were?" "Yes! With an ax! With my bare hands!" "Oh,
I'll bet. Oh, you poor, pussy-whipped bastard, I'll just bet you would have."
"I would have," I croaked through my tears. "Look, you're just the same as
when you were a kid. You can give it, but you can't take it. Only now, on
top of that, you can't give it either." "Oh, why is that? What happened?"
"The world didn't turn out to be the sixth-grade classroom at P.S. 3, that's
what happened. With gribben on a fat slice of rye bread waiting for you
when you got home from a day of wowing the teachers. You weren't
exactly trained to take punishment, Peppy." Still weeping, but bitterly now,
I asked him, "Is anybody?" "Well, from the look of things, your ‘wife' got
very good instruction in it—and I think she was planning to pass the torch
on to you. She sounds to me just from our phone conversation like one of
the great professors in the subject." "Yes?" You see, driving back from the
airport that day I felt like somebody being filled in on what had transpired
on earth during the sabbatical year he had just spent on Mars; I could have
just stepped off a space ship, or out of steerage—I felt so green and strange
and lost and dumb.

By late afternoon I was in Dr. Spielvogel's office; out in the waiting
room Moe sat like a bouncer with his arms folded and his feet planted
solidly on the floor, watching to be sure I did not slip off by myself to
the airport. By nightfall Maureen was on her way East. Within two days I
had notified the chairman of my department that I would be unable to return
to my job in the fall. By the end of the week Maureen—having failed in
several attempts to get past the door to Moe's apartment—had returned to
Madison, cleared our stuff out of our apartment, and come East a second
time; she moved into a hotel for transients on lower Broadway, and there
she intended to remain, she said, until I had let go of my brother's apron
strings and returned to our life together. Failing that, she said, she would do
what I was "forcing" her to do through the courts. She told me on the
phone (when it rang, I picked it up, Moe's instructions to the contrary
notwithstanding) that my brother was a "woman hater" and my new analyst
a "fraud." "He's not even licensed, Peter," she said of Spielvogel. "I looked
him up. He's a European quack—practicing here without any credentials at
all. He's not attached to a single psychoanalytic institute—no wonder he
tells you to leave your wife!" "You're lying again, Maureen—you just made
that up! You'll say anything!" "But you're the liar! You're the betrayer!
You're the one who deceived me with that little student of yours! Carried
on with her for months behind my back! While I cooked your dinner and
washed your socks!" "And what did you do to get me to marry you in the
first place! Just what!" "Oh, I knew I should never have told you that—I
knew you would use that against me some day, to excuse yourself and your
rotten philandering! Oh, how can you allow two such people to turn you
against your own wife—when you were the guilty one, you were the one
who was screwing those students left and right!" "I was not screwing
students left and right—" "Peter, I caught you red-handed with that girl
with the braids!" "That is not left and right, Maureen! And you are the one
who turned me against you, with your crazy fucking paranoia!" "When?
When did I do that, I'd like to know?" "From the beginning! Before we
were even married!" "Then why on earth did you marry me, if I was so
hateful to you even then? Just to punish me like this?" "I married you
because you tricked me into marrying you! Why else!" "But that didn't
mean you had to—you still could decide on your own! And you did, you
liar! Don't you even remember what happened? You asked me to be your
wife. You proposed."

"Because among other things you threatened to kill yourself if I
didn't!" "And you mean to say you believed me?" "What?" "You actually
believed that I would kill myself over you? Oh, you terrible narcissist! You
selfish egomaniacal maniac! You actually do think that you are the be-all
and end-all of human existence!" "No, no, it's you who think I am! Why
else won't you leave me alone!" "Oh, Jesus," she moaned, "oh Jesus—
haven't you ever heard of love?"



　　　　　　2. SUSAN: 1963–1966



It is now nearly a year since I decided that I would not marry Susan McCall
and ended our long love affair. Until last year marrying Susan had been
legally impossible because Maureen continued to refuse to grant me a
divorce under the existing New York State matrimonial laws or to consent
to a Mexican or out-of-state divorce. But then one sunny morning (only one
short year ago), Maureen was dead, and I was a widower, free at last of the
wife I had taken, entirely against my inclinations but in accordance with my
principles, back in 1959. Free to take a new one, if I so desired.

Susan's own absurd marriage to the right Princeton boy had also ended
with the death of her mate. It had been briefer even than my own, and also
childless, and she wanted now to have a family before it was "too late." She
was into her thirties and frightened of giving birth to a mongoloid child; I
hadn't known how frightened until I happened by accident to come upon a
secret stockpile of biology books that apparently had been picked up in a
second-hand bookstore on Fourth Avenue. They were stuffed in a splitting
carton on the floor of the pantry where I had gone in search of a fresh can of
coffee one morning while Susan was off at her analyst's. I assumed at first
that they were books she had accumulated years ago at school; then I
noticed that two of them, The Basic Facts of Human Heredity by Amram
Scheinfeld and Human Heredity by Ashley Montagu, hadn't been published
until she was already living alone and widowed in her New York apartment.

Chapter Six of the Montagu book, "The Effects of Environment Upon
the Developing Human Being in the Womb," was heavily marked with a
black crayon, whether by Susan, or by whoever had owned the book be-
fore her, I had no sure way of knowing. "Studies of the reproductive
development of the female show that from every point of view the best
period during which the female may undertake the process of reproduction
extends on the average from the age of twenty-one to about twenty-six
years of age…From the age of thirty-five years onward there is a sudden
jump in the number of defective children that are born, especially of the
type known as mongoloids.…In mongolism we have the tragic example of
what may be an adequately sound genetic system being provided; with an
inadequate environment with resulting disordered development in the
embryo." If it was not Susan who had done the heavy underlining, it was
she who had copied out into the margin, in her round, neat schoolgirlish
hand, the words "an inadequate environment."

A single paragraph describing mongoloid children was the only one on
the page that had not been framed and scored with the black crayon; in its
own simple and arresting way, however, it gave evidence of having been
read no less desperately. The seven words that I italicize here had, in the
book, been underlined by a yellow felt-tipped pen, the kind that Susan liked
to use to encourage correspondents to believe that she was in the highest of
spirits. "Mongoloid children may or may not have the fold of skin over the
inner angle of the eye (epicanthic fold) or the flat root of the nose that
goes with this, but they do have smallish heads, fissured tongues, a trans-
verse palmar crease, with extreme intellectual retardation. Their I.Q. ranges
between 15 and 29 points, from idiocy to the upper limit of about seven
years. Mongoloids are cheerful and very friendly personalities, with often
remarkable capacities for imitation and memories for music and complex
situations which far outrank their other abilities. The expectation of life
at birth is about nine years." After almost an hour with these books on the
pantry floor, I returned them to the carton, and when I saw Susan again that
evening said nothing about them. Nothing to her, but thereafter I was as
haunted by the image of Susan buying and reading her biology books as she
was of giving birth to a monstrosity.

But I did not marry her. I had no doubt that she would be a loving and
devoted mother and wife, but having been unable ever to extricate myself
by legal means from a marriage into which I'd been coerced in the first
place, I had deep misgivings about winding up imprisoned once again.
During the four years that Maureen and I had been separated, her lawyer
had three times subpoenaed me to appear in court in an attempt to get
Maureen's alimony payments raised and my "hidden" bank accounts with
their hidden millions revealed to the world. On each occasion I appeared,
as summoned, with my packet of canceled checks, my bank statements, and
my income tax returns to be grilled about my earnings and my expenses,
and each time I came away from those proceedings swearing that I would
never again put authority over my personal life into the hands of some
pious disapproving householder known as a New York municipal judge.
Never again would I be so stupid and reckless as to allow some burgher in
black robes to tell me that I ought to "switch" to writing movies so as to
make sufficient money to support the wife I had "abandoned." Henceforth I
would decide with whom I would live, whom I would support, and for how
long, and not the state of New York, whose matrimonial laws, as I had
experienced them, seemed designed to keep a childless woman who refused
to hold a job off the public dole, while teaching a lesson to the husband
(me!) assumed to have "abandoned" his innocent and helpless wife for no
other reason than to writhe in the fleshpots of Sodom. At those prices,
would that it were so!

As my tone suggests, I had found myself as humiliated and compromised,
and nearly as disfigured, by my unsuccessful effort to get unmarried
as I had ever been by the marriage itself: over the four years of
separation I had been followed to dinner by detectives, served with
subpoenas in the dentist's chair, maligned in affidavits subsequently
quoted in the press, labeled for what seemed like all eternity "a defen-
dant," and judged by a man with whom I would not eat my dinner—and I did
not know if I could undergo these indignities again, and the accompanying
homicidal rage, without a stroke finishing me off on the witness stand.
Once I even took a swing at Maureen's dapper (and, let it be known, el-
derly) lawyer in the corridor of the courthouse, when I learned that it was
he who had invited the reporter from the Daily News to attend the hearing
at which Maureen (for the occasion, in Peter Pan collar and tears) testified
that I was "a well-known seducer of college girls." But that story of my
swashbuckling in its turn. My point is that I had not responded with much
equanimity to the role in which I was cast by the authorities and did not
want to be tested by their system of sexual justice ever again.

But there were other, graver reasons not to marry, aside from my fear
of divorce. Though I had never taken lightly Susan's history of emotional
breakdown, the fact is that as her lover it had not weighed upon me as I
expected it would if I were to become her husband and her offspring's
father. In the years before we met, Susan had gone completely to pieces on
three occasions: first, in her freshman (and only) year at Wellesley; then
after her husband had been killed in a plane crash eleven months into their
marriage; and most recently, when her father, whom she had doted upon,
had died in great pain of bone cancer. Each time she fell into a kind of
waking coma and retired to a corner (or a closet) to sit mutely with her
hands folded in her lap until someone saw fit to lift her onto a stretcher and
carry her away. Under ordinary circumstances she managed to put down
what she called her "everyday run-of-the-mill terror" with pills: she had
through the years discovered a pill for just about every phobia that
overcame her in the course of a day, and had been living on them, or not
living on them, since she had left home for college. There was a pill for the
classroom, a pill for "dates," a pill for buying clothes, a pill for returning
clothes, and needless to say, pills for getting started in the morning and
dropping into oblivion at night. And a whole mixed bag of pills which she
took like M&Ms when she had to converse, even on the phone, with her
formidable mother.

After her father's death she had spent a month in Payne Whitney, where
she'd become the patient of a Dr. Golding, reputedly a specialist with
broken china. He had been her analyst for two years by the time I came
along and had by then gotten her off everything except Ovaltine, her
favorite childhood narcotic; in fact, he had encouraged the drinking of
Oval-tine at bedtime and during the day when she was feeling distressed.
Actually during the course of our affair Susan did not take so much as an
aspirin for a headache, a perfect record, and one that might have served to
assure me that that past was past. But then so had her record been "perfect"
when she had enrolled at Wellesley at the age of eighteen, an A student from
Princeton's Miss Fine's School for Young Ladies, and immediately develop-
ed such a fear of her German professor, a caustic young European refugee
with a taste for leggy American girls, that instead of going off to his
class she took a seat in the closet of her room every Monday, Wednesday,
and Friday at ten A.M., and until the hour was over, hid out there, coasting
along on the belladonna that she regularly obtained from Student Health for
her menstrual cramps. By chance one day (and a merciful day it was) a
dormitory chambermaid opened the closet door during Susan's German
hour, and her Mother was summoned from Princeton to take her out from
behind her winter coats and away from Wellesley for good.

The possibility of such episodes recurring in the future alarmed me.
I believe my sister and brother would argue that Susan's history of
breakdowns was largely what had intrigued me and attracted me, and that
my apprehension over what might happen to her, given the inevitable
tensions and pressures of marriage, was the first sign I had displayed,
since coming of age, that I had a modicum of common sense in matters
pertaining to women. My own attitude toward my apprehensiveness is not
so unambiguously approving; I still do not know from day to day whether
it is cause for relief or remorse.

Then there is the painful matter of the elusive orgasm: no matter how
she struggled to reach a climax, "it" never happened. And of course the
harder she worked at it, the more like labor and the less like pleasure erotic
life became. On the other hand, the intensity of her effort was as moving as
anything about her —for in the beginning, she had been altogether content
just to open her legs a little way and lie there, a well to pump if anyone
should want to, and she herself couldn't imagine why anyone would, lovely
and well-formed as she was. It took much encouragement and, at the outset,
much berating, to get her to be something more than a piece of meat on a
spit that you turned this way and that until you were finished; she was never
finished, but then she had never really begun.

What a thing it was to watch the appetite awaken in this shy and timid
creature! And the daring—for if only she dared to, she might actually have
what she wanted! I can see her still, teetering on the very edge of success.
The pulse beats erratically in her throat, the jaw strains upward, the gray
eyes yearn—just a yard, a foot, an inch to the tape, and victory over the
self-denying past! Oh yes, I remember us well at our honest toil—pelvises
grinding as though to grind down bone, fingers clutching at one another's
buttocks, skin slick with sweat from forehead to feet, and our flushed
cheeks (as we near total collapse) pressing so forcefully into one another
that afterward her face is blotchy and bruised and my own is tender to the
touch when I shave the' following morning. Truly, I thought more than once
that I might the of heart failure. "Though in a good cause," I whisper, when
Susan had signaled at last a desire to throw in the towel for the night;
drawing a finger over the cheekbone and across the bridge of the nose, I
would check for tears—rather, the tear; she would rarely allow more than
one to be shed, this touching hybrid of courage and fragility. "Oh," she
whispers, "I was almost almost almost…" "Yes?" Then that tear. "Always,"
she says, "almost." "It'll happen." "It won't. You know it won't. What I
consider almost is probably where everybody else begins." "I doubt it."
"You don't…Peter, next time—what you were doing…do it—harder." So I
did it, whatever it was, harder, or softer, or faster, or slower, or deeper, or
shallower, or higher, or lower, as directed. Oh, how Mrs. Susan Seabury
McCall of Princeton and Park Avenue tried to be bold, to be greedy, to be
low ("Put it…" "Yes, say it, Suzie—" "Oh, in me from behind, but don't
hurt—!")—not of course that living on bennies in a Wellesley dormitory in
1951 hadn't constituted an act of boldness for a society-bred, mother
disciplined, father-pampered young heiress from a distinguished New
Jersey family, replete on the father's side with a U.S. senator and an
ambassador to England, and on the mother's, with nineteenth-century
industrial barons. But that diversion had been devised to annihilate
temptation; now she wanted to want…Exhilarating to behold, but over the
long haul utterly exhausting, and the truth was that by the third year of our
affair both of us were the worse for wear and came to bed like workers
doing overtime night after night in a defense plant: in a good cause, for
good wages, but Christ how we wished the war was over and won and we
could rest and be happy.

I have of course to wonder now if Susan wouldn't have been better off
if I had deferred to her and simply left her alone about coming. "I don't
care about that," she had told me, when I first broached the distressing
subject. I suggested that perhaps she should care. "Why don't you just
worry about your own fun…" said she. I told her that I was not worrying
about "fun." "Oh, don't be pretentious," she dared to mumble—then,
begging: "Please, what difference does it make to you anyway?" The
difference, I said, would be to her. "Oh, stop trying to sound like the Good
Sex Samaritan, will you? I'm just not a nymphomaniac and I never was. I
am what I am, and if it's been good enough for everyone else—" "Has it?"
"No!" and out came the tear. So the resistance began to crumble, and the
struggle, which I initiated and to which I was accomplice and accessory,
began.

I should point out here that the distressing subject had been a source of
trouble between Maureen and myself as well: she too was unable to reach a
climax, but maintained that what stood in her way was my "selfishness."
Characteristically she had confused the issue somewhat by leading me to
believe for the longest while that she and orgasms were on the very best of
terms—that I, in fact, had as much chance of holding her back as a picket
fence has of obstructing an avalanche. Well into the first year of our
marriage, I continued to look on in wonder at the crescendo of passion that
would culminate in her sustained outcry of ecstasy when I began to
ejaculate; you might even say that my ejaculations sort of faded off into
nothing beside her clamorous writhings. It came as a surprise then (to coin a
phrase appropriate to these adventures) to learn that she had actually been
pretending, faking those operatic orgasms, she explained, so as to protect
me from the knowledge of just how inadequate a lover I was. But how long
could she keep up that pretense in order to bolster my sense of manliness?
What about her, she wanted to know. Thereafter I was to hear repeatedly
how even Mezik, the brute who was her first husband, even Walker, the
homosexual who was her second, knew more about how to satisfy a woman
than the selfish, inept, questionable heterosexual who was I.

Oh, you crazy bitch (if the widower may take a moment out to address
the ghost of his wife), death is too good for you, really.

Why isn't there a hell, with fire and brimstone? Why isn't there a devil
and damnation? Why isn't there sin any more? Oh, if I were Dante,
Maureen, I'd go about writing this another way!

At any rate: in that Maureen's accusations, no matter how patently
bizarre, had a way of eating into my conscience, it very well might be that
what Susan derided as my sexual good samaritanism was in part an attempt
by me to disprove the allegations brought against me by a monumentally
dissatisfied wife. I don't really know. I believe I meant well, though at the
time I came to Susan there is no denying how dismayed I was by my record
as a pleasure-giving man.

Obviously what drew me to Susan to begin with—only a year into my sep-
aration and still reeling—was that in temperament and social bearing she
was as unlike Maureen as a woman could be. There was no confusing
Maureen's recklessness, her instinct for scenes of wild accusation,
her whole style of moral overkill, with Susan's sedate and mannerly
masochism. To Susan McCall, speaking aloud and at length of disap-
pointment, even to one's lover, was like putting an elbow on the dinner
table, something One Just Didn't Do. She told herself that by making her
heartache her business and nobody else's, she was being decorous and
tactful, sparing another the inconsequential bellyaching of "a poor little
rich girl," though of course the person she was sparing (and deluding) by
being so absurdly taciturn and stoically blind about her life was herself.
She was the one who didn't want to hear about it, or think about it, or do
anything about it, even as she continued to suffer it in her own resigned
and baffled way. The two women were wholly antithetical in their response to
deprivation, one like a dumb, frightened kid in a street fight who knows no
way to save his hide but to charge into the melee, head down and skinny
arms windmilling before him, the other docile and done in, resigned to
being banged around or trampled over. Even when Susan came to realize
that she needn't settle any longer for a diet of bread and water, that it
wasn't simply "okay" with me (and the rest of mankind) that she exhibit a
more robust appetite, but that it made her decidedly more attractive and
appealing, there was the lifelong style of forbearance, abstemiousness in all
things but pharmaceuticals, there was the fadeaway voice, the shy averted
glance, the auburn hair drawn austerely back in a knot at the back of the
slender neck, there was the bottomless patience, the ethereal silence, that
single tear, to mark her clearly as a member of another tribe, if not another
sex, from Maureen.

It need hardly be pointed out that to me hers was a far more poignant
straggle to witness (and be a party to) than that one in which Maureen had
been so ferociously engaged—for where Maureen generally seemed to want
to have something largely because someone else was able to have it (if I
had been impotent, there is no doubt she would have been content to be
frigid), Susan now wanted what she wanted in order to rid herself of the
woman she had been. Her rival, the enemy whom she hoped to dispossess
and drive into exile, if not extinction, was her own constrained and terrified
self.

Poignant, moving, admirable, endearing—in the end, too much for me. I
couldn't marry her. I couldn't do it. If and when I was ever to marry again,
it would have to be someone in whose wholeness I had abounding faith and
trust. And if no one drawing breath was that whole—admittedly I wasn't,
my own capacity for faith and trust, among other things, in a state of
serious disrepair—maybe that meant I would never remarry. So be it. Worse
things had happened, one of them, I believed, to me.

So: freed from Maureen by her death, it seemed to me that I had either
to go ahead and make Susan a wife and mother at thirty-four, or leave her
so that she might find a man who would do just that before she became, in
Dr. Montagu's words, a totally "inadequate environment" for procreation.
Having been to battle for nearly all of my adult life, first with Maureen
and then with the divorce laws of the state of New York—laws so rigid and
punitive they came to seem to me the very codification of Maureen's
"morality," the work of her hand—I no longer had the daring, or the heart,
or the confidence to marry again. Susan would have to find some man who
was braver, or stronger, or wiser, or maybe just more foolish and deluded—
Enough. I still don't know how to describe my decision to leave her,
nor have I stopped trying to. As I asked at the outset: Has anything
changed?

Susan tried to kill herself six months after I had pronounced the affair over.
I was here in Vermont. After I left her, my days in New York, till then so
bound up with hers, had become pointless and empty. I had my work, I had
Dr. Spielvogel, but I had become used to something more, this woman. As it
turned out, I was no less lonely for her here in my cabin, but at least I
knew that the chances were greatly reduced that she would show up in the
Vermont woods at midnight, as she did at my apartment on West Twelfth
Street, where she could call into the intercom, "It's me, I miss you." And
what do you do at that hour, not let her in? "You could," Dr. Spielvogel
advised me, "take her home in a taxi, yes." "I did—at two." "Try it at
midnight." So I did, came downstairs in my coat, to escort her out of the
building and back to Park and Seventy-ninth. Sunday the buzzer went off in
the morning. "Who is it?" "I brought you the Times. It's Sunday." "I know
it's Sunday." "Well, I miss you like mad. How can we be apart on Sunday?"
I released the lock on the downstairs door ("Take her home in a taxi; there
are taxis on Sunday"—"But I miss her!") and she came on up the stairs,
beaming, and invariably, Sunday after Sunday, we wound up making love in
our earnest and strenuous way. "See," says Susan. "What?" "You do want
me. Why are you acting as though you don't?" "You want to be married.
You want to have children. And if that's what you want you should have it.
But I myself don't, can't, and won't!" "But I'm not her. I'm me. I'm not out
to torture you or coerce you into anything. Have I ever? Could I possibly? I
only want to make you happy." "I can't do it. I don't want to." "Then don't.
You're the one who brought up marriage. I didn't say a word about it. You
just said I can't do it and I have to go— and you went! But this is
intolerable. Not living with you doesn't make sense. Not even seeing each
other—it's just too bizarre." "I don't want to stand between you and a
family, Susan." "Oh, Peter, you sound like some dope on a soap opera when
you say that. If I have to choose between you and a family, I choose you."
"But you want to be married, and if you want to be married, and if you want
to have children, then you should have them. But 1 don't, can't, and won't."
"It's because I don't come, isn't it? And never will. Not even if you put it in
my ear. Well, isn't it?" "No." "It's because I'm a junkie." "You are hardly a
junkie." "But it is that, it's those pills I pop. You're afraid of having
somebody like me on your hands forever—you want somebody better,
somebody who comes like the postman, through rain and snow and gloom
of night, and doesn't sit in closets and can live without her Ovaltine at the
age of thirty-four— and why shouldn't you? I would too, if I were you. I
mean that. I understand completely. You're right about me." And out rolled
the tear, and so I held her and told her no-no-it-isn't-so (what else, Dr.
Spielvogel, is there to say at that moment—yes, you're absolutely correct?).
"Oh, I don't blame you," said Susan, 'Tm not even a person, really." "Oh,
what are you then?" "I haven't been a person since I was sweet sixteen. I'm
just symptoms. A collection of symptoms, instead of a human being."

These surprise visits continued sporadically over a period of four
months and would have gone on indefinitely, I thought, if I just stayed on
there in New York. Certainly, I could refuse to respond to the doorbell,
pretend when she came by that I wasn't at home, but as I reminded Dr.
Spielvogel when he suggested somewhat facetiously that I "marshal" my
strength and forget about the bell—"it'll stop soon enough"—this was
Susan I was dealing with, not Maureen. Eventually I packed a bag and,
marshaling my strength, came up here.

Just before I left my apartment, however, I spent several hours writing
Susan notes telling her where I was going—and then tearing them up. But
what if she "needed" me? How could I just pick up and disappear? I ended
up finally telling a couple who were our friends where I would be hiding
out, assuming that the wife would pass this confidence on to Susan before
my bus had even passed over the New York State line.

I did not hear a word from Susan for six weeks. Because she had been
told where I was or because she hadn't?

Then one morning I was summoned from breakfast to the phone here
at the Colony—it was our friends informing me that Susan had been found
unconscious in her apartment and rushed by ambulance to the hospital. It
seemed that the previous night she had finally accepted an invitation to
dinner with a man; he had left her at her door around eleven, and she had
come back into the apartment and swallowed all the Seconal and Tuinal and
Placidyl that she had been secreting under her lingerie over the years. The
cleaning lady had found her in the morning, befouled and in a heap on the
bathroom floor, surrounded by empty vials and envelopes.

I got an afternoon flight from Rutland and was at the hospital by the
evening visiting hours. When I arrived at the psychiatric ward, I was told
she had just been transferred and was directed to a regular private room.
The door was slightly ajar and I peered in—she was sitting up in bed, gaunt
and scraggly looking and still very obviously dazed and disoriented, like a
prisoner, I thought, who has just been returned from an all-night session
with her interrogators. When she saw that it was me rapping on the door,
out came the tear, and despite the presence of the formidable mother, who
coolly took my measure from the bedside, she said, I love you, that's why
I did it."

After ten days in the hospital getting her strength back—and assuring
Dr. Golding when he came around to visit each morning, that she would
never again lay in a secret cache of sleeping pills—she was released in the
care of her mother and went back home to New Jersey, where her father
had been a professor of classics at Princeton until his death. Mrs. Seabury,
according to Susan, was a veritable Calpurnia; in grace, in beauty, in
carriage, in icy grandeur (and, said Susan, "in her own estimation") very
much a Caesar's wife—and to top it off, Susan added hopelessly, she
happened also to be smart. Yes, top marks, it turned out, from the very
college where Susan hadn't been able to make it through her freshman year.
I had always suspected that Susan might be exaggerating somewhat her
mother's majesty—it was, after all, her mother—but at the hospital, when
by chance our daily visits overlapped, I found myself not a little awed by
the patrician confidence radiated by this woman from whom Susan had
obviously inherited her own striking good looks, though not a Calpurnian
presence. Mrs. Seabury and I had next to nothing to say to one another. She
looked at me in fact (or so I imagined it, in those circumstances) as though
she did not see there much opposition to be brooked. Only further evidence
of her daughter's prodigality. "Of course," her silence seemed to me to say,
"of course it would be over the loss of a hysterical Jewish 'poet.'" In the
corridors outside the hospital room of my suicidal mistress, it was difficult
to rise to my own defense.

When I came down to Princeton to visit Susan, we two sat in the garden
back of the brick house on Mercer Street, next door to where Einstein
had lived (legend had it that as a little red-headed charmer, back in
the years before she was just "symptoms," Susan used to give him candy to
do her arithmetic homework); Madame Seabury, wearing pearls, sat with a
book just inside the terrace door, no more than ten yards away—it was not
A Jewish Father she was reading, I was sure. I had taken the train to
Princeton to tell Susan that now that she was being looked after by her
mother, I would be going back to Vermont. So long as she had been in the
hospital, I had, at Dr. Golding's suggestion, been deliberately vague about
my plans. "You don't have to tell her anything, one way or another.'' "What
if she asks?" "I don't think she will," Golding said; "for the time being
she's content that she got you down here. She won't push her luck." "Not
yet. But what about when she gets out? What if she tries it again?" "I'll take
care of that," said Golding, with a businesslike smile meant to close off
conversation. I wanted to say: "You didn't take such marvelous care of
'that' last time!" But who was the runaway lover to blame the devoted
doctor for the castoff mistress's suicide attempt?

It was a warmish March day, and Susan was wearing a clinging yellow
jersey dress, looking very slinky for a young woman who generally
preferred to keep her alluring body inconspicuous. Her hair, unknotted for
the occasion, was a thick mane down her back; a narrow band of girlish
freckles faintly showed across the bridge of her nose and her cheekbones.
She had been out in the sun every afternoon—in her bikini, she let me know
—and looked gorgeous. She could not keep her hands from her hair, and
continuously, throughout our conversation, took it from behind her neck
and pulled it like a thick, auburn rope over either shoulder; then, raising
her chin just a touch, she would push the mass of hair back behind her neck
with two open palms. The wide mouth and slightly protrusive jaw that gave
a decisive and womanly quality to her delicate beauty, struck me suddenly
as prehistoric, the sign of what was still raw and forceful in this bridled
daughter of propriety and wealth. I had always found her beauty stirring,
but never before had it seemed so thoroughly dominated by the sensuous.
That was new. Where was Susan the interrogated prisoner? Susan the
mousy widow? Susan the awesome mother's downtrodden Cinderella? All
gone! Was it having toyed with suicide and gotten away with it that gave
her the courage to be so blatantly tempting? Was it the proximity of the
disapproving mother that was goading her on? Or was this her calculated
last-ditch effort to arouse and lure back the fugitive from matrimony?

Whatever, I was aroused.

With her legs thrown over the filigreed arm of the white wrought-iron
chaise, Susan's yellow dress rode high on her tanned thigh—I thought it
must be the way she used to sit at age eight with Einstein, before she had
begun to be educated by her fears. When she shifted in the chaise, or simply
raised her arms to fool with her hair, the edge of her pale underpants came
into view.

"Coming on very shameless," I said. "For my benefit or your mother's?"

"Both. Neither."

"I don't think she thinks the world of me to begin with."

"Nor of me."

"Then that won't help any, will it?"

"Please, you're 'coming on' like somebody's nanny."

Silence, while I watch that hair fan out in her two hands. One of her
tanned legs is swinging to the slowest of beats over the arm of the garden
chaise. This is not at all the scenario that I had constructed on the train
coming down. I had not counted on a temptress, or an erection.

"She always thought I had the makings of a whore anyway," says Susan,
frowning like any victimized adolescent.

"I doubt that."

"Oh, are you siding with my mother these days? It's a regular phalanx.
Only you're the one who turned me against her."

"That tack won't work," I said flatly.

"What will then? Living here in my old room like the crazy daughter?
Having college boys ask me for dates over the card catalogue in the
library? Watching the eleven o'clock news, with my Ovaltine and my mom?
What ever has worked?"

I didn't answer.

"I ruin everything," she announced.

"You want to tell me that I do?"

"I want to tell you that Maureen does—still! Now why did she have to
go and get killed? What are all these people trying to do anyway, dying
off on me this way? Everything was really just fine, until she upped and
departed this life. But out of her clutches, Peter, you're even more
haywire than you were in. Leaving me like that was crazy."

"I'm not haywire, I'm not crazy, and everything was not 'just fine.'
You were biding your time. You want to be married and a mother. You
dream about it."

"You're the one who dreams about it. You're the one who's obsessed
with marriage. I told you I was willing to go ahead without--"

"But I don't want you going ahead ‘without'! I don't want to be
responsible for denying you what you want."

"But that's my worry, not yours. And I don't want it any more, I told
you that. If I can't, I won't."

"Yes?--then what am I to make of all those books, Susan?"

"Which books?"

"Your volumes on human heredity."

She winced. "Oh." But the mildness of what she said next, the faint air
of self-mockery, surprised me. And relieved me too, for in my impatience
with what I took to be rather self-deluded assertions about living "without,"
I had gone further than I'd meant to. "Are they still around?" she asked, as
though it was a teddy bear that I'd uncovered from a secret hiding place.

"Well, I didn't move them."

"I was going through a stage…as they say."

"What stage?"

"Pathetic. Morbid. Blue. That stage…When did you find them?"

"One morning. Only about a year ago."

"I see…Well--" All at once she seemed crushed by my discovery; I
thought that she might scream. "Well," she said, inhaling deeply, "what
next? What else have you found out about me?"

I shook my head.

"You should know--" she stopped.

I said nothing. But what should I know? What should I know?

"A Princeton hippie," said Susan, slyly smiling, "is taking me to a
movie tonight. You should know that."

"Very nice," I said. "A new life."

"He picked me up at the library. Want to know what I'm reading these
days?"

"Sure. What?"

"Everything about matricide I can get my hands on," she told me,
through her teeth.

"Well, reading about matricide in a college library never killed
anybody."

"Oh, I just went there because I was bored."

"In that dress?"

"Yes, in this dress. Why not? It's just a little dress to wear around the
stacks, you know."

"I can see that."

"I'm thinking of marrying him, by the way."

"Who?"

"My hippie. He'd probably ‘dig' a two-headed baby. And a decrepit
‘old lady.'"

"That thigh staring me and your mother in the face doesn't look too
decrepit."

"Oh," said Susan, "it won't kill you to look at it."

"Oh, it's not killing me," I said, and suppressed an urge to reach out
and up and stroke what I saw.

"Okay," she said abruptly--"you can tell me what you came to tell me,
Peter. I'm ‘ready.' To use a serviceable phrase of my mother's, I've
come to grips with reality. Shoot. You're never going to see me again."

"I don't see what's changed," I answered.

"You don't--I know you don't. You still think I'm Maureen. You still
think I'm that terrible person."

"Hardly, Susan."

"But how can you go around never trusting anyone ever again just be-
cause of a screwball like that! I don't lie, Peter. I don't deceive. I'm me.
And don't give me that look."

‘What look?"

"Oh, let's go up to my bedroom. The hell with Mother. I want to make
love to you, terribly."

"What look?"

She closed her eyes. "Stop," she whispered. "Don't be furious with me.
I swear to you, I didn't mean it that way. It was not blackmail, truly.
I just could not bear any longer Being Brave."

"Then why didn't you call your doctor--instead of taking Maureen's
favorite home remedy!"

"Because I didn't want him--I wanted you. But I didn't pursue you, did
I? For six weeks you were up there in Vermont, and I didn't write, and I
didn't phone, and I didn't get on an airplane--did I? Instead I went around
day after day Being Brave, and not in Vermont either, but in the apartment
where I used to eat and sleep with you. Finally I even came to grips with
reality and accepted an invitation for dinner--and that was my biggest mis-
take. I tried to Start My Life Again, just like Dr. Golding told me to, and
this very upright man that I went out with went ahead and gave me a lecture
on how I oughtn't to depend upon people who were ‘lacking in integrity.'
He told me that he heard from a reliable source in publishing that you were
lacking in integrity. Oh, he made me furious, Peter, and I told him I was
going home, and so he got up and left with me, and when I got home I
wanted to call you so, I wanted to speak to you so badly, and the only way I
couldn't do it was to take the pills. I know it makes no sense, it was so
utterly stupid, and I would never ever do it again. You don't know how
sorry I am. And you may tell yourself that I did it out of anger with you, or
to try to blackmail you, or to punish you, or because I actually took what
that man said about you to heart--but it was none of that. It was just that I
was so worn down from going around for six weeks Being Brave! Oh, let's
go somewhere, to a motel room or somewhere. I want terribly to be fucked.
That's all I've been thinking about down here for days. I feel like--a fiend.
Oh, please, I'm going to scream, living with this mother of mine!

Here that mother of hers was out through the terrace doors, across the
patio, and into the garden before Susan could even brush away the tear or I
could respond to her appeal. And what response would I have made? Her
explanation did seem to me at that moment truthful and sufficient. Of
course she did not lie or deceive, of course she was not Maureen. If I didn't
want Susan, I realized then, it was not because I didn't want her to sacrifice
for me her dream of a marriage and a family; it was because I didn't want
Susan any more, under any conditions. Nor did I want anyone else. I
wanted only to be placed in sexual quarantine, to be weaned from the other
sex forever.

Yet everything she said was so convincing.

Mrs. Seabury asked if I could come inside with her a moment.

"I take it," she said, when we were standing together just inside the
terrace doors, "that you told her you don't plan to see her again."

"That's right."

"Then perhaps the best thing now would be to go."

"I think she's expecting me to take her to lunch."

"She has no such expectation that I know of. I can see to her lunch.
And her welfare generally."

Outside Susan was now standing up beside the chaise. Both Mrs. Seabury
and I were looking her way when she pulled the yellow jersey dress up
over her head and let it fall to the lawn. It wasn't pale underpants
I'd seen earlier beneath the skimpy dress, but a white bikini. She adjusted
the back rest of the chaise until it was level with the seat and the foot rest,
and then stretched herself out on it, face down. An arm hung limply over
either side.

Mrs. Seabury said, "Staying any longer will only make it more difficult
for her. It was very good of you," she said in her cool and unruffled way,
"to visit her at the hospital every day. Dr. Golding agreed. That was the best
thing to do in the situation, and we appreciate it. But now she must really
make an effort to come to grips with reality. She must not be allowed to
continue to act in ways that are not in her own interest. You must not let
her work on your sympathies with her helplessness. She has been wooing
people that way all her life. I tell you this for your own good--you must not
imagine yourself in any way responsible for Susan's predicament. She has
always been all too willing to collapse in other people's arms. We have tried
to be kind and intelligent about this behavior always--she is what she is--
but one must also be firm. And I don't think it would be kind, intelligent, or
firm for you to forestall the inevitable any longer. She must begin to forget
you, and the sooner the better. I am going to ask you to go now, Mr.
Tarnopol, before my daughter once again does something that she will
regret. She cannot afford much more remorse or humiliation. She hasn't the
stamina for it."

Out in the garden, Susan had turned over and was lying now on her back,
her legs as well as her arms dangling over the sides of the chaise--
four limbs seemingly without strength.

I said to Mrs. Seabury, "I'll go out and say goodbye. I'll tell her I'm
going."

"I could as easily tell her you've gone. She knows how to be weak but
she also knows something about how to be strong. It's a matter of
continually making it clear to her that people are not going to be
manipulated by the childish ploys of a thirty-four-year-old woman."

"I'll just say goodbye."

"All right. I won't make an issue over a few more minutes," she said,
though it was altogether clear how little she liked being crossed by a
hysterical Jewish poet. "She has been carrying on in that swimsuit for a
week now. She greets the mailman in it every morning. Now she is exhi-
biting herself in it for you. Given that less than two weeks ago she tried
to take her life, I would hope that you could summon up as much self
control as our mailman does and ignore the rather transparent display of
teenage vampirism."

"That is not what I am responding to. I lived with Susan for over three
years."

"I don't wish to hear about that. I was never delighted by that
arrangement. I deplored it, in fact."

"I was only explaining to you why I'd prefer not to leave without at
least telling her that I'm going."

She said, "It is not possible for you to leave because she is lying on her
back with her legs spread apart and--"

"And," I replied, my face ablaze, "suppose that were the reason?"

"Is that all you people can think about?"

"Which ‘people' are you referring to?"

"People like yourself and my daughter, experimenting with one
another's genitals, up there in New York. When do you stop being
adolescent transgressors and grow up? You know you never had the
slightest intention of making Susan your wife. You are too much of a
‘swinger' for that. Such people used to be called ‘bohemians.' They don't
believe in marriage, with its risks and its trials and its difficulties--only in
sex, till it bores them. Well, that is your business--and your prerogative, I
am sure, as an artist. But you should not be so reckless as to foist your
elitist values upon someone like Susan, who happens to come from a
different background and was raised according to more traditional standards
of conduct. Look at her out there, trying so hard to be a sexpot for your
benefit. How could you have wanted to put such a ridiculous idea in that
girl's head? Of all the things to encourage a person like Susan to become!
Why on earth couldn't you have left such an unlikely candidate alone? Must
she be driven crazy with sex too? Must every last woman in the world be
‘turned on' by you modern Don Juans? To what end, Mr. Tarnopol, other
than to quench your unquenchable sexual vanity? Wasn't she confused and
broken enough--without this?"

"I don't know where to begin to tell you that you're wrong."

I walked out into the garden and looked down at a body as familiar to
me as my own.

"I'm going now," I said.

She opened her eyes against the sun, and she laughed, a small, rather
surprisingly cynical laugh; then after a moment's contemplation, she raised
the hand nearest to me from where it dangled to the ground and placed it
between the legs of my trousers, directly on my penis. And she held me like
that, her face now stolid and expressionless in the strong light. I did nothing
but stand there, being held. From where she had stepped out onto the patio,
Mrs. Seabury looked on.

This all couldn't have lasted as long as a minute.

She lowered her hand to her own bare stomach. "Go ahead," Susan
whispered. "Go." But just before I moved away she raised her body
and pressed her cheek to my trousers.

"And I was ‘wrong,'" said Mrs. Seabury, her voice harsh at last, as I
passed through the living room to the street.

At the time we met, Susan was just thirty and had been living for eleven
years in the co-op apartment at Park and Seventy-ninth that had become
hers (along with the eighteenth-century English marquetry furniture, the
heavy velvet draperies, the Aubusson carpets, and two million dollars'
worth of securities in McCall and McGee Industries) when the company
plane bearing her young husband to a board meeting crashed into a
mountainside in upstate New York eleven months into the marriage. In that
marrying the young heir had been considered by everyone (excepting her
father, who, characteristically, had remained silent) a fantastic stroke of
luck for a girl who hadn't enough on the ball to survive two semesters at
college, Susan (who eventually confided to me that she really hadn't liked
McCall that much) took his death very hard. Believing that her chances
were all used up at twenty, she retired to her bed and lay there, mute and
motionless, every single day during the month of mourning. As a result she
wound up doing woodwork for six months at a fashionable "health farm"
down in Bucks County known as the Institute for Better Living. Her father
would have preferred that she return to the house on Mercer Street after she
had completed her convalescence, but Susan's "counselor" at the Institute
had long talks with her about maturity and by the end of her stay had
convinced her to return to the apartment at Park and Seventy-ninth and
"give it a try on her own." To be sure, she too would have preferred to
return to Princeton and the father she adored--doing "research" for him in
the library, lunching with him at Lahiere's, hiking with him on weekends
along the canal--if only living with her father didn't entail living under the
gaze of her mother, that gaze that frightened her largely because it said,
"You must grow up and you must go away."

In Manhattan, the rich and busy ladies in her building who "adopted"
her made it their business to keep Susan occupied-running their errands for
them during the week, and on Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays
accompanying schoolchildren around town to be sure they didn't lose their
mufflers and were home in time for supper (to which Susan, having sung
her servile little lungs out for it, would sometimes be invited). That was
what she did for eleven years--and, of course, she "fixed up" the apartment
that she and this ghost named "Jamey" had never really "finished." Every
few years she enrolled in a course at the night division at Columbia. Always
she would take copious notes and diligently do all the reading, until such
time as she began to fear that the professor was going to call upon her to
speak. She would disappear then from the class, for a time, however,
keeping up with the reading at home--even giving herself tests of her own
devising. Men made some use of her over these eleven years, mostly after
charity dinners and dances, which she attended on the arm of a bachelor
nephew or some young cousin of the chairwoman, a rising something or
other in the world. That was easy enough, and after a while did not even
require eight hundred milligrams of Miltown for her to be able to "cope":
she just opened her legs a little way, and he who was rising in the world did
what little remained to be done. Sometimes the cousins and nephews (or
maybe it was just the thoughtful chairwomen) sent her flowers the next day:
she saved the cards in a folder in the file cabinet that contained her lecture
notes and self-administered, ungraded examinations. "Will call. Great night.
Love, A." or B. or C.

Early each summer there would generally be a knock on her apartment
door: a man to ask if she would have dinner with him while his wife was
away in the country. These were the husbands of the women in the building
for whom she went around town all day picking up swatches of fabrics and
straightening out errors in charge accounts. Their wives had told them what
a lovely young person Susan was, and then they would themselves have
caught sight of the five foot nine inch redhead when she was getting in and
out of taxis in front of the building, her arms loaded with other people's
Bergdorf boxes and her dress shimmying up her slender legs. One of these
men, a handsome and charming investment banker ("like a father to me,"
the thirty-year-old widow told me, without blinking an eye), gave her a new
electric range for a present when fall came and he wanted to be sure she
kept her mouth shut; she didn't need a new range (not even to keep her
mouth shut), but because she did not want to hurt his feelings, she had the
one she and Jamey and the decorator had bought ripped out and the new
one installed. And not one of these hot-weather paramours of hers, afflicted
as he might be with middle-age wife-weariness, ever wanted to run off with
the rich and beautiful young woman and start a new life--and that to Susan
was as damning a fact as any in the prosecution's case against her self
esteem.

I didn't want to run off with her either. Yet I came back, night after
night, returned to her apartment to eat and read and sleep, which was not
what young A., B., C, D., or E. had ever done. And for good reason: they
obviously had too much going for them, too much confidence and vitality
and hope for the future, to settle for more than a night with the likes of
Susan the Submissive. I, on the other hand, at the age of thirty, with my
prizes and my publication behind me, had had it. I sat at dinner in Jamey's
baronial chair, Susan serving me like a geisha. I shaved in Jamey's
lacquered brothel of a bathroom, my towels warming on the electrical
heating stand while I discovered the luxury of his Rolls razor. I read in his
gargantuan club chair, my feet up on the ottoman covered in Jamey's
mother's favorite flame stitch, a gift for his twenty-second (and last)
birthday. I drank those rare vintages of Jamey's wine that Susan had kept at
the proper temperature in an air-conditioned pantry all these years, as
though she expected that he might rise from the grave one day and ask to
taste his Richebourg. When my shoes got wet in a rainstorm, I stuffed them
with his wooden shoe trees and padded around in his velvet slippers from
Tripler's. I borrowed stays from his shirts. I weighed myself on his scale.
And was generally bored by his wife. But she did not make a single
demand.

All Susan said to me about our arrangement was this, and being Susan,
she didn't even say it aloud: "I'm yours. I'll do anything. Come and go as
you like. Let me feed you. Let me sit with you at night and watch you read.
You can do anything you want to my body. I'll do anything you say. Just
have dinner with me sometimes and use some of these things. And I'll
never utter a peep. I'll be good as gold. I won't ask what you do when you
go away. You don't have to take me anywhere. Just stay here sometimes
and make use of whatever you want, including me. You see, I have all
these thick bath-sized towels and Belgian lace tablecloths, all this lovely
crockery, three bathrooms, two televisions, and two million dollars of
Jamey's money with more of my own to come, I have these breasts and
this vagina, these limbs, this skin--and no life. Give me just a little bit of
that, and in return whenever you want to you can come here and recover
from your wife. Any hour of the day or night. You don't even have to call
beforehand."

It's a deal, I said. The broken shall succor the broken.

Of course, Susan was not the first young woman that I had met in New
York since I'd come East seeking asylum in June of ‘62. She was just the
first one I'd settled in with. According to the custom of that era--it is
depressing to think that it may be the custom still--I had been to parties,
befriended girls (which is to say, stood exchanging ironic quips with them
in the corner of someone's crowded West Side apartment), and then had
gone to bed with them, either before or after taking them out to dinner a
couple of times. Some were undoubtedly nice people, but I didn't have the
staying power or the confidence really to find out. Oftentimes during my
first year in New York I discovered that I did not really want to take off
my clothes or those of my new-found acquaintance, once we had gotten
back to one or another of our apartments, and so I would fall into silent fits
of melancholy that must have made me seem rather freakish--or at least
affected. One young knockout, I remember, took it very personally and
became incensed that I should suddenly have turned lugubrious on her after
having been "so ferociously charming" with my back against the wall of
one of those crowded living rooms; she asked if it was true that I was try-
ing to kick being queer, and I, dim-witted as can be, began to struggle to
remove her pantyhose, an act which turned out to consume such passion
as I had. She took her leave shortly thereafter, and the following morning,
going down for the paper and my seeded roll, I found wedged into the
frame of the door an index card that had penciled on it, "Abandon Hope, All
Ye Who Enter Here." Those parties I went to, with their ongoing intersexual
competition in self-defense, bred a lot of this sort of scuffling, or maybe a
little bit went a long way with me then; eventually invitations from editors
and writers to parties where there would be "a lot of girls" I mostly turned
down; when I didn't, I generally regretted it afterward.

Only months after my arrival, it became clear to me--depressingly so
--that New York City was probably the worst possible place, outside of the
Vatican, for a man in my predicament to try to put an end to his old life and
begin a new one. As I was discovering at these parties, I was in no shape to
get much pleasure out of my status as a "single" man; and, as I discovered
in my lawyer's office, the state of New York was hardly about to grant that
status de jure recognition. Indeed, now that the Peter Tarnopols were New
York residents, it looked as though they would be husband and wife forever.
Too late I learned that had we gotten separated back in Wisconsin, we
could, according to the law there, have been divorced after having
voluntarily lived separate and apart for five years. (Of course, had I
returned to Wisconsin in June of ‘62, rather than staying on at Morris's
apartment and from there launching into my career as Spielvogel's patient,
it is doubtful that I ever could have managed to set myself up in Madison
separate and apart from Maureen.) But, as things turned out, in the
sanctuary that I had taken New York to be, the only grounds for divorce was
adultery, and since Maureen did not want to divorce me on any grounds,
and I had no way of knowing whether she was an adulteress, or proving it
even if I knew, it looked in all likelihood as though I would be celebrating
my golden wedding anniversary on the steps of the State House in Albany.
Moreover, because my lawyer had been unable to get Maureen and her
attorney to agree to a legal separation or to any kind of financial settlement
(let alone to a Mexican or Nevada divorce that would have required mutual
consent to be incontestable), my official marital status in New York very
shortly came to be that of the guilty party in a separation action brought by
a wife against a husband who had "abandoned" her. Though we had lived
together as husband and wife for only three years, I was ordered by the New
York court to provide maintenance for my abandoned wife to the tune of
one hundred dollars a week, and to provide it until death did us part. And in
New York State what else could part us?

I could, of course, have moved and taken up residence in some state
with a less restrictive divorce law, and for a while, with the aid of The
Complete Guide to Divorce by Samuel G. Kling--the book that became my
bedside Bible in that first bewildering phase of my life as a New York
resident--I seriously investigated the possibilities. Reading Kling I found
out that in some eleven states "separation without cohabitation and without
reasonable expectation of reconciliation" was grounds for divorce, after
anywhere from eighteen months to three years. One night I got out of bed at
four A.M. and sat down and wrote letters to the state universities in each of
the eleven states and asked if there might be a job open for me in their
department of English; within the month I had received offers from the
universities of Florida, Delaware, and Wyoming. According to Kling, in the
first two states "voluntary three-year separation" provided grounds for
divorce; in Wyoming, only two years' separation was necessary. My lawyer
was quick to advise me of the various means by which Maureen might
attempt to contest such a divorce; he also let me know that upon granting
me a divorce the out-of-state judge would in all probability order me to
continue to pay the alimony set by the New York court in the separation
judgment; furthermore (to answer my next question), if I refused after the
divorce to make the alimony payments, I could be (and with Maureen as my
antagonist, no doubt would be) hauled into court under state reciprocity
agreements and held in contempt by the Florida or Delaware or Wyoming
judge for failing to support my former spouse in New York. A divorce, my
lawyer said, I might be able to pull off--but escape the alimony? never.
Nonetheless, I went ahead and accepted a job teaching American literature
and creative writing the following September in Laramie, Wyoming. I went
immediately to the library and took out books on the West. I went up to the
Museum of Natural History and walked among the Indian artifacts and the
tableau of the American bison. I decided I would try to learn to ride a horse,
at least a little, before I got out there. And I thought of the money I would
not be paying to Dr. Spielvogel.

Some ten weeks later I wrote to tell the chairman of the English
department in Laramie that because of unforeseen circumstances I would be
unable to take the job. The unforeseen circumstance was the hopelessness I
had begun to feel at the prospect of a two-year exile in Wyoming. After
which I might be able to ride a horse, but I would still have to pay through
the nose. If the divorce even went uncontested! And would Florida be any
better? Less remote, but a year longer to qualify for the divorce, and the end
result just as uncertain. It was about this time that I decided that the only
way out was to leave America and its marital laws and reciprocal state
agreements and begin my life anew as a stranger in a foreign country. Since
I understood that Maureen could always attach future royalties if they were
to come through a New York publishing house, I would have to sell world
rights to my next book to my English publisher and receive all payment
through him. Or why not start from scratch--grow a beard and change my
name?…And who was to say there would ever be a next book?

I spent the following few months deciding whether to return to Italy,
where I still had a few friends, or to try Norway, where chances were slim
that anybody would ever find me (unless of course they went looking). How
about Finland? I read all about Finland in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
High rate of literacy, long winters, and many trees. I imagined myself in
Helsinki, and, while I was at it, Istanbul, Marrakesh, Lisbon, Aberdeen, and
the Shetland Islands. Very good place to disappear, the Shetland Islands.
Pop. 19,343, and not that far, really, from the North Pole. Principal
industries, sheep farming and fishing. Also raise famous ponies. No
mention in Britannica of treat agreement with New York State for
extradition of marital criminals…

But, oh, if I was outraged in New York over all I had lost in that
marriage, imagine how I would feel when I woke up bearded in my cottage
on the moors in Scalloway to discover I had lost my country as well. What
"freedom" would I have won then, speaking American to the ponies? What
"justice" would I have made, an ironical Jewish novelist with a crook and a
pack of sheep? And what's worse, suppose she found me out and followed
me there, for all that my name is now Long Tom Dumphy? Not at all
unlikely, given that I couldn't shake her in this, a country of two hundred
million. Oh, imagine what that would be like, me with me stick and
Maureen with her rage in the middle of the roarin' North Sea, and only
19,343 others to hold us apart?

So, unhappily (and not at all, really) I accepted my fate as a male
resident of the state of New York of the republic of America who no longer
cared to live with a wife whose preference it was to continue to live with
(and off) him. I began, as they say, to try to make the best of it. Indeed, by
the time I met Susan I was actually beginning to pass out of the first stages
of shell shock (or was it fallout sickness?) and had even found myself rather
taken with (as opposed to "taken by," very much a preoccupation at the
time) a bright and engaging girl named Nancy Miles, fresh out of college
and working as a "checker" for the New Yorker. Nancy Miles was
eventually to go off to Paris to marry an American journalist stationed there,
and subsequently to publish a book of autobiographical short stories, most
of them based upon her childhood as a U.S. Navy commander's daughter in
postwar Japan. However, the year I met her she was free as a bird, and
soaring like one, too. I hadn't been so drawn to anyone since the Wisconsin
debacle, when I had thrown myself at the feet of my nineteen-year-old
student Karen (for whom I intermittently continued to pine, by the way; I
imagined her sometimes with me and the sheep in Scalloway), but after
three consecutive evenings together of nonstop dinner conversation, the last
culminating in lovemaking as impassioned as anything I'd known since
those illicit trysts between classes in Karen's room, I decided not to call
Nancy again. Two weeks passed, and she sent me this letter:

　　Mr. Peter Tarnopol
　　Institute for Unpredictable Behavior
　　62 West 12th Street
　　New York, N.Y.

　　Dear Mr. Tarnopol:

　　With reference to our meeting of 5/6/63:

　　1. What happened?

　　2. Where are we?

　　While I fully recognize that numerous demands of this
　　nature must strain the limits of your patience, I nonetheless
　　make bold to request that you fill out the above questionnaire
　　and return it to the address below as soon as it is convenient.

　　　　　　　　　　　　I remain,
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　yours,
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Perplexed

Perplexed perhaps, but not broken. That was the last I heard from Nancy. I
chose Susan.

It goes without saying that those seeking sanctuary have ordinarily to settle
for something less than a seven-room apartment on the Upper East Side of
Manhattan in which to take refuge from the wolves or the cops or the cold.
I for one had never lived in anything approaching Susan's place for size or
grandeur. Nor had I ever eaten so well in my life. Maureen's cooking wasn't
that bad, but generally dinnertime was the hour reserved at our house for
settling scores with me and my sex--unsettled scores that some evenings
seemed to me to have been piling up ever since the first nucleic acid
molecule went ahead and reproduced itself several billion years ago;
consequently, even when the food was hot and tasty, the ambience was
wrong. And in the years before I took to dining in each night on Maureen's
gall, there had been army chow or university cafeteria stew. But Susan was
a pro, trained by masters at what she had not learned at Calpurnia's knee:
during the year she had been waiting for her fiancé to be graduated from
Princeton and their life of beauty and abundance to begin, she had com-
muted up to New York to learn how to cook French, Italian, and Chinese
specialties. The course in each cuisine lasted six weeks, and Susan stay-
ed on (as she hadn't at Wellesley) triumphantly to complete all three. To
her great glee she discovered she could now at least outcook her mother.
Oh, what a wonderful wife (she hoped and prayed) she was going to make
for this fantastic stroke of luck named James McCall the Third!

During her widowhood Susan had only rarely had the opportunity to feed
anyone other than herself, and so it was that I became the first dinner
guest ever to appreciate in full a culinary expertise that spanned the
continents. I had never tasted food so delicious. And not even my own
dutiful mother had waited on me the way this upper-crust waitress did. I
was under standing instructions to proceed to eat without her, so that she
could scamper freely back and forth into the kitchen getting the next dish
going in her wok. Good enough. We had little outside of the food to talk
about anyway. I asked about her family, I asked about her analysis, I asked
about Jamey and the McCalls. I asked why she had left Wellesley in her
first year. She shrugged and she flushed and she averted her eyes. She
replied, oh they're very nice, and he's very nice, and she's such a sweet
and thoughtful person, and "Why did I leave Wellesley? Oh, I just left." For
weeks I got no more information or animation than I had the night we met,
when I was seated next to her at the dinner party I was invited to annually
at my publisher's town house: unswerving agreeableness, boundless timidity
--a frail and terrified beauty. And in the beginning that was just fine
with me. Bring on the blanquette de veau.

Each morning I headed back to the desk in my West Twelfth Street sublet,
off to school to practice the three Rs--reading, writing, and angrily
toting up yet again the alimony and legal bills. In the elevator, as I
descended from 9D, I met up with the schoolchildren a third my age whom
Susan took on weekends to the Planetarium and the puppet shows, and the
successful business executives whose August recreation she had sometimes
been. And what am I doing here, I would ask myself. With her! Just how
debilitated can I be! My brother's recent warning would frequently come
back to me as I exited past the doorman, who always courteously raised his
cap to Mrs. McCall's gentleman caller, but had surmised enough about my
bankroll not to make a move to hail a cab. Moe had telephoned me about
Susan the night after I had come around with her to have dinner at his and
Lenore's invitation. He laid it right on the line. "Another Maureen, Pep?"
"She's hardly a Maureen." "The gray eyes and the ‘fine' bones have got you
fooled, kiddo. Another fucked-up shiksa. First the lumpenproletariat, now
the aristocracy. What are you, the Malinowski of Manhattan? Enough erotic
anthropology. Get rid of her, Pep. You're sticking your plug in the same
socket." "Moe, hold the advice, okay?" "Not this time. I don't care to come
home a year from now, Peppy, to find you shitting into your socks." "But
I'm all right." "Oh, Christ, here we go again." "Moey, I happen to know
what I'm doing." "With a woman you know what you're doing? Look, what
the hell is Spielvogel's attitude toward this budding catastrophe--what
is he doing to earn his twenty bucks an hour, anything?" "Moe, she is not
Maureen!" "You're letting the legs fool you, kid, the legs and the ass." "I
tell you I'm not in it for that." "If not that, what? Her deep intelligence?
Her quick wit? You mean on top of being tongue-tied, the ice cube can't screw
right either? Jesus! A pretty face must go an awful long way with you--
that, plus a good strong dose of psychoneurosis, and a girl is in business
with my little brother. You come over here tonight for dinner, Peppy, you
come eat with us every night--I've got to talk some sense into you." But
each evening I turned up at Susan's, not Moe's, carrying with me my book
to be read later by the fire, envisioning, as I stepped through the door,
my blanquette, my bath, and my bed.

So the first months passed. Then one night I said, ‘Why don't you go
back to college?" "Oh, I couldn't do that." "Why couldn't you?" "I have
too much to do already." "You have nothing to do." "Are you kidding?" "Why
don't you go back to college, Susan?" "I'm too busy, really. Did you say
you did want kirsch on your fruit?"

Some weeks later. "Look, a suggestion." "Yes?" "Why don't you move
in bed?" "Haven't you enough room?" "I mean move. Underneath me."
"Oh, that. I just don't, that's all." "Well, try it. It might liven things up."
"I'm happy as I am, thank you. Don't you like the spinach salad?" "Listen
to me: why don't you move your body when I fuck you, Susan?" "Oh,
please, let's just finish dinner." "I want you to move when I fuck you." "I
told you, I'm happy as I am." "You're miserable as you are." "I'm not, and
it's none of your business." "Do you know how to move?" "Oh, why are
you torturing me like this?" "Do you want me to show you what I mean by
‘move'?" "Stop this. I am not going to talk about it! I don't have to be
shown anything, certainly not by you! Your life isn't such a model of order,
you know." "What about college? Why don't you go back to college?" "Peter,
stop. Please! Why are you doing this to me?" "Because the way you live is
awful." "It is not." "It's crazy, really." "If it's so crazy then what are
you doing here every night? I don't force you to spend the night. I don't
ask anything of you at all." "You don't ask anything of anyone, so that's
neither here nor there." "That's none of your business either." "It is my
business." "Why? Why yours?" "Because I am here--because I do spend the
night.""Oh, please, you must stop right now. Don't make me argue, please. I
hate arguments and I refuse to participate in one. If you want to argue with
somebody, go argue with your wife. I thought you come here not to fight."

She had a point, the point--here I need contend with nothing --but it
stopped me only for a while. Eventually one night some two months later
she jumped up from the table and, popping her one tear, said, "I can't go
back to school, and leave me alone about it--I'm too old and I'm too
stupid! What school would even take me!"

It turned out to be C.C.N.Y. They gave her credit for one semester's work
at Wellesley. "This is just too silly. I'm practically thirty-one. People
will laugh." "Which people are those?" "People. I'm not going to do it. By
the time I graduated I'd be fifty." ‘What are you going to do instead till
you're fifty, shop?" "I help my friends." "Those friends can hire fellows
pulling rickshaws to help them the way you do." "That's just being cynical
about people you don't like. I have a huge apartment to take care of,
besides." ‘What are you so frightened of?" "That's not the issue." "What is
then?" "That you won't just let me do things the way I want to. Everything I
do is wrong in your eyes. You're just like my mother. She never thinks I can
do anything right either." "Well, I think you can." "Only because you're
embarrassed by my stupidity. It doesn't do for your ‘self-image' to be seen
with such a sap--so the upshot is that in order to save your face, I have to
go to college! And move in bed! I don't even know where C.C.N.Y. is--on
a map! What if I'm the only person there who's white?" ‘Well, you may be
the only person there quite so white--" "Don't joke--not now!" "You're
going to be fine." "Oh, Peter," she moaned, and clinging to her napkin
crawled into my lap to be rocked like a child--"what if I have to talk in
class? What if they call on me?" Through my shirt I could feel ice packs on
my back--her two hands. "What do I do then?" she pleaded. "Speak." "But
if I can't. Oh, why are you putting me through this misery?" "You told me
why. My self-image. So I can fuck you with a clear conscience." "Oh, you,
you couldn't fuck anybody with a clear conscience--dumb, smart, or in
between. And be serious. I'm so terrified I feel faint." Though not too
terrified to utter aloud, for the first time in her life, that most danger-
ous of American words. The next afternoon I had one of those mock headlines
printed up in a Times Square amusement palace and presented it to her at
dinner, a phony tabloid with a black three-inch banner reading: SUSAN
SAYS IT!

In the kitchen one night a year later I sat on a stool near the stove
sipping a glass of the last of Jamey's Mouton-Rothschild, while Susan
prepared ratatouille and practiced a talk she had to give the next morning in
her introductory philosophy class, a five-minute discourse on the Skeptics.
"I can't remember what comes next--I can't do it." "Concentrate." "But
I'm cooking something." "It will cook itself." "Nothing cooks itself that
tastes any good." "Then stop a minute and let's hear what you're going to
say." "But I don't care about the Skeptics. And you don't, Peter. And
nobody in my class cares, I can assure you of that. And what if I just
can't talk? What if I open my mouth and nothing comes out? That's what
happened to me at Wellesley." And to me at Brooklyn College, but I didn't
tell her, not on that occasion. "Something," I said confidently, "will
come out." "Yes? What?" "Words. Concentrate on the words the way you
concentrate on the eggplant there--" "Would you come with me? On the
subway? Just till I get up there?" "I'll even come to the class with you."
"No! You mustn't! I'd be paralyzed if you were there." "But I'm here."
"This is a kitchen," she said, smiling, but not all that happy. And then,
with some further prodding, she went ahead and delivered her philosophy re-
port, though more to the ratatouille than to me. "Perfect." "Yes?" "Yes."
"Then why," asked Susan, who was turning out to be a wittier young widow than
any of us had imagined, "then why do I have to do it again tomorrow? Why
can't this count?" "Because it's a kitchen." "Shit," said Susan, "that's
not fair."

Am I describing two people falling in love? If so, I didn't recognize it
for that at the time. Even after a year, Susan's still seemed to me my
hideout, my sanctuary from Maureen, her lawyer, and the courts of the state
of New York, all of whom had designated me a defendant. But at Susan's I
needed no more defense than a king upon his throne. Where else could I go
to be so revered? The answer, friends, is nowhere; it had been a long time
between salaams. The least I could do in exchange was to tell her how to
live right. Admittedly, A Lot I Knew, but then it did not take much to know
that it is better to be a full-time student at City College than a matric-
ulated customer at Bergdorf's and Bonwit's from nine to five, and better, I
believed, to be alive and panting during the sex act than in a state of
petrifaction, if you are going to bother to perform that act at all. So I,
ironically enough, coached my student in remedial copulation and public
speaking, and she nursed me with the tenderest tenderness and the sweetest
regard. A new experience all around. So was the falling in love, if that's
what our mutual education and convalescence added up to. When she made
the dean's list I was as proud as any papa, bought her a bracelet and dinner;
and when she tried and failed to come, I was crushed and disbelieving, like
a high-school teacher whose brilliant, impoverished student has somehow
been turned down for the scholarship to Harvard. How could it be, after all
those study sessions we had put in together? All that dedication and hard
work! Where had we gone wrong? I have suggested how unnerving it was
for me to be accomplice to that defeat--the fact is that somewhere along
the way Susan's effort to reach an orgasm came to stand in my mind for the
full recovery of us both. And maybe this, as much as anything, helped to
make it unattainable, the responsibility for my salvation as well as her own
being far too burdensome for her to bear…You see, I am not claiming here
that I went about conducting this affair in the manner of a reclamation
engineer--nor was I seeking to unseat Dr. Golding, who was paid to cure
the sick and heal the wounded, and whose own theory, as it sifted through
to me, seemed to be that the more paternal or patriarchal my influence upon
Susan, the more remote the prospect of the orgasm. I thought one could
make as good an argument against this line of speculation as for it, but I
didn't try. I was neither theoretician nor diagnostician, nor for that matter
much of a "father figure" in my own estimation. It would have seemed to
me that you hadn't to penetrate very far beneath the surface of our affair
to see that I was just another patient looking for the cure himself.

In fact, it required my doctor to get me to continue to take my medicine
named Susan, when, along the way, I repeatedly complained that I'd had
enough, that the medicine was exacerbating the ailment more than it might
be curing it. Dr. Spielvogel did not take my brother Moe's view of Susan--
no, with Spielvogel I did. "She's hopeless," I would tell him, "a frightened
little sparrow." "You would prefer another vulture?" "Surely there must be
something in between," thinking, as I spoke, of Nancy Miles, that soaring
creature, and the letter I'd never answered. "But you don't have something
in between. You have this." "But all that timidity, all that fear…The
woman is a slave, Doctor, and not just to me--to everyone." "You prefer
contentiousness? You miss the scenes of high drama, do you? With
Maureen, so you told me, it was the Gotterdammerung at breakfast, lunch,
and dinner. What's wrong with a little peace and quiet with your meals?"
"But there are times when she is a mouse." "Good enough," said
Spielvogel, "who ever heard of a little mouse doing a grown man any
serious harm?" "But what happens when the mouse wants to be married--
and to me?" "How can she marry you? You are married already." "But
when I'm no longer married." "There will be time to worry about that then,
don't you think?" "No. I don't think that at all. What if when I should want
to leave her, she tries to do herself in? She is not stable, Doctor, she is not
strong--you must understand that." ‘Which are you talking about now,
Maureen or Susan?" "I can tell them apart, I assure you. But that doesn't
mean that it isn't beyond Susan, just because it happens also to be a
specialty of Maureen's." "Has she threatened you with suicide if you should
ever leave her?" "She wouldn't threaten me with anything. That isn't her
way." "But you are certain that she would do it, if at some future date, when
the issue arose, you chose not to marry her. That is the reason you want to
give her up now." "I don't particularly ‘want' to. I'm telling you I ought to."
"But you are enjoying yourself somewhat, am I right?" "Somewhat, yes.
More than somewhat. But I don't want to lead her on. She is not up to it.
Neither am I." "But is it leading her on, to have an affair, two young
people?" "Not in your eyes, perhaps." "In whose then? Your own?" "In
Susan's, Doctor, in Susan's! Look, what if after the affair is no more, she
cannot accept the fact and commits suicide? Answer that, will you?" "Over
the loss of you she commits suicide?" "Yes!" "You think every woman in
the world is going to kill herself over you?" "Oh, please, don't distort the
point I'm making. Not ‘every woman'-- just the two I've wound up with."
"Is this why you wind up with them?" "Is it? I'll think about it. Maybe so.
But then that is yet another reason to dissolve this affair right now. Why
continue if there is anything like a chance of that coming to pass? Why
would you want to encourage me to do a thing like that?" "Was I encoura-
ging ‘that'? I was only encouraging you to find some pleasure and com-
fort in her compliant nature. I tell you, many a man would envy you.
Not everybody would be so distressed as you by a mistress who is beautiful
and submissive and rich, and a Cordon Bleu cook into the bargain." "And,
conceivably, a suicide." "That remains to be seen. Many things are con-
ceivable that have little basis in reality." "I'm afraid in my position I
can't afford to be so cavalier about it." "Not cavalier. Only no more
convinced than is warranted, in the circumstances. And no more terrified."
"Look, I am not up to any more desperate stunts. I've got a right to be
terrified. I was married to Maureen. I still am!" "Well then, if you feel so
strongly, if you've been burned once and don't want to take the chance--"
"I am saying, to repeat, that it may not be such a ‘chance'--and I don't
feel I have a right to take it. It's her life that is endangered, not mine."
"‘Endangered'? What a narcissistic melodrama you are writing here, Mr.
Tarnopol. If I may offer a literary opinion." "Yes? Is that what it is?" "Isn't
it?" "I don't always know, Doctor, exactly what you mean by ‘narcissism.'
What I think I am talking about is responsibility. You are the one who is
talking about the pleasure and comforts in staying. You are the one who is
talking about what is in it for me. You are the one who is telling me not to
worry about Susan's expectations or vulnerability. It would seem to me that
it's you who are inviting me to take the narcissistic line." "All right, if that's
what you think, then leave her before it goes any further. You have this
sense of responsibility to the woman--then act upon it." "But just a second
ago you were suggesting that my sense of responsibility was misplaced.
That my fears were delusional. Or weren't you?" "I think they are
excessive, yes."

Right now I get no advice about Susan from anyone. I am here to be free of
advisers--and temptation. Susan a temptation? Susan a temptress? What a
word to describe her! Yet I have never ached for anyone like this before.
As the saying goes, we'd been through a lot together, and not in the way
that Maureen and I had been "through it." With Maureen it was the relent-
less sameness of the struggle that nearly drove me mad; no matter how much
reason or intelligence or even brute force I tried to bring to bear upon
our predicament, I could not change a thing--everything I did was futile,
including of course doing nothing. With Susan there was struggle all
right, but then there were rewards. Things changed. We changed. There was
progress, development, marvelous and touching transformations all around.
Surely the last thing you could say was that ours was a comfortable,
settled arrangement that came to an end because our pleasures had become
tiresome and stale. No, the progress was the pleasure, the transformations
what gave me most delight--which is what has made her attempt at suicide
so crushing…what makes my yearning for her all the more bewildering.
Because now it looks as though nothing has changed, and we are back
where we began. I have to wonder if the letters I begin to write to her and
leave unfinished, if the phone calls I break off dialing before the last
digit, if that isn't me beginning to give way to the siren song of The Wo-
man Who Cannot Live Without You, She Who Would Rather Be Dead Than
Unwed--if this isn't me on the brink again of making My Mistake, contriv-
ing to continue, after a brief intermission, what Spielvogel would call my
narcissistic melodrama…But then it is no less distressing for me to
think that out of fear of My Mistake, I am making another even worse:
relinquishing for no good reason the generous, gentle, good-hearted, ww
Maureenish woman with whom I have actually come to be in love. I think
to myself, "Take this yearning seriously. You want her," and I rush to the
phone to call down to Princeton--and then at the phone I ask myself if
"love" has very much to do with it, if it isn't the vulnerability and
brokenness, the neediness, to which I am being drawn. Suppose it is really
nothing more than a helpless beauty in a bikini bathing suit taking hold of
my cock as though it were a lifeline, suppose it is only that that inspires
this longing. Such things have been known to happen. "Sexual vanity," as Mrs.
Seabury says. "Rescue fantasies," says Dr. Spielvogel, "boyish dreams of
Oedipal glory." "Fucked-up shiksas," my brother says, "you can't resist
them, Pep."

Meanwhile Susan remains under the care of her mother in Princeton,
and I remain up here, under my own.




　　　　　3. MARRIAGE À LA MODE


Rapunzel, Rapunzel,
Let down your hair.

--from the Grimms' fairy tale



For those young men who reached their maturity in the fifties, and who
aspired to be grown-up during that decade, when as one participant has
written, everyone wanted to be thirty, there was considerable moral pres-
tige in taking a wife, and hardly because a wife was going to be one's
maidservant or "sexual object." Decency and Maturity, a young man's
"seriousness," were at issue precisely because it was thought to be the other
way around: in that the great world was so obviously a man's, it was only
within marriage that an ordinary woman could hope to find equality and
dignity. Indeed, we were led to believe by the defenders of womankind of
our era that we were exploiting and degrading the women we didn't marry,
rather than the ones we did. Unattached and on her own, a woman was
supposedly not even able to go to the movies or out to a restaurant by
herself, let alone perform an appendectomy or drive a truck. It was up to us
then to give them the value and the purpose that society at large withheld--
by marrying them. If we didn't marry women, who would? Ours, alas, was
the only sex available for the job: the draft was on.

No wonder then that a young college-educated bourgeois male of my
generation who scoffed at the idea of marriage for himself, who would just
as soon eat out of cans or in cafeterias, sweep his own floor, make his own
bed, and come and go with no binding legal attachments, finding female
friendship and sexual adventure where and when he could and for no longer
than he liked, laid himself open to the charge of "immaturity," if not
"latent" or blatant "homosexuality." Or he was just plain "selfish." Or he
was "frightened of responsibility." Or he could not "commit himself" (nice
institutional phrase, that) to "a permanent relationship." Worst of all, most
shameful of all, the chances were that this person who thought he was
perfectly able to take care of himself on his own was in actuality "unable to
love."

An awful lot of worrying was done in the fifties about whether people
were able to love or not--I venture to say, much of it by young women in
behalf of the young men who didn't particularly want them to wash their
socks and cook their meals and bear their children and then tend them for
the rest of their natural days. "But aren't you capable of loving anyone?
Can't you think of anyone but yourself?" when translated from desperate
fifties-feminese into plain English, generally meant "I want to get married
and I want you to get married to."

Now I am sure that many of the young women of that period who set them-
selves up as specialists in loving hadn't a very clear idea of how strong
a charge their emotions got from the instinct for survival--or how much
those emotions arose out of the yearning to own and be owned, rather than
from a reservoir of pure and selfless love that was the special property
of themselves and their gender. After all, how lovable are men? Particu-
larly men "unable to love"? No, there was more to all that talk about
"commitment" and "permanent relationships" than many young women (and
their chosen mates) were able to talk about or able at that time fully to
understand: the more was the fact of female dependence, defenselessness,
and vulnerability.

This hard fact of life was of course experienced and dealt with by wo-
men in accordance with personal endowments of intelligence and sanity
and character. One imagines that there were brave and genuinely self-
sacrificing decisions made by women who refused to accede to those
profoundest of self-delusions, the ones that come cloaked in the guise of
love; likewise, there was much misery in store for those who were never
able to surrender their romantic illusions about the arrangement they had
made in behalf of their helplessness, until they reached the lawyer's of-
fice, and he threw their way that buoy known as alimony. It has been said
that those ferocious alimony battles that have raged in the courtrooms of
this country during the last few decades, the way religious wars raged
throughout Europe in the seventeenth century, were really "symbolic" in
nature. My guess is that rather than serving as a symbol around which to
organize other grievances and heartaches, the alimony battle frequently
tended to clarify what was generally obscured by the metaphors with which
marital arrangements were camouflaged by the partners themselves. The
extent of the panic and rage aroused by the issue of alimony, the ferocity
displayed by people who were otherwise sane and civilized enough,
testifies, I think, to the shocking--and humiliating--realization that came to
couples in the courtroom about the fundamental role that each may actually
have played in the other's life. "So, it has descended to this," the enraged
contestants might say, glaring in hatred at one another--but even that was
only an attempt to continue to hide from the most humiliating fact of all:
that it really was this, all along.

Now I realize that it is possible to dismiss these generalizations as a
manifestation of my bitterness and cynicism, an unfortunate consequence of
my own horrific marriage and of the affair that recently ended so unhappily.
Furthermore, it can be said that, having chosen women like Maureen and
Susan (or, if you prefer, having had them chosen for me by my own aber-
rant, if not pathological, nature), I for one should not generalize, even
loosely, about what men want (and get) from women, or what women want
and get out of men. Well, I grant that I do not find myself feeling very
"typical" at this moment, nor am I telling this story in order to argue that
my life is representative of anything; nonetheless, I am naturally inter-
ested in looking around to see how much of my experience with women has
been special to me and--if you must have it that way--my pathology, and
how much is symptomatic of a more extensive social malaise. And looking
around, I conclude this: in Maureen and Susan I came in contact with two
of the more virulent strains of a virus to which only a few women among
us are immune.

Outwardly, of course, Maureen and Susan couldn't have been more dissim-
ilar, nor could either have had a stronger antipathy for the "type" she
took the other to be. However, what drew them together as women--which
is to say, what drew me to them, for that is the subject here--was that
in her own extreme and vivid way, each of these antipathetic originals
demonstrated that sense of defenselessness and vulnerability that has come
to be a mark of their sex and is often at the core of their relations with
men. That I came to be bound to Maureen by my helplessness does not mean
that either of us ever really stopped envisioning her as the helpless victim
and myself as the victimizer who had only to desist in his brutishness for
everything to be put right and sexual justice to be done. So strong was
the myth of male inviolability, of male dominance and potency, not only
in Maureen's mind but in mine, that even when I went so far as to dress
myself in a woman's clothes and thus concede that as a man I surrendered,
even then I could never fully assent to the idea that in our household
conventional assumptions about the strong and the weak did not adequately
describe the situation. Right down to the end, I still saw Maureen, and she
saw herself, as the damsel in distress; and in point of fact, beneath all
that tough exterior, all those claims to being "in business for herself"
and nobody's patsy, Maureen was actually more of a Susan than Susan was,
and. to herself no less than to me.

There is a growing body of opinion which maintains that by and large
marriages, affairs, and sexual arrangements generally are made by masters
in search of slaves: there are the dominant and the submissive, the brutish
and the compliant, the exploiters and the exploited. What this formula fails
to explain, among a million other things, is why so many of the "masters"
appear themselves to be in bondage, oftentimes to their "slaves." I do not
contend--to make the point yet again--that my story furnishes anything
like an explanation or a paradigm; it is only an instance, a post-chivalric
instance to be sure, of what might be described as the Prince Charming
phenomenon. In this version of the fairy tale the part of the maiden locked
in the tower is played consecutively by Maureen Johnson Tarnopol and
Susan Seabury McCall. I of course play the prince. My performance, as
described here, may give rise to the sardonic suggestion that I should have
played his horse. But, you see, it was not as an animal that I wished to be a
star--it was decidedly not horsiness, goatishness, foxiness, lionliness, or
beastliness in any form that I aspired to. I wanted to be humanish: manly, a
man.

At the time when all this began, I would never even have thought it nec-
essary to announce that as an aspiration--I was too confident at twenty
five that success was all but at hand--nor did I foresee a career in
which being married and then trying to get unmarried would become my
predominant activity and obsession. I would have laughed had anyone
suggested that struggling with a woman over a marriage would come to
occupy me in the way that exploring the South Pole had occupied Admiral
Byrd--or writing Madame Bovary had occupied Flaubert. Clearly the last
thing I could have imagined was myself, a dissident and skeptical member
of my generation, succumbing to all that moralizing rhetoric about
"permanent relationships." And, in truth, it did take something more than
the rhetoric to do me in. It took a Maureen, wielding it. Yet the humbling
fact remains: when the dissident and skeptical member of his generation
was done in, it was on the same grounds as just about everyone else.
I was fooled by appearances, largely my own.

As a young writer already publishing stories in literary quarterlies, as
one who resided in a Lower East Side basement apartment between Second
Avenue and the Bowery, living on army savings and a twelve-hundred
dollar publisher's advance that I doled out to myself at thirty dollars a week,
I did not think of myself as an ordinary or conventional university graduate
of those times. My college acquaintances were all off becoming lawyers
and doctors; a few who had been friends on the Brown literary magazine
were working on advanced degrees in literature--prior to my induction into
the army, I had myself served a year and a half in the Ph.D. program at
the University of Chicago, before falling by the wayside, a casualty of
"Bibliography" and "Anglo-Saxon"; the rest--the fraternity boys, the
athletes, the business majors, those with whom I'd had little association
at school--were by now already married and holding down nine-to-five jobs.
Of course I dressed in blue button-down oxford shirts and wore my hair
clipped short, but what else was I to wear, a serape? long curls? This
was 1958. Besides, there were other ways in which it seemed to me I was
distinguishable from the mass of my contemporaries: I read books and I
wanted to write them. My master was not Mammon or Fun or Propriety, but
Art, and Art of the earnest moral variety. I was by then already well into
writing a novel about a retired Jewish haberdasher from the Bronx who on
a trip to Europe with his wife nearly strangles to death a rude German
housewife in his rage over "the six million." The haberdasher was modeled
upon my own kindly, excitable, hard-working Jewish father who had had a
similar urge on a trip he and my mother had taken to visit me in the army;
the haberdasher's GI son was modeled upon myself, and his experiences
closely paralleled mine in Germany during my fourteen months as a corpo-
ral in Frankfurt. I had had a German girl friend, a student nurse, large
and blonde as a Valkyrie, but sweet to the core, and all the confusion that
she had aroused in my parents, and in me, was to be at the heart of the
novel that eventually became A Jewish Father.

Over my desk I did not have a photograph of a sailboat or a dream
house or a diapered child or a travel poster from a distant land, but words
from Flaubert, advice to a young writer that I had copied out of one of his
letters: "Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you
may be violent and original in your work." I appreciated the wisdom in this,
and coming from Flaubert, the wit, but at twenty-five, for all my dedication
to the art of fiction, for all the discipline and seriousness (and awe) with
which I approached the Flaubertian vocation, I still wanted my life to be
somewhat original, and if not violent, at least interesting, when the day's
work was done. After all, hadn't Flaubert himself, before he settled down at
his round table to become the tormented anchorite of modern literature,
gone off as a gentleman-vagabond to the Nile, to climb the pyramids and
sow his oats with dusky dancing girls?

So: Maureen Johnson, though not exactly Egyptian, struck me as someone
who might add a little outside interest to my dedicated writer's life.
Did she! Eventually she displaced the writing, she was so interesting.
To begin with, she was twenty-nine years of age, that temptingly unknown
creature of a young man's eroto-heroic imaginings, an older woman.
Moreover, she had the hash marks to prove it. Not one but two divorces:
first from the husband in Rochester, a Yugoslav saloonkeeper named Mezik,
whose sixteen-year-old barmaid she had been; she claimed that Mezik, a
heavy drinker with a strong right hook, had once "forced" her to go down
on a friend of his, the manager of an upholstery factory--later she changed
the story somewhat and said that the three of them had been drunk at the
time, and that the men had drawn straws to see which of them young
Maureen would go off with to the bedroom; she had decided to blow
Mezik's buddy, rather than have intercourse with him, because it had
seemed to her, in the circumstances and in her innocence, less demeaning.
"It wasn't," she added. Then the marriage and divorce from Walker, a
handsome young actor with a resonant voice and a marvelous profile who
turned out to be a homosexual--that is to say, he'd "promised" Maureen
he'd get over it after the wedding, but only got worse. Twice then she had
been "betrayed" by men--nonetheless there was plenty of the scrapper in
her when we met. And plenty of tough wit. "I am Duchess of Malfi still,"
was a line she pulled on me our first night in bed--not bad, I thought, not
bad, even if it was obviously something her actor husband had taught her.
She had the kind of crisp good looks that are associated with "dark
Irishmen"--only a little marred in her case by a lantern jaw--a lithe, wiry
little body (the body of a tomboyish prepubescent, except for the sizable
conical breasts) and terrific energy and spirit. With her quick movements
and alert eyes, she was like one of nature's undersized indefatigables, the
bee or the hummingbird, who are out working the flowers from sunup to
sundown, sipping from a million stamens in order to meet their minimum
daily nutritional requirements. She jocularly boasted of having been the
fastest runner, male or female, of her era in the Elmira, New York, grade
school system, and that (of all she told me) may well have been the truth.
The night we met--at a poet's party uptown--she had challenged me to a
footrace from the Astor Place subway station to my apartment two blocks
away on East Ninth: "Winner calls the shots!" she cried, and off we went --
I triumphed, but only by the length of a brownstone, and at the apartment,
breathless from the race she'd run me, I said, "Okay, the spoils: take off
your clothes," which she gladly (and rapidly) proceeded to do in the
hallway where we stood, panting. Hot stuff, this (thought I); very
interesting. Oh yes, she was fast, that girl--but I was faster, was I not?…
Also, I should mention here, Maureen had these scores to settle with my
sex, and rather large delusions about her gifts, which she had come to
believe lay somewhere, anywhere, in the arts.

At the age of sixteen, an eleventh-grader, she had run away from her
family's home in Elmira--a runaway, that got me too. I'd never met a real
one before. What did her father do? "Everything. Nothing. Handyman.
Night watchman. Who remembers any more?" Her mother? "Kept house.
Drank. Oh, Christ, Peter, I forgot them long ago. And they, me." She ran off
from Elmira to become--of course, an actress…but of all places, to
Rochester. "What did I know?" she said, dismissing her innocence with a
wave of the hand; a dead issue, that innocence. In Rochester she met Mezik
("married the brute--and then met his buddy"), and after three years of
frustration with the second-raters in the local avant-garde theater group,
switched to art school to become--an abstract painter. Following her
divorce, she gave up painting--and the painter whose mistress she had
become during her separation from Mezik and who had broken his
"promise" to help get her in with his dealer in Detroit--and took
harpsichord lessons while waiting on tables in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
a town she'd heard had fewer types like Mezik in residence. There, just
twenty-one, she married Walker of the Brattle Theater; five long years
followed, of him and his Harvard boys. By the time we met, she had already
tried wood sculpture in Greenwich Village (her teacher's wife was fiercely
jealous of her, so she dropped it) and was back "in the theater," tempora-
rily "in the production end"--that is, taking tickets and ushering at an off
Broadway theater on Christopher Street.

As I say, I believed all these reversals and recoveries, all this movement
of hers, to be evidence of a game, audacious, and determined little spirit;
and it was, it was. So too did this mess of history argue for a certain
instability and lack of focus in her life. On the other hand, there was so
much focus to my own, and always had been, that Maureen's chaotic,
daredevil background had a decidedly exotic and romantic appeal. She had
been around--and around. I liked that idea; I hadn't been anywhere really,
not quite yet.

She was also something of a rough customer, and that was new to me too.
At the time I took up with Maureen, I had for nearly a year been having
a passionate affair with a college girl named Dina Dornbusch, a senior at
Sarah Lawrence and the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family from Long
Island. She was an ambitious literature and language major, and we met
when she came to my basement apartment, along with four other coeds and
a Mademoiselle editor, to interview me about my work. I had just gotten out
of the army, and my "work" at the time consisted only of the six short
stories that had been published in the quarterlies while I had been stationed
in Frankfurt; that they had been read by these awed young girls was very
nice to know. I already knew of course that they had been read with interest
by New York book publishers and literary agents, for their numerous letters
of inquiry had reached me in Germany, and upon returning to the U.S. after
my discharge, I had chosen an agent and subsequently signed a publisher's
contract that provided me with a modest advance for the novel I was
writing. But that I had, while serving as a draftee in Germany, achieved
enough "fame" for these girls to settle on me as the young American writer
they wished to interview for a feature in the magazine, well, needless to say,
that opened up a fantasy or two in my head. To be sure, I talked to them
about Flaubert, about Salinger, about Mann, about my experiences in
Germany and how I thought I might put them to use in fiction, but
nonetheless I was wondering throughout how to get the girl with the
marvelous legs and the earnest questions to stay behind when the others
left.

Oh, why did I forsake Dina Dombusch--for Maureen! Shall I tell you?
Because Dina was still in college writing papers on "the technical
perfection" of "Lycidas." Because Dina listened to me so intently, was so
much my student, taking my opinions for her own. Because Dina's father
gave us front-row seats to Broadway musicals that we had to go to see for
fear of offending him. Because--yes, this is true, too; incredible, but true--
because when Dina came in to visit me from school, practically all we did,
from the moment she stepped into the doorway, was fuck. In short, because
she was rich, pretty, protected, smart, sexy, adoring, young, vibrant, clever,
confident, ambitious--that's why I gave her up for Maureen! She was a girl
still, who had just about everything. I, I decided at twenty-five, was beyond
"that." I wanted something called "a woman."

At twenty-nine, with two unhappy marriages behind her, with no rich,
doting father, no gorgeous clothes, and no future, Maureen seemed to me to
have earned all that was implied by that noun; she was certainly the first
person of her sex I had ever known intimately to be so completely adrift
and on her own. "I've always been more or less in business for myself,"
she'd told me at the party where we'd met--straight, unsentimental talk,
and I liked it. With Dina, everybody seemed always to be in business for
her. Likewise with myself.

Prior to Maureen, the closest I had come to a girl who had known real
upheaval in her life was Grete, the student nurse in Frankfurt, whose family
had been driven from Pomerania by the advancing Russian army. I used to
be fascinated by whatever she could tell me about her experience of the
war, but that turned out to be next to nothing. Only a child of eight when
the war ended, all she could remember of it was living in the country with her
brothers and sisters and her mother, on a farm where they had eggs to eat,
animals to play with, and spelling and arithmetic to learn in the village
school. She remembered that when the family, in flight in the spring of '45,
finally ran into the American army, a GI had given her an orange; and on
the farm sometimes, when the children were being particularly noisy, her
mother used to put her hands up to her ears and say, "Children, quiet, quiet,
you sound like a bunch of Jews." But that was as much contact as she
seemed to have had with the catastrophe of the century. This did not make
it so simple for me as one might think, nor did I in turn make it easy for
Grete. Our affair frequently bewildered her because of my moodiness, and
when she then appeared to be innocent of what it was that had made me
sullen or short-tempered, I became even more difficult. Of course, she had
been only eight when the European war ended--nonetheless, I could never
really believe that she was simply a big, sweet, good-natured, common-
sensical eighteen-year-old girl who did not care very much that I was a
dark Jew and she a blonde Aryan. This suspiciousness, and my self-
conscious struggle with it, turned up in the affair between the two young
lovers depicted in A Jewish Father.

What I liked, you see, was something taxing in my love affairs,
something problematical and puzzling to keep the imagination going even
while I was away from my books; I liked most being with young women
who gave me something to think about, and not necessarily because we
talked together about "ideas."

So, Maureen was a rough customer--I thought about that. I wondered
if I was "up"--nice word--to someone with her history and determination.
It would seem by the way I hung in there that I decided that I at least ought
to be. I had been up to Grete and the problems she raised for me, had I not?
Why back away from difficulties, or disorder, or even turbulence--what
was there to be afraid of? I honestly didn't know.

Besides, for a very long time, the overwhelming difficulty-Maureen's
helplessness--was largely obscured by the fight in her and by the way in
which she cast herself as the victim always of charlatans and ingrates,
rather than as a person who hadn't the faintest idea of the relationship of
beginning, middle, and end. When she fought me, I was at first so busy
fighting back I didn't have time to see her defiance as the measure of her
ineptitude and desperation. Till Maureen I had never even fought a man in
anger--with my hands, that is; but I was much more combative at twenty
five than I am now and learned quickly enough how to disarm her of her
favorite weapon, the spike of a high-heeled shoe. Eventually I came to
realize that not even a good shaking such as parents administer to re-
calcitrant children was sufficient to stop her once she was on the warpath
--it required a slap in the face to do that. "Just like Mezik!" screamed
Maureen, dropping dramatically to the floor to cower before my violence
(and pretending as best she could that it did not give her pleasure to have
uncovered the brute in the high-minded young artist).

Of course by the time I got around to hitting her I was already in over
my head and looking around for a way out of an affair that grew more
distressing and bewildering--and frightening--practically by the hour. It
was not only the depths of acrimony between us that had me reeling, but the
shocking realization of this helplessness of hers, that which drove her to the
episodes of wild and reckless rage. As the months passed I had gradually
come to see that nothing she did ever worked--or, rather, I had finally come
to penetrate the obfuscating rhetoric of betrayal and victimization in order
to see it that way: the Christopher Street producer went back on his "prom-
ise" to lift her from the ticket office into the cast; the acting teacher in
the West Forties who needed an assistant turned out to be "a psychotic";
her boss at one job was "a slave driver," at the next, "a fool," at the next, "
a lecher," and invariably, whenever she quit in disgust or was fired and
came home in angry tears--whenever yet another of those "promises" that
people were forever making to her had been broken--she would return to my
basement apartment in the middle of the day to find me over the typewriter,
pouring sweat--as happens when I'm feeling fluent --and reeking through
my button-down oxford shirt like a man who'd been out all day with the
chain gang. At the sight of me working away feverishly at what I wanted
most to do, her rage at the world of oppressors was further stoked by
jealousy of me --even though, as it happened, she greatly admired my few
published stories, defended them vehemently against all criticism, and
enjoyed vicariously the small reputation that I was coming to have. But
then vicariousness was her nemesis: what she got through men was all she
got. No wonder she could neither forgive nor forget him who had wronged her
by "forcing" her at sixteen into bed with his buddy, or him who preferred
the flesh of Harvard freshmen to her own; and if she could not relinquish
the bartender Mezik or the bit player Walker, imagine the meaning she must
have found in one whose youthful earnestness and single-minded devotion
to a high artistic calling might magically become her own if only she could
partake forever of his flesh and blood.

Our affair was over (except that Maureen wouldn't move out, and I
hadn't the sense, or the foresight, to bequeath to her my two rooms of
secondhand furniture and take flight; having never before been defeated in
my life in anything that mattered, I simply could not recognize defeat as a
possibility for me, certainly not at the hands of someone seemingly so
inept)--our affair was over, but for the shouting, when Maureen told me…
Well, you can guess what she told me. Anybody could have seen it coming
a mile away. Only I didn't. Why would a woman want to fool Peter Tarn-
opol? Why would a woman want to tell me a lie in order to get me to
marry her? What chance for happiness in such a union? No, no, it just could
not be. No one would be so silly and stupid as to do a thing like that and
certainly not to me. I Had Just Turned Twenty-Six. I Was Writing A Serious
Novel. I Had My Whole Life Ahead Of Me. No-the way I pictured it, I
would tell Maureen that this affair of ours had obviously been a mistake
from the beginning and by now had become nothing but a nightmare for
both of us. "As much my fault as yours, Maureen"--I didn't believe it, but I
would say it, for the sake of getting out without further altercation; the
only sensible solution, I would say, was for each now to go his own separate
way. How could we be anything but better off without all this useless
conflict and demeaning violence in our lives? "We just"--I would tell her,
in straight, unsentimental talk such as she liked to use herself--"we just
don't have any business together any more." Yes, that's what I would say,
and she would listen and nod in acquiescence (she would have to--I would
be so decent about it, and so sensible) and she would go, with me wishing
her good luck.

It didn't work out that way. Actually it was in the midst of one of the
ten or fifteen quarrels that we had per day, now that she had decided to
stay at home and take up writing herself, that I told her to leave. The ar-
gument, which began with her accusing me of trying to prevent her from writ-
ing fiction because I was "frightened" of competition from a woman, ended
with her sinking her teeth into my wrist--whereupon, with my free hand, I
bloodied her nose. "You and Mezik! No difference at all!" The barkeeper,
she claimed, used to draw blood from her every single day during the last
year of their married life--he had turned her nose "into a faucet." For me it
was a first, however--and a shock. Likewise her teeth in my flesh was like
nothing I had ever known before in my stable and unbloody past. I had been
raised to be fearful and contemptuous of violence as a means of settling
disputes or venting anger--my idea of manliness had little to do with
dishing out physical punishment or being able to absorb it. Nor was I
ashamed that I could do neither. To find Maureen's blood on my hand was
in fact unmanning, as disgraceful as her teeth marks on my wrist. "Go!" I
screamed, "Get out of here!" And because she had never seen me in such a
state before--I was so unhinged by rage that while she packed her suitcase I
stood over her tearing the shirt off my own body--she left, borrowing my
spare typewriter, however, so she could write a story about "a heartless
infantile son-of-a-bitch so-called artist just like you!"

"Leave that typewriter where it is!" "But what will I write on then?"
"Are you kidding? Are you crazy? You're going to 'expose' me, and you
want me to give you the weapon to do it with?" "But you have two of them!
Oh, I'm going to tell the world, Peter, I'll tell them just what a selfish,
selfimportant, ego-maniacal baby you are!" "Just go, Maureen--and I'll tell
them! But I won't have any more fucking screaming and arguing and biting
around here when I am trying to do my work!" "Oh fuck your high and
mighty work! What about my life!" "Fuck your life, it's not my affair any
longer! Get out of here! Oh, take it --take it and just go!" Maybe she
thought (now that my shirt was hanging off me in strips) that I might start
in next tearing her to shreds--for all at once she backed off and was out
of the apartment, taking with her, to be sure, the old gray Remington Royal
portable that had been my parents' bar mitzvah present to the hotshot
assistant sports editor of the Yonkers High Broadcaster.

Three days later she was back at the door, in blue duffel coat and knee
socks, wan and scrappy looking as a street urchin. Because she could not
face her top-floor room on Carmine Street alone, she had spent the three
days with friends of hers, a Village couple in their early fifties whom I
couldn't stand, who in turn considered me and my narratives "square." The
husband (advertised by Maureen as "an old friend of Kenneth Patchen's")
had been Maureen's teacher when she first came to New York and went into
wood sculpture. Months back she had declared that she had been badly
misled by these two "schizorenos," but never explained how.

As was her way the morning after even the most horrendous scenes,
she laughed off the violent encounter of three days earlier, asking me (in
wonderment at my naïveté) how I could take seriously anything she may
have said or done in anger. One aspect of my squareness (according to
those who worked in wood) was that I had no more tolerance for the
irregular or the eccentric than George F. Babbitt of Zenith, Middle America.
I was not open to experience in my basement apartment on East Ninth the
way those middle-aged beatniks were in their Bleecker Street loft. I was a
nice Jewish boy from Westchester who cared only about Success. I was
their Dina Dornbusch.

"Lucky I am," I told her, "otherwise you'd be at the bottom of the East
River." She was sitting in a chair, still in her duffel coat; I had given
no sign that I had any intention of allowing her to move back in. When
she had gone to peck me on the cheek in the doorway, I had--again, to her
amusement--pulled my head away. "Where's the typewriter?" I asked, my
way of saying that as far as I was concerned the only excuse Maureen could
have to be visiting me was to return what she had borrowed. "You middle
class monster!" she cried. "You throw me out into the street. I have to go
sleep on somebody's floor with sixteen cats lapping my face all night long
--and all you can think about is your portable typewriter! Your things. It's
a thing, Peter, a thing --and I'm a human being!" "You could have slept at
your own place, Maureen." "I was lonely. You don't understand that because
you have ice in your heart instead of feelings. And my own place isn't a
'place,' as you so blithely put it--it's a shithole of an attic and you
know it! You wouldn't sleep there for half an hour." "Where's the
typewriter?" "The typewriter is a thing, damn it, an inanimate object!
What about me?" and leaping from the chair, she charged, swinging her
pocketbook like a shillelagh. "CLIP ME WITH THAT, MAUREEN, AND
I'LL KILL YOU!" "Do it!" was her reply. "Kill me! Some man's going to
--why not a 'civilized' one like you! Why not a follower of Flaubert!" Here
she collapsed against me, and with her arms around my neck, began to sob.
"Oh, Peter, I don't have anything. Nothing at all. I'm really lost, baby. I
didn't want to go to them--I had to. Please, don't make me go away again
right now. I haven't even had a shower in three days. Let me just take a
shower. Let me just calm down--and this time I'll go forever, I promise."
She then explained that the loft on Bleecker Street had been burglarized one
night when all except the cats were out eating spaghetti on Fourteenth
Street; my typewriter had been stolen, along with all of her friends' wood
carving tools, their recorders, and their Blatstein, which sounded to me like
an automatic rifle but was a painting.

I didn't believe a word of it. She went off to the bathroom, and when I
heard the shower running, I put my hand into the pocket of her duffel coat
and after just a little fishing around in the crumpled Kleenex and the small
change came up with a pawn ticket. If I hadn't been living half a block from
the Bowery, I don't imagine it would have occurred to me that Maureen had
taken the typewriter up the street for the cash. But I was learning--though
not quite fast enough.

Now an even worldlier fellow than myself--George F. Babbitt, say, of
Zenith--would have remembered the old business adage, "Cut your losses,"
and after finding the pawn ticket, would have dropped it back into her
pocket and said nothing. Shower her, humor her, and get her the hell out,
George F. Babbitt would have said to himself, and peace and quiet will
reign once again. Instead I rushed into the bathroom--no Babbitt I--where
we screamed at each other with such ferocity that the young married couple
upstairs, whose life we made a misery during these months (the husband, an
editor at a publishing house, cuts me to this day), began to pound on the
floor above with a broom handle. "You petty little thief! You crook!"
"But I did it for you!" "For me? You pawned my typewriter for me?" "Yes!"
"What are you talking about?" Here, with the water still beating down on
her, she slumped to the bottom of the bathtub, and sitting on her haunches,
began actually to keen in her woe. Unclothed, she would sometimes make
me think of an alley cat-quick, wary, at once scrawny and strong; now, as
she rocked and moaned with grief under the full blast of the shower,
something about the weight and pointiness of her large conical breasts, and
her dark hair plastered to her head, made her look to me like some woman
out of the bush, a primitive whose picture you might come upon in National
Geographic, praying to the sun-god to roll back the waters. "Because--"
she howled, "because I'm pregnant. Because--because I wasn't going to
tell you. Because I was going to get the money however I could and get an
abortion and never bother you again. Peter, I've been shoplifting too."
"Stealing? Where?" "Altman's-a little from Klein's. I had, to!" "But you
can't be pregnant, Maureen--we haven't slept together for weeks!" "BUT I
AM! TWO MONTHS PREGNANT!" "Two months?" "Yes! And I never said a word,
because I didn't want to interfere with your ART!" "Well, you should have,
goddam it, because I would have given you the money to go out and get an
abortion!" "Oh, you are so generous--! But it's too late-- I've taken
enough from men like you in my life! You're going to marry me or I'm going
to kill myself! And I will do it!" she cried, hammering defiantly on the
rim of the tub with her two little fists. "This is no empty threat, Peter
--I cannot take you people anymore! You selfish, spoiled, immature, ir-
responsible Ivy League bastards, born with those spoons in your mouths!"
The silver spoon was somewhat hyperbolic, and even she knew that much,
but she was hysterical, and in hysteria, as she eventually made clear to
me, anything goes. "With your big fat advance and your high Art--oh, you
make me sick the way you hide from life behind that Art of yours! I hate
you and I hate that fucking Flaubert, and you are going to marry me, Peter,
because I have had enough! I'm not going to be another man's helpless
victim! You are not going to dump me the way you dumped that girl!"

"That girl" was how she referred to Dina, toward whom she had never
until that moment been anything but dismissive; now, all at once, she
invoked in her own behalf not just Dina, but Grete and the Pembroke
undergraduate who had been my girl friend during my senior year at
Brown. All of them shared with Maureen the experience of being "dis-
carded" when I had finished having my "way" with them. "But we are not
leftovers, Peter; we're not trash or scum and we will not be treated that
way! We are human beings, and we will not be thrown into a garbage pail
by you!" "You're not pregnant, Maureen, and you know damn well you're
not. That's what all this 'we' business is about," I said, suddenly, with
perfect confidence. And with that, she all but collapsed--"We're not talking
about me right now," she said, "we're talking about you. Don't you know
yet why you got rid of your Pembroke pal? Or your German girl friend? Or
that girl who had everything? Or why you're getting rid of me?" I said,
"You're not pregnant, Maureen. That is a lie." "It is not--and listen to
me! Do you have no idea at all why it is you are so afraid of marriage and
children and a family and treat women the way that you do? Do you know
what you really are, Peter, aside from being a heartless, selfish writing
machine?" I said, "A fag." "That's right! And making light of it doesn't
make it any less true!" "I would think it makes it more true." "It does! You
are the most transparent latent homosexual I have ever run across in my
life! Just like big brave Mezik who forced me to blow his buddy--so that
he could watch. Because it's really what he wanted to do himself--but he
didn't even have the guts for that!" "Forced you? Oh, come on, pal, you've
got pointy teeth in that mouth of yours--I've felt your fangs. Why didn't
you bite it off and teach them both a lesson, if you were being forced to?"
"I should have! Don't you think I didn't think of it! Don't you think a woman
doesn't think of it every time! And don't you worry, mister, if they weren't
twelve inches taller than me, I would have bitten the thing off at the root!
And spit on the bleeding stump--just like I spit on you, you high and
mighty Artist, for throwing me two months pregnant out into the street!"
But she was weeping so, that the spittle meant for me just rolled down her
lips onto her chin.

She slept in the bed that night (first bed in three days, I was reminded)
and I sat at my desk in the living room, thinking about running away--not
because she continued to insist she had missed two periods in a row, but
because she was so tenaciously hanging on to what I was certain was a
lie. I could leave right then for any number of places. I had friends up in
Providence, a young faculty couple who'd gladly put me up for a while. I
had an army buddy in Boston, graduate-school colleagues still out in
Chicago, there was my sister Joan in California. And of course brother
Morris uptown, if I should require spiritual comfort and physical refuge
near at hand. He would take me in for as long as was necessary, no
questions asked. Since I'd settled in New York, I had been getting phone
calls from Moe every couple of weeks checking to see if there was anything
I needed and reminding me to come to dinner whenever I was in the mood.
At his invitation I had even taken Maureen up to their apartment one
Sunday morning for bagels and the smoked fish spread. To my surprise, she
had appeared rather cowed by my brother's bearish manner (Moe is a great
one to cross-examine strangers), and the general intensity of the family
life seemed to make her morose; she did not have much to say after we left,
except that Moe and I were very different people. I agreed; Moe was very
much the public man (the university, the UN commissions, political meet-
ings and organizations ever since high school) and very much the paterf-
amilias…She said, "I meant he's a brute." "A what?" "The way he treats
that wife of his. It's unspeakable." "He's nuts about her, for Christ's
sake." "Oh? Is that why he walks all over her? What a little sparrow she
is! Has she ever had an idea of her own in her life? She just sits there,
eating his crumbs. And that's her life." "Oh, that's not her life, Mau-
reen." "Sorry, I don't like him--or her."

Moe didn't like Maureen either, but at the outset said nothing, as-
suming it was my affair not his, and that she was just the girl of the
moment. As I had assumed myself. But when combat between Maureen and
me stepped up dramatically, and I apparently began to look and sound as
confused and embattled as I'd become, Moe tried on a couple of occasions
to give me some brotherly advice; each time I shook him off. As I still
couldn't imagine any long-range calamity befalling me, I objected stren-
uously to being "babied," as I thought of it--particularly by someone
whose life, though admirable, was grounded in ways I was just too young to
be concerned about. As I saw it, it was essential for me to be able to
confront whatever troubles I'd made for myself without his, or anyone
else's, assistance. In brief, I was as arrogant (and blind) as youth and luck
and an aristocratic literary bent could make me, and so, when he invited me
up to Columbia for lunch I told him, "I'll work it all out, don't worry." "But
why should it be 'work'? Your work, is your work, not this little Indian." "I
take it that's some kind of euphemism. For the record, the mother's family
was Irish, the father's German." "Yeah? She looks a little Apache to me,
with those eyes and that hair. There's something savage there, Peppy. No?
All right, don't answer. Sneer now, pay later. You weren't brought up for
savagery, kid." "I know. Nice boy. Jewish." "What's so bad about that? You
are a nice civilized Jewish boy, with some talent and some brains. How
much remains to be seen. Why don't you attend to that and leave the lions
to Hemingway." "What is that supposed to mean, Moey?" "You. You look like
you've been sleeping in the jungle." "Nope. Just down on Ninth Street."
"I thought girls were for fun, Pep. Not to scare the shit out of you."
I was offended both by his low-mindedness and his meddling and refused to
talk further about it. Afterward I looked in the mirror for the signs of
fear--or doom. I saw nothing: still looked like Tarnopol the Triumphant
to me.

The morning after Maureen had announced herself pregnant, I told her
to take a specimen of urine to the pharmacy on Second and Ninth; that way,
said I without hiding my skepticism, we could shortly learn just how
pregnant she was. "In other words, you don't believe me. You want to close
your eyes to the whole thing!" "Just take the urine and shut up." So she did
as she was told: took a specimen of urine to the drugstore for the pregnancy
test--only it wasn't her urine. I did not find this out until three years
later, when she confessed to me (in the midst of a suicide attempt) that she
had gone from my apartment to the drugstore by way of Tompkins Square Park,
lately the hippie center of the East Village, but back in the fifties still
a place for the neighborhood poor to congregate and take the sun. There she
approached a pregnant Negro woman pushing a baby carriage and told her
she represented a scientific organization willing to pay the woman for a
sample of her urine. Negotiations ensued. Agreement reached, they retired
to the hallway of a tenement building on Avenue B to complete the
transaction. The pregnant woman pulled her underpants down to her knees,
and squatting in a corner of the unsavory hallway--still heaped with
rubbish (just as Maureen had described it) when I paid an unsentimental
visit to the scene of the crime upon my return to New York only a few years
later--delivered forth into Maureen's preserve jar the stream that sealed
my fate. Here Maureen forked over two dollars and twenty-five cents. She
drove a hard bargain, my wife.

During the four days that we had to wait--according to Maureen--for
the result of the pregnancy test, she lay on my bed recalling scenes and
conversations out of her wasted past: delirious (or feigning delirium--or
both), she quarreled once again with Mezik, screamed her hatred at Mezik's
buddy from the upholstery factory, and choked and wept with despair to
discover Walker in their bathroom in Cambridge, dressed in her underwear,
his own white sweat socks stuffed into the cups of the brassiere. She would
not eat; she would not converse; she refused to let me telephone the
psychiatrist who had once tried treating her for a couple of months; when I
called her friends over on Bleecker Street, she refused to talk to them. I
went ahead anyway and suggested to them that they might want to come
over and see her--maybe they at least could get her to eat something--
whereupon the wife grabbed the phone away from the husband and said,
"We don't want to see that one again ever," and hung up. So, all was not
well with the "schizorenos" on Bleecker Street either, after Maureen's brief
visit…And I was afraid now to leave the apartment for fear that she would
try to kill herself when I was gone. I had never lived through three such
days before in my life, though I was to know a hundred more just as grim
and frightening in the years to come.

The night before we were to learn the test results, Maureen abruptly
stopped "hallucinating" and got up from bed to wash her face and drink
some orange juice. At first she wouldn't speak directly to me, but for an
hour sat perfectly still, calm and controlled, in a chair in the living
room, wrapped in my bathrobe. Finally I told her that as she was up and
around, I was going out to take a walk around the block. "Don't try any-
thing," I said, "I'm just going to get some air." Her tone, in response,
was mild and sardonic. "Air? Oh, where, I wonder?" "I'm taking a walk
around the block." "You're about to leave me, Peter, I know that. Just
the way you've left every girl you've ever known. Find 'em-fuck 'em-and-
forget 'em Flaubert." "I'll be right back." When I unlatched the door to
go out, she said, as though addressing a judge from the witness stand--
prophetic bitch! --"And I never saw him again, Your Honor."

I went around to the drugstore and asked the pharmacist if by any
chance the result of Mrs. Tarnopol's pregnancy test--so Maureen had
identified herself, just a bit prematurely--due back tomorrow might have
come in that night. He told me the result had come in that morning.
Maureen had gotten it wrong--we hadn't to wait four days, only three. Was
the error inadvertent? Just one of her "mistakes"? ("So I make mistakes!"
she'd cry. "I'm not perfect, damn it! Why must everybody in this world be a
perfect robot--a compulsive little middle-class success machine, like you!
Some of us are human." )But if not a mistake, if intentional, why? Out of
habit? An addiction to falsification? Or was this her art of fiction,
"creativity" gone awry…?

Harder to fathom was the result. How could Maureen be pregnant for
two whole months and manage to keep it from me? It made no sense. Such
restraint was beyond her--represented everything she was not. Why would
she have let me throw her out that first time without striking back with this
secret? It made no sense. It could not be.

Only it was. Two months pregnant, by me.

Only how? I could not even remember the last time we two had had inter-
course. Yet she was pregnant, somehow, and if I didn't marry her, she
would take her life rather than endure the humiliation of an abortion or an
adoption or of abandoning a fatherless child. It went without saying that
she, who could not hold a job for more than six months, was incapable of
raising a child on her own. And it went without saying--to me, to me--that
the father of this fatherless child-to-be was Peter Tarnopol. Never once did
it occur to me that if indeed she were pregnant, someone other than I might
have done it. Yes, I already knew what a liar she was, yet surely not so
thoroughgoing as to want to deceive me about something as serious as
fatherhood. That I couldn't believe. This woman was not a character out of
a play by Strindberg or a novel by Hardy, but someone with whom I'd been
living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, sixty minutes by subway and
bus from Yonkers, where I'd been born.

Now, unduly credulous as I may have been, I still needn't have married
her; had I been so independent, so manly, so "up" to travail as I aspired to
be in my middle twenties, she would never have become my wife, even if a
laboratory test had "scientifically" proved that she was with child and even
if I had been willing to accept on faith that mine was the penis responsible.
I could still have said this: "You want to kill yourself, that's your business.
You don't want an abortion, also up to you. But I'm not getting married to
you, Maureen, under any circumstances. Marrying you would be insane."

But instead of going home to tell her just that, I walked from Ninth
Street all the way up to Columbia and back, concluding on upper Broadway
--only two blocks from Morris's building-- that the truly manly way to
face up to my predicament was to go back to the apartment, pretending
that I still did not know the result of the pregnancy test, and deliver the
following oration : "Maureen, what's been going on here for three days
makes no sense. I don't care if you're pregnant or not. I want you to marry
me, regardless of how the test comes out tomorrow. I want you to be my
wife." You see, I just couldn't believe, given her behavior during the past
three days, that she was bluffing about doing herself in; I was sure
that if I walked out on her for good, she would kill herself. And that was
unthinkable--I could not be the cause of another's death. Such a suicide
was murder. So I would marry her instead. And, further, I would do my best
to make it appear that in marrying her I had acted out of choice rather than
necessity, for if our union were to be anything other than a nightmare of
recrimination and resentment, it would have to appear to Maureen--and
even, in a way, to me--that I had married her because I had decided that I
wanted to, rather than because I had been blackmailed, or threatened, or
terrorized into it.

But why ever would I want to? The whole thing made no sense--espec-
ially as we had not copulated in God only knew how long! And I never
wanted to again! I hated her.

Yes, it was indeed one of those grim and unyielding predicaments such
as I had read about in fiction, such as Thomas Mann might have had in
mind when he wrote in an autobiographical sketch the sentence that I had
already chosen as one of the two portentous epigraphs for A Jewish Father:
"All actuality is deadly earnest, and it is morality itself that, one
with life, forbids us to be true to the guileless unrealism of our youth."

It seemed then that I was making one of those moral decisions that I
had heard so much about in college literature courses. But how different it
all had been up in the Ivy League, when it was happening to Lord Jim and
Kate Croy and Ivan Karamazov instead of to me. Oh, what an authority on
dilemmas I had been in the senior honors seminar! Perhaps if I had not
fallen so in love with these complicated fictions of moral anguish, I never
would have taken that long anguished walk to the Upper West Side and
back, and arrived at what seemed to me the only "honorable" decision for
a young man as morally "serious" as myself. But then I do not mean to
attribute my ignorance to my teachers, or my delusions to books. Teachers
and books are still the best things that ever happened to me, and probably
had I not been so grandiose about my honor, my integrity, and my manly
duty, about "morality itself," I would never have been so susceptible to a
literary education and its attendant pleasures to begin with. Nor would I
have embarked upon a literary career. And it's too late now to say that I
shouldn't have, that by becoming a writer I only exacerbated my
debilitating obsession. Literature got me into this and literature is gonna
have to get me out. My writing is all I've got now, and though it happens
not to have made life easy for me either in the years since my auspicious
debut, it is really all I trust.

My trouble in my middle twenties was that rich with confidence and
success, I was not about to settle for complexity and depth in books alone.
Stuffed to the gills with great fiction-entranced not by cheap romances,
like Madame Bovary, but by Madame Bovary--I now expected to find in every-
day experience that same sense of the difficult and the deadly earnest
that informed the novels I admired most. My model of reality, deduced
from reading the masters, had at its heart intractability. And here it
was, a reality as obdurate and recalcitrant and (in addition) as awful as
any I could have wished for in my most bookish dreams. You might even say
that the ordeal that my daily life was shortly to become was only Dame
Fortune smiling down on "the golden boy of American literature" (New York
Times Book Review, September 1959) and dishing out to her precocious favo-
rite whatever literary sensibility required. Want complexity? Difficulty?
Intractability? Want the deadly earnest? Yours!

Of course what I also wanted was that my intractable existence should
take place at an appropriately lofty moral altitude, an elevation some-
where, say, between The Brothers Karamazov and The Wings of the Dove. But
then not even the golden can expect to have everything: instead of the
intractability of serious fiction, I got the intractability of soap opera.
Resistant enough, but the wrong genre. Though maybe not, given the
leading characters in the drama, of which Maureen, I admit, was only one.
I returned to Ninth Street a little after eleven; I had been gone nearly
three hours. Maureen, to my surprise, was now completely dressed and
sitting at my desk in her duffel coat.

"You didn't do it," she said, and lowering her face to the desk, began to
cry.

"Where were you going, Maureen?" Probably back to her room; I
assumed to the East River, to jump in.

"I thought you were on a plane to Frankfurt."

"What were you going to do, Maureen?"

"What's the difference…"

"Maureen! Look up at me."

"Oh, what's the difference any more, Peter. Go, go back to that Long
Island girl, with her pleated skirts and her cashmere sweaters."

"Maureen, listen to me: I want to marry you. I don't care whether
you're pregnant or not. I don't care what the test says tomorrow. I want
to marry you." I sounded to myself about as convincing as the romantic lead
in a high-school play. I think it may have been in that moment that my face
became the piece of stone I was to carry around on my neck for years there-
after. "Let's get married," I said, as if saying it yet again, another way,
would fool anyone about my real feelings.

Yet it fooled Maureen. I could have proposed in Pig Latin and fooled
Maureen. She could of course carry on in the most bizarre and unpredict-
able ways, but in all those years of surprises, I would never be so
stunned by her wildest demonstration of rage, her most reckless public
ravings, as I was by the statement with which she greeted this proposal
so obviously delivered without heart or hope.

She erupted, "Oh, darling, we'll be happy as kings!"

That was the word--"kings," plural--uttered wholly ingenuously. I don't
think she was lying this time. She believed that to be so. We would be
happy as kings. Maureen Johnson and Peter Tarnopol.

She threw her arms around me, as happy as I had ever seen her--and
for the first time I realized that she was truly mad. I had just proposed
marriage to a madwoman. In deadly earnest.

"Oh, I always knew it," she said joyously.

"Knew what?"

"That you loved me. That you couldn't hold out forever against that
kind of love. Not even you."

She was crazy.

And what did that make of me? A "man"? How?

She went on and on about the paradise that lay before us. We could
move to the country and save money by growing our own vegetables. Or
continue to live in the city where she could become my agent (I had an
agent, but no matter). Or she could just stay home and bake bread and type
my manuscripts (I typed my own, but no matter) and get back to her wood
sculpture.

"You'll have to stay at home anyway," I said. "The baby."

"Oh, lovey," she said. "I'll do it--for you. Because you do love me.
You see, that's all I had to find out--that you loved me. That you weren't
Mezik, that you weren't Walker. That I could trust you. Don't you
understand? Now that I know, I'll do anything."

"Meaning?"

"Peter, stop being suspicious--you don't have to be any more. I'll have
an abortion. If the test comes back tomorrow saying that I'm pregnant--and
it will, I've never missed two periods before in my life, never--but don't
worry, I'll go off and get an abortion. Whatever you want, I'll do it. I know
of a doctor. In Coney Island. And I'll go to him, if you want me to."

I wanted her to, all right. I'd wanted her to right at the outset, and had
she agreed then, I would never have made my "manly" proposal of
marriage. But better now than not at all. And so the next day, after I phoned
the drugstore and pretended to be hearing for the first time the lab report
verifying Mrs. Tarnopol's pregnancy, I went to the bank and withdrew ten
weeks' worth of advance and another twenty dollars for the round-trip taxi
fare to Coney Island. And on Saturday morning, I put Maureen in a taxi and
she went off to Coney Island by herself, which she said was the only way
the abortionist would receive his patients. I stood out on Second Avenue
watching the cab move south, and I thought: "Now get out. Take a plane to
anywhere, but go while the going is good." But I didn't, because that isn't
what a man like myself did. Or so I "reasoned."

Besides, in bed the night before, Maureen had wept in fearful anticipa-
tion of the illegal operation (had she had the abortion, it would actually
have been her third, I eventually found out) and clinging to me, she
begged, "You won't desert me, will you? You'll be here when I get home--
won't you? Because I couldn't take it if you weren't…" "I'll be here,"
said I, manfully.

And there I was when she returned at four that afternoon, my fond lover,
pale and wan (the strain of sitting six hours at the movies), wearing a
Kotex between her legs to absorb the blood (said she), and still in pain from
the abortion she had undergone (said she) without an anesthetic. She went
immediately to bed to ward off the hemorrhage that she feared was coming
on, and there she lay, on into the night, teeth chattering, limbs trembling,
in an old, washed-out sweatshirt of mine and a pair of my pajamas. I piled
blankets on top of her, but that still didn't stop her shaking. "He just stuck
his knife up there," she said, "and wouldn't give me anything for the pain
but a tennis ball to squeeze. He promised he would put me out, on the
phone he promised me, and then when I was on the table and said, 'Where's
the anesthetic?', he said, 'What do you think, girlie, I'm out of my mind?' I
said, 'But you promised. How else can I possibly stand the pain?' And you
know what he told me, that smelly old bastard? 'Look, you want to get up
and go, fine with me. You want me to get rid of the baby, then squeeze the
magic ball and shut up. You had your fun, now you're going to have to pay.'
So I stayed, I stayed and I squeezed down on the ball, and I tried to think
just about you and me, but it hurt, oh, he hurt me so much."

A horrifying tale of humiliation and suffering at the hands of yet
another member of my sex, and a lie from beginning to end. Only it took
me a while to find out. In actuality, she had pocketed the three hundred
dollars (against the day I would leave her penniless) and after disembarking
from the cab when it got to Houston Street, had gone back up to Times
Square by subway to see Susan Hayward in I Want to Live, saw it three
times over, the morbid melodrama of a cocktail waitress (if I remember
correctly--I had already taken her to see it once myself) who gets the death
penalty in California for a crime she didn't commit: right up Maureen's
alley, that exemplary little tale. Then she'd donned a Kotex in the
washroom and had come on home, weak in the knees and white around the
gills. As who wouldn't be, after a day in a Times Square movie house?
All this she confessed three years later in Wisconsin.

The next morning I went alone to a booth--Maureen charging, as I left
the apartment, that I was running away, leaving her bleeding and in pain
while I disappeared forever with "that girl"--and telephoned my parents to
tell them I was getting married.

"Why?" my father demanded to know.

"Because I want to." I was not about to tell my father, in whom I had
not confided anything since I was ten, what I had been through in the past
week. I had loved him dearly as a child, but he was only a small-time
haberdasher, and I now wrote short stories published in the high-brow
magazines and had a publisher's advance on a serious novel dense with
moral ambiguity. So which of us could be expected to understand the
principle involved? Which was what again? Something to do with my duty,
my courage, my word.

"Peppy," my mother said, after having received the news in silence,
"Peppy, I'm sorry, but I have to say it--there's something wrong with that
woman. Isn't there?"

"She's over thirty years old," said my father.

"She's twenty-nine."

"And you're just twenty-six, you're a babe in the woods. Son, she's
kicked around too long for my money. Your mother is right--something
ain't right there with her."

My parents had met my intended just once, in my apartment; on the
way home from a Wednesday matinee, they had stopped off to say hello,
and there was Maureen, on my sofa, reading the script of a TV serial in
which someone had "promised" her a part. Ten minutes of amiable, if self
conscious talk, and then they took the train back home. What they were
saying about Maureen I assumed grew out of conversations with Morris and
Lenore. I was wrong. Morris had never mentioned Maureen to them. They
had figured her out on their own--after only ten minutes.

I tried acting lighthearted; laughing, I said, "She's not the girl across
the street, if that's what you mean."

"What does she even do for a living? Anything?"

"She told you. She's an actress."

"Where?"

"She's looking for work."

"Son, listen to me: you're a college graduate. You're a summa cum
laude. You had a four-year scholarship. The army is behind you. You've
traveled in Europe. The world is before you, and it's all yours. You can
have anything, anything--why are you settling for this? Peter, are you
listening?"

"I'm listening."

"Peppy," asked my mother, "do you--love her?"

"Of course I do." And what did I want to shout into the phone at that
very moment? I'm coming home. Take me home. This isn't what I want to
do. You're right, there's something wrong with her: the woman is mad.
Only I gave my word!

My father said, "Your voice don't sound right to me."

"Well, I didn't expect this kind of reaction, frankly, when I said I
would be getting married."

"We want you to be happy, that's all," said my mother.

"This is going to make you happy, marrying her?" asked my father.

"I'm not talking about that she's Gentile. I'm not a narrow-minded dope, I
never was. I don't live in a dead world. The German girl in Germany was
something else, and her I never disliked personally, you know that. But
that's water under the bridge."

"I know. I agree."

"I'm talking about happiness now, with another human being."

"Yes, I follow you."

"You don't sound right," he said, his own voice getting huskier with
emotion. "You want me to come down to the city? I'll come in a minute--"

"No, don't be silly. Good Christ, no. I know what I'm doing. I'm doing
what I want."

"But why so sudden?" my father asked, fishing. "Can you answer me
that? I'm sixty-five years old, Peppy, I'm a grown man--you can talk to
me, and the truth."

"What's 'sudden' about it? I've known her nearly a year. Please, don't
fight me on this."

"Peter," said my mother, teary now, "we don't fight you on anything."

"I know, I know. I appreciate that. So let's not start now. I just called to
tell you. A judge is marrying us on Wednesday at City Hall."

My mother's voice was weak now, almost a whisper, when she asked,

"You want us to come?" It didn't sound as though she cared to be told yes.
What a shock that was!

"No, there's no need for you to be there. It's just a formality. I'll call
you afterwards."

"Peppy, are you still on the outs with your brother?"

"I'm not on the outs with him. He lives his life and I live mine."

"Peter, have you spoken to him about this? Peppy, your older brother is
a brother boys dream about having. He adores you. Call him, at least."
"Look, it's not a point I want to debate with Moe. He's a great arguer--
and I'm not. There's nothing to argue over."

"Maybe he wouldn't argue. Maybe at least he'd like to know, to come
to whatever it is--the wedding ceremony."

"He won't want to come."

"And you won't talk to him, only for a few minutes? Or to Joan?"
"What does Joan know about my life? Dad, just let me get married,
okay?"

"You make it sound like nothing, like marrying a person for the rest of
your life is an everyday affair. It ain't."

"I'm summa cum laude. I know that."

"Don't joke. You left us when you were too young, that's the problem.
You always had your way. The apple of your mother's eye--you could have
anything. The last of her babies…"

"Look, look--"

"You thought you already knew everything at fifteen--remember? We
should never have let you skip all those grades and get ahead of yourself--
that was our first mistake."

On the edge of tears now, I said, "That may be. But I would have been
out of grade school by now anyway. Look, I'm getting married. It'll be all
right." And I hung up, before I lost control and told my father to come
down and take back to his home his twenty-six-year-old baby boy.




　　　　　4. DR. SPIELVOGEL



We may incite [the patient] to jealousy or inflict upon
him the pain of disappointed love, but no special
technical design is necessary for that purpose. These
things happen spontaneously in most analyses.

--Freud, "Analysis Terminable and Interminable"



I first met Dr. Spielvogel the year Maureen and I were married. We had
moved out of my Lower East Side basement apartment to a small house in
the country near New Milford, Connecticut, not far from where Spielvogel
and his family were summering at Candlewood Lake. Maureen was going
to grow vegetables and I was going to write the final chapters of A Jewish
Father. As it turned out, the seeds never got in the ground (or the bread
in the oven, or the preserves in the jar), but because there was a twelve-by
twelve shack at the edge of the woods back of the house with a holt on the
door, somehow the book got finished. I saw Spielvogel maybe three times
that summer at parties given by a New York magazine editor who was liv-
ing nearby. I don't remember that the doctor and I had much to say to
each other. He wore a yachting cap, this New York analyst summering in
rural Connecticut, but otherwise he seemed at once dignified and without
airs--a tall, quiet, decorous man, growing stout in his middle forties,
with a mild German accent and that anomalous yachting cap. I never even
noticed which woman was his wife; I discovered later that he had noticed
which was mine.

When, in June of ‘62, it became necessary, according to my brother, for
me to remain in New York and turn myself over to a psychiatrist, I came
up with Spielvogel's name; friends in Connecticut that summer had spoken
well of him, and, if I remembered right, treating "creative" people was
supposed to be his specialty. Not that that made much difference to me in
the shape I was in. Though I continued to write every day, I had really
stopped thinking of myself as capable of creating anything other than
misery for myself. I was not a writer any longer, no matter how I filled
the daylight hours--I was Maureen's husband, and I could not imagine how I
could get to be anything else ever again.

His appearance, like mine, had changed for the worse in three years.
While I had been battling with Maureen, Spielvogel had been up against
cancer. He had survived, though tire disease appeared to have shrunk him
down some. I remembered him of course in the yachting cap and with a
summer tan; in his office, he wore a drab suit bought to fit a man a size
larger, and an unexpectedly bold striped shirt whose collar now swam
around his neck. His skin was pasty, and the heavy black frames of the
glasses he wore tended further to dramatize this shrinkage he had under-
gone--beneath them, behind them, his head looked like a skull. He also
walked now with a slight dip, or list, to the left, the cancer having
apparently damaged his hip or leg. In all, the doctor he reminded me of
most was Dr. Roger Chillingworth in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. Appro-
priate enough, because I sat facing him as full of shameful secrets as
the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale.

Maureen and I had lived a year in western Connecticut, a year at the
American Academy in Rome, and a year at the university in Madison, and
as a result of all that moving around I had never been able to find anyone
in whom I was willing to confide. By the end of three years I had convinced
myself that it would be "disloyal," a "betrayal," to tell even the closest
friends I had made in our wanderings what went on between Maureen and
me in private, though I imagined they could guess plenty from what often
took place right out on the street or in other people's houses. Mostly I
didn't open up to anyone because I was so ashamed of my defenselessness
before her wrath and frightened of what she might do either to herself or
to me, or to the person in whom I'd confided, if she ever found out what I
had said. Sitting in a chair immediately across from Spielvogel, looking in
embarrassment from his shrunken skull to the framed photograph of the Ac-
ropolis that was the only picture on his cluttered desk, I realized that I
still couldn't do it: indeed, to tell this stranger the whole sordid story
of my marriage seemed to me as reprehensible as committing a serious crime.
"You remember Maureen?" I asked. "My wife?"

"I do. Quite well." His voice, in contrast to his appearance, was strong
and vigorous, causing me to feel even more puny and self-conscious…the
little stool pigeon about to sing. My impulse was to get up and leave, my
shame and humiliation (and my disaster) still my own--and simultaneously
to crawl into his lap. "A small, pretty, dark-haired young woman," he said.
"Very determined looking."

"Very."

"A lot of spunk there, I would think."

"She's a lunatic, Doctor!" I began to cry. For fully five minutes I
sobbed into my hands--until Spielvogel asked, "Are you finished?"
There are lines from my five years of psychoanalysis as memorable to
me as the opening sentence of Anna Karenina--"Are you finished?" is
one of them. The perfect tone, the perfect tactic. I turned myself over
to him, then and there, for good or bad.

Yes, yes, I was finished. "All I do these days is collapse in tears…" I
wiped my face with a Kleenex from a box that he offered me and proceeded
to "spill"--though not about Maureen (I couldn't, right off) but about Karen
Oakes, the Wisconsin coed with whom I had been maniacally in love during
the winter and early spring of that year. I had been watching her bicycle
around the campus for months before she showed up in my undergraduate
writing section in the second semester to become the smartest girl in the
class. Good-natured, gentle, a beguiling mix of assertive innocence and shy
adventurousness, Karen had a small lyrical gift as a poet and wrote clever,
somewhat magisterial literary analyses of the fiction that we read in class;
her candor and lucidity, I told Spielvogel, were as much a balm to me as her
mild temperament, her slender limbs, her pretty and composed American
girl's face. Oh, I went on and on about Ka-reen (the pet name for the pillow
talk), growing increasingly intoxicated, as I spoke, with memories of our
ardent "passion" and brimming "love"--I did not mention that in all we
probably had not been alone with one another more than forty-eight hours
over the course of the three months, and rarely for more than forty-five
minutes at a clip; we were together either in the classroom with fifteen
undergraduates for chaperones, or in her bed. Nonetheless she was, I said,
"the first good thing" to happen in my private life since I'd been discharg-
ed from the army and come to New York to write. I told Spielvogel how she
had called herself "Miss Demi-Womanhood of 1962"; he did not appear to
be one-hundredth as charmed by the remark as I had been, but then he had
not just disrobed for the first time the demi-woman who had said it. I
recounted to him the agonies of doubt and longing that I had experienced
before I went ahead, three weeks into the semester, and wrote "See me"
across the face of one of her A+ papers. She came, as directed, to my office,
and accepted my courtly, professorial invitation to be seated. In the first
moments, courtliness was rampant, as a matter of fact. "You wanted to see
me?" "Yes, I did, Miss Oakes." A silence ensued, long and opaquely
eloquent enough to satisfy Anton Chekhov. "Where do you come from,
Miss Oakes?" "Racine." "And what does your father do?" "He's a physi-
cian." And then, as though hurling myself off a bridge, I did it: reach-
ed forward and laid a hand upon her straw-colored hair. Miss Oakes swallow-
ed and said nothing. "I'm sorry," I told her, "I couldn't help it." She
said: "Professor Tarnopol, I'm not a sophisticated person." Whereupon I
proceeded to apologize profusely. "Oh, please, don't worry," she said, when
I wouldn't stop, "a lot of teachers do it." "Do they?" the award-winning
novelist asked. "Every semester so far," said she, nodding a little wearily;
"and usually it's English." "What happens then, usually?" "I tell them I'm
not a sophisticated person. Because I'm not." "And then?" "That's it,
generally." "They get conscience-stricken and apologize profusely." "They
have second thoughts, I suppose." "Just like me." "And me," she said,
without blinking; "the doctrine of in loco parentis works both ways."
"Look, look--" "Yes?" "Look, I'm taken with you. Terribly." "You don't
even know me, Professor Tarnopol." "I don't and I do. I've read your
papers. I've read your stories and poems." "I've read yours." Oh my God,
Dr. Spielvogel, how can you sit there like an Indian? Don't you appreciate
the charm of all this? Can't you see what a conversation like that meant
to me in my despair? "Look, Miss Oakes, I want to see you--I have to see
you!" "Okay." "Where?" "I have a room--" "I can't go into a dormitory,
you know that." "I'm a senior. I don't live in the dorm any more. I moved
out." "You did?" "I have my own room in town." "Can I come to talk to
you there?" "Sure."

Sure! Oh, what a wonderful, charming, disarming, engaging little word
that one is! I went around sibilating it to myself all through the rest of
the day. "What are you so bouncy about?" asked Maureen. Shoor. Shewer.
Shur. Now just how did that beautiful and clever and willing and healthy young
girl say it anyway? Sure! Yes, like that--crisp and to the point. Sure! Oh
yes, sure as sure is sure, Miss Oakes is going to have an adventure, and
Professor Tarnopol is going to have a breakdown…How many hours before
I decided that when the semester was over we would run off together? Not
that many. The second time we were in bed I proposed the idea to Ka-reen.
We would go to Italy in June--catch the Pan Am flight from Chicago (I'd
checked on it by phone) the evening of the day she'd taken her last exam;
I could send my final grades in from Rome. Wouldn't that be terrific?
Oh, I would say to her, burying my face in her hair, I want to take you
somewhere, Ka-reen, I want to go away with you! And she would murmur
softly, "Mmmmmm, mmmmmm," which I interpreted as delicious acquie-
scence. I told her about all the lovely Italian piazzas in which Mau-
reen and I had screamed bloody murder at one another: the Piazza San
Marco in Venice, the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, the Piazza del
Campo in Siena…Karen went home for spring vacation and never came
back. That's how overbearing and frightening a character I had become.
That murmuring was just the sound her good mind gave off as it gauged the
dreadful consequences of having chosen this particular member of the
conscience-stricken English faculty to begin sophisticated life with outside
of a college dorm. It was one thing reading Tolstoy in class, another playing
Anna and Vronsky with the professor. After she failed to return from spring
recess, I made desperate phone calls to Racine practically daily. When I call
at lunchtime I am told she is "out." I refuse to believe it--where does she
eat then? "Who is this, please?" I am asked. I mumble, "A friend from
school…are you sure she isn't…?" "Would you care to leave your name?"
"No." After dinner each night I last about ten minutes in the living room
with Maureen before I begin to feel myself on the brink of cracking up;
rising from my reading chair, I throw down my pencil and my book--as
though I am Rudolph Hess, twenty years in Spandau Prison, I cry, "I have
to take a walk! I have to see some faces! I'm suffocating in here!" Once out
the door, I break into a sprint, and crossing back lawns and leaping low
garden fences, I head for the dormitory nearest our apartment, where there
is a telephone booth on the first floor. I will catch Karen at the dinner
hour and beg her at least to come back to school for the rest of this sem-
ester, even if she will not run away in June to live in Trastevere with me.
She says, "Hang on a sec--let me take it on another phone." A few mo-
ments later I hear her call, "Will you hang up the downstairs phone, please,
Mom?" "Karen! Karen!" "Yes, I'm back." "Ka-reen, I can't bear it--I'll
meet you somewhere in Racine! I'll hitch! I can be there by nine-thirty!"
But she was the smartest girl in my class and had no intention of letting
some overwrought creative writing teacher with a bad marriage and a
stalled career ruin her life. She could not save me from my wife, she said,
I would have to do that myself. She had told her family she had had an
unhappy love affair, but, she assured me, she had not and would not tell
them with whom. "But what about your degree?" I demanded, as though I
were the dean of students. "That's not important right now," said Karen,
speaking as calmly from her bedroom in Racine as she did in class. "But I
love you! I want you!" I shouted at the slender girl who only the week
before had bicycled in sneakers and a poplin skirt to English 312, her straw
colored hair in braids and her innards still awash with semen from our
lunchtime assignation in her rented room. "You just can't leave, Karen! Not
now! Not after how marvelous it's been!" "But I can't save you, Peter. I'm
only twenty years old." In tears I cried, "I'm only twenty-nine!" "Peter, I
should never have started up. I had no idea what was at stake. That's my
fault. Forgive me. I'm as sorry as I can be." "Christ, don't be ‘sorry'--just
come back!" One night Maureen followed me out of the house and across
the backyards to the dormitory, and after standing out of sight for a minute
with her ear to the telephone booth, threw back the door while I was
pleading with Karen yet again to change her mind and come with me to
Europe on the Pan Am night flight from O'Hare. "Liar!" screamed Maureen,
"whore-mongering liar!" and ran back to the apartment to swallow a small
handful of sleeping pills. Then, on hands and knees, she crawled into the
living room in her underwear and knelt there on the floor with my Gillette
razor in her hand, waiting patiently for me to finish talking with my un-
dergraduate harlot and come on home so that she could get on with the job
of almost killing herself.

I told Spielvogel what Maureen had confessed to me from the living
room floor. Because this had happened only two months earlier, I found
with Spielvogel, as I had that morning with Moe in the taxi back from the
airport, that I could not recount the story of the false urine specimen
without becoming woozy and weak, as though once the story surfaced in
my mind, it was only a matter of seconds before the fires of rage had raced
through me, devouring all vitality and strength. It is not that easy for me to
tell it today without at least a touch of vertigo. And I have never been able
to introduce the story into a work of fiction, not that I haven't repeatedly
tried and failed in the five years since I received Maureen's confession. I
cannot seem to make it credible--probably because I still don't entirely
believe it myself. How could she? To me! No matter how I may contrive to
transform low actuality into high art, that is invariably what is emblazoned
across the face of the narrative, in blood: HOW COULD SHE? TO ME!

"And then," I told Spielvogel, "do you know what she said next? She
was on the floor with the blade of the razor right on her wrist. In her panties
and bra. And I was just standing over her. Dumbstruck. Dumbstruck. I could
have kicked her head in. I should have!"

"And what did she say?"

"Say? She said, ‘If you forgive me for the urine, I'll forgive you for
your mistress. I'll forgive you for deceiving me with that girl on the
bicycle and begging her to run away with you to Rome.'"

"And what did you do?" asked Spielvogel.

"Did I kick her, you mean? No. No, no, no, no, no. I didn't do anything
--to her. Just stood there for a while. I couldn't right off get over the
ingenuity of it. The relentlessness. That she had thought of such a thing
and then gone ahead and done it. I actually felt admiration. And pity, pity!
That's true. I thought, ‘Good Christ, what are you? To do this thing, and
then to keep it a secret for three years!' And then I saw my chance to get
out. As though it required this, you see, nothing less, for me to feel free to
go. Not that I went. Oh, I told her I was going, all right. I said, I'm leav-
ing, Maureen, I can't live any more with somebody who would do such a thing,
and so on. But she was crying by then and she said, ‘Leave me and I'll cut
my wrists. I'm full of sleeping pills already.' And I said, and this is true,
I said, ‘Cut them, why should I care?' And so she pressed down with the
razor--and blood came out. It turned out that she had only scratched
herself, but what the hell did I know? She could have gone through to the
bone. I started shouting, ‘Don't--don't do that!' and I began wrestling with
her for the razor. I was terrified that I was going to get my own veins
slashed in the rolling around, but I kept trying to get it away, grabbing at
the damn thing--and I was crying. That goes without saying. All I do now is
cry, you know--and she was crying, of course, and finally I got the thing
away from her and she said, ‘Leave me, and I'll ruin that girl of yours! I'll
have that pure little face in every paper in Wisconsin!' And then she began
to scream about my ‘deceiving' her and how I couldn't be trusted and she
always knew it--and this is just three minutes after describing in detail to
me buying the urine from that Negro woman on Avenue B!"

"And what did you do then?"

"Did I slit her throat from ear to ear? No. No! I fell apart. Completely.
I went into a tantrum. The two of us were smeared with blood--my left palm
had been cut, up by the thumb, and her wrist was dripping, and God only
knows what we looked like--like a couple of Aztecs, fucking up the
sacrificial rites. I mean, it's comical when you think about it. I am the
Dagwood Bumstead of fear and trembling!"

"You had a tantrum."

"That's not the half of it. I got down on my knees--I begged her to let
me go. I banged my head on the floor, Doctor. I began running from room
to room. Then--then I did what she told me Walker used to do. Maybe
Walker never even did it; that was probably a lie too. Anyway, I did it. At
first I was just running around looking for some place to hide the razor from
her. I remember unscrewing the head and dropping the blade into the toilet
and flushing and flushing and the damn thing just lying there at the bottom
of the bowl. Then I ran into our bedroom--I was screaming all this time,
you see, ‘Let me go! Let me go!' and sobbing, and so on. And all the while
I was tearing my clothes off. I'd done that before, in a rage with her, but this
time I actually tore everything off me. And I put on Maureen's underwear. I
pulled open her dresser and I put on a pair of her underpants-- I could just
get them up over my prick. Then I tried to get into one of her brassieres. I
put my arms through the shoulder loops, that is. And then I just stood there
like that, crying--and bleeding. Finally she came into the room--no, she
just got as far as the doorway and stood there, looking at me. And, you see,
that's all she was wearing, too, her underwear. She saw me and she broke
into sobs again, and she cried, ‘Oh, sweetheart, no, no…

"Is that all she said?" asked Spielvogel. "Just called you ‘sweetheart'?"

"No. She said, ‘Take that off. I'll never tell anybody. Just take that off
right now.'"

"That was two months ago," said Dr. Spielvogel, when it appeared that
I had nothing more to say.

"Yes."

"And?"

"It's not been good, Doctor."

"What do you mean?"

"I've done some other strange things."

"Such as?"

"Such as staying with Maureen--that's the strangest thing of all! Three
years of it, and now I know what I know, and I'm still living with her! And
if I don't fly back tomorrow, she says she's going to tell the world
‘everything.' That's what she told my brother to tell me on the phone. And
she will. She will do it."

"Any other ‘strange things'?"

"…with my sperm."

"I didn't hear you. Your sperm? What about your sperm?"

"My semen--I leave it places."

"Yes?"

"I smear it places. I go to people's houses and I leave it-places."

"You break into people's houses?"

"No, no," I said sharply--what did he think I was, a madman? "I'm invit-
ed. I go to the bathroom. I leave it somewhere…on the tap. In the soap
dish. Just a few drops…"

"You masturbate in their bathrooms."

"Sometimes, yes. And leave…"

"Your signature."

"Tarnopol's silver bullet."

He smiled at my joke; I did not. I had still more to tell. "I've done it in
the university library. Smeared it on the bindings of books."

"Of books? Which books?"

"Books! Any books! Whatever books are handy!"

"Anywhere else?"

I sighed.

"Speak up, please," said the doctor.

"I sealed an envelope with it," I said in a loud voice. "My bill to the
telephone company."

Again Spielvogel smiled. "Now that is an original touch, Mr. Tarnopol."

And again I broke into sobs. "What does it mean!"

"Come now," said Dr. Spielvogel, "what do you think it ‘means'? You
don't require a soothsayer, as far as I can see."

"That I'm completely out of control!" I said, sobbing. "That I don't
know what I'm doing any more!"

"That you're angry," he said, slapping the arm of his chair. "That you
are furious. You are not out of control--you are under control. Maureen's
control. You spurt the anger everywhere, except where it belongs. There
you spurt tears."

"But she'll ruin Karen! She will! She knows who she is--she used to
check out my students like a hawk! She'll destroy that lovely innocent
girl!"

"Karen sounds as if she can take care of herself."

"But you don't know Maureen once she gets going. She could murder some-
body. She used to grab the wheel of our VW in Italy and try to run us off the
side of a mountain--because I hadn't opened a door for her leaving the
hotel in Sorrento! She could carry a grudge like that for days--then she
would erupt with it, in the car, weeks later! You can't imagine what it's
like when she goes wild!"

"Well, then, Karen should be properly warned, if that is the case.

"It is the case! It's hair-raising! Grabbing the wheel from my hands and
spinning it the other way when we're winding down a mountain road! You
must believe what I've been through--I am not exaggerating! To the
contrary, I'm leaving things out!"

Now, with my avenger dead and her ashes scattered from a plane into
the Atlantic Ocean, now with all that rage stilled, it seems to me that I
simply could not have been so extensively unmanned by Maureen Johnson
Mezik Walker Tarnopol, dropout from Elmira High, as I indicated (and
demonstrated) to Spielvogel during our first hour together. I was, after all,
bigger than she was, more intelligent than she was, better educated than she
was, and far more accomplished. What then (I asked the doctor) had made
me such a willing, or will-less, victim? Why couldn't I find the strength,
or just the simple survival mechanism, to leave her once it became obvious
that it was no longer she who needed rescuing from her disasters, but I
from mine? Even after she had confessed to committing the urine fraud, even
then I couldn't get up and go! Now why? Why should someone who had bat-
tled so determinedly all his life to be independent--his own child, his own
adolescent, his own man--why should someone with my devotion to "ser-
iousness" and "maturity" knuckle under like a defenseless little boy to
this cornball Clytemnestra?

Dr. Spielvogel invited me to look to the nursery for the answer. The
question with which he began our second session was, "Does your wife
remind you of your mother?"

My heart sank. Psychoanalytic reductivism was not going to save me from
the IRT tracks, or worse, from returning to Wisconsin at the end of the
week to resume hostilities with Maureen. In reply to the question I said,
no,she did not. My wife reminded me of no one I had ever known before,
anywhere. Nobody in my entire lifetime had ever dared to deceive, insult,
threaten, or blackmail me the way she did--certainly no woman I had ever
known. Nor had anyone ever hollered at me like that, except perhaps the
basic training cadre at Fort Dix. I suggested to Spielvogel that it wasn't
because she was like my mother that I couldn't deal with her, but, if
anything, because she was so unlike her. My mother was not aggrieved,
contentious, resentful, violent, helpless, or suicidal, and she did not
ever want to see me humbled--far from it. Certainly, for our purposes,
the most telling difference between the two was that my mother adored me,
worshipped me across the board, and I had basked in that adoration. Indeed,
it was her enormous belief in my perfection that had very likely helped to
spawn and nourish whatever gifts I had. I supposed that it could be said that
I had knuckled under to my mother when I was still a little boy--but in a
little boy that is not knuckling under, is it? That is just common sense and a
feel for family life: childhood realpolitik. One does not expect to be treated
like a thirty-year-old at five. But at fifteen I certainly did expect deferential
treatment of a kind, and from my mother I got it. As I remember it, I could
sweet-talk that lady into just about anything during my high-school years,
without too much effort get her to agree to the fundamental soundness of
my position on just about every issue arising out of my blooming sense of
prerogatives; in fact, it was with demonstrable delight (as I recalled it) that
she acquiesced to the young prince whom she had been leading all these
years toward the throne.

It was the supernumerary father I'd had to struggle with back then. He
was anxious for me in my ambitiousness and cockiness. He had seen less of
me as a child--off in the store all day, and in bad times selling roofing and
siding for his brother-in-law door to door at night--and understandably he
had some trouble when he first discovered that the little bird's beak he'd
been feeding all those years had been transformed overnight into a yapping
adolescent mouth that could outtalk him, outreason him, and generally
outsmart him with the aid of "logic," "analogy," and assorted techniques of
condescension. But then came my four-year scholarship to Brown, and that
crown of crowns, straight As in college, and gradually he too gave in and
left off even trying to tell me what to think and do. By my seventeenth year
it was already pretty clear tiiat I did not mean to use my freedom from
parental constraint and guidance to become a bum, and so, to his credit, he
did the best an aggressive entrepreneur and indestructible breadwinner and
loving father could, to let me be.

Spielvogel wouldn't see it that way. He questioned my "fairly happy
childhood," suggesting that people could of course delude themselves about
the good old days that had never been. There might be a harsher side to it
all that I was conveniently forgetting--the threatening aspect of my
mother's competence and vigor and attentiveness, and the "castration
anxiety," as he called it, that it had fostered in her baby boy, the last,
and emotionally the most fragile, of her offspring. From my descriptions
of Morris's life and my few vivid childhood recollections of him, Dr.
Spielvogel concluded that my brother had been "constitutionally" a much
tougher specimen than I to begin with, and that his biological endowment
had been reinforced in his formative years when he had virtually to raise
himself while my mother was off working most of each day in the store
with my father. As for Joan, it was Spielvogel's educated guess that as the
ugly duckling and the girl in the family she had hardly been in danger of
being overwhelmed by my mother's attention; to the contrary, she had
probably felt herself at the periphery of the family circle, neglected and
useless as compared with the hearty older brother and the clever younger
one. If so (he continued, writing his Tarnopol family history), it would not
be surprising to find her in her forties still so avid to have--famous friends,
modish beauty, exotic travels, fancy and expensive clothes: to have, in a
word, the admiration and envy of the crowd. He shocked me by asking if
my sister also took lovers with such avidity. "Joannie? It never occurred
to me." "Much hasn't," the doctor assured the patient.

Now I for one had never denied that my mother might have been less
than perfect; of course I remembered times when she seemed to have
scolded me too severely or needlessly wounded my pride or hurt my
feelings; of course she had said and done her share of thoughtless things
while bringing me up, and at times, in anger or uncertainty, had like any
parent taken the tyrannical way out. But not until I came under the
influence of Dr. Spielvogel could I possibly have imagined a child any
more valued or loved than Mrs. Tarnopol's little boy. Any more, in fact, and
I really would have been in trouble. My argument with this line the doctor
began to take on my past was that if I had suffered anything serious from
having had a mother like my own, it was because she had nourished in me a
boundless belief in my ability to win whatever I wanted, an optimism and
innocence about my charmed life that (now that I thought about it) could
very well have left me less than fortified against the realities of setback
and frustration. Yes, perhaps what made me so pathetic at dealing with Maureen
in her wildest moments was that I simply could not believe that anybody
like her could exist in the world that had been advertised to me as Peter's
oyster. It wasn't the repetition of an ancient "trauma" that rendered me so
helpless with my defiant wife--it was its uniqueness. I might as well have
been dealing with a Martian, for all the familiarity I had with female rage
and resentment.

I admitted readily to Dr. Spielvogel that of course I had been reduced
in my marriage to a bewildered and defenseless little boy, but that, I
contended, was because I had never been a bewildered little boy before.
I did not see how we could account for my downfall in my late twenties
without accounting simultaneously for all those years of success and good
fortune that had preceded it. Wasn't it possible that in my "case," as I
willingly called it, triumph and failure, conquest and defeat derived from
an indestructible boyish devotion to a woman as benefactress and celebrant,
protectress and guide? Could we not conjecture that what had made me so
available to the Bad Older Woman was the reawakening in me of that habit
of obedience that had stood me in such good stead with the Good Older
Woman of my childhood? A small boy, yes, most assuredly, no question
about it--but not at all, I insisted, because the protecting, attentive,
and regulating mother of my fairly happy memories had been Spielvogel's
"phallic threatening mother figure" to whom I submitted out of fear and
whom a part of me secretly loathed. To be sure, whoever held absolute
power over a child had inevitably to inspire hatred in him at times, but
weren't we standing the relationship on its head by emphasizing her
fearsome aspect, real as it may have been, over the lovingness and
tenderness of the mother who dominated the recollections of my first ten
years? And weren't we drastically exaggerating my submissiveness as well,
when all available records seemed to indicate that in fact I had been a
striving, spirited little boy, nicknamed Peppy, who hardly behaved in the
world like a whipped dog? Children, I told Spielvogel (who I assumed
knew as much), had undergone far worse torment than I ever had for
displeasing adults.

Spielvogel wouldn't buy it. It was hardly unusual, he said, to have felt
loved by the "threatening mother"; what was distressing was that at this late
date I should continue to depict her in this "idealized" manner. That to him
was a sign that I was still very much "under her spell," unwilling so much
as to utter a peep of protest for fear yet of reprisal. As he saw it, it was
my vulnerability as a sensitive little child to the pain such a mother might
so easily inflict that accounted for "the dominance of narcissism" as my
"primary defense." To protect myself against the "profound anxiety" engen-
dered by my mother--by the possibilities of rejection and separation,
as well as the helplessness that I experienced in her presence--I had
cultivated a strong sense of superiority, with all the implications of
"guilt" and "ambivalence" over being "special."

I argued that Dr. Spielvogel had it backwards. My sense of superiority
--if he wanted to call it that--was not a "defense" against the threat of
my mother, but rather my altogether willing acceptance of her estimation of
me. I just agreed with her, that's all. As what little boy wouldn't? I was not
pleading with Spielvogel to believe that I had ever in my life felt like an
ordinary person or wished to be one; I was only trying to explain that it
did not require "profound anxiety" for my mother's lastborn to come up with
the idea that he was somebody to conjure with.

Now, when I say that I "argued" or "admitted," and Spielvogel "took issue,"
etc., I am drastically telescoping a dialectic that was hardly so neat
and narrow, or so pointed, as it evolved from session to session. A sum-
mary like this tends to magnify considerably my own resistance to the
archaeological reconstruction of my childhood that began to take shape
over the first year or so of therapy, as well as to overdraw the subtle e-
nough means by which the doctor communicated to me his hypotheses about
the origin of my troubles. If I, in fact, had been less sophisticated about
"resistance"--and he'd had less expertise--I might actually have been able
to resist him more successfully. (On the basis of this paragraph, Dr.
Spielvogel would undoubtedly say that my resistance, far from being
overcome by my "sophistication," has triumphed over all in the end. For
why do I assign to him, rather than myself, the characterization of my
Mother as "a phallic threatening figure," if not because I am still unwilling
to be responsible for thinking such an unthinkable thought'?) Also, had I
been less desperate to be cured of whatever was ailing me, and ruining me,
I probably could have held out somewhat longer--though being, as of old,
the most willing of pupils, I would inevitably, I think, have seriously
entertained his ideas just out of schoolboy habit. But as it was, because I
so wanted to get a firm grip upon myself and to stop being so susceptible to
Maureen, I found that once I got wind of Dr. Spielvogel's bias, I became
increasingly willing to challenge my original version of my fairly happy
childhood with rather Dickensian recollections of my mother as an over-
whelming and frightening person. Sure enough, memories began to turn up
of cruelty, injustice, and of offenses against my innocence and integrity,
and as time passed, it was as though the anger that I felt toward Mau-
reen had risen over its banks and was beginning to rush out across the
terrain of my childhood. If I would never wholly relinquish my benign
version of our past, I nonetheless so absorbed Spielvogel's that when, some
ten months into analysis, I went up to Yonkers to have Passover dinner with
my parents and Morris's family, I found myself crudely abrupt and cold
with my mother, a performance almost as bewildering afterward to me as to
this woman who so looked forward to each infrequent visit that I made to
her dinner table. Peeved, and not about to hide it, my brother took me aside
at one point in the meal and said, "Hey, what's going on here tonight?" I
could not give him anything but a shrug for a reply. And try as I might,
when I later kissed her goodbye at the door, I did not seem to have the
wherewithal to feign even a little filial affection--as though my mother,
who had been crestfallen the very first time she had laid eyes on Maureen,
and afterward had put up with the fact of her solely to please me, was
somehow an accomplice to Maureen's vindictive rage.

Somewhere along in my second year of therapy, when relations with my mo-
ther were at their coolest, it occurred to me that rather than resenting
Spielvogel, as I sometimes did, for provoking this perplexing change in
behavior and attitude toward her, I should see it rather as a strategy, harsh
perhaps but necessary, designed to deplete the fund of maternal veneration
on which Maureen had been able to draw with such phenomenal results. To
be sure, it was no fault of my mother's that I had blindly transferred the
allegiance she had inspired through the abundance of her love to someone
who was in actuality my enemy; it could be taken, in fact, as a measure of
just how gratifying a mother she had been, what a genius of a mother she
had been, that a son of hers, decades later, had found himself unable to
"wrong" a woman with whom his mother shared nothing except a common
gender, and a woman whom actually he had come to despise. Nonetheless,
if my future as a man required me to sever at long last the reverential
bonds of childhood, then the brutal and bloody surgery on the emotions would
have to proceed, and without blaming the physician in charge for whatever
pain the operation might cause the blameless mother or for the disorien-
tation it produced in the apron-strung idolatrous son…Thus did I try
to rationalize the severity with which I was coming to judge my mother,
and to justify and understand the rather patriarchal German-Jewish doctor,
whose insistence on "the phallic threatening mother" I sometimes thought
revealed more about some bete noire of his than of my own.

But that suspicion was not one that I cared, or dared, to pursue. I was
far too much the needy patient to presume to be my doctor's doctor. I had
to trust someone if I hoped ever to recover from my defeat, and I chose him.
I had, of course, no real idea what kind of man Dr. Spielvogel was out-
side of his office, or even in the office with other patients. Where exactly
he had been born, raised, and educated, when and under what circumstances
he had emigrated to America, what his wife was like, whether he had
children--I knew no more about these simple facts of his life than I did
about the man who sold me my morning paper; and I was too obedient to
what I understood to be the rules of the game to ask, and too preoccupied
with my own troubles to be anything more than sporadically curious about
this stranger in whose presence I lay down on a couch in a dimly lit room
for fifty minutes, three afternoons a week, and spoke as I had never spoken
even to those who had proved themselves worthy of my trust. My attitude
toward the doctor was very much like that of the first-grader who accepts
on faith the wisdom, authority, and probity of his teacher, and is unable
to grasp the idea that his teacher also lives in the ambiguous and uncertain
world beyond the blackboard.

I had myself been just such a youngster, and experienced my first
glimpse of my doctor riding a Fifth Avenue bus with the same stunned
disbelief and embarrassment that I had felt at age eight when, in the
company of my sister, I had passed the window of a neighborhood
barbershop one day and saw the man who taught "shop" in my school
getting a shine and a shave. I was four months into my analysis on the
drizzly morning when I looked up from the bus stop in front of Doubleday's
on Fifth Avenue and saw Spielvogel, in a rainhat and a raincoat, looking out
from a seat near the front of the No. 5 bus and wearing a decidedly dismal
expression on his face. Of course years before I had seen him in his
yachting cap sipping a drink at a summer party, so I knew for a fact that he
did not really cease to exist when he was not practicing psychoanalysis on
me; I happened too to have been acquainted with several young training
analysts during my year of graduate work at Chicago, people with whom
I'd gotten along easily enough during evenings in the local student bar.
But then Spielvogel was no casual beer-drinking acquaintance: he was
the repository of my intimate history, he was to be the instrument of my
psychic--my spiritual--recovery, and that a person entrusted with that
responsibility should actually go out into the street and board a public
vehicle such as carried the common herd from point A to point B--well, it
was beyond my comprehension. How could I have been so stupid as to
confide my darkest secrets to a person who went out in public and took a
bus? How could I ever have believed that this gaunt, middle-aged man,
looking so done in and defenseless beneath his olive-green rainhat, this
unimpressive stranger on a bus, could possibly free me from my woes? And
just what in God's name was I expected to do now--climb aboard, pay my
fare, proceed down the aisle, tap him on the shoulder, and say-say what?
"Good day, Dr. Spielvogel, it's me--you remember, the man in his wife's
underwear."

I turned and walked rapidly away. When he saw me move off, the bus
driver, who had been waiting patiently for me to rise from my reverie and
enter the door he held open, called out, in a voice weary of ministering
to the citizenry of Manhattan, "Another screwball," and drove off, bearing
through an orange light my shaman and savior, bound (I later learned,
incredulously) for an appointment with his dentist.

It was in September of 1964, at the beginning of my third year of ana-
lysis, that I had a serious falling out with Dr. Spielvogel. I considered
discontinuing the therapy with him, and even after I decided to stay on,
found it impossible to invest in him and the process anything like the belief
and hope with which I had begun. I could never actually divest myself of
the idea that I had been ill-used by him, though I knew that the worst thing
I could do in my "condition" was nurse feelings of victimization and
betrayal. Six months ago, when I left New York, it was largely because I
was so disheartened and confounded by what Susan had done; but also it
was because my dispute with Dr. Spielvogel, which never really had been
settled to my satisfaction, had become again a volatile issue between us--
revived, to be sure, by Susan's suicide attempt, which I had been fearing for
years, but which Spielvogel had generally contended was a fear having
more to do with my neurotic personality than with "reality." That I should
think that Susan might try to kill herself if and when I should ever leave her,
Spielvogel had chalked up to narcissistic self-dramatization. So too did he
explain my demoralization after the fear had been substantiated by fact.

"I am not a fortune-teller," he said, "and neither are you. There was as
much reason, if not more, to believe she would not do it as that she would.
You know yourself--she knew herself--that this affair of yours was the
most satisfying thing to happen to her in years. She had, literally, the time
of her life. She began at last to become a full-grown woman. She bloomed,
from all reports--correct? If when you left her, she did not have enough
support from her doctor, from her family, from wherever, well, that is
unfortunate. But what can you do? She did at least have what she had with
you. And she could not have had it without you. To regret now having
stayed with her all those years, because of this--well, that is not to look
very carefully at the credit side of the ledger. Especially, Mr. Tarnopol, as
she did not commit suicide. You act here, you know, as though that is what
has happened, as though there has been a funeral, and so on. But she only
attempted suicide, after all. And, I would think, with little intention of
succeeding. The fact is that her cleaning woman was to arrive early the very
next morning, and that the woman had a key with which to let herself into
Susan's apartment. She knew then that she would be found in only a few
hours. Correct? Of course, Susan took something of a risk to get what she
wanted, but as we see, she pulled it off quite well. She did not die. You did
come running. And you are running yet. Maybe only in circles, but that for
her is still better than out of her life completely. It is you, you see, who is
blowing this up out of all proportion. Your narcissism again, if I may say so.
Much too much overestimation of--well, of practically everything. And to
use this incident, which has not ended so tragically, you know--to use this
incident to break off therapy and go off into isolation again, once more the
defeated man, well, I think you are making a serious mistake."

If so, I went ahead and made it. I could not continue to confide in him
or to take myself seriously as his patient, and I left. The last of my
attachments had been severed: no more Susan, no more Spielvogel, no more
Maureen. No longer in the path of love, hate, or measured professional
concern--by accident or design, for good or bad, I am not there.

Note: A letter from Spielvogel arrived here at the Colony just this
week, expressing thanks for the copies of "Salad Days" and

"Courting Disaster" that I mailed to him earlier in the month. I had
written:

For some time now I've been debating whether to send on to you these two
(postanalytic) stories I wrote during my first months here in Vermont. I
do now, not because I wish to open my case up to a renewed investigation
in your office (though I see how you might interpret these manuscripts in
that way), but because of your interest in the processes of art (and because
lately you have been on my mind). I know that your familiarity with the
biographical and psychological data that furnished the raw material for such
flights of fancy might give rise to theoretical speculation, and the
theoretical speculation give rise in turn to the itch to communicate your
findings to your fellows. Your eminent colleague Ernst Kris has noted that
"the psychology of artistic style is unwritten," and my suspicion (aroused
by past experience) is that you might be interested in taking a crack at it.
Feel free to speculate all you want, of course, but please, nothing in print
without my permission. Yes, that is still a sore subject, but not so sore
(I've concluded) as to outweigh this considered impulse to pass on for your
professional scrutiny these waking dreams whose "unconscious" origins (I
must warn you) may not be so unconscious as a professional might like to
conclude at first glance. Yours, Peter Tarnopol.

Spielvogel's reply:

It was thoughtful of you to send on to me your two new stories. I read
them with great interest and enjoyment, and as ever, admiration for your
skills and understanding. The two stories are so different and yet so expertly
done, and to my mind balance each other perfectly. The scenes with Sharon
in the first I found especially funny, and in the second the fastidious
attention that the narrating voice pays to itself struck me as absolutely
right, given his concerns (or "human concerns" as the Zuckerman of "Salad
Days" would have said in his undergraduate seminar). What a sad and pain-
ful story it is. Moral, too, in the best, most serious way. You appear to
be doing very well. I wish you continued success with your work. Sincerely,
Otto Spielvogel.

This is the doctor whose ministrations I have renounced? Even if the
letter is just a contrivance to woo me back onto his couch, what a lovely
and clever contrivance! I wonder whom he has been seeing about his prose
style. Now why couldn't he write about me like that? (Or wasn't that piece
he wrote about me really as bad as I thought? Or was it even worse? And
did it matter either way? Surely I know what it's like having trouble writing
up my case in English sentences. I've been trying to do it now for years.
Then, was ridding myself of him wrong too? Or am I just succumbing--
like a narcissist! Oh, he knows his patient, this conjurer…Or am I being
too suspicious?)

So: shall I go ahead now and confuse myself further by sending copies
of the stories to Susan? to my mother and father? to Dina Dornbusch? to
Maureen's Group? How about to Maureen herself?

Dear Departed: It may cheer you up some to read the enclosed. Little
did you know how persuasive you were. Actually had you played your
cards right and been just a little less nuts we'd be miserably married yet.
Even as it is, your widower thinks practically only of you. Do you think of
him in Heaven, or (as I fear) have you set your sights on some big strapping
neurotic angel ambivalent about his sexual role? These two stories owe
much to your sense of things--you might have conceived of the self
intoxicated princeling of "Salad Days" yourself and called him me; and,
allowing for artistic license of course, isn't Lydia pretty much how you saw
yourself (if, that is, you could have seen yourself as you would have had
others see you)? How is Eternity, by the way? In the hope that these two
stories help to pass the time a little more quickly, I am, your bereaved,
Peter.

Out of the whirlwind, a reply:

　　　Dear Peter: I've read the stories and found them most amusing, par-
　　　ticularly the one that isn't supposed to be. Your spiritual exertions
　　　(on your own behalf) are very touching. I took the liberty (I didn't
　　　imagine you would mind) of passing them on to the Lord. You will be
　　　pleased to know that "Courting Disaster" brought a smile to His lips
　　　as well. No wrath whatsoever, I'm happy to report, though He did re-
　　　mark (not without a touch of astonishment), "It is all vanity, isn't
　　　it?" The stories are currently making the rounds of the saints, who
　　　I'm sure will find your aspiration to their condition rather flatter-
　　　ing. The rumor here among the holy martyrs is that you've got a new
　　　work under way that you say is really going "to tell it like it is."
　　　If so, I expect that means Maureen again. How do you intend to por-
　　　tray me this time? Holding your head on a plate? I think a phallus
　　　would increase your sales. But of course you know best how to exploit
　　　my memory for high artistic purposes. Good luck with My Martyrdom as
　　　a Man, That is to be the title, is it not? All of us here in Heaven
　　　look forward to the amusement it is sure to afford those who know you
　　　from on high. Your beloved wife, Maureen. P.S. Eternity is fine. Just
　　　about long enough to forgive a son of a bitch like you.

And now, class, will you please hand in your papers, and before turning
to Dr. Spielvogel's useful fiction, let us see what you have made of the
legends here contrived:


　　　　　　　　　　　　English 312

　　　　　　　　　　 M&F 1:00-2:30

　　　　　　 (assignations by appointment)

　　　　　　　　　Professor Tarnopol

　　　　THE USES OF THE USEFUL FICTIONS:

　　　　　Or, Professor Tarnopol Withdraws

　　　　　　 Somewhat from His Feelings

　　　　　　　　　　by Karen Oakes

　　　Certainly I do not deny when I am reading that the author may be
　　　impassioned, nor even that he might have conceived the first plan
　　　of his work under the sway of passion. But his decision to write
　　　supposes that he withdraws somewhat from his feelings…

　　　　　　--Sartre, What Is Literature?

　　　On ne feut jamais se connaitre, mais settlement se raconter.

　　　　　　　--Simone de Beauvoir

"Salad Days," the shorter of the two Zuckerman stories assigned for
today, attempts by means of comic irony to contrast the glories and
triumphs of Nathan Zuckerman's golden youth with the "misfortune" of his
twenties, to which the author suddenly alludes in the closing lines. The
author (Professor Tarnopol) does not elucidate in the story the details of that
misfortune; indeed, the point he makes is that, by him at least, it cannot be
done. "Unfortunately, the author of this story, having himself experienced a
similar misfortune at about the same age, does not have it in him, even yet,
midway through his thirties, to tell it briefly or to find it funny.
‘Unfortunate,'" concludes the fabricated Zuckerman, speaking in behalf of
the dissembling Tarnopol, "because he wonders if that isn't more the
measure of the man than of the misfortune."

In order to dilute the self-pity that (as I understand it) had poisoned his
imagination in numerous previous attempts to fictionalize his unhappy
marriage, Professor Tarnopol establishes at the outset here a tone of co-
vert (and, to some small degree, self-congratulatory) self-mockery; this
calculated attitude of comic detachment he maintains right on down to the
last paragraph, where abruptly the shield of lightheartedness is all at once
pierced by the author's pronouncement that in his estimation the true story
really isn't funny at all. All of which would appear to suggest that if
Professor Tarnopol has managed in "Salad Days" to make an artful
narrative of his misery, he has done so largely by refusing directly to
confront it.

In contrast to "Salad Days," "Courting Disaster" is marked throughout
by a tone of sobriety and an air of deep concern; here is all the heartfeltness
that has been suppressed in "Salad Days." A heroic quality adheres to the
suffering of the major characters, and their lives are depicted as far too
grave for comedy or satire. The author reports that he began this story
intending that his hero should be tricked into marrying exactly as he himself
had been. Why that bedeviling incident from Professor Tarnopol's personal
history could not be absorbed into this fictional artifice is not difficult to
understand: the Nathan Zuckerman imagined in "Courting Disaster" requires
no shotgun held to his head for him to find in the needs and sorrows of
Lydia Ketterer the altar upon which to offer up the sacrifice of his man-
hood. It is not compromising circumstances, but (in both senses) the
gravity of his character, that determines his moral career; all the culpability
is his.

In "Courting Disaster," then, Professor Tarnopol conceives of himself
and Mrs. Tarnopol as characters in a struggle that, in its moral pathos, veers
toward tragedy, rather than Gothic melodrama, or soap opera, or farce,
which are the modes that generally obtain when Professor Tarnopol narrates
the story of his marriage to me in bed. Likewise, Professor Tarnopol invents
cruel misfortunes (i.e., Lydia's incestuous father, her sadistic husband, her
mean little aunts, the illiterate Moonie) to validate and deepen Lydia's
despair and to exacerbate Nathan's morbid sense of responsibility--this
plenitude of heartache, supplying, as it were, "the objective correlative" for
the emotions of shame, grief, and guilt that inform the narration.

And that informed Professor Tarnopol's marriage.

To put the matter altogether directly: if Mrs. Tarnopol had been such a
Lydia, if Professor Tarnopol had been such a Nathan, and if I, Karen Oakes,
had been a Moonie of a stepdaughter instead of just the star pupil of my sex
in English 312 that semester, then, then his subsequent undoing would have
made a certain poetic sense.

But as it is, he is who he is, she is who she is, and I am simply myself,
the girl who would not go with him to Italy. And there is no more poetry, or
tragedy, or for that matter, comedy to it than that.

Miss Oakes: As usual, A+. Prose overly magisterial in spots, but you
understand the stories (and the author) remarkably well for one of your age
and background. It is always something to come upon a beautiful young girl
from a nice family with a theoretical turn of mind and a weakness for the
grand style and the weighty epigraph. I remember you as an entirely
beguiling person. On my deathbed I shall hear you calling from your room,
"Will you hang up the downstairs phone, please, Mom?" That plain-spoken
line spoke volumes to me too. Ka-reen, you were right not to run off to
Italy with me. It wouldn't have been Moonie and Zuckerman, but it probably
wouldn't have been any good. Still, you should know that whatever the
"neurotic" reason, I was gone on you-- let no man, lay or professional,
say I wasn't, or ascribe my "hangup" over you simply to my having
transgressed the unwritten law against copulating with those sort-of
forbidden daughters known as one's students (though I admit: asking Miss
Oakes, from behind my desk, to clarify further for the other students some
clever answer she'd just given in class, only twenty minutes after having
fallen to my knees in your room to play the supplicant beneath your belly,
was a delicious sensation; cunnilingus aside, I don't think teaching has ever
been so exciting, before or since, or that I've ever felt so tender or de-
voted to any class as I did to our English 312. Perhaps the authorities
should reconsider, from a strictly pedagogical point of view, the existing
taboo, being mindful of the benefits that may accrue to the class whose
teacher has taken one of its members as his secret love; I'll write the AAUP
about this, in good scholarly fashion of course outlining for them the tra-
dition, from Socrates to Abelard to me--nor will I fail to mention the thanks
we three received from the authorities for having thrown ourselves so con-
scientiously into our work. To think, I recounted to you on our very first
"date" what they did to Abelard--yet, here I am still stunned at how I got
mutilated by the state of New York). Ah, Miss Oakes, if only I hadn't been
so overbearing! Memories of my behavior make me cringe. I told you about
Isaac Babel and about my wife with the same veins popping. My insistence,
my doggedness, and my tears. How it must have alarmed you to hear me
sobbing over the phone--your esteemed professor! If only I had taken it a
little easier and suggested a couple of weeks together in northern Wis-
consin, some lake somewhere, rather than forever in tragic Europe, who
knows, you might have been willing to start off that way. You were brave
enough--it's just that I didn't have the wherewithal for a little at a time.
At any rate, I have had enough Vivid Experience to last awhile, and am off
in the bucolic woods writing my memoirs. Whether this will put the Vivid
Experience to rest I don't know. Perhaps what I'll think when I'm done is
that these pages add up to Maureen's final victory over Tarnopol the
novelist, the culmination of my life as her man and no more. To be writing
"in all candor" doesn't suggest that I've withdrawn that much from my
feelings. But then why the hell should I? So maybe my animus is not
wholly transformed--so maybe I am turning art into a chamberpot for
hatred, as Flaubert says I shouldn't, into so much camouflage for self
vindication--so, if the other thing is what literature is, then this ain't.
Kareen, I know I taught the class otherwise, but so what? I'll try a character
like Henry Miller, or someone out-and-out bilious like Celine for my hero
instead of Gustave Flaubert-- and won't be such an Olympian writer as it
was my ambition to be back in the days when nothing called personal
experience stood between me and aesthetic detachment. Maybe it's time
to revise my ideas about being an "artist," or "artiste" as my adversary's
lawyer preferred to pronounce it. Maybe it was always time. Only one
drawback: in that I am not a renegade bohemian or cutup of any kind (only
a municipal judge could have taken me for that), I may not be well suited
for the notoriety that attends the publication of an unabashed and
unexpurgated history of one's erotic endeavors. As the history itself will
testify, I happen to be no more immune to shame or built for public
exposure than the next burgher with shades on his bedroom windows and a
latch on the bathroom door--indeed, maybe what the whole history sig-
nifies is that I am sensitive to nothing in all the world as I am to my
moral reputation. Not that I like being fleeced of my hard-earned dough
either. Maybe I ought just to call this confession "The Case Against
Leeches, by One Who Was Bled," and publish it as a political tract--go on
Johnny Carson and angrily shake an empty billfold at America, the least I
can do for all those husbands who've been robbed deaf, dumb, and blind by
chorines and maureens in the courts of law. Inveigh with an upraised fist
against "the system," instead of against my own stupidity for falling into
the first (the first!) trap life laid for me. Or ought I to deposit these
pages too into my abounding liquor carton, and if I must embroil myself in
the battle yet again, go at it like an artist worthy of the name, without
myself as the "I," without the bawling and the spleen, and whatever else un-
attractive that shows? What do you think, shall I give this up and go back
to Zuckermanizing myself and Lydiafying Maureen and Moonieing over you?
If I do take the low road of candor (and anger and so forth) and publish
what I've got, will you (or your family) sue for invasion of privacy and
defamation of character? And if not you, won't Susan or her family? Or
will she go one better and, thoroughly humiliated, do herself in? And how
will I take it when my photograph appears on the Time magazine book page,
captioned "Tarnopol: stripped to his panties and bra." I can hear myself
screaming already. And what about the letter in the Sunday Times book
review section, signed by members of Maureen's Group, challenging my mal-
icious characterization of Maureen as a pathological liar, calling me the
liar and my hook, the fraud. How will I like it when the counterattack is
launched by the opposition--will it strike me then that I have exorcised the
past, or rather that now I have wed myself to it as irrevocably as ever I
was wed to Maureen? How will I like reading reviews of my private life in
the Toledo Blade and the Sacramento Bee? And what will Commentary make
of this confession? I can't imagine it's good for the Jews. What about when
the professional marital experts and authorities on love settle in for a
marathon discussion of my personality problems on the "David Susskind
Show"? Or is that just what I need to straighten me out? Maybe the best
treatment possible for my excessive vulnerability and preoccupation
generally with My Good Name (which is largely how I got myself into this
fix to begin with) is to go forth brazenly crying, "Virtue! a fig! ‘tis in
ourselves that we are thus or thus." Sure, quote Iago to them--tell them,
"Oh, find me self-addicted and self-deluded, find me self and nothing more!

Call me a crybaby, call me a misogynist, call me a murderer, see if I
care. Tis only in ourselves that we are thus or thus--bra and panties
notwithstanding. Your names'll never harm me!" Only they do, Ka-reen, the
names drive me wild, and always have. So where am I (to get back to
literature): still too much "under the sway of passion" for Flaubertian
transcendence, but too raw and touchy by far (or just too ordinary, a cit-
izen like any other) to consider myself equal to what might, in the long
run, do my sense of shame the greatest good: a full-scale unbuttoning, a
la Henry Miller or Jean Genet…Though frankly (to use the adverb of the
unbuttoned), Tarnopol, as he is called, is beginning to seem as imaginary
as my Zuckermans anyway, or at least as detached from the memoirist--his
revelations coming to seem like still another "useful fiction," and not
because I am telling lies. I am trying to keep to the facts. Maybe all I'm
saying is that words, being words, only approximate the real thing, and so
no matter how close I come, I only come close. Or maybe I mean that as far
as I can see there is no conquering or exorcising the past with words-words
born either of imagination or forthrightness--as there seems to be (for me)
no forgetting it. Maybe I am just learning what a past is. At any rate, all
I can do with my story is tell it. And tell it. And tell it. And that's the
truth. And you, what do you do to pass the time? And why do I care all of a
sudden, and again? Perhaps because it occurs to me that you are now twenty-
five, the age at which I passed out of Eden into the real unreal world
--or perhaps it's just because I remember you being so uncrazy and so
much your own person. Young, of course, but that to me made it all the
more extraordinary. As did your face. Look, this sexual quarantine is not
going to last forever, even I know that. So if you're ever passing through
Vermont, give me a call. Maureen is dead (you might not have guessed
from how I've gone on here) and another love affair ended recently with my
friend (the Susan mentioned above) attempting to kill herself. So come on
East and try your luck. See me. You always liked a little adventure. As
did your esteemed professor of sublimation and high art, Peter T.

My dispute with Spielvogel arose over an article he had written for the
American Forum for Psychoanalytic Studies and published in a special
number focusing on "The Riddle of Creativity." I happened to catch sight
of the magazine on his desk as I was leaving the office one evening in the
third year of my analysis--noticed the symposium tide on the cover and
then his name among the contributors listed below. I asked if I might
borrow it to read his paper. He answered, "Of course," though it seemed to
me that before issuing gracious consent, a look of distress, or alarm, had
crossed his face--as though anticipating (correctly) what my reaction to
the piece would be…But if so, why had the magazine been displayed so con-
spicuously on the desk I passed every evening leaving his office? Since he
knew that like most literary people I as a matter of course scan the titles
of all printed matter lying out in the open--by now he had surely observed
that reading-man's tic in me a hundred times--it would seem that either he
didn't care one way or another whether I noticed the Forum, or that he
actually wanted me to see his name on the magazine's cover and read his
contribution. Why then the split second of alarm? Or was I, as he was
inevitably to suggest later, merely "projecting" my own "anticipatory
anxiety" onto him?

"Am I submitted in evidence?" I asked, speaking in a mild, jesting
tone, as though it was as unlikely as it was likely and didn't matter to me
either way. "Yes," answered Spielvogel. "Well," said I, and pretended to be
taken aback a little in order to hide just how surprised I was. "I'll read it
tonight." Spielvogel's polite smile now obscured entirely whatever that
might really mean to him.

As was now my custom, after the six o'clock session with Dr. Spielvogel,
I walked from his office at Eighty-ninth and Park down to Susan's a-
partment, ten blocks to the south. It was a little more than a year
since Susan had become an undergraduate at City College, and our life
together had taken on a predictable and pleasant orderliness--pleasant, for
me, for being so predictable. I wanted nothing more than day after day
without surprises; just the sort of repetitious experience that drove other
people wild with boredom was the most gratifying thing I could imagine. I
was high on routine and habit.

During the day, while Susan was off at school, I went home and wrote,
as best I could, in my apartment on West Twelfth Street. On Wednesdays I
went off in the morning to Long Island (driving my brother's car), where I
spent the day at Hofstra, teaching my two classes and in between having
conferences with my writing students. Student stories were just beginning
at this time to turn heavily "psychedelic"--undergraduate romantics of my
own era had called their unpunctuated pages of random associations "stream-
of-consciousness" writing--and to take "dope" smoking as their subject.
As I happened to be largely uninterested in drug-inspired visions or the
conversation that attended them, and rather impatient with writing that
depended for its force upon unorthodox typographical arrangements or
marginal decorations in Magic Marker, I found teaching creative writing
even less rewarding than it had been back in Wisconsin, where at least
there had been Karen Oakes. My other course, however, an honors reading
seminar in a dozen masterpieces of my own choosing, had an unusually
powerful hold on me, and I taught the class with a zealousness and
vehemence that left me limp at the end of my two hours. I did not
completely understand what inspired this state of manic excitement or
produced my molten volubility until the course had evolved over a couple
of semesters and I realized what the principle of selection was that lay
behind my reading list from the masters. At the outset I had thought I was
just assigning great works of fiction that I admired and wanted my fifteen
senior literature students to read and admire too--only in time did I realize
that a course whose core had come to be The Brothers Karamazov, The
Scarlet Letter, The Trial, Death in Venice, Anna Karenina, and Kleist's
Michael Kohlhaas derived of course from the professor's steadily
expanding extracurricular interest in the subject of transgression and
punishment.

In the city at the end of my workday I would generally walk the seventy-
odd blocks to Spielvogel's office--for exercise and to unwind after yet
another session at the desk trying, with little success, to make art out of
my disaster, but also in the vain attempt to get myself to feel like something
other than a foreigner being held against his will in a hostile and alien
country. A small-city boy to begin with (growing up in Yonkers in the
thirties and forties, I probably had more in common with youngsters raised
in Terre Haute or Altoona than in any of the big New York boroughs), I
could not see a necessary or sufficient reason for my being a resident of
the busiest, most congested spot on earth, especially since what I required
above all for my kind of work were solitude and quiet. My brief tenure on
the Lower East Side following my discharge from the service certainly
evoked no nostalgia; when, shortly after my day in court with Maureen, I
hiked crosstown one morning from West Twelfth Street to Tompkins Square
Park, it was not to reawaken fond memories of the old neighborhood, but to
search through the scruffy little park and the rundown streets nearby for the
woman from whom Maureen had bought a specimen of urine some three
and a half years earlier. In a morning of hunting around, I of course saw
numerous Negro women of childbearing age out in the park and in the
aisles of the local supermarket and climbing on and off buses on Avenues A
and B, but I did not approach a single one of them to ask if perchance back
in March of 1959 she had entered into negotiations with a short, dark-haired
young woman from "a scientific organization," and if so, to ask if she
would now (for a consideration) come along to my lawyer's office to sign
an affidavit testifying that the urine submitted to the pharmacist as Mrs.
Tarnopol's had in actuality been her own. Enraged and frustrated as I was
by the outcome of the separation hearing, crazed enough to spend an entire
morning on this hopeless and useless undercover operation, I was never
completely possessed.

Or is that what I am now, living here and writing this?

My point is that by and large to me Manhattan was: one, the place to
which I had come in 1958 as a confident young man starting out on a
promising literary career, only to wind up deceived there into marriage with
a woman for whom I had lost all affection and respect; and two, the place to
which I had returned in 1962, in flight and seeking refuge, only to be
prevented by the local judiciary from severing the marital bond that had all
but destroyed my confidence and career. To others perhaps Fun City and
Gotham and the Big Apple, the Great White Way of commerce and finance
and art--to me the place where I paid through the nose. The number of
people with whom I shared my life in this most populous of cities could be
seated comfortably around a kitchen table, and the Manhattan square
footage toward which I felt an intimate attachment and considered essential
to my well-being and survival would have fit, with room to spare, into the
Yonkers apartment in which I'd been raised. There was my own small apart-
ment on West Twelfth Street--rather, the few square feet holding my desk
and my wastebasket; on Seventy-ninth and Park, at Susan's, there was the
dining table where we ate together, the two easy chairs across from one
another where we read in her living room at night, and the double bed we
shared; ten blocks north of Susan's there was a psychoanalyst's couch, rich
with personal associations; and up on West 107th Street, Morris's cluttered
little study, where I went once a month or so, as often willingly as not, to
be big-brothered--that being the northernmost pin on this runaway husband's
underground railway map of New York. The remaining acreage of this city
of cities was just there--as were those multitudes of workers and traders
and executives and clerks with whom I had no connection whatsoever--
and no matter which "interesting" and lively route I took to Spielvogel's
office at the end of each day, whether I wandered up through the garment
district, or Times Square, or the diamond center, or by way of the old
bookstores on Fourth Avenue, or through the zoo in Central Park, I could
never make a dent in my feeling of foreignness or alter my sense of myself
as someone who had been detained here by the authorities, stopped in
transit like that great paranoid victim and avenger of injustice in the
Kleist novella that I taught with such passion out at Hofstra.

One anecdote to illustrate the dimensions of my cell and the thickness
of the walls. Late one afternoon in the fall of '64, on my way up to
Spielvogel's, I had stopped off at Schulte's secondhand bookstore on Fourth
Avenue and descended to the vast basement where thousands of "used"
novels are alphabetically arranged for sale in rows of bookshelves twelve
feet high. Moving slowly through that fiction warehouse, I made my way
eventually to the Ts. And there it was: my book. To one side Sterne, Styron,
and Swift, to the other Thackeray, Thurber, and Trol-lope. In the middle (as
I saw it) a secondhand copy of A Jewish Father, in its original blue and
white jacket. I took it down and opened to the flyleaf. It had been given to
"Paula" by "Jay" in April 1960. Wasn't that the very month that Maureen
and I had it out amid the blooming azaleas on the Spanish Steps? I looked
to see if there were markings on any of the pages, and then I placed the
book back where I had found it, between A Tale of a Tub and Henry
Esmond. To see out in the world, and in such company, this memento of my
triumphant apprenticeship had set my emotions churning, the pride and
hopelessness all at once. "That bitch!" said I, just as a teenage boy,
cradling half a dozen books in his arms, and wearing a washed-out gray
cotton jacket, noiselessly approached me on his sneakers. An employee, I
surmised, of Schulte's lower depths. "Yes?" "Excuse me," he said, "is your
name Peter Tarnopol by any chance, sir?" I colored a little. "It is." "The
novelist?" I nodded my head, and then he turned a very rich red himself.
Uncertain clearly as to what to say next, he suddenly blurted, "I mean—
what ever happened to you?" I shrugged. "I don't know," I told him, "I'm
waiting to find out myself." The next instant I was out into the ferment and
pressing north: skirting the office workers springing from the revolving
doors and past me down into the subway stations, I plunged through the
scrimmage set off by the traffic light at each intersection—down the field I
charged, cutting left and right through the faceless counterforce, until at last
I reached Eighty-ninth Street, and dropping onto the couch, delivered over
to my confidant and coach what I had carried intact all the way from
Schulte's crypt—the bookboy's heartfelt question that had been blurted out
at me so sweetly, and my own bemused reply. That was all I had heard
through the world-famous midtown din which travelers journey halfway
round the globe to behold.

So then: after paying my call on the doctor, I would head on down to
Susan's for dinner and to spend the evening, the two of us most nights
reading in those easy chairs on either side of the fireplace, until at mid-
night we went to bed, and before sleep, regularly devoted ourselves for some
fifteen or twenty minutes to our mutual effort at erotic rehabilitation. In
the morning Susan was up and out by seven thirty—Dr. Golding's first patient
of the day—and about an hour later I departed myself, book in hand, only
occasionally now getting a look from one of the residents who thought that
if the young widow McCall had fallen to a gentleman caller of the Israelite
persuasion in baggy corduroy trousers and scuffed suede shoes, she might
at least instruct him to enter and exit by way of the service elevator. Still,
if not suitably haut bourgeois for Susan's stately co-op, I was in most ways
leading the "regular and orderly" life that Flaubert had recommended for
him who would be "violent and original" in his work.

And the work, I thought, was beginning to show it. At least there was be-
ginning to be work that I did not feel I had to consign, because it was so
bad, to the liquor carton at the bottom of my closet. In the previous year
I had completed three short stories: one had been published in the New
Yorker, one in the Kenyon Review, and the third was to appear in Harper's.
They constituted the first fiction of mine in print since the publication
of A Jewish Father in 1959. The three stories, simple though they were,
demonstrated a certain clarity and calm that had not been the hallmark of
my writing over the previous years; inspired largely by incidents from
boyhood and adolescence that I had recollected in analysis, they had
nothing to do with Maureen and the urine and the marriage. That book,
based upon my misadventures in manhood, I still, of course, spent
maddening hours on every day, and I had some two thousand pages of
manuscript in the liquor carton to prove it. By now the various abandoned
drafts had gotten so shuffled together and interwoven, the pages so defaced
with Xs and arrows of a hundred different intensities of pen and pencil, the
margins so tattooed with comments, reminders, with schemes for pagination
(Roman numerals, Arabic numerals, letter of the alphabet in complex
combinations that even I, the cryptographer, could no longer decode) that
what impressed one upon attempting to penetrate that prose was not the
imaginary world it depicted, but the condition of the person who'd been
doing the imagining: the manuscript was the message, and the message was
Turmoil. I had, in fact, found a quotation from Flaubert appropriate to my
failure, and had copied it out of my worn volume of his correspondence (a
book purchased during my army stint to help tide me over to civilian life); I
had Scotch-taped the quotation to the carton bearing those five hundred
thousand words, not a one of them juste. It seemed to me it might be a
fitting epitaph to that effort, when and if I was finally going to have to
call it quits. Flaubert, to his mistress Louise Colet, who had published a
poem maligning their contemporary, Alfred de Musset: "You wrote with a
personal emotion that distorted your outlook and made it impossible to keep
before your eyes the fundamental principles that must underlie any
imaginative composition. It has no aesthetic. You have turned art into an
outlet for passion, a kind of chamberpot to catch an overflow. It smells bad;
it smells of hate!"

But if I could not leave off picking at the corpse and remove it from the
autopsy room to the grave, it was because this genius, who had done so
much to form my literary conscience as a student and an aspiring novelist,
had also written—

Art, like the Jewish God, wallows in sacrifice.

And:

In Art…the creative impulse is essentially fanatic.

And:

…the excesses of the great masters! They pursue an idea to its
furthermost limits.

These inspirational justifications for what Dr. Spielvogel might describe
simply as "a fixation due to a severe traumatic experience" I also copied
out on strips of paper and (with some self-irony, I must say) taped them
too, like so many fortune-cookie ribbons, across the face of the box con-
taining my novel-in-chaos. On the evening that I arrived at Susan's with
the American Forum for Psychoanalytic Studies in my hand, I called hello
from the door, but instead of going to the kitchen, as was my habit—how I
habituated myself during those years! how I coveted whatever orderliness I
had been able to reestablish in my life!— to chat with her from a stool
while she prepared our evening's delicacies, I went into the living room and
sat on the edge of Jamey's flame-stitch ottoman, reading quickly through
Spielvogel's article, entitled "Creativity: The Narcissism of the Artist."
Somewhere in the middle of the piece I came upon what I'd been looking
for—at least I supposed this was it: "A successful Italian-American poet in
his forties entered into therapy because of anxiety states experienced as
a result of his enormous ambivalence about leaving his wife…" Up to this
point in the article, the patients described by Spielvogel had been "an
actor," "a painter," and "a composer"—so this had to be me. Only I had not
been in my forties when I first became Spielvogel's patient; I'd come to
him at age twenty-nine, wrecked by a mistake I'd made at twenty-six. Surely
between a man in his forties and a man in his twenties there are differ-
ences of experience, expectation, and character that cannot be brushed a-
side so easily as this…And "successful"? Does that word (in my mind, I
immediately began addressing Spielvogel directly), does that word describe
to you the tenor of my life at that time? A "successful" apprenticeship,
absolutely, but when I came to you in 1962, at age twenty-nine, I had for
three years been writing fiction I couldn't stand, and I could no longer
even teach a class without fear of Maureen rushing in to "expose" me to my
students. Successful? His forties? And surely it goes without saying that to
disguise (in my brother's words) "a nice civilized Jewish boy" as something
called "an Italian-American," well, that is to be somewhat dim-witted about
matters of social and cultural background that might well impinge upon a
person's psychology and values. And while we're at it, Dr. Spielvogel, a
poet and a novelist have about as much in common as a jockey and a diesel
driver. Somebody ought to tell you that, especially since "creativity" is your
subject here. Poems and novels arise out of radically different sensibilities
and resemble each other not at all, and you cannot begin to make sense
about "creativity" or "the artist" or even "narcissism" if you are going
to be so insensitive to fundamental distinctions having to do with age,
accomplishment, background, and vocation. And if I may, sir— his self is to
many a novelist what his own physiognomy is to a painter of portraits: the
closest subject at hand demanding scrutiny, a problem for his art to solve—
given the enormous obstacles to truthfulness, the artistic problem. He is not
simply looking into the mirror because he is transfixed by what he sees.
Rather, the artist's success depends as much as anything on his powers of
detachment, on de-narcissizing himself. That's where the excitement comes
in. That hard conscious work that makes it art! Freud, Dr. Spielvogel,
studied his own dreams not because he was a "narcissist," but because he
was a student of dreams. And whose were at once the least and most
accessible of dreams, if not his own?

…And so it went, my chagrin renewed practically with each word. I
could not read a sentence in which it did not seem to me that the
observation was off, the point missed, the nuance blurred—in short, the
evidence rather munificently distorted so as to support a narrow and
unilluminating thesis at the expense of the ambiguous and perplexing
actuality. In all there were only two pages of text on the "Italian-American
poet," but so angered and disappointed was I by what seemed to me the
unflagging wrongness of the description of my case, that it took me ten
minutes to get from the top of page 85 to the bottom of 86. "…enormous
ambivalence about leaving his wife…It soon became clear that the poet's
central problem here as elsewhere was his castration anxiety vis-a-vis a
phallic mother figure…" Not so! His central problem here as elsewhere
derives from nothing of the sort. That will not serve to explain his
"enormous ambivalence" about leaving his wife any more than it describes
the prevailing emotional tone of his childhood years, which was one of
intense security. "His father was a harassed man, ineffectual and submissive
to his mother…" What? Now where did you get that idea? My father was
harassed, all right, but not by his wife—any child who lived in the same
house with them knew that much. He was harassed by his own adamant
refusal to allow his three children or his wife to do without: he was harassed
by his own vigor, by his ambitions, by his business, by the times. By his
overpowering commitment to the idea of Family and the religion he made
of Doing A Man's Job! My "ineffectual" father happened to have worked
twelve hours a day, six and seven days a week, often simultaneously at two
exhausting jobs, with the result that not even when the store was as barren
of customers as the Arctic tundra, did his loved ones lack for anything
essential. Broke and overworked, no better off than a serf or an indentured
servant in the America of the thirties, he did not take to drink, jump out of
the window, or beat his wife and kids—and by the time he sold Tarnopol's
Haberdashery and retired two years ago, he was making twenty thousand
bucks a year. Good Christ, Spielvogel, from whose example did I come to
associate virility with hard work and self-discipline, if not from my
father's? Why did I like to go down to the store on Saturdays and spend all
day in the stockroom arranging and stacking the boxes of goods? In order to
hang around an ineffectual father? Why did I listen like Desdemona to
Othello when he used to lecture the customers on Interwoven socks and
McGregor shirts—because he was had at it? Don't kid yourself—and the
other psychiatrists. It was because I was so proud of his affiliation with
those big brand names—because his pitch was so convincing. It wasn't his
wife's hostility he had to struggle against, but the world's! And he did it,
with splitting headaches to be sure, but without giving in. I've told you that
a hundred times. Why don't you believe me? Why, to substantiate your
"ideas," do you want to create this fiction about me and my family, when
your gift obviously lies elsewhere. Let me make up stories—you make
sense! "…in order to avoid a confrontation with his dependency needs
toward his wife the poet acted out sexually with other women almost from
the beginning of his marriage." But that just is not so! You must be thinking
of some other poet. Look, is this supposed to be an amalgam of the ailing,
or me alone? Who was there to "act out" with other than Karen? Doctor, I
had a desperate affair with that girl—hopeless and ill-advised and
adolescent, that may well be, but also passionate, also painful, also warm
hearted, which was what the whole thing was about to begin with: I was
dying for some humanness in my life, that's why I reached out and touched
her hair! And oh yes, I fucked a prostitute in Naples after a forty-eight hour
fight with Maureen in our hotel. And another in Venice, correct—making
two in all. Is that what you call "acting out" with "other women almost
from the beginning of his marriage"? The marriage only lasted three years!
It was all "almost" the beginning. And why don't you mention how it
began? "…he once picked up a girl at a party…" But that was here in New
York, months and months after I had left Maureen in Wisconsin. The
marriage was over, even if the state of New York refused to allow that to be
so! "…the poet acted out his anger in his relationships with women,
reducing all women to masturbatory sexual objects…" Now, do you really
mean to say that? All women? Is that what Karen Oakes was to me, "a
masturbatory sexual object"? Is that what Susan McCall is to me now? Is
that why I have encouraged and cajoled and berated her into going back to
finish her schooling, because she is "a masturbatory sexual object"? Is that
why I nearly give myself a stroke each night trying to help her to come?
Look, let's get down to the case of cases: Maureen. Do you think that's
what she was to me, "a masturbatory sexual object"? Good God, what a
reading of my story that is! Rather than reducing that lying, hysterical bitch
to an object of any kind, I made the grotesque mistake of elevating her to
the status of a human being toward whom I had a moral responsibility.
Nailed myself with my romantic morality to the cross of her desperation!
Or, if you prefer, caged myself in with my cowardice! And don't tell me
that was out of "guilt" for having already made of her "a masturbatory
sexual object" because you just can't have it both ways! Had I actually been
able to treat her as some goddam "object," or simply to see her for what she
was, I would never have done my manly duty and married her! Did it ever
occur to you, Doctor, in the course of your ruminations, that maybe I was
the one who was made into a sexual object? You've got it all backwards,
Spielvogel—inside out! And how can that be? How can you, who have
done me so much good, have it all so wrong? Now there is something to
write an article about! That is a subject for a symposium! Don't you see, it
isn't that women mean too little to me—what's caused the trouble is that
they mean so much. The testing ground, not for potency, but virtue! Believe
me, if I'd listened to my prick instead of to my upper organs, I would never
have gotten into this mess to begin with! I'd still be fucking Dina
Dornbusch! And she'd have been my wife!

What I read next brought me up off the ottoman and to my feet, as
though in a terrifying dream my name had finally been called—then I
remembered that blessedly it was not a Jewish novelist in his late twenties
or early thirties called Tarnopol, but a nameless Italian-American poet in his
forties that Spielvogel claimed to be describing (and diagnosing) for his
colleagues. "…leaving his semen on fixtures, towels, etc., so completely
libidinized was his anger; on another occasion, he dressed himself in
nothing but his wife's underpants, brassiere, and stockings…?" Stockings?
Oh, I didn't put on her stockings, damn it! Can't you get anything right?
And it was not at all "another occasion"! One, she had just drawn blood
from her wrist with my razor; two, she had just confessed (a) to perpetrating
a fraud to get me to marry her and (b) to keeping it secret from me for three
wretched years of married life; three, she had just threatened to put Karen's
"pure little face" in every newspaper in Wisconsin-Then came the worst of
it, what made the protective disguise of the Italian-American poet so
ludicrous…In the very next paragraph Spielvogel recounted an incident
from my childhood that I had myself narrated somewhat more extensively
in the autobiographical New Yorker story published above my name the
previous month.

It had to do with a move we had made during the war, when Moe was
off in the merchant marine. To make way for the landlord's newlywed
daughter and her husband, we had been dispossessed from the second-floor
apartment of the two-family house where we had been living ever since the
family had moved to Yonkers from the Bronx nine years earlier, when I'd
been born. My parents had been able to find a new apartment very like our
old one, and fortunately only a little more expensive, some six blocks away
in the same neighborhood; nonetheless, they had been infuriated by the
high-handed treatment they had received from the landlord, particularly
given the loving, proprietary care that my mother had taken of the building,
and my father of the little yard, over the years. For me, being uprooted after
a lifetime in the same house was utterly bewildering; to make matters even
worse, the first night in our new apartment I had gone to bed with the room
in a state of disarray that was wholly foreign to our former way of life.
Would it be this way forever-more? Eviction? Confusion? Disorder? Were
we on the skids? Would this somehow result in my brother's ship, off in the
dangerous North Atlantic, being sunk by a German torpedo? The day after
the move, when it came time to go home from school for lunch, instead of
heading off for the new address, I "unthinkingly" returned to the house in
which I had lived all my life in perfect safety with brother, sister, mother,
and father. At the second-floor landing I was astonished to find the door
to our apartment wide open and to hear men talking loudly inside. Yet
standing in the hallway on that floor planed smooth over the years by my
mother's scrub brush, I couldn't seem to get myself to remember that we
had moved the day before and now lived elsewhere. "It's Nazis!" I thought.
The Nazis had parachuted into Yonkers, made their way to our street, and
taken everything away. Taken my mother away. So I suddenly perceived it. I
was no braver than the ordinary nine-year-old, and no bigger, and so where
I got the courage to peek inside I don't know. But when I did, I saw that
"the Nazis" were only the house-painters sitting on a drop cloth on what
used to be our living-room floor, eating their sandwiches out of wax-paper
wrappings. I ran—down that old stairwell, the feel of the rubber treads on
each stair as familiar to me as the teeth in my head, and through the
neighborhood to our new family sanctum, and at the sight of my mother in
her apron (unbeaten, unbloodied, unraped, though visibly distressed from
imagining what might have happened to delay her punctual child on his
way home from school), I collapsed into her arms in a fit of tears.

Now, as Spielvogel interpreted this incident, I cried in large part
because of "guilt over the aggressive fantasies directed toward the mother."
As I construed it—in the short story in journal form, entitled "The Diary of
Anne Frank's Contemporary"— I cry with relief to find that my mother is
alive and well, that the new apartment has been transformed during the
morning I have been in school into a perfect replica of the old one—and
that we are Jews who live in the haven of Westchester County, rather than
in our ravaged, ancestral, Jew-hating Europe.

Susan finally came in from the kitchen to see what I was doing off by
myself.

"Why are you standing there like that? Peter, what's happened?"

I held the journal in the air. "Spielvogel has written an article about
something he calls creativity.' And I'm in it."

"By name?"

"No, but identifiably me. Me coming home to the wrong house when I
was nine. He knew I was using it. I talked about that story to him, and still
he goes ahead and has some fictitious Italian-American poet—!"

"Who? I can't follow you."

"Here!" I handed her the magazine. "Here! This straw fucking patient
is supposed to be me! Read it! Read this thing!"

She sat down on the ottoman and began to read. "Oh, Peter."

"Keep going."

"It says…"

"What?"

"It says here—you put on Maureen's underwear and stockings. Oh,
he's out of his mind."

"He's not—I did. Keep reading."

Her tear appeared. "You did?"

"Not the stockings, no—that's him, writing his banal fucking fiction!
He makes it sound like I was dressing up for the drag-queen ball! All I was
doing, Susan, was saying, 'Look, I wear the panties in this family and don't
you forget it!' That's all it boils down to! Keep reading! He doesn't get
anything right. It's all perfectly off!"

She read a little further, then put the magazine in her lap. "Oh,
sweetheart."

"What? What?"

It says…

"My sperm?"

"Yes."

"I did that too. But I don't anymore! Keep reading!"

"Well," said Susan, wiping away her tear with a fingertip, "don't shout
at me. I think it's awful that he's written this and put it in print. It's
unethical, it's reckless—and I can't even believe he would do such a thing.
You tell me he's so smart. You make him sound so wise. But how could
anybody wise do something so insensitive and uncaring as this?"

"Just read on. Read the whole hollow pretentious meaningless thing,
right on down to the footnotes from Goethe and Baudelaire to prove a
connection between 'narcissism' and 'art'! So what else is new? Oh, Jesus,
what this man thinks of as evidence! 'As Sophocles has written,'—and that
constitutes evidence! Oh, you ought to go through this thing, line by line,
and watch the ground shift beneath you! Between every paragraph there's a
hundred-foot drop!"

"What are you going to do?"

"What can I do? It's printed—it's out."

"Well, you just can't sit back and take it. He's betrayed your
confidence!"

"I know that."

"Well, that's terrible."

"I know that!"

"Then do something!" she pleaded.

On the phone Spielvogel said that if I was as "distressed" as I sounded
—"I am!" I assured him—he would stay after his last patient to see me for
the second time that day. So, leaving Susan (who had much to be distressed
about, too), I took a bus up Madison to his office and sat in the waiting
room until seven thirty, constructing in my mind angry scenes that could
only culminate in leaving Spielvogel forever.

The argument between us was angry, all right, and it went on unabated
through my sessions for a week, but it was Spielvogel, not I, who finally
suggested that I leave him. Even while reading his article, I hadn't
been so shocked—so unwilling to believe in what he was doing—as when he
suddenly rose from his chair (even as I continued my attack on him from
the couch) and took a few listing steps around to where I could see him.
Ordinarily I addressed myself to the bookcase in front of the couch, or to
the ceiling overhead, or to the photograph of the Acropolis that I could see
on the desk across the room. At the sight of him at my side, I sat straight up.
"Look," he said, "this has gone far enough. I think either you will have now
to forget this article of mine, or leave me. But we cannot proceed with
treatment under these conditions."

"What kind of choice is that?" I asked, my heart beginning to beat
wildly. He remained in the middle of the room, supporting himself now
with a hand on the back of a chair. "I have been your patient for over two
years. I have an investment here —of effort, of time, of hope, of money. I
don't consider myself recovered. I don't consider myself able to go at my
life alone just yet. And neither do you."

"But if as a result of what I have written about you, you find me so
'untrustworthy' and so 'unethical,' so absolutely 'wrong' and, as you put it,
'off' about relations between you and your family, then why would you
want to stay on as a patient any longer? It is clear that I am too flawed to be
your doctor."

"Come off it, please. Don't hit me over the head with the 'narcissism'
again. You know why I want to stay on."

"Why?"

"Because I'm scared to be out there alone. But also because I am
stronger—things in my life are better. Because staying with you, I was
finally able to leave Maureen. That was no inconsequential matter for me,
you know. If I hadn't left her, I'd be dead—dead or in jail. You may think
that's an exaggeration, but I happen to know that it's true. What I'm saying
is that on the practical side, on the subject of my everyday life, you have
been a considerable help to me. You've been with me through some bad
times. You've prevented me from doing some wild and foolish things.
Obviously I haven't been coming here three times a week for two years for
no reason. But all that doesn't mean that this article is something I can just
forget."

"But there is really nothing more to be said about it. We have discussed
it now for a week. We have been over it thoroughly. There is nothing new to
add."

"You could add that you were wrong."

"I have answered the charge already and more than once. I don't find
anything I did 'wrong.'"

"It was wrong, it was at the very least imprudent, for you to use that
incident in your article, knowing as you did that I was using it in a story."

"We were writing simultaneously, I explained that to you."

"But I told you I was using it in the Anne Frank story."

"You are not remembering correctly. I did not know you had used it until
I read the story last month in the New Yorker. By then the article was
at the printer's."

"You could have changed it then—left that incident out. And I am not
remembering incorrectly."

"First you complain that by disguising your identity I misrepresent you
and badly distort the reality. You're a Jew, not an Italian-American. You're
a novelist, not a poet. You came to me at twenty-nine, not at forty. Then in
the next breath you complain that I fail to disguise your identity enough—
rather, that I have revealed your identity by using this particular incident.
This of course is your ambivalence again about your 'special-ness.

"It is not of course my ambivalence again! You're confusing the ar-
gument again. You're blurring important distinctions--just as you do in
that piece! Let's at least take up each issue in turn."

"We have taken up each issue in turn, three and four times over.

"But you still refuse to get it. Even if your article was at the printer,
once you had read the Anne Frank story you should have made every effort
to protect my privacy--and my trust in you!

"It was impossible."

"You could have withdrawn the article."

"You are asking the impossible."

"What is more important, publishing your article or keeping my trust?"

"Those were not my alternatives."

"But they were."

"That is the way you see it. Look here, we are clearly at an impasse,
and under these conditions treatment cannot be continued. We can make no
progress."

"But I did not just walk in off the street last week. I am your patient."

"True. And I cannot be under attack from my patient any longer."

"Tolerate it," I said bitterly--a phrase of his that had helped me through
some rough days. "Look, given that you must certainly have had an inkling
that I might be using that incident in a piece of fiction, since you in
fact knew I was working on a story to which that incident was the
conclusion, mightn't you at the very least have thought to ask my
permission, ask if it was all right with me…"

"Do you ask permission of the people you write about?"

"But I am not a psychoanalyst! The comparison won't work. I write
fiction--or did, once upon a time. A Jewish Father was not 'about' my
family, or about Grete and me, as you certainly must realize. It may have
originated there, but it was finally a contrivance, an artifice, a rumination
on the real. A self-avowed work of imagination, Doctor! I do not write
'about' people in a strict factual or historical sense."

"But then you think," he said, with a hard look, "that I don't either."

"Dr. Spielvogel, please, that is just not a good enough answer. And you
must know it. First off, you are bound by ethical considerations that happen
not to be the ones that apply to my profession. Nobody comes to me with
confidences the way they do to you, and if they tell me stories, it's not so
that I can cure what ails them. That's obvious enough. It's in the nature of
being a novelist to make private life public--that's a part of what a novelist
is up to. But certainly it is not what I thought you were up to when I came
here. I thought your job was to treat me! And second, as to accuracy--you
are supposed to be accurate, after all, even if you haven't been as accurate
as I would want you to be in this thing here."

"Mr. Tarnopol, 'this thing here' is a scientific paper. None of us could
write such papers, none of us could share our findings with one another, if
we had to rely upon the permission or the approval of our patients in order
to publish. You are not the only patient who would want to censor out the
unpleasant facts or who would find 'inaccurate' what he doesn't like to hear
about himself."

"Oh that won't wash, and you know it! I'm willing to hear anything about
myself--and always have been. My problem, as I see it, isn't my impenetra-
bility. As a matter of fact, I tend to rise to the bait, Dr. Spielvogel,
as Maureen, for one, can testify."

"Oh, do you? Ironically, it is the narcissistic defenses discussed here
that prevent you from accepting the article as something other than an
assault upon your dignity or an attempt to embarrass or belittle you. It is
precisely the blow to your narcissism that has swollen the issue out of all
proportion for you. Simultaneously, you act as though it is about nothing
but you, when actually, of the fifteen pages of text, your case takes up
barely two. But then you do not like at all the idea of yourself suffering
from 'castration anxiety.' You do not like the idea of your aggressive
fantasies vis-à-vis your mother. You never have. You do not like me to
describe your father, and by extension you, his son and heir, as 'ineffect-
ual' and 'submissive,' although you don't like when I call you 'successful'
either. Apparently that tends to dilute a little too much your comforting
sense of victimized innocence."

"Look, I'm sure there are in New York City such people as you've just
described. Only I ain't one of 'em! Either that's some model you've got in
your head, some kind of patient for all seasons, or else it's some other
patient of yours you're thinking about; I don't know what the hell to make
of it, frankly. Maybe what it comes down to is a problem of self-expression;
maybe it's that the writing isn't very precise."

"Oh, the writing is also a problem?"

"I don't like to say it, but maybe writing isn't your strong point."

He smiled. "Could it be, in your estimation? Could I be precise enough to
please you? I think perhaps what so disturbs you about the incident in the
Anne Frank story is not that by using it I may have disclosed your identity,
but that in your opinion I plagiarized and abused your material. You are
made so very angry by this piece of writing that I have dared to publish. But
if I am such a weak and imprecise writer as you suggest, then you should
not feel so threatened by my little foray into English prose."

"I don't feel 'threatened.' Oh, please, don't argue like Maureen, will
you? That is just more of that language again, which doesn't at all express
what you mean and doesn't get anyone anywhere."

"I assure you, unlike Maureen, I said 'threatened' because I meant
'threatened.'"

"But maybe writing isn't your strong point. Maybe that is an objective
statement of fact and has nothing to do with whether I am a writer or a
tightrope walker."

"But why should it matter so much to you?"

"Why? Why?" That he could seriously ask this question just took the heart
out of me; I felt the tears welling up. "Because, among other things, I
am the subject of that writing! I am the one your imprecise language has
misrepresented! Because I come here each day and turn over the day's
receipts, every last item out of my most personal life, and in return I
expect an accurate accounting!" I had begun to cry. "You were my friend,
and I told you the truth. I told you everything."

"Look, let me disabuse you of the idea that the whole world is waiting
with bated breath for the newest issue of our little journal in which you
claim you are misrepresented. I assure you that is not the case. It is not
the New Yorker magazine, or even the Kenyon Review. If it is any comfort to
you, most of my colleagues don't even bother to read it. But this is your
narcissism again. Your sense that the whole world has nothing to look
forward to but the latest information about the secret life of Peter
Tarnopol."

The tears had stopped. "And that is your reductivism again, if I may
say so, and your obfuscation. Spare me that word 'narcissism,' will you?
You use it on me like a club."

"The word is purely descriptive and carries no valuation," said the
doctor.

"Oh, is that so? Well, you be on the receiving end and see how little 'val-
uation' it carries! Look, can't we grant that there is a difference between
self-esteem and vanity, between pride and megalomania? Can we grant that
there actually is an ethical matter at stake h.ere, and that my sensitivity
to it, and your apparent indifference to it, cannot be explained away as a
psychological aberration of mine? You've got a psychology too, you know.
You do this with me all the time, Dr. Spielvogel. First you shrink the area
of moral concern, you say that what I, for instance, call my responsibility
toward Susan is so much camouflaged narcissism--and then if I consent
to see it that way, and I leave off with the moral implications of my con-
duct, you tell me I'm a narcissist who thinks only about his own welfare.
Maureen, you know, used to do something similar--only she worked the
hog-tying game from the other way round. She made the kitchen sink into a
moral issue! Everything in the whole wide world was a test of my decency
and honor--and the moral ignoramus you're looking at believed her! If
driving out of Rome for Frascati, I took a wrong turn, she had me pegged
within half a mile as a felon, as a fiend up from Hell by way of Westchester
and the Ivy League. And I believed her!…Look, look--let's talk about Mau-
reen a minute, let's talk about the possible consequences of all this for
me, 'narcissistic' as that must seem to you. Suppose Maureen were to get
hold of this issue and read what you've written here. It's not unlike her,
after all, to be on her toes where I'm concerned--where alimony is
concerned. I mean it won't do, to go back a moment to what you just said--
it won't do to say that nobody reads the magazine anyway. Because if you
really believed that, then you wouldn't publish your paper there to begin
with. What good are your findings published in a magazine that has no
readers? The magazine is around, and it's read by somebody, surely here in
New York it is--and if it somehow came to Maureen's attention…well, just
imagine how happy she would be to read those pages about me to the judge
in the courtroom. Just imagine a New York municipal judge taking that stuff
in. Do you see what I'm saying?"

"Oh, I see very well what you're saying."

"Where you write, for instance, that I was 'acting out' sexually with
other women 'almost from the beginning of the marriage.' First off, that
is not accurate either. Stated like that, you make it seem as though I'm
just another Italian-American who sneaks off after work each day for a
quick bang on the way home from the poetry office. Do you follow me? You
make me sound like somebody who is simply fucking around with women
all the time. And that is not so. God knows what you write here is not a
proper description of my affair with Karen. That was nothing if it wasn't
earnest--and earnest in part because I was so new at it!"

"And the prostitutes?"

"Two prostitutes--in three years. That breaks down to about half a
prostitute a year, which is probably, among miserably married men, a
national record for not acting out. Have you forgotten? I was miserable!
See the thing in context, will you? You seem to forget that the wife I was
married to was Maureen. You seem to forget the circumstances under which
we married. You seem to forget that we had an argument in every piazza,
cathedral, museum, trattoria, pensione, and hotel on the Italian peninsula.
Another man would have beaten her head in! My predecessor Mezik, the
Yugoslav barkeep, would have 'acted out' with a right to the jaw. I am a
literary person. I went forth and did the civilized thing--I laid a three
thousand-lire whore! Ah, and that's how you came up with 'Italian
American' for me, isn t it?

He waved a hand to show what he thought of my aperçu-- then said, "An-
other man might have confronted his wife more directly, that is true,
rather than libidinizing his anger."

"But the only direct way to confront that woman was to kill her! And you
yourself have told me that killing people is against the law, crazy wives
included. I was not 'sexually acting out,' whatever that means--I was
trying to stay alive in all that madness. Stay me! 'Let me shun that,'
and so on!"

"And," he was saying, "you conveniently forget once again the wife of
your young English department colleague in Wisconsin."

"Good Christ, who are you, Cotton Mather? Look, I may be childish and
a weakling, I may even be the narcissist of your fondest professional
dreams--but 1 am not a slob! I am not a bum or a lecher or a gigolo or
some kind of walking penis. Why do you want to portray me that way?
Why do you want to characterize me in your writing as some sort of
heartless rapist manqué? Surely, surely there is another way to de-
scribe my affair with Karen--"

"But I said nothing about Karen. I only reminded you of the wife of your
colleague, whom you ran into that afternoon at the shopping center in
Madison."

"You've got such a good memory, why don't you also remember that I didn't
even fuck her! She blew me, in the car. So what? So what? I tell you,
it was a surprise to the two of us. And what's it to you, anyway? I mean
that! We were friends. She wasn't so happily married either. That, for
Christ's sake, wasn't 'sexually acting out.' It was friendship! It was
heartbrokenness! It was generosity! It was tenderness! It was despair! It was
being adolescents together for ten secret minutes in the rear of a car before
we both went nobly back into Adulthood! It was a sweet and harmless game
of Let's Pretend! Smile, if you like, smile from your pulpit, but that's still
closer to a proper description of what was going on there than what you call
it. And we did not let it go any further, which was a possibility, you know;
we let it remain a kind of happy, inconsequential accident and returned like
good soldiers to the fucking front lines. Really, Your Holiness, really, Your
Excellency, does that in your mind add up to 'acting out sexually with other
women from the beginning of the marriage'?"

"Doesn't it?"

"Two street whores in Italy, a friend in a car in Madison…and Karen?
No! I call it practically monkish, given the fact of my marriage. I call
it pathetic, that's what! From the beginning of his marriage, the Italian
American poet had some crazy idea that now that he was a husband his
mission in life was to "be faithful--to whom never seemed to cross his
mind. It was like keeping his word and doing his duty--what had gotten him
married to this shrew in the first place! Once again the Italian-American
poet did what he thought to be 'manly' and 'upright' and 'principled'--
which, needless to say, was only what was cowardly and submissive. Pussy
whipped, as my brother so succinctly puts it! As a matter of fact, Dr.
Spielvogel, those two Italian whores and my colleague's wife back of the
shopping center, and Karen, constituted the only praiseworthy, the only
manly, the only moral…oh, the hell with it."

"I think at this point we are only saying the same thing in our different
vocabularies. Isn't that what you just realized?"

"No, no, no, no, no. I just realized that you are never going to admit to
me that you could be mistaken in any single particular of diction, or syntax,
let alone in the overriding idea of that paper. Talk about narcissism as a
defense!"

He did not bristle at my tone, contemptuous as it had become. His voice
throughout had been strong and even--a touch of sarcasm, some irony, but
no outrage, and certainly no tears. Which was as it should be.

What did he have to lose if I left?

"I am not a student any longer, Mr. Tarnopol. I do not look to my patients
for literary criticism. You would prefer that I leave the professional writ-
ing to you, it would seem, and confine my activities to this room. You
remember how distressed you were several years ago to discover that I
occasionally went out into the streets to ride the bus."

"That was awe. Don't worry, I'm over it."

"Good. No reason for you to think I'm perfect."

"I don't."

"On the other hand, the alternative is not necessarily to think I am
another Maureen, out to betray and deceive you for my own sadistic and
vengeful reasons."

"I didn't say you were."

"You may nonetheless think that I am."

"If you mean do I think that I have been misused by you, the answer is
yes. Maureen is not the issue--that article is."

"All right, that is your judgment. Now you must decide what you are
going to do about the treatment. If you want to continue with your attack
upon me, treatment will be impossible--it would be foolish even to try. If
you want to return to the business at hand, then of course I am prepared to
go forward. Or perhaps there is a third alternative that you may wish to
consider--perhaps you will choose to take up treatment with somebody
else. This is for you to decide before the next session."

Susan was enraged by the decision I did reach. I never had heard her
argue about anything as she did against Spielvogel's "brutal" handling of
me, nor had she ever dared to criticize me so forthrightly either. Of course
her objections were in large part supplied by Dr. Golding, who, she told me,
had been "appalled" by the way Spielvogel had dealt with me in the article
in the Forum; however, she would never even have begun to communicate Gold-
ing's position to me if it were not for startling changes that were taking
place in her attitude toward herself. Now, maybe reading about me walking
around in Maureen's underwear did something to boost her confidence with
me, but whatever had triggered it, I found myself delighted by the emer-
gence of the vibrant and emphatic side so long suppressed in her--at the
same time that I was greatly troubled by the possibility that what she
and her doctor were suggesting about my decision to stay with Spielvogel
constituted more of the humbling truth. Certainly in my defense I offered
up to Susan what sounded even to me like the feeblest of arguments.

"You should leave him," she said.

"I can't. Not at this late date. He's done me more good than harm."

"But he's got you all wrong. How could that do anybody any good?"

"I don't know--but it did me. Maybe he's a lousy analyst and a good
therapist."

"That makes no sense, Peter."

"Look, I'm not getting into bed with my worst enemy any more, am I?
I am out of that, am I not?"

"But any doctor would have helped you to leave her. Any doctor who
was the least bit competent would have seen you through that."

"But he happens to be the one who did it."

"Does that mean he can just get away with anything as a result? His
sense of what you are is all wrong. Publishing that article without
consulting you about it first was all wrong. His attitude when you
confronted him with what he had done, the way he said, 'Either shut up
or go'--that was as wrong as wrong can be. And you know it! Dr. Golding
said that was as reprehensible as anything he had ever heard of between a
doctor and his patient. Even his writing stinks--you said it was just
jargon and crap."

"Look, I'm staying with him. I don't want to talk about it any more."

"If I answered you like that, you'd hit the ceiling. You'd say, 'Stop
backing away! Stand up for yourself, twerp!' Oh, I don't understand why
you are acting like this, when the man has so clearly abused you. Why do
you let people get away with such things?"

"Which people?"

'Which people? People like Maureen. People like Spielvogel. People
who…"

"What?"

"Well, walk all over you like that."

"Susan, I cannot put in any more time thinking of myself as someone
who gets walked over. It gets me nowhere."

"Then don't be one! Don't let them get away with it!"

"It doesn't seem to me that in this case anybody is getting away with
anything."

"Oh, Lambchop, that isn't what Dr. Golding says."

Spielvogel simply shrugged off what Dr. Golding said, when I passed it
on to him. "I don't know the man," he grunted, and that was that. Settled.
As though if he did know him, he could tell me Golding's motives for
taking such a position--otherwise, why bother? As for Susan's anger, and
her uncharacteristic vehemence about my leaving him, well, I understood
that, did I not? She hated Spielvogel for what Spielvogel had written about
the Peter who was to her so inspirational and instructive, the man she had
come to adore for the changes he was helping to bring about in her life.
Spielvogel had demythologized her Pygmalion--of course Galatea was
furious. Who expected otherwise?

I must say, his immunity to criticism was sort of dazzling. Indeed, the
imperviousness of this pallid doctor with the limping gait seemed to me, in
those days of uncertainty and self-doubt, a condition to aspire to: I am right
and you are wrong, and even if I'm not, I'll just hold out and hold out and
not give a single inch, and that will make it so. And maybe that's why I
stayed on with him--out of admiration for his armor, in the hope that some
of that impregnability would rub off on me. Yes, I thought, he is teaching
me by example, the arrogant German son of a bitch. Only I won't give him
the satisfaction of telling him. Only who is to say he doesn't know it? Only
who is to say he does, other than I?

As the weeks passed and Susan continued to grimace at the mention of
Spielvogel's name, I sometimes came close to making what seemed to me
the best possible defense of him--and thereby of myself, for if it turned
out that I had been as deluded about Spielvogel as about Maureen, it was
going to be awfully hard ever to believe in my judgment again. In order to
substantiate my own claim to sanity and intelligence, and to protect my
sense of trust from total collapse (or was it just to perpetuate my childish
illusions? to cherish and protect my naïveté right on down to the last good
drop?), I felt I had to make as strong a case as I could for him. And even
if that meant accepting as valid his obfuscating defense--even if it meant
looking back myself with psychoanalytic skepticism upon my own valid object-
ions! "Look," I wanted to say to Susan, "if it weren't for Spielvogel, I
wouldn't even be here. If it weren't for Spielvogel saying Why not stay?'
every time I say 'Why not leave?' I would have been out of this affair long
ago. We have him to thank for whatever exists between us--he's the one
who was your advocate, not me." But that it was largely because of Spiel-
vogel's encouragement that I had continued to visit her almost nightly
during that first year, when I was so out of sympathy with her way of
living, was really not her business, even if she wouldn't let up about his
"reprehensible" behavior; nor would it do her fragile sense of self-esteem
any good to know that even now, several years into our affair--with me her
Lambchop and her my Suzie Q., with all that tender lovers' playfulness
between us--that it was Spielvogel who prevented me from leaving her
whenever I became distressed about those burgeoning dreams of marriage
and family that I did not share. "But she wants to have children--and now,
before she gets any older." "But you don't want to." "Right. And I can't
allow her to nurse these expectations. That just won't do." "Then tell her
not to." "I do. I have. She can't bear hearing it any more. She says, 'I know,
I know, you're not going to marry me--do you have to tell me that every
hour?'" "Well, every hour is perhaps a little more frequent than necessary."
"Oh, it isn't every hour-it just sounds that way to her. You see, because I
tell her where things stand doesn't mean she takes it to heart." "Yes, but
what more can you do?" "Go. I should." T wouldn't think she thinks you
should." "But if I stay…" "You might really fall in love with her. Does it
ever occur to you that maybe this is what you are running away from? Not
the children, not the marriage…but the love?" "Oh, Doctor, don't start
practicing psychoanalysis. No, that doesn't occur to me. I don't think it
should, because I don't think it's true." "No? But you are somewhat in love
already--are you not? You tell me how sweet she is, how kind she is. How
gentle. You tell me how beautiful she is when she sits there reading. You
tell me what a touching person she is. Sometimes you are positively lyrical
about her." "Am I?" "Yes, yes, and you know that." "But there is still too
much that's wrong there, you know that." "Yes, well, this I could have
warned you about at the outset." "Please, the husband of Maureen Tarnopol
understands that the other gender is also imperfect." "Knowing this, the
husband of Maureen Tarnopol should be grateful perhaps for a woman, who
despite her imperfections, happens to be tender and appreciative and ab-
solutely devoted to him. She is all these things, am I right?" "She is all
these things. She also turns out to be smart and charming and funny." "And
in love with you." "And in love with me." "And a cook--such a cook. You
tell me about her dishes, you make my mouth water." "You're very hung up
on the pleasure principle, Dr. Spielvogel." "And you? Tell me, where are
you running again? To what? To whom? Why?" "To no one, to nothing--
but 'why?' I've told you why: suppose she tries to commit suicide!" "Still
with the suicide?" "But what if she does it!" "Isn't that her responsibility?
And Dr. Golding's? She is in therapy after all. Are you going to run for fear
of this remote possibility?" "I can't take it hanging over my head. Not after
all that's gone on. Not after Maureen." "Maybe you are too thin-skinned,
you know? Maybe it is time at thirty to develop a thicker hide." "No doubt.
I'm sure you rhinoceroses lead a better life. But my hide is my hide. I'm
afraid you can shine a flashlight through it. So give me some other advice."
"What other advice is there? The choice is yours. Stay or run." "This choice
that is mine you structure oddly." "All right, you structure it." "The point,
you see, is that if I do stay, she must realize that I am marrying no one
unless and until I want to do it. And everything conspires to make me think
that I don't want to do it." "Mr. Tarnopol, somehow I feel I can rely on you
to put that proviso before her from time to time."

Why did I stay with Spielvogel? Let us not forget his Mosaic prohibit-
ions and what they meant to a thin-skinned man at the edge of he
knew not what intemperate act.

Thou shalt not covet thy wife's underwear.

Thou shalt not drop thy seed upon thy neighbor's bathroom floor or
dab it upon the bindings of library books.

Thou shalt not be so stupid as to buy a Hoffritz hunting knife to slay
your wife and her matrimonial lawyer.

"But why can't I? What's the difference any more? They're driving me cra-
zy! They're ruining my life! First she tricked me into marrying her with
that urine, now they're telling the judge I can write movies and make a
fortune! She tells the court that I 'obstinately' refuse to go out to Holly-
wood and do an honest day's work! Which is true! I obstinately refuse! Because
that is not my work! My work is writing fiction! And I can't even do that
any more! Only when I say I can't, they say, right, so just get your ass out
to Hollywood where you can earn yourself a thousand bucks a day! Look! Just
look at this affidavit she filed! Look what she calls me here, Doctor--'a
well-known seducer of college girls'! That's how she spells 'Karen'! Read
this document, will you please? I brought it so you can see with your own
eyes that I am not exaggerating! Just look at this version of me! 'A seducer
of college girls'! They're trying to hold me up, Doctor Spielvogel--this is
legalized extortion!" "To be sure," said my Moses, gently, "but still you
cannot buy that knife and stick it in her heart. You must not buy a knife,
Mr.Tarnopol." "WHY NOT? GIVE ME ONE GOOD REASON WHY NOT!"

"Because killing is against the law." "FUCK THE LAW! THE LAW IS WHAT IS
KILLING ME!" "Be that as it may, kill her and they will put you in jail."
"So what!" "You wouldn't like it there." "I wouldn't care--she'd be
dead. Justice would come into this world!" "Ah, but Just as the world
would become following her death, for you it still wouldn't be paradise.
You did not even like the army that much, remember? Well, jail is worse.
I don't believe you would be happy there." "I'm not exactly happy here."
"I understand that. But there you would be even less happy."

So, with him to restrain me (or with him to pretend to restrain me,
while I pretend to be unrestrained), I did not buy the knife in Hoffritz's
Grand Central window (her lawyer's office was just across the street,
twenty flights up). And a good thing too, for when I discovered that the
reporter from the Daily News who sat in a black raincoat at the back of the
courtroom throughout the separation proceedings had been alerted to the
hearing by Maureen's lawyers, I lost all control of myself (no pretending
now), and out in the corridor during the lunch recess, I took a swing at the
dapper, white-haired attorney in his dark three-piece suit with the Phi Beta
Kappa key dangling conspicuously from a chain. He was obviously a man
of years (though in my state, I might even have attacked a somewhat
younger man), but he was agile and easily blocked my wild blow with his
briefcase. "Watch out, Egan, watch out for me!" It was pure play-groundese
I shouted at him, language dating back to the arm's-length insolence of
grade-school years; my eyes were running with rage, as of old, but before I
could swing out at his briefcase again, my own lawyer had grabbed me
around the middle and was dragging me backward down the corridor. "You
jackass," said Egan coldly, "we'll fix your wagon." "You goddam thief! You
publicity hound! What more can you do, you bastard!" "Wait and see," said
Egan, unruffled, and even smiling at me now, as a small crowd gathered
around us in the hall. "She tricked me," I said to him, "and you know it!
With that urine!" "You've got quite an imagination, son. Why don't you put
it to work for you?" Here my lawyer managed to turn me completely
around, and running and pushing at me from behind, shoved me a few paces
farther down the courthouse corridor and into the men's room.

Where we were promptly joined by the stout, black-coated Mr. Valducci
of the Daily News. "Get out of here, you," I said, "leave me alone."
"I just want to ask you some questions. I want to ask about your wife,
that's all. I'm a reader of yours. I'm a real fan." "I'll bet." "Sure.
The Jewish Merchant. My wife read it too. Terrific ending. Ought to be a
movie." "Look, I've heard enough about the movies today!" "Take it easy,
Pete--I just want to ask you, for instance, what did the missus do before
you were married?" "The missus was a show girl! She was in the line at the
Latin Quarter! Fuck off, will you!" "Whatever you say, whatever you say,"
and with a bow to my attorney, who had now interposed himself between
the two of us, Valducci stepped back a ways and asked, deferentially, "You
don't mind if I take a leak, do you? Since I'm already here?" While
Valducci voided, we looked on in silence. "Just shut up," my lawyer
whispered to me. "See you, Pete," said Valducci, after meticulously
washing and drying his hands, "see you, Counselor."

The next morning, over Valducci's by-line, in the lower half of page
five, ran this three-column head--

PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR TURNS COURTROOM
PRIZEFIGHTER

The story was illustrated with my book-jacket photo, dark-eyed, thin
faced innocence, circa 1959, and a photograph of Maureen taken the day
before, her lantern jaw slicing the offending air as she strides down the
courthouse steps on the arm of Attorney Dan P. Egan, who, the story noted
(with relish) was seventy years old and formerly middleweight boxing
champion at Ford-ham; in his heyday, I learned, he was known as "Red,"
and was still a prized toastmaster at Fordham alumni functions. The tears I
had shed during my contretemps with Red did not go unreported. "Oh, I
should never have listened to you about that knife. I could have killed
Valducci too." "You are not satisfied with page five?" "I should have done
it. And that judge too. Cut his self-righteous gizzard out, sitting there
pitying poor Maureen!" "Please," said Spielvogel, laughing lightly, "the
pleasure would have been momentary." "Oh, no, it wouldn't." "Oh, yes,
believe me. Murder four people in a courtroom, and before you know it, it's
over and you're behind bars. This way, you see, you have it always to
imagine when your spirit needs a lift."

So I stayed on as Spielvogel's patient, at least so long as Maureen drew
breath (and breathed fire), and Susan McCall was my tender, appreciative,
and devoted mistress.




　　　　　　　5. FREE




Here lies my wife: here let her lie! Now she's at rest, and so am
I.

--John Dryden, "Epitaph Intended for His Wife"



It was three years later, in the spring of 1966, that Maureen telephoned to
say she had to talk to me "personally" as soon as possible, and "alone," no
lawyers present. We had seen each other only twice since that courtroom
confrontation reported in the Daily News, at two subsequent hearings held
at Maureen's request in order to determine if she could get any more than
the hundred a week that Judge Rosenzweig had originally ordered the well
known seducer of college girls to pay in alimony to his abandoned wife.
Both times a court-appointed referee had examined my latest tax return, my
royalty statements and bank records, and concluded that no increase was
warranted. I had pleaded that what was warranted was a reduction, since my
income, rather than increasing, had fallen off by about thirty per cent since
Judge Rosenzweig had first ordered me to pay Maureen five thousand
dollars a year out of the ten I was then making. Rosenzweig's decision had
been based on a tax return that showed me earning a salary of fifty-two
hundred a year from the University of Wisconsin and another five thousand
from my publisher (representing one quarter of the substantial advance I
was getting for my second book). By 1964, however, the last of the
publisher's four annual payments of five thousand dollars had been doled
out to me, the book they had contracted with me for bore no resemblance to
a finished novel, and I was broke. Out of each year's ten thousand in
income, five thousand had gone to Maureen for alimony, three to Spielvogel
for services rendered, leaving two for food, rent, etc. At the time of the
separation there had been another sixty-eight hundred in a savings account
--my paperback proceeds from A Jewish Father-but that too had been
divided equally between the estranged couple by the judge, who then laid
the plaintiff's legal fees on the defendant; by our third appearance at the
courthouse, the remainder of those savings had been paid out to meet my
own lawyer's bills. In '65 Hofstra raised me to sixty-five hundred a year for
teaching my two seminars, but my income from writing consisted only of
what I could bring in from the short stories I was beginning to publish. To
meet expenses I cut down my sessions with Spielvogel from three to two a
week, and began to borrow money from my brother to live on. Each time I
came before the referee I explained to him that I was now giving my wife
somewhere between sixty-five and seventy per cent of my income, which
did not strike me as fair. Mr. Egan would then point out that if Mr. Tarnopol
wished to "normalize" his income, or even "to improve his lot in life, as
most young men strive to do," he had only to write fiction for Esquire, the
New Yorker, Harper's, the Atlantic Monthly, or for Playboy magazine,
whose editors would pay him--here, to read the phenomenal figure, he
donned his tortoiseshell glasses--"three thousand dollars for a single short
story." As evidence in support of his claim, he produced letters subpoenaed
from my files, wherein the fiction editors of these magazines invited me to
submit any work I had on hand or planned for the future. I explained to the
referee (an attentive, gentlemanly, middle-aged Negro, who had announced,
at the outset, that he was honored to meet the author of A Jewish Father;
another admirer--God only knew what that meant) that every writer of any
eminence at all receives such letters as a matter of course; they were not in
the nature of bids, or bribes, or guarantees of purchase. When I finished
writing a story, as I had recently, I turned it over to my agent, who, at my
suggestion, submitted it to one or another of the commercial magazines Mr.
Egan had named. There was nothing I could do to make the magazine
purchase it for publication; in fact, over the previous few years three of
these magazines, the most likely to publish my work, had repeatedly
rejected fiction of mine (letters of rejection submitted here by my lawyer as
proof of my plunging literary reputation), despite those warm invitations for
submission, which of course cost them nothing to send out. Certainly, I
said, I could not submit to them stories that I had not written, and I could
not write stories--about here I generally lost my temper, though the
referee's equanimity remained serenely intact--on demand! "Oh, my,"
sighed Egan, turning to Maureen, "the artiste bit again." "What? What did
you say?" I threateningly inquired, though we sat around a conference table
in a small office in the courthouse, and I, like the referee, had heard every
word that Egan had whispered. "I said, sir," replied Egan, "that I wish I was
an artiste and didn't have to work 'on demand' either." Here we were
brought gently to order by the referee, who, if he did not give me my
reduction, did not give Maureen her increase either.

I took no comfort in his "fairness," however. Money was constantly on
my mind: what was being extorted from me by Maureen, in collusion (as I
saw it) with the state of New York, and what I was now borrowing from
Moe, who refused to take interest or to set a date for repayment. "What do
you want me to do, shylock my own flesh and blood?" he said, laughing. "I
hate this, Moey." "So you hate it," was his reply.

My lawyer's opinion was that actually I ought to be happy that the
alimony now appeared to have been "stabilized" at a hundred a week,
regardless of fluctuation in my income. I said, "Regardless of fluctuation
down, you mean. What about fluctuation up?" "Well, you'd be getting more
that way, too, Peter," he reminded me. "But then 'stabilized' doesn't mean
stabilized at all, does it, if I should ever start to bring in some cash?" "Why
don't we cross that bridge when we come to it? For the time being, the
situation looks as good to me as it can."

But it was only a few days after the last of our hearings that a letter
arrived from Maureen; admittedly, I should have destroyed it unread.
Instead I tore open the envelope as though it contained an unknown
manuscript of Dostoevsky's. She wished to inform me that if I "drove" her
to "a breakdown," I would be the one responsible for her upkeep in a
mental hospital. And that would come to something more than "a measly"
hundred dollars a week--it would come to three times that. She had no
intention of obliging me by being carted off to Bellevue. It was clearly
Payne Whitney she was shooting for. And this, she told me, was no idle
threat--her psychiatrist had warned her (which was why she was warning
me) that she might very well have to be institutionalized one day if I were
to continue to refuse "to be a man." And being a man, as the letter went on
to explain, meant either coming back to her to resume our married life, and
with it "a civilized role in society," or failing that, going out to Hollywood
where, she informed me, anybody with the Prix de Rome in his hip pocket
could make a fortune. Instead I had chosen to take that "wholly unrealistic"
job at Hofstra, working one day a week, so that I could spend the rest of my
time writing a vindictive novel about her. "I'm not made of steel," the let-
ter informed me, "no matter what it pleases you to tell people about me.
Publish a book like that and you will regret the consequences till your
dying day."

As I begin to approach the conclusion of my story, I should point out
that all the while Maureen and I were locked in this bruising, painful
combat--indeed, almost from the moment of our first separation hearing in
January 1963, some six months after my arrival in New York--the
newspapers and the nightly television news began to depict an increasingly
chaotic America and to bring news of bitter struggles for freedom and
power which made my personal difficulties with alimony payments and
inflexible divorce laws appear by comparison to be inconsequential.
Unfortunately, these highly visible dramas of social disorder and human
misery did nothing whatsoever to mitigate my obsession; to the contrary,
that the most vivid and momentous history since World War Two was being
made in the streets around me, day by day, hour by hour, only caused me to
feel even more isolated by my troubles from the world at large, more
embittered by the narrow and guarded life I now felt called upon to live--or
able to live--because of my brief, misguided foray into matrimony. For all
that I may have been attuned to the consequences of this new social and
political volatility, and like so many Americans moved to pity and fear by
the images of violence flashing nightly across the television screen, and by
the stories of brutality and lawlessness appearing each morning on page one
of the New York Times, I simply could not stop thinking about Maureen and
her hold over me, though, to be sure, my thinking about her hold over me
was, as I well knew, the very means by which she continued to hold me. Yet
I couldn't stop--no scene of turbulence or act of terror that I read about
in the papers could get me to feel myself any less embattled or entrapped.

In the spring of 1963, for instance, when for nights on end I could not
get to sleep because of my outrage over Judge Rosenzweig's alimony
decision, police dogs were turned loose on the demonstrators in Birm-
ingham; and just about the time I began to imagine myself plunging a
Hoffritz hunting knife into Maureen's evil heart, Medgar Evers was shot
to death in his driveway in Mississippi. In August 1963, my nephew Abner
telephoned to ask me to accompany him and his family to the civil rights
demonstration in Washington; the boy, then eleven, had recently read A
Jewish Father and given a report on it in school, likening me, his uncle
(in a strained, if touching conclusion), to "men like John Steinbeck and
Albert Camus." So I drove down in their car to Washington with Morris,
Lenore, and the two boys, and with Abner holding my hand, listened to Mar-
tin Luther King proclaim his "dream"--on the way home I said, "You think we
can get him to speak when I go to alimony jail?" "Sure," said Moe, "also
Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. They'll assemble at City Hall and sing
'Tarnopol Shall Overcome' to the mayor." I laughed along with the kids,
but wondered who would protest, if I defied the court order to continue to
support Maureen for the rest of her natural days and said I'd go to jail
instead, for the rest of mine if need be. No one would protest, I real-
ized: enlightened people everywhere would laugh, as though we two squab-
bling mates were indeed Blondie and Dagwood, or Maggie and Jiggs…In Sept-
ember, Abner was student chairman of his school's memorial service to
commemorate the death of the children killed in the Birmingham church
bombing--I attended, again at his invitation, but halfway through a reading
by a strapping black girl of a poem by Langston Hughes, slipped out from
my seat beside my sister-in-law to race over to my lawyer's office and show
him the subpoena that had been served on me earlier that morning while I
sat getting my teeth cleaned in the dentist's office--I had been asked to
show cause why the alimony shouldn't be raised now that I was "a full-time
faculty member" of Hofstra College…In November President Kennedy was
assassinated in Dallas. I made my walk to Spielvogel's office by what must
have turned out to be a ten-mile route. I wandered uptown in the most
roundabout fashion, stopping wherever and whenever I saw a group of strang-
ers clustered together on a street corner; I stood with them, shrugged
and nodded at whatever they said, and then moved on. And of course I
wasn't the only unattached soul wandering around like that, that day. By
the time I got to Spielvogel's the waiting-room door was locked and he had
gone home. Which was just as well with me: I didn't feel like "analyzing"
my incredulity and shock. Shortly after I arrived at Susan's I got a phone
call from my father. "I'm sorry to bother you at your friend's," he said,
somewhat timidly, "I got the name and number from Morris." "That's
okay," I said, "I was going to call you." "Do you remember when Roosevelt
died?" I did indeed--so too had the young protagonist of A Jewish Father.
Didn't my father remember the scene in my novel, where the hero recalls
his own father's grieving for FDR? It had been drawn directly from life:
Joannie and I had gone down with him to the Yonkers train station to pay
our last respects as a family to the dead president, and had listened in
awe (and with some trepidation) to our father's muffled, husky sobbing when
the locomotive, draped in black bunting and carrying the body of FDR,
chugged slowly through the local station on its way up the river to Hyde
Park; that summer, when we went for a week's vacation to a hotel in South
Fallsburg, we had stopped off at Hyde Park to visit the fallen president's
grave. "Truman should be such a friend to the Jews," my mother had said at
the graveside, and the emotion that had welled up in me when she spoke
those words came forth in a stream of tears when my father added, "He
should rest in peace, he loved the common man." This scene too had been
recalled by the young hero of A Jewish Father, as he lay in bed with his
German girl friend in Frankfurt, trying to explain to her in his five-hundred-
word German vocabulary who he was and where he came from and why
his father, a good and kindly man, hated her guts…Nonetheless my father
had asked me on the phone that night, "Do you remember when Roosevelt
died?"--for whatever he read of mine he could never really associate with
our real life; just as I on the other hand could no longer have a real
conversation with him that did not seem to me to be a reading from my
fiction. Indeed, what he then proceeded to say to me that night struck me
as something out of a book I had already written. And likewise what little I
said to him--for this was a father-and-son routine that went way back and
whose spirit and substance was as familiar to me as a dialogue by Abbott
and Costello,…which isn't to say that being a partner in the act ever left
me unaffected by our patter. "You're all right?" he asked, "I don't mean to
interrupt you at your friend's. You understand that?" "That's okay." "But I
just wanted to be sure you're all right." "I'm all right." "This is a terrible
thing. I feel for the old man--he must be taking it hard. To lose another son
--and like that. Thank God there's still Bobby and Ted." "That should help
a little." "Ah, what can help," moaned my father, "but you're all right?"
"I'm fine." "Okay, that's the most important thing. When are you going to
court again?" he asked. "Next month sometime." "What does your lawyer
say? What are the prospects? They can't sock you again, can they?" "We'll
see." "You got enough cash?" he asked. "I'm all right." "Look, if you need
cash--" "I'm fine. I don't need anything." "Okay. Stay in touch, will you,
please? We're starting to feel like a couple of lepers up here, where you're
concerned." "I will, I'll be in touch." "And let me know immediately how
the court thing turns out. And if you need any cash." "Okay." "And don't
worry about anything. I know he's a southerner, but I got great faith in
Lyndon Johnson. If it was Humphrey I'd breathe easier about Israel--but
what can we do? Anyway, look, he was close to Roosevelt all those years,
he had to learn something. He's going to be all right. I don't think we
got anything to worry about. Do you?" "No." "I hope you're right. This
is awful. And you take care of yourself. I don't want you to be strapp-
ed, you understand?" "I'm fine."

Susan and I stayed up to watch television until Mrs. Kennedy had
arrived back in Washington on Air Force One. As the widow stepped from
the plane onto the elevator platform, her fingers grazed the coffin, and I
said, "Oh, the heroic male fantasies being stirred up around the nation."
"Yours too?" asked Susan. "I'm only human," I said. In bed, with the lights
off, and clasped in one another's arms, we both started to cry. "I didn't even
vote for him," Susan said. "You didn't?" "I could never tell you before. I
voted for Nixon." "Jesus, but you were fucked up." "Oh, Lambchop, Jackie
Kennedy wouldn't have voted for him if she hadn't been his wife. It's the
way we were raised."

In September 1964, the week after Spielvogel had published his findings
on my case in the American Forum for Psychoanalytic Studies, the Warren
Commission published theirs on the assassination. Lee Harvey Oswald,
alone and on his own, was responsible for the murder of President
Kennedy, the commission concluded; meanwhile Spielvogel had determined
that because of my upbringing I suffered from "castration anxiety" and
employed "narcissism" as my "primary defense." Not everyone agreed with
the findings either of the eminent jurist or of the New York analyst:
so, in the great world and in the small, debate raged about the evidence,
about the conclusions, about the motives and the methods of the objective
investigators…And so those eventful years passed, with reports of
disaster and cataclysm continuously coming over the wire services to
remind me that I was hardly the globe's most victimized inhabitant. I had
only Maureen to contend with--what if I were of draft age, or Indochi-
nese, and had to contend with LBJ? What was my Johnson beside theirs? I
watched the footage from Selma and Saigon and Santo Domingo, I told
myself that that was awful, suffering that could not be borne…all of
which changed nothing between my wife and me. In October 1965, when Susan
and I stood in the Sheep Meadow of Central Park, trying to make out what
the Reverend Coffin was saying to the thousands assembled there to protest
the war, who should I see no more than fifteen feet away, but Maureen.
Wearing a button pinned to her coat: "Deliver Us Dr. Spock." She was
standing on the toes of her high boots, trying to see above the crowd to the
speaker's platform. The last word I'd had from her was that letter warning
me about the deluxe nervous breakdown that I would soon be getting billed
for because of my refusal "to be a man." How nice to see she was still
ambulatory--I supposed it argued for my virility. Oh, how it burned me up
to see her here! I tapped Susan. "Well, look who's against the war."
"Who?" "Tokyo Rose over there. That's my wife, Suzie Q." "That one?" she
whispered. "Right, with the big heartfelt button on her breast." "Why-she's
pretty, actually." "In her driven satanic way, I suppose so. Come on, you
can't hear anything anyway. Let's go." "She's shorter than I thought--from
your stories." "She gets taller when she stands on your toes. The bitch.
Eternal marriage at home and national liberation abroad. Look," I said,
motioning up to the police helicopter circling in the air over the crowd,
"they've counted heads for the papers--let's get out of here." "Oh, Peter,
don't be a baby--" "Look, if anything could make me for bombing Hanoi,
she's it. With that button yet. Deliver me, Dr. Spock--from her!"


That antiwar demonstration was to be my last contact with her until the
spring of 1966, when she phoned my apartment, and in an even and matter
of-fact voice said to me, "I want to talk to you about a divorce, Peter.
I am willing to talk sensibly about all the necessary arrangements, but I
cannot do it through that lawyer of yours. The man is a moron and Dan
simply cannot get through to him."

Could it be? Were things about to change? Was it about to be over?

"He is not a moron, he is a perfectly competent matrimonial lawyer."

"He is a moron, and a liar, but that isn't the point, and I'm not go-
ing to waste my time arguing about it. Do you or don't you want a di-
vorce?"

"What kind of question is that? Of course I do."

"Then why don't the two of us sit down together and work it out?"

"I don't know that we two could, 'together.'"

"I repeat: do you or do you not want a divorce?"

"Look, Maureen--"

"If you do, then I will come to your apartment after my Group tonight
and we can iron this thing out like adults. It's gone on long enough and,
frankly, I'm quite sick of it. I have other things to do with my life."
'Well, that's good to hear, Maureen. But we surely can't meet to settle
it in my apartment."

"Where then? The street?"

"We can meet on neutral ground. We can meet at the Algonquin.

"Really, what a baby you are. Little Lord Fauntleroy from Westchester
--to this very day."

"The word Westchester' still gets you, doesn't it? Just like 'Ivy
League.' All these years in the big city and still the night watchman's
daughter from Elmira."

"Ho hum. Do you want to go on insulting me, or do you want to get on
with the business at hand? Truly, I couldn't care less about you or your
opinion of me at this point. I'm well over that. I have a life of my own.
I have my flute."

"The flute now?"

"I have my flute," she went on, "I have Group. I'm going to the New
School."

"Everything but a job," I said.

"My doctor doesn't feel I can hold a job right now. I need time to
think."

"What is it you 'think' about?"

"Look, do you want to score points with your cleverness, or do you
want a divorce?"

"You can't come to my apartment."

"Is that your final decision? I will not talk about a serious matter like
this in the street or in some hotel bar. So if that is your final decision,
I am hanging up. For God's sake, Peter, I'm not going to eat you up."

"Look," I said, "all right, come here, if that's all we're going to talk
about."

"I assure you I have nothing else to converse about with a person like
you. I'll come right from Group."

That word! "What time is 'Group' over?" I asked.

"I'll be at your place at ten," she said.

"I don't like it," said Spielvogel, when I phoned with the news of the
rendezvous I'd arranged, all on my own.

"I don't either," I said. "But if she changes the subject, I'll throw her
out. I'll have her go. But what else could I say? Maybe she finally means
it. I can't afford to say no."

"Well, if you said yes, it's yes."

"I could still call her up and get out of it, of course."

"You want to do that?"

"I want to be divorced, that's what I want. That's why I thought I had
better grab hold of the opportunity while I had it. If it means risking
a scene with her, well, I'll have to risk it."

"Yes? You are up to that? You won't collapse in tears? You won't tear
your clothes off your back?"

"No, no. That's over."

"Well, then," said Spielvogel, "good luck."

"Thanks."

Maureen arrived promptly at ten P.M. She was dressed in a pretty red
wool suit--a demure jacket over a silk blouse, and a flared skirt--smarter
than anything I'd ever seen her in before; and though drawn and creased
about the eyes and at the corners of the mouth, her face was deeply tanned
--nothing urchinlike or "beat" about this wife of mine any longer. It turned
out that she had just come back from five days in Puerto Rico, a vacation
that her Group had insisted on her taking. On my money, you bloodsucker.
And the suit too. Who paid for that but putz-o here!

Maureen made a careful survey of the living room that Susan had helped
me to furnish for a few hundred dollars. It was simple enough, but through
Susan's efforts, cozy and comfortable: rush matting on the floor, a
round oak country table, some unpainted dining chairs, a desk and a lamp,
bookcases, a daybed covered with an India print, a secondhand easy chair
with a navy-blue slipcover made by Susan, along with navy-blue curtains
she'd sewn together on her machine. "Very quaint," said Maureen super-
ciliously, eyeing the basket of logs by the fireplace, "and very House
and Garden, your color scheme."

"It'll do."

From supercilious to envious in the twinkling of an eye-- "Oh, I would
think it would do quite nicely. You ought to see what I live in. It's
half this size."

"The proverbial shoe box. I might have known."

"Peter," she said, drawing a breath that seemed to catch a little in her
chest, "I've come here to tell you something." She sat down in the easy
chair, making herself right at home.

"To tell--?"

'I'm not going to divorce you. I'm never going to divorce you."

She paused and waited for my response; so did I.

"Get out," I said.

"I have a few more things to say to you."

"I told you to get out."

"I just got here. I have no intention of--"

"You lied. You lied again. You told me on the phone less than three
hours ago that you wanted to talk--"

"I've written a story about you. I want to read it to you. I've brought it
with me in my purse. I read it to my class at the New School. The instructor
has promised to try to get it published, that's how good he thinks it is. I'm
sure you won't agree--you have those high Flaubertian standards, of course
--but I want you to hear it. I think you have a right to before I go ahead and
put it in print."

"Maureen, either get up and go, under your own steam, or I am going
to throw you out."

"Lay one finger on me and I will have you put in jail. Dan Egan knows
I'm here. He knows you invited me here. He didn't want me to come. He's
seen you in action, Peter. He said if you laid a finger on me I was to call
him immediately. And in case you think it's on your lousy hundred dollars
that I went to Puerto Rico, it wasn't. It was Dan who gave me the money,
when the Group said I had to get away."

"Is that a 'Group' you go to or a travel agency?"

"Ha ha."

"And the chic outfit. Therapist buy you that, or did your fellow patients
pass the cup?"

"No one 'bought' it for me. Mary Egan gave it to me--the suit used to
be hers. She bought it in Ireland. Don't worry, I'm not exactly living the
high life on the money you earn through the sweat of your brow four hours
a week at Hofstra. The Egans are my friends, the best friends I've ever
had."

"Fine. You need 'em. Now scram. Get out."

"I want you to hear this story," she said, reaching into her purse for the
manuscript. "I want you to know that you're not the only one who has tales
to tell the world about that marriage. The story--" she said, removing the
folded pages from a manila envelope--"the story is called 'Dressing Up in
Mommy's Clothes.'"

"Look, I'm going to call the police and have them throw you out of
here. How will that suit Mr. Egan?"

"You call the police and I'd call Sal Valducci."

"You won't call anybody."

"Why don't you telephone your Park Avenue millionairess, Peppy? Maybe
she'll send her chauffeur around to rescue you from the clutches of your
terrible wife. Oh, don't worry, I know all about the bee-yoo-tiful Mrs.
McCall. A bee-yoo-tiful drip-- a helpless, hopeless, rich little society
drip! Oh, don't worry, I've had you followed, you bastard--I know what
you're up to with women!"

"You've had me what?"

"Followed! Trailed! Damn right I have! And it cost me a fortune! But
you're not getting away scot-free, you!"

"But I'll divorce you, you bitch, any day of the week! We don't need
detectives, we don't need--"

"Oh, don't you tell me what I need, dealing with someone like you! I
don't have a millionairess, you know, to buy me cuff links at Carder's! I
make my way in this world on my own!"

"Shit, so do we all! And what cuff links? What the hell are you talking
about now?"

But she was off and running again, and the story of "the Carder cuff links"
she would carry with her to her grave. "Oh just your speed, she is! Poor
little rich girls, or little teenage students all gaga over their artisti-
cal teacher, like our friend with the braids in Wisconsin. Or that Jewish
princess girl from Long Island. And how about the big blonde German
nurse you were fucking in the army? A nurse--just perfect for you! Just
perfect for our big mamma's boy with the tearful brown eyes! A real
woman, and you're in tears, Peter. A real woman and--"

"Look, who set you up in business as a real woman? Who appointed
you the representative of womankind? Stop trying to shove your bloody
Kotex down my throat, Maureen--you're not a real anything, that's your
goddam trouble! Now get out. How dare you have me followed!"

She didn't budge.

"I'm telling you to go."

"When I'm finished saying what I came here to say I will leave--and
then without your assistance. Right now I'm going to read this story,
because I want you to understand in no uncertain terms that two can play
this writing game, two can play at this kind of slander, if it's slander-
ing me you have in your vindictive mind. Quid pro quo, pal."

"Get--out."

"It's a short story about a writer named Paul Natapov, who unknown to
the readership that takes him so seriously, and the highbrow judges who
give him awards, likes to relax around the house in his wife's underwear."

"You fucking lunatic!" I cried, and pulled her up from the chair by one
arm. "Now out, out, out you psychopath! There-- there's the only thing
that's real about you, Maureen, your psychopathology! It isn't the woman
that drives me to tears, it's the nut! Now out!"

"No! No! You're only after my story," she screamed--"but tear it to
shreds--I still have a carbon in Dan Egan's safe!"

Here she flung herself to the floor, where she took hold of the legs of
the chair and began kicking up at me, bicycle fashion, with her high-heeled
shoes.

"Get up! Cut it out! Go! Go, Maureen--or I'm going to beat your crazy
head in!"

"Just you try it, mister!"

With the first crack of my hand I bloodied her delicate nose.

"Oh, my God…" she moaned as the blood spurted from her nostrils and
down onto the jacket of her handsome suit, blood a deeper red than the
nubby wool.

"And that is only the beginning! That is only the start. I'm going to
beat you to an unrecognizable pulp!"

"Go ahead! What do I care. The story's still in Dan's safe! Go ahead!
Kill me, why don't you!"

"Okay, I will," and cuffed her head, first one side, then the other. "If
that's what you want, I will!"

"Do it!"

"Now--" I said, striking at the back of her skull with the flat of my
palm, "now--" I hit her again, same spot, "now when you go to court, you
won't have to make it all up: now you'll have something real to cry about
to the good Judge Rosenzweig! A real beating, Maureen! The real thing, at
last!" I was on the floor, astraddle her, cuffing her head with my open
hand. Her blood was smeared everywhere: over her face, my hands, the rush
matting, all over the front of her suit, down her silk blouse, on her bare
throat. And the pages of the story were strewn around us, most of them
bloodied too. The real thing--and it was marvelous. I was loving it.

I, of course, had no intention of killing her right then and there, not so
long as those jails that Spielvogel had warned me about still existed. I was
not even really in a rage any longer. Just enjoying myself thoroughly. All
that gave me pause--oddly-- was that I was ruining the suit in which she'd
looked so attractive. But overlook the suit, I managed to tell myself. "I'm
going to kill you, my beloved wife, I'm going to end life for you here today
at the age of thirty-six, but in my own sweet time. Oh, you should have
agreed to the Algonquin, Maureen."

"Go ahead--" drooling now down her chin, "my life, my life is such shit,
let me die already…"

"Soon, soon now, very soon now you're going to be nice and dead." I hadn't
to wonder for very long where to assault her next. I rolled her onto her
face and began to pound with a stiff palm at her behind. The skirt of the
red suit and her half-slip were hiked up in the back, and there was her little
alley cat's behind, encased in tight white underpants, perhaps the very pair
about which her class at the New School had heard so much of late. I beat
her ass. Ten, fifteen, twenty strokes--I counted them out for her, aloud--
and then while she lay there sobbing, I stood up and went to the fireplace
and picked up the black wrought-iron poker that Susan had bought for me
in the Village. "And now," I announced, "I am going to kill you, as
promised."

No word from the floor, just a whimper.

"I'm afraid they are going to have to publish your fiction posthumously,
because I am about to beat your crazy, lying head in with this poker. I
want to see your brains, Maureen. I want to see those brains of yours with
my own eyes. I want to step in them with my shoes--and then I'll pass
them along to Science. God only knows what they'll find. Get ready,
Maureen, you're about to die horribly."

I could make out now the barely audible words she was whimpering: "Kill
me," she was saying, "kill me kill me--" as oblivious as I was in the
first few moments to the fact that she had begun to shit into her underwear.
The smell had spread around us before I saw the turds swelling the seat of
her panties. "Die me," she babbled deliriously--"die me good, die me long
--"

"Oh, Christ."

All at once she screamed, "Make me dead!"

"Maureen. Get up, Maureen. Maureen, come on now."

She opened her eyes. I wondered if she had passed over at last into
total madness. To be institutionalized forever--at my expense. Ten
thousand bucks more a year! I was finished!

"Maureen! Maureen!"

She managed a bizarre smile.

"Look." I pointed between her legs. "Don't you see? Don't you know?
Look, please. You've shit all over yourself. Do you hear me, do you
understand me? Answer me!"

She answered. "You couldn't do it."

"What?"

"You couldn't do it. You coward."

"Oh, Jesus."

"Big brave man."

"Well, at least you're yourself, Maureen. Now get up. Use the
bathroom!"

"A yellow coward."

"Wash yourself!"

She pushed up on her elbows and tried to bring herself to her feet, but
with an agonized groan, slumped backward. "I--I have to use your phone."

"After," I said, reaching down with a hand to help lift her.

"I have to phone now."

I gagged and averted my head. "Later--!"

"You beat me"--as though the news had just that moment reached her.
"Look at this blood! My blood! You beat me like some Harlem whore!"

I had now to step away from the odor she gave off. Oh, this was just
too much madness, too much all around. The tears started rolling out
of me. 'Where is your phone!"

"Look, who are you calling?"

"Whoever I want! You beat me! You filthy pig, you beat me!" She had
made it now up onto her knees. One blow with the poker--still in my
right hand, by the way--and she would phone no one.

I watched her stumbling over her own feet to the bedroom. One shoe
on and one shoe off. "No, the bathroom!"

"I have to phone…"

"You're leaking your shit all over!"

"You beat me, you monster! Is that all you can think of? The shit on
your House and Garden rug? Oh, you middle-class bastard, I don't believe
it!"

"WASH YOURSELF!"

"NO!"

From the bedroom came the sound of the casters rolling into the worn
grooves in the wooden floor. She had collapsed onto the bed, as though
dropping from the George Washington Bridge.

She was dialing--and sobbing.

"Hello? Mary? It's Maureen. He beat up on me, Mary--he-hello? No? Hello?"
With an animalish whine of frustration, she hung up. Then she was dialing
again, so slowly and fitfully she might have been falling off to sleep
between every other digit.

"Hello? Hello, is this the Egans? Is this 201-236-2890? Isn't this
Egans? Hello?" She let out another whine and threw the receiver at the
hook. "I want to talk to the Egans! I want the Egans!" she cried, bang-
ing the receiver up and down now in its cradle.

I stood in the doorway to the bedroom with my poker.

"What the hell are you crying about?" she said, looking up at me. "You
wanted to beat me, and you beat me, so stop crying. Why can't you be a
man for a change and do something, instead of being such a crybaby!"

"Do what? Do what?"

"You can dial the Egans! You broke my fingers! I have no feeling in my
fingers!"

"I didn't touch your fingers!"

"Then why can't I dial! DIAL FOR ME! STOP CRYING FOR FIVE SECONDS
AND DIAL THE RIGHT NUMBER!"

So I did it. She told me to do it, and I did it. 201-236-2890. Ding-a
ling. Ding-a-ling.

"Hello?" a woman said.

"Hello," said I, "is this Mary Egan?"

"Yes. Who is this, please?"

"Just a moment, Maureen Tarnopol wants to talk to you." I handed my
wife the phone, gagging as her aroma reached me again.

"Mary?" Maureen said. "Oh Mary," and wretchedly, she was sobbing once
again. "Is, is Dan home? I have to talk to Dan, oh Mary, he, he beat
me, Peter, that was him, he beat up on me, bad-"

And I, fully armed, stood by and listened. Who was I to phone for her
next, the police to come and arrest me, or Valducci to write it up in
the Daily News?

I left her to herself in the bedroom, and with a sponge and a pan of
water from the kitchen began to clean the blood and feces from the rush
matting on the living room floor. I kept the poker by my side--now,
ridiculously, for protection.

I was on my knees, the fifteenth or twentieth wad of paper toweling in
my hand, when Maureen came out of the bedroom.

"Oh, what a good little boy," she said.

"Somebody has to clean up your shit."

"Well, you're in trouble now, Peter."

I imagined that she was right--my stomach felt all at once as though
I were the one who had just evacuated in his pants-- but I pretended
otherwise. "Oh, am I?"

'When Dan Egan gets home, I wouldn't want to be in your shoes."

"That remains to be seen."

"You better run, my dear. Fast and far."

"You better wash yourself--and then go!"

"I want a drink."

"Oh, Maureen, please. You stink!"

"I NEED A DRINK! YOU TRIED TO MURDER ME!"

"YOU'RE TRACKING SHIT EVERYWHERE!"

"Oh, that's typical of you!"

"DO AS I SAY! WASH YOURSELF!"

"NO!"

I brought out a bottle of bourbon and poured each of us a big drink. She
took the glass and before I could say "No!" sat right down on Susan's
slipcover.

"Oh, you bitch."

"Fuck it," she said, hopelessly, and threw down the drink, barroom
style.

"You call me the baby, Maureen, and sit there in your diaper-ful,
defying me. Why must you defy me like this? Why?"

"Why not," she said, shrugging. "What else is there to do." She held
the glass out for another shot.

I closed my eyes, I didn't want to look at her. "Maureen," I pleaded,
"get out of my life, will you? Will you please? I beg you. How much more
time are we going to use up in this madness? Not only my time but yours."

"You had your chance. You chickened out."

"Why must it end in murder?"

Coldly: "I'm only trying to make a man out of you, Peppy, that's all.

"Oh, give it up then, will you? It's a lost cause. You've won, Maureen,
okay? You're the winner."

"Bullshit I am! Oh, don't you pull that cheap bullshit on me."

"But what more do you want?"

"What I don't have. Isn't that what people want? What's coming to
me."

"But nothing is coming to you. Nothing is coming to anyone."

"And that also includes you, golden boy!" And leaking through her under-
pants, she finally, fifteen minutes after the initial request, marched off
to the bathroom--where she slammed and locked the door.

I ran up and hammered on it--"And don't you try to kill yourself in
there! Do you hear me?"

"Oh, don't worry, mister--you ain't gettin' off that easy this time!"

It was nearly midnight when she decided on her own that she was ready
to leave: I had to sit and watch her try to clean the blood from the
pages of "Dressing Up in Mommy's Clothes" (by Maureen J. Tarnopol)
with a damp sponge; I had to find her a large paper clip and a clean manila
envelope for the manuscript; I had to give her two more drinks, and then
listen to myself compared, not entirely to my advantage, with Messrs.
Mezik and Walker. While I went about removing the odoriferous slipcovers
and bedspread to the bathroom clothes hamper, I was berated at length for
my class origins and allegiances, as she understood them; my virility she
analyzed while I sprinkled the rush matting with Aqua Velva. Only when I
threw all the windows open and stood there in the breeze, preferring to
breathe fumes from outside rather than inside the apartment, did Maureen
finally get up to go. "Am I now supposed to oblige you, Peter, by
jumping?" "Just airing the place--but exit however you like." "I came in
through the door and I will now go out through the door." "Always the
lady." "Oh, you won't get away with this!" she said, breaking into tears
as she departed.

I double-locked and chained the door behind her, and immediately
telephoned Spielvogel at his home.

"Yes, Mr. Tarnopol. What can I do for you?"

"I'm sorry to wake you, Dr. Spielvogel. But I thought I'd better talk to
you. Tell you what happened. She came."

"Yes?"

"And I beat her up."

"Badly?"

"She's still walking."

"Well, that's good to hear."

I began to laugh. "Literally beat the shit out of her. I'd bloodied her
nose, you see, and spanked her ass, and then I told her I was going to kill
her with the fireplace poker, and apparently the idea excited her so, she
crapped all over the apartment."

"I see."

I couldn't stop laughing. "It's a longer story than that, but that's the gist
of it. She just started to shit!"

Spielvogel said, after a moment, "Well, you sound as though you had a
good time."

"I did. The place still stinks, but actually, it was terrific. In retrospect,
one of the high points of my life! I thought, 'This is it, I'm going to do it.
She wants a beating, I'll give it to her!' The minute she came in, you see,
the minute she sat down, she virtually asked for it. Do you know what she
told me? 'I'm not going to divorce you, ever.'"

"I expected as much."

"Yes? Then why didn't you say something?"

"You indicated to me it was worth the risk. You assured me you
wouldn't collapse, however things went."

"Well, I didn't…did I?"

"Did you?"

"I don't know. Before she left--after the beating--she called her
lawyer. I dialed the number for her."

"You did?"

"And I cried, I'm afraid. Not torrentially, but some. I tell you, though, it
wasn't for me, Doctor--believe it or not, it was for her. You should have
seen that performance."

"And now what?"

"Now?"

"Now you ought to call your lawyer, yes?"

"Of course!"

"You sound a little unstrung," said Spielvogel.

"I'm really all right. I feel fine, surprisingly enough."

"Then telephone the lawyer. If you want, call me back and tell me what
he said. I'll be up."

What my lawyer said was that I was to leave town immediately and stay
away until he told me to come back. He informed me that for what I had
done I could be placed under arrest. In my euphoria, I had neglected to
think of it that way.

I called Spielvogel back to give him the news and cancel my sessions
for the coming week; I said that I assumed (please no haggling, I prayed)
that I wouldn't have to pay for the hours that I missed--"likewise if I get
ninety days for this." "If you are incarcerated," he assured me, "I will try
my best to get someone to take over your hours." Then I telephoned Susan,
who had been waiting by her phone all night to learn the outcome of my
meeting with Maureen--was I getting divorced? No, we were getting out of
town. Pack a bag. "At this hour? How? Where?" I picked her up in a taxi
and for sixty dollars (it would have gone for three sessions with Spielvogel
anyway, said I to comfort myself) the driver agreed to take us down the
Garden State Parkway to Atlantic City, where I had once spent two idyllic
weeks as a twelve-year-old in a seaside cottage with my cousins from
Camden, my father's family. There, within the first twelve hours, I had
fallen in love with Sugar Wasserstrom, a sprightly curly-haired girl from
New Jersey, a schoolmate of my cousin's, prematurely fitted out with
breasts just that spring (April, my cousin told me from his bed that night).
That I came from New York made me something like a Frenchman in Sugar's
eyes; sensing this, I told lengthy stories about riding the subway, till
shortly she began to fall in love with me too. Then I let her have my Gene
Kelly version of "Long Ago and Far Away," crooned it right into her ear as
we snuggled down the boardwalk arm in arm, and with that, I believe, I
finished her off. The girl was gone. I kissed her easily a thousand times in
two weeks. Atlantic City, August 1945: my kingdom by the sea. World War
Two ended with Sugar in my arms--I had an erection, which she tactfully
ignored, and which I did my best not to bring to her attention. Doubled-up
with the pain of my unfired round, I nonetheless kept on kissing. How could
I let suffering stop me at a time like this? Thus the postwar era dawned,
and, at twelve, my adventures with girls had begun.

I was to stay away as long as Dan Egan remained in Chicago on business.
My lawyer was waiting for Egan to get back to be absolutely certain he
wasn't going to press charges for assault with intent to kill--or to
attempt to persuade him not to. In the meantime, I tried to show Susan a
good time. We had breakfast in bed in our boardwalk hotel. I paid ten
dollars to have her profile drawn in pastels. We ate big fried scallops
and visited the Steel Pier. I recalled for her the night of V-J Day, when
Sugar and I and my cousins and their friends had conga-ed up and down the
boardwalk (with my aunt's permission) to celebrate Japan's defeat. Was I
effusive! And free with the cash! But it's my money, isn't it? Not hers--
mine! I still couldn't grow appropriately serious about the grave legal
consequences of my brutality, or remorseful, quite yet, about having done
so cold-heartedly what, as a little Jewish boy, I had been taught to despise.
A man beating a woman? What was more loathsome, except a man beating
a child?

The first evening I checked in on the phone with Dr. Spielvogel at the hour
I ordinarily would have been arriving at his office for my appointment. "I
feel like the gangster hiding out with his moll," I told him. "It sounds like
it suits you," he said. "All in all it was a rewarding experience. You should
have told me about barbarism a long time ago." "You seem to have taken to
it very nicely on your own."

In the late afternoon of our second full day, my lawyer phoned--no,
Egan wasn't back from Chicago, but his wife had called to say that
Maureen had been found unconscious in her apartment and taken by
ambulance to Roosevelt Hospital. She had been out for two days and there
was a chance she would die.

And covered with bruises, I thought. From my hands.

"After she left me, she went home and tried to kill herself."

"That's what it sounds like."

"I better get up there then."

"Why?" asked the lawyer.

"Better that I'm there than that I'm not." Even I wasn't quite sure what
I meant.

"The police might come around," he told me.

Valducci might come around, I thought.

"You sure you want to do this?" he asked.

"I'd better."

"Okay. But if the cops are there, call me. I'll be home all night. Don't
say anything to anyone. Just call me and I'll come over."

I told Susan what had happened and that we were going back to New
York. She too asked why. "She's not your business any more, Peter. She is
not your concern. She's trying to drive you crazy, and you're letting her."

"Look, if she dies I'd better be there."

"Why?"

"I ought to be, that's all."

"But why? Because you're her 'husband'? Peter, what if the police are
there? What if they arrest you--and put you in jail! Do you see what
you've done--you could go to jail now. Oh, Lambchop, you wouldn't last
an hour in jail."

"They're not going to put me in jail," I said, my heart quaking.

"You beat her, which was stupid enough--but this is even more stupid.
You keep trying to do the 'manly' thing, and all you ever do is act like a
child."

"Oh, do I?"

"There is no 'manly' thing with her. Don't you see that yet? There are
only crazy things. Crazier and crazier! But you're like a little boy in a
Superman suit, with some little boy's ideas about being big and strong.
Every time she throws down the glove, you pick it up! If she phones, you
answer! If she writes letters, you go crazy. If she does nothing, you go home
and work on your novel about her! You're like--like her puppet! She yanks
--you jump! It's--it's pathetic."

"Oh, is it?"

"Oh," said Susan, brokenhearted, "why did you have to hit her? Why
did you do that?"

"Actually, I thought it pleased you."

"Did you really? Pleased me? I hated it. I just haven't told you in so
many words because you were so pleased with yourself. But why on earth
did you do it? The woman is a psychopath, you tell me that yourself. What
is gained by beating up someone who isn't even responsible for what she
says? What is the good of it?"

"I couldn't take any more, that's the good of it! She may be a psycho-
path, but I am the psychopath's husband and I can't take any more."

"But what about your will? You're the one who is always telling me
about using my will. You're the one who got me back to college, hitting me
over the head with my will--and then you, you who hate violence, who are
sweet and civilized, turn around and do something totally out of control
like that. Why did you let her come to your apartment to begin with?"

"To get a divorce!"

"But that's what your lawyer is for!"

"But she won't cooperate with my lawyer."

"And who will she cooperate with instead? You?"

"Look, I am trying to get out of a trap. I stepped into it back when I
was twenty-five, and now I'm thirty-three and I'm still in it-"

"But the trap is you. You're the trap. When she phoned you, why didn't
you just hang up? When she said no to the Algonquin, why didn't you
realize--"

"Because I thought I saw a way out! Because this alimony is bleeding
me dry! Because going back and forth into court to have my income
scrutinized and my check stubs checked is driving me mad! Because I am
four thousand dollars in debt to my brother! Because I have nothing left of
a twenty-thousand-dollar advance on a book that I cannot write! Because
when little Judge Rosenzweig hears I teach only two classes a week, he's
ready to send me to Sing Sing! He has to sit on his ass all day to earn his
keep, while coed seducers like me are out there abandoning their wives
left and right--and teaching only two classes! They want me to get a paper
route, Susan! They wouldn't care if I sold Good Humors! Abandoned her?
She's with me day and night! The woman is unabandonable!"

"By you."

"Not by me--by them!"

"Peter, you're going wild."

"I am wild! I've gone!"

"But Lambchop," she pleaded, "I have money. You could use my
money."

"I could not."

"But it's not even mine. It's no one's, really. It's Jamey's. It's my
grandfather's. And they're all dead, and there's tons of it, and why not? You
can pay back your brother, you can pay back the publisher and forget that
novel, and go on to something new. And you can pay her whatever the court
says, and then just forget her--oh, do forget her, once and for all, before
you ruin everything. If you haven't already!"

Oh, I thought, would that be something. Pay them all off, and start in
clean. Clean! Go back to Rome and start again…live with Susan and our
pots of geraniums and our bottles of Frascati and our walls of books in a
white-washed apartment on the Janiculum…get a new VW and go off on all
those trips again, up through the mountains in a car with nobody grabbing
at the wheel…gelati in peace in the Piazza Navona…marketing in peace in
the Campo dei Fiori…dinner with friends in Trastevere, in peace: no
ranting, no raving, no tears…and writing about something other than
Maureen…oh, just think of all there is to write about in this world that
is not Maureen…Oh, what luxe!

"We could arrange with the bank," Susan was saying, "to send her a
check every month. You wouldn't even have to think about it. And,
Lambchop, that would be that. You could just wipe the whole thing out,
like that."

"That wouldn't be that, and I couldn't wipe anything out like that, and
that is that. Besides, she's going to die anyway."

"Not her," said Susan, bitterly.

"Pack your stuff. Let's go."

"But why will you let her crucify you with money when there's no
need for it!"

"Susan, it is difficult enough borrowing from my big brother."

"But I'm not your brother. I'm your--me."

"Let's go."

"No!" And angrier than I could ever have imagined her, she marched
off into the bathroom adjoining our room.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, I closed my eyes and tried to think
clearly. My limbs weakened as I did so. She's black and blue. Couldn't they
say I killed her? Couldn't they make the case that I stuffed the pills down
her throat and left her there to croak? Can they find fingerprints on flesh?
If so, they'll find mine!

Here I experienced a cold shock on the top of the head.

Susan was standing over me, having just poured a glass of water, drawn
from the tap, on my head. Violence breeds violence, as they say--for Susan,
it was the most violent act she had ever dared to commit in her life.

"I hate you," she said, stamping her foot.

And on that note we packed our bags and the box of salt water taffy I
had bought for Dr. Spielvogel, and in a rented car we departed the seaside
resort where many and many a year ago I had first encountered romantic
love: Tarnopol Returns To Face The Music In New York.

At the hospital, blessedly, no Valducci and no police--no handcuffs, no
squad car, no flashbulbs, no TV cameras grinding away at the mug of the
prize-winning murderer…Paranoid fantasy, all that--grandiose delusions
for the drive up the parkway, Narcissismo, with a capital N! Guilt and
ambivalence over his specialness? Oh, Spielvogel, maybe you are right in
ways you do not even know--maybe this Maureen of mine is just the Miss
America of a narcissist's dreams. I wonder: have I chosen this She-Wolf of
a woman because I am, as you say, such a Gargantua of Self-Love? Because
secretly I sympathize with the poor girl's plight, know it is only right that
she should lie, steal, deceive, risk her very life to have the likes of me?
Because she says with every wild shriek and desperate scheme, "Peter Tarn-
opol, you are the cat's meow." Is that why I can't call it quits with her,
because I'm flattered so?

No, no, no, no more fancy self-lacerating reasons for how I am being
destroyed. I can walk away all right--only let me!

I took the elevator to the intensive-care unit and gave my name to the
young nurse at the desk there. "How," I asked softly, "is my wife?" She told
me to take a seat and wait to talk to the doctor who was presently in with
Mrs. Tarnopol. "She's alive," I said. "Oh, yes," the nurse answered,
reaching out kindly to touch my elbow. "Good. Great," I replied; "and
there's no chance of her--" The nurse said, "You'll have to ask the doctor,
Mr. Tarnopol."

Good. Great. She may die yet. And I will finally be free!

And in jail!

But I didn't do it!

Someone was tapping me on the shoulder.

"Aren't you Peter?"

A short, chubby woman, with graying hair and a pert, lined face, and
neatly attired in a simple dark-blue dress and "sensible" shoes, was looking
at me rather shyly; as I would eventually learn, she was only a few years
older than I and a fifth-grade teacher in a Manhattan parochial school (and,
astonishingly, in therapy because of a recurrent drinking problem); she
looked no more threatening than the helpful librarian out of my childhood,
but there in that hospital waiting room all I saw looking up at me was an
enemy, Maureen's avenger. I backed off a step.

"Aren't you Peter Tarnopol the writer?"

The kindly nurse had lied. Maureen was dead. I was being placed under
arrest for first-degree murder. By this policewoman. "Yes," I said, "yes, I
write."

"I'm Flossie."

"Who?"

"Flossie Koerner. From Maureen's Group. I've heard so much about
you."

I allowed with a weak smile that that might be so.

"I'm so glad you got here," she said. "She'll want to see you as soon as
she comes around…She has to come around, Peter --she has to!"

"Yes, yes, don't you worry now…"

"She loves life so," said Flossie Koerner, clutching at one of my hands.
I saw now that the eyes behind the spectacles were red from weeping. With
a sigh, and a sweet, an endearing smile really, she said, "She loves you so."

"Yes, well…we'll just have to see now…"

We sat down beside one another to wait for the doctor.

"I feel I practically know you," said Flossie Koerner.

"Oh, yes?"

"When I hear Maureen talk about all those places you visited in Italy,
it's all so vivid, she practically makes me feel I was there, with the two
of you, having lunch that day in Siena--and remember that little pensione
you stayed at in Florence?"

"In Florence?"

"Across from the Boboli Gardens. That that sweet little old lady
owned, the one who looked like Isak Dinesen?"

"Oh, yes."

"And the little kitty with the spaghetti sauce on its face."

"I don't remember that…"

"By the Trevi Fountain. In Rome."

"Don't remember…"

"Oh, she's so proud of you, Peter. She boasts about you like a little girl.
You should hear when someone dares to criticize the tiniest thing in your
book. Oh, she's like a lioness protecting one of her cubs."

"She is, eh?"

"Oh, that's finally Maureen's trademark, isn't it? If I had to sum her up
in one word, that would be it: loyalty."

"Fierce loyalty," I said.

"Yes, so fierce, so determined--so full of belief and passion. Everything
means so much to her. Oh, Peter, you should have seen her up in El-
mira, at her father's funeral. It was you of course that she wanted to come
with her--but she was afraid you'd misunderstand, and then she's always
been so ashamed of them with you, and so she never dared to call you. I
went with her instead. She said, 'Flossie, I can't go up there alone--but I
have to be there, I have to…' She had to be there, Peter, to forgive him…
for what he did."

"I don't know about any of this. Her father died?"

"Two months ago. He had a heart attack and died right on a bus."

"And what had he done that she had to forgive?"

"I shouldn't say."

"He was a night watchman somewhere…wasn't he? Some plant in
Elmira…"

She had taken my hand again--"When Maureen was eleven years
old…"

"What happened?"

"I shouldn't be the one to tell it, to tell you."

"What happened?"

"Her father…forced her…but at the graveside, Peter, she forgave him. I
heard her whisper the words myself. You can't imagine what it was like--it
went right through me. 'I forgive you, Daddy,' she said."

"Don't you think it's strange she never told me this herself?"

Don't you think it might even be something she happened to read about
in Tender Is the Night? Or Krafft-Ebing? Or in the "Hundred Neediest
Cases" in the Christmas issue of the Sunday Times? Don't you think that
maybe she's just trying to outdo the rest of you girls in the Group? Sounds
to me, Flossie, like a Freudian horror story for those nights you all spend
roasting marshmallows around the therapist's campfire.

"Tell you?" said Flossie. "She was too humiliated to tell anyone, her
whole life long, until she found the Group. All her life she was terrified
people would find out, she felt so--so polluted by it. Not even her mother
knew."

"You met her mother?"

"We stayed overnight at their house. Maureen's been back twice to see
her. They spend whole days talking about the past. Oh, she's trying so hard
to forgive her too. To forgive, to forget."

"Forget what? Forgive what?"

"Mrs. Johnson wasn't much of a mother, Peter…"

Flossie volunteered no lurid details, nor did I ask.

"Maureen didn't want you, above all, ever to know any of this. We would
try so hard to tell her that they weren't her fault. I mean intellectually
of course she understood that…but emotionally it was just embedded in her
from her earliest childhood, that shame. It was really a classic case his
tory."

"Sounds that way."

"Oh, I told her you would understand."

"I believe I do."

"How can she die? How can a person with her will to live and to struggle
against the past, someone who battles for survival the way she does, and
for a future--how can she die! The last time she came down from Elmira,
oh, she was so torn up. That's why we all thought Puerto Rico might lift
her spirits. She's such a wonderful dancer."

"Oh?"

"But all that dancing, and all that sun, and just getting away --and then
she got back and just took a nose dive. And did this. She's so proud. Too
proud sometimes, I think. That's why she takes things so much to heart.
Where you're concerned, especially. Well, you were everything to her, you
know that. You see, intellectually she knows by now how sorry you are. She
knows that girl was just a tramp, and one of those things men do. It's partly
Mr. Egan--I shouldn't say it, but it's being in his clutches. Every time you
go plead with her to come back to you, he turns around and says no, you're
not to be trusted. Maybe I'm telling tales out of school--but we are talking
about Maureen's life. But you see, he's such a devout Catholic, Mr. Egan,
and Mrs. Egan even more so--and, Peter, being Jewish you may not
understand what it means to them when a husband did what you did. My
parents would react the same way. I grew up in that kind of atmosphere, and
I know how strong it is. They don't know how the world has changed--they
don't know about girls like that Karen, and they don't want to know. But I
see those college girls today, the kinds of morals they have, and their
disrespect for everything. I know what they're capable of. They get a
beeline on an attractive man old enough to be their own father--"

The doctor appeared.

Tell me she is dead. I'll go to jail forever. Just let that filthy
·psychopathic liar be dead. The world will be a better place.

But the news was "good." Mr. Tarnopol could go in now to see his
wife. She was out of danger--she had come around; the doctor had even
gotten her to speak a few words, though she was so groggy she probably
hadn't understood what either of them had said. Fortunately, the doctor
explained, the whiskey she had taken with the pills had made her sick and
she'd thrown up most of "the toxic material" that otherwise would have
killed her. The doctor warned me that her face was bruised--"Yes? It is?"--
as she had apparently been lying for a good deal of the time with her mouth
and nose pushed into the mattress and her own vomit. But that too was
fortunate, for if she had not been on her stomach while throwing up, she
probably would have strangulated. There were also bruises on the buttocks
and thighs. "There are?" Yes, indicating that she had spent a part of the two
days on her back as well. All that movement, the doctor said, was what had
kept her alive.

I was in the clear.

But so was Maureen.

"How did they find her?" I asked the doctor.

"I found her," Flossie said.

'We have Miss Koerner to thank for that," the doctor said.

"I was calling there for days," said Flossie, "and getting no answer. And
then last night she missed Group. I got suspicious, even though she
sometimes doesn't come, when she gets all wrapped up in her flute or
something--but I just got very suspicious, because I knew she was in this
depression since coming back from Puerto Rico. And this afternoon I
couldn't stand worrying any more, and I told Sister Mary Rose that I had to
leave and in the middle of an arithmetic class I just got in a taxi and came
over to Maureen's and knocked on the door. I just kept knocking and then I
heard Delilah and I was sure something was up."

"Heard who?"

"The cat. She was meowing away, but there was still no answer. So I
got down on my hands and knees in the corridor there, and there's a little
space under the door, because it doesn't fit right, which I always told
Maureen was dangerous, and I called to the pussy and then I saw Maureen's
hand hanging down over the side of the bed. I could see her fingertips
almost touching the carpet. And so I ran to a neighbor and phoned the
police and they broke in the door, and there she was, just in her underwear,
her bra too I mean, and all this…mess, like the doctor said."

I wanted to find out from Flossie if a suicide note had been found, but
the doctor was still with us, and so all I said was, "May I go in to see her
now?"

"I think so," he said. "Just for a few minutes."

In the darkened room, in one of the half dozen criblike beds, Maureen
lay with her eyes closed, under a sheet, hooked up by tubes and wires to
various jugs and bottles and machines. Her nose was swollen badly, as
though she'd been in a street brawl. Which she had been.

I looked silently down at her, perhaps for as long as a minute, before I
realized that I had neglected to call Spielvogel. I wanted all at once to
talk over with him whether I really ought to be here or not. I would like
to ask him his opinion. I would like to know my own. What was I doing here?
Rampant narcissismo--or, as Susan diagnosed it, just me being a boy
again? Coming when called by my master Maureen! Oh, if so, tell me how I
stop! How do I ever get to be what is described in the literature as a man? I
had so wanted to be one, too--why then is it always beyond me? Or--could
it be?--is this boy's life a man's life after all? Is this it? Oh, could be, I
thought, could very well be that I have been expecting much too much from
"maturity." This quicksand is it--adult life!

Maureen opened her eyes. She had to work to bring me into focus. I gave
her time. Then I leaned over the bed's side bars, and with my face
looming over hers, said, "This is Hell, Maureen. You are in Hell. You
have been consigned to Hell for all eternity."

I meant for her to believe every word.

But she began to smile. A sardonic smile for her husband, even in
extremis. Faintly, she said, "Oh, delicious, if you're here too."

"This is Hell, and I am going to look down at you for all of Time and
tell you what a lying bitch you are."

"Just like back in Life Itself."

I said, shaking a fist, "What if you had died!"

For a long time she didn't answer. Then she wet her lips and said, "Oh,
you would have been in such hot water."

"But you would have been dead."

That roused her anger, that brought her all the way around. Yep, she was
alive now. "Please, don't bullshit me. Don't give me 'Life is Sacred.' It
is not sacred when you are constantly in pain." She was weeping. "My life
is just pain."

You're lying, you bitch. You're lying to me, like you lie to Flossie
Koerner, like you lie to your Group, like you lie to everyone. Cry, but I
won't cry with you!

So swore he who aspired to manhood; but the little boy who will not
die began to go to pieces.

"The pain, Maureen,"--the tears from my face plopped onto the sheet
that covered her--"the pain comes from all this lying that you do. Lying is
the form your pain takes. If only you would make an effort, if only you
would give it up--"

"Oh, how can you? Oh get out of here, you, with your crocodile tears.
Doctor," she cried feebly, "help."

Her head began to thrash around on the pillow--"Okay," I said, "calm
down, calm yourself. Stop." I was holding her hand.

She squeezed my fingers, clutched them and wouldn't let go. It had
been a while now since we'd held hands.

"How," she whimpered, "how…"

"Okay, just take it easy."

"--How can you be so heartless when you see me like this?"

"I'm sorry."

"I'm only alive two minutes…and you're over me calling me a liar.
Oh, boy," she said, just like somebody's little sister.

"I'm only trying to suggest to you how to alleviate the pain. I'm trying
to tell you…" ah, go on with it, go on, "the lying is the source of your
self-loathing."

"Bullshit," she sobbed, pulling her fingers from mine. "You're trying
to get out of paying the alimony. I see right through you, Peter. Oh thank
God I didn't die," she moaned. "I forgot all about the alimony. That's how
mortified and miserable you left me!"

"Oh, Maureen, this is fucking hell."

"Who said no?" said she, and exhausted now, closed her eyes, though not
for oblivion, not quite yet. Only to sleep, and rise in a rage one last
time.

When I came back into the waiting room there was a man with Flossie
Koerner, a large blond fellow in gleaming square-toed boots and wearing a
beautifully cut suit in the latest mode. He was so powerfully good-looking
--charismatic is the word these days--that I did not immediately separate
out the tan from the general overall glow. I thought momentarily that he
might be a detective, but the only detectives who look like him are in the
movies.

I got it: he too must just be back from vacationing in Puerto Rico!

He extended a hand, big and bronzed, for me to shake. Soft wide French
cuffs; gold cuff links cast in the form of little microphones; strange
animalish tufts of golden hair on the knuckles…Why, just from the wrists to
the fingernails he was something to conjure with--now how in hell did she
get him? Surely to catch this one would require the piss of a pregnant
contessa. "I'm Bill Walker," he said. "I flew here as soon as I got the
news. How is she? Is she able to talk?"

It was my predecessor, it was Walker, who had "promised" to give up
boys after the marriage, and then had gone back on his word. My, what a
dazzler he was! In my lean and hungry Ashkenazic way I am not a bad
looking fellow, but this was beauty.

"She's out of danger," I told Walker. "Oh yes, she's talking; don't
worry, she's her old self."

He flashed a smile warmer and larger than the sarcasm warranted; he
didn't even see it as sarcasm, I realized. He was just plain overjoyed to hear
she was alive.

Flossie, also in seventh heaven, pointed appreciatively to the two of us.
"You can't say she doesn't know how to pick 'em."

It was a moment before I understood that I was only being placed
alongside Walker in the category of Good-Looking Six-Footers. My face
flushed--not just at the thought that she who had picked Walker had picked
me, but that both Walker and I had picked her.

"Look, maybe we ought to have a drink afterwards, and a little chat,"
Walker suggested.

"I have to run," I replied, a line that Dr. Spielvogel would have found
amusing.

Here Walker removed a billfold from the side-vented jacket that nipped
his waist and swelled over his torso, and handed me a business card. "If you
get up to Boston," he said, "or if for any reason you want to get in touch
about Maur."

Was a pass being made? Or did he actually care about "Maur"?

"Thanks," I said. I saw from the card that he was with a television station
up there.

"Mr. Walker," said Flossie, as he started for the nurse's desk. She was
still beaming with joy at the way things had worked out. "Mr. Walker--
would you?" She handed him a piece of scratch paper she had drawn hastily
from her purse. "It's not for me--it's for my little nephew. He collects
them."

"What's his name?"

"Oh, that's so kind. His name is Bobby."

Walker signed the paper and, smiling, handed it back to her.

"Peter, Peter." She was plainly chagrined and embarrassed, and touched
my hand with her fingertips. "Would you? I couldn't ask earlier, not with
Maureen still in danger…you understand…don't you? But, now, well, I'm
just so elated…so relieved." With that she handed me a piece of paper.
Perplexed, I signed my name to it. I thought: Now all she needs is Mezik's
X and Bobby will have the set. What's going on with this signature
business? A trap? Flossie and Walker in cahoots with--with whom? My
signature to be used for what? Oh, please, relax. That's paranoid madness.
More narcissismo.

Says who.

"By the way," Walker told me, "I admired A Jewish Father tremendous-
ly. Powerful stuff. I thought you really captured the moral dilemma
of the modern American Jew. When can we expect another?"

"As soon as I can shake that bitch out of my life."

Flossie couldn't (and consequently wouldn't) believe her ears.

"She's not such a bad gal, you know," said Walker, in a low stern voice,
impressive now for its restraint as well as its timbre. "She happens to be
one of the gamest people I know, as a matter of fact. She's been through a
lot, that girl, and survived it all."

"So have I been through it, pal. At her hands!" A film of perspiration
had formed on my forehead and beneath my nose--I was greatly enraged
by this tribute to Maureen's guts, particularly coming from this guy.

"Oh," he said icily, and swelling a little as he spoke, "I understand you
know how to take care of yourself, all right. You've got hands too, from
what I hear." He lifted one corner of his mouth, a contemptuous smile…
tinged slightly (unless I was imagining things) with a coquettish invitation.
"If you can't stand the heat, as they say--"

"Gladly. Gladly," I interrupted. "Just go in there and tell her to unlock
the kitchen door!"

Flossie, a hand now on either of us, jumped in--"He's just upset, Mr.
Walker, from everything that's happened."

"I should hope so," said Walker. He took three long strides to the
nurse's desk, where he announced, "I'm Bill Walker. I spoke earlier to Dr.
Maas."

"Oh. Yes. You can see her now. But only for a few minutes."

"Thank you."

"Mr. Walker?" The nurse, a stout, pretty twenty-year-old, till then all
tact and good sense, turned shy and awkward suddenly. Flushing, she said
to him, "Would you mind? I'm going off duty. Would you, please?" And
she too produced a piece of paper for him to sign.

"Of course." Walker leaned over the desk toward the nurse. 'What's
your name?" he asked.

"Oh, that doesn't matter," she said, going even a deeper scarlet. "Just
say 'Jackie'--that'd be enough."

Walker signed the paper, slowly, with concentration, and then headed
off into the intensive-care room.

"Who's he?" I asked Flossie.

My question confused her. "Why, Maureen's husband, between you
and that Mr. Mezik."

"And that's why all the world wants his autograph?" I asked sourly.

"Don't--don't you really know?"

"Know what?"

"He's the Huntley-Brinkley of Boston. He's the anchorman of their six
o'clock news. He was just on the cover of the last TV Guide. He's the one
that used to be a Shakespearean actor."

"I see."

"Peter, I'm sure it's that Maureen just didn't want to make you jealous
by mentioning him right now. He's just been helping her over the rough
spots, that's really all there is to it."

"And he's the one who took her to Puerto Rico."

Flossie, out of her depth completely now, and not at all sure any longer
what was to be said to smooth life over for this triumvirate with whose fate
she was intimately involved, shrugged and nearly wilted. We, I realized,
were her own private soap opera: she was the audience to our drama, our
ode-singing chorus; this was the Fortinbras my Deep Seriousness had called
forth. Fair enough, I thought--this Fortinbras for this farce!

Flossie said, "Well--"

"Well, what?"

"Well, I think so, that they were together there, yes. But, believe me,
he's just somebody, well, that she could turn to…after you did…what you
did…with Karen."

"I get it," I said, and pulled on my coat.

"Oh, please don't be jealous. It's a brother-sister relationship more than
anything else--someone close, lending her a helping hand. She's over him,
I swear to you. She knew long ago that with him it would always be career
career. He can propose from now till doomsday, she'd never go back to a
man whose work and talent is his everything. That's true. Please don't jump
to conclusions because of him, it's not fair. Peter, you must have faith--
she will take you back, I'm sure of it."

I passed a phone booth on my way through the hospital lobby, but didn't
stop to call anyone to ask if I was about to do the wrong thing again or
the right thing at last--I saw a way out (I thought) and so I ran. This
time to Maureen's apartment on West Seventy-eighth Street, only a few
blocks from the hospital to which the ambulance had carried her some hours
earlier. There had to be evidence against her somewhere in that apartment--
in the diary she kept, some entry describing how she had laid this trap from
which I still could not escape. A confession about the urine written in her
own hand--that we would submit in evidence to the court, to Judge Milton
Rosenzweig, whose mission it was to prevent phallic havoc from being
unleashed on the innocent and defenseless abandoned women of the county
of New York of the state of New York. Oh, little robed Rosenzweig, he
would have kept the primal horde in line! How he bent over backwards not
to show favoritism to his, the Herculean sex…Prior to my own separation
hearing there had been the case of Kriegel v. Kriegel; it was still in ses-
sion when I arrived with my lawyer at the courthouse on Centre Street. "Your
Honor," pleaded Kriegel, a heavyset businessman of fifty, addressing him-
self (when we entered the courtroom) directly to the judge; his attorney,
standing beside him, made sporadic attempts to quiet his client down, but
from Kriegel's posture and tone it was clear that he had decided to Throw
Himself Upon the Mercy of the Court. "Your Honor," he said, "I understand
full well that she lives in a walk-up. But I didn't tell her to get a walk-up.
That was her choice. She could get an elevator building on what I give her a
week, I assure you. But, Your Honor, I cannot give her what I do not have."
Judge Rosenzweig, up by his bootstraps from Hell's Kitchen to N.Y.U. Law,
and still a burly little battler for all his sixty-odd years, flicked contin-
ually with one index finger at an earlobe as he listened--as though over the
decades he had found this the best means to prevent the bullshit addressed
to the bench from passing down into the Eustachian tube and poisoning his
system. His humorous bantering side and his stern contemptuous side were
all right there in that gesture. He wore the gown of a magistrate, but the
manner (and the hide) was that of an old Marine general who had spent a
lifetime hitting the beaches in defense of Hearth and Home. "Your Honor,"
said Kriegel, "I'm in the feather business, as the court knows. That's it,
sir. I buy and I sell feathers. I'm not a millionaire like she tells you."
Judge Rosenzweig, obviously pleased by the opportunity for light banter pro-
vided him by Mr. Kriegel, said, "Still, that's a nice suit you got on your
back. That's a Hickey-Freeman suit. Unless my eyes deceive me, that's a two
hundred-dollar suit." "Your Honor--" said Kriegel, spreading his hands
deferentially before the judge, as though he held in each palm the three or
four feathers that he passed on to the pillow people in the course of a day,
"Your Honor, please, I would not come to court in rags." "Thank you." "I
mean it, Your Honor." "Look, Kriegel, I know you. You own more colored pro-
perty in Harlem than Carter has little liver pills." "Me? No, not me, Your
Honor. I beg to differ with Your Honor. That's my brother. That's Louis
Kriegel. I'm Julius." "You're not in with your brother? Are you sure that's
what you want to tell the court, Mr. Kriegel?" "In with him?" "In with
him." "Well, if so, only on the side, Your Honor." Then me. I don't shilly
shally quite so long as Kriegel; no, no Judge Rosenzweig has to badger for-
ever a man of my calling--and Thomas Mann's and Leo Tolstoy's--to get at
the Truth! "What's it mean here, Mr. Tarnopol, 'a well-known seducer
of college girls'? What's that mean?" "Your Honor, I think that's an
exaggeration." "You mean you're not well-known for it, or you're not a
seducer of college girls?" "I'm not a 'seducer' of anybody." "So what do
they mean here, do you think?" "I don't know, sir." My lawyer nods approv-
ingly at me from the defense table; I have done just as I was instructed
to in the taxi down to the courthouse: "…just say you don't know and
you have no idea…make no accusations…don't call her a liar…don't
call her anything but Mrs. Tarnopol . . Rosenzweig has a great feeling for
abandoned women…he won't permit name-calling of abandoned women in his
court…just shrug it off, Peter, and don't admit a thing--because he is a
prick of the highest order under the best of circumstances. And this isn't
the best of circumstances, a teacher fucking his students." "I didn't fuck
my students." "Fine. Good. That's just what you tell him. The judge has a
granddaughter at Barnard College, her picture, Peter, is all over his
chambers. Friend, this old gent is the Stalin of Divorce Court Communism:
'From each according to his ability, to each according to her need.' And
with a vengeance. So watch it, Peter, will you?" On the witness stand I
unfortunately forgot to. "Are you telling me then," asked Rosenzweig, "that
Mr. Egan, in his affidavit prepared for Mrs. Tarnopol, has lied to the court?
Is this an outright lie--yes or no?" "As stated, it is, yes." "Well, how
would you state it to make it true? Mr. Tarnopol, I'm asking you a question.
Give me an answer, please, so we can get on here!" "Look, I have nothing
to hide --I have nothing to feel guilty about--" "Your Honor," interrupted
my lawyer, even as I told the judge, "I had a love affair." "Yes?" said
Rosenzweig, smiling, his ear-flicking finger poised now at the side of
his head--"How nice. With whom?" "A girl in my class--whom I loved, Your
Honor--a young woman." And that of course helped the cause enormously,
that qualification.

But now we would all find out just who the guilty party was, just who
had committed a crime against whom! "Judge Rosenzweig, you may remem-
ber that the last time I appeared before you, I brought no charges a-
gainst Mrs. Tarnopol. I was cautioned by my attorney, and rightly so, to
say nothing whatsoever about a fraud that had been perpetrated on me by
my wife, because at that time, Your Honor, we had nothing in the way of
evidence to support so damning an accusation. And we realized that,
understandably, His Honor would not take kindly to unsubstantiated
charges being brought against an 'abandoned' woman, who was here only
to seek the protection that the law rightfully provides her. But now,
Your Honor, we have the proof, a confession written in the 'abandoned'
woman's own hand, that on March 1, 1959, she purchased, for two dollars
and twenty-five cents in cash, several ounces of urine from a pregnant
Negro woman with whom she made contact in Tompkins Square Park, on the
Lower East Side of Manhattan. We have proof that she did then take said
urine to a drugstore at the corner of Second Avenue and Ninth Street, and
that she submitted it, in the name of 'Mrs. Peter Tarnopol,' to the
pharmacist for a pregnancy test. We further have proof…" No matter that
my lawyer had already told me that it was much too late for evidence of a
fraud to do me any good, if ever it would have. I had to get the goods on
her! Find something to restrain her, something that would make her quit
and go away! Because I could not take any longer playing the role of the
Archenemy, Divorcing Husband as Hooligan, Moth in the Fabric of Society
and Housewrecker in the Householder's State!

And luck (I thought) was with me! The door broken in by the police
late that afternoon had not yet been repaired--the door (just as I'd
been hoping and praying) was ajar, freedom a footstep away! Bless the
mismanagement of this megalopolis!

A light was burning in the apartment. I knocked very gently. I did not
want to rouse the neighbors in the other two apartments on the landing. But
no one appeared to check out the door of their hospitalized neighbor--bless
too this city's vast indifference! The only one I aroused was a fluffy black
Persian cat who slithered up to greet me as I slipped into the empty
apartment. The recent acquisition named Delilah. Nothing subtle there,
Maureen. I never said I was, she answers as I push the door shut behind me.
You want subtlety, read The Golden Bowl. This is life, bozo, not high art.

More luck! There, right out on the dining table, the three-ring school
notebook in which Maureen used to scribble her "thoughts"--generally in
the hours immediately following a quarrel. Keeping "a record," she once
warned me, of who it was that "started" all our arguments, the proof of what
"a madman" I was. When we were living together at the Academy in Rome
and later in Wisconsin, she used to keep the diary carefully hidden away--
it was "private property," she told me, and if I should ever try to "steal"
it, she would not hesitate to call in the local constabulary, be it Italian
or middle western. This, though she herself had no compunction about
opening mail that came for me when I wasn't home: "I'm your wife, aren't
I? Why shouldn't I? Do you have something to hide from your own wife?" I
expected then that, when I did get my hands on it, the diary would contain
much that she wanted to hide from her husband. I rushed to the dining table,
anticipating a gold mine.

I turned to an entry dated "8/15/58," written in the early weeks of our
"courtship." "It's hard to sketch my own personality really, since per-
sonality implies the effect one has on others, and it's difficult to know
truly what that effect is. However, I think I can guess some of this effect
correctly. I have a moderately compelling personality." And on in that
vein, describing her moderately compelling personality as though she were a
freshman back in high school in Elmira. "At best I can be quite witty and
bright and I think at best I can be a winning per-son…

The next entry was dated "Thursday, October 9, 1959." We were by then
already married, living in the little rented house in the country outside
New Milford. "It's almost a year--" actually it was over a year, unless she
had removed a page, the one I was looking for, describing the purchase of
the urine!--since I've written here and my life is different in every way.
It's a miracle how change of circumstances can truly change your essential
self. I still have awful depressions, but I truly have a more optimistic out-
look and only at the blackest moments do I feel hopeless. Strangely tho', I do
think more often about suicide, it seems to grow as a possibility altho' I
really wouldn't do it now, I'm certain. I feel P. needs me more than ever
now, tho' that of course is something he would never admit to. If it weren't
for me he'd still be hiding behind his Flaubert and wouldn't know what real
life was like if he fell over it. What did he ever think he was going to
write about, knowing and believing nothing but what he read in books? Oh, he
can be such a self-important snob and fool! Why does he fight me like this?
I could be his Muse, if only he'd let me. Instead he treats me like the
enemy. When all I've ever really wanted is for him to be the best writer
in the world. It's all too brutally ironic.

That missing page, where was it? Why was there no mention made of what
she had done to get P. to need her so!

"Madison, May 24, 1962." A month after she had discovered me in the
phone booth telephoning Karen; a month after she had taken the pills and
the whiskey, put a razor to her wrist, and then confessed about the urine.
An entry that caused a wave of nausea to come over me as I read it. I had
been leaning over the table all this time, reading on my feet; now I sat
down and read three times over her revelations of May 24, 1962: "Somehow"--
somehow!--

P. has a deep hostile feeling for me and when face to face the emotion I
sense now is hatred. Somehow I've finally become despairing and hopeless
about it all and feel utterly cheerless most of the time. I love P. and our
life together--or what our life could be if only he weren't so neurotic, but
it seems impossible. It's so joyless. His emotional coldness grows in leaps
and bounds. His inability to love is positively frightening. He simply does
not touch, kiss, smile, etc., let alone make love, a most unsatisfying state
for me. I felt fed up with everything this morning and ready to throw it all
over. Yet I know I must not lose heart. Life is not easy --P.'s naive expecta-
tions to the contrary. However, I sometimes think that to think about and try to
ferret out P.'s neurosis is fruitless, for accurate as I may be, even if he
were analyzed it would take years and years with a case like his, and no doubt
I'd be discarded in the process anyway, though he might at last see what a
madman he is. The only satisfaction is that I know perfectly well that if he
does give me up, he will inevitably marry next someone who has her own
talent and ego to match, who will care for that instead of him. Would he be
surprised then! I almost wish it for him except I don't wish it for myself.
But he is killing my feeling so that if all this coldness from him should
continue, finally my star will ascend and my heart will be stony instead of
his. What a pity that would be, tho'.

"West 78th St., 3/22/66." The next-to-last entry, written just three
weeks earlier. After our day in court with Judge Rosenzweig. After the two
go-rounds with the court-appointed referee. After Valducci. After Egan.
After alimony. Four years after I'd left her, seven years after the urine.
The entry, in its entirety:

Where have I been? Why haven't I realized this? Peter doesn't care for
me. He never did! He married me only because he thought he had to. My
God! It seems so plain now, how could I have been mistaken before? Is this
insight a product of Group? I wish I could go away. It's so degrading. I
wonder if I'll ever have the luck to be in love with someone who loves me,
the real me, and not some cockeyed idea of me, a la the Meziks, Walkers,
and Tarnopols of this world. That seems to me now nearly all I could want,
though I now know how practical I really am--or how practical it's
necessary to be to survive.

And the last entry. She had written a suicide note, but it would seem that
no one had thought to look for it in her three-ring school notebook. The
handwriting, and the prose, indicated that she was already under the in-
fluence of the pills, and/or the whiskey, when she began to write her final
message to herself:

Marilyn Monroe Marilyn Monroe Marilyn Monroe Marilyn Monroe why do
they do these Marilyn Monroe why to use Marilyn why to use us Marilyn

That was it. Somehow she had then made it from the table back to the
bed, nearly to die there like the famous movie star herself. Nearly!

A policeman had been watching me from the door for I didn't know
how long. He had his pistol drawn.

"Don't shoot!" I cried.

"Why not?" he asked. "Get up, you."

"It's okay, Officer," I said. I rose on boneless legs. I rose on air.
Without even being asked I put my hands over my head. The last time I'd
done that I'd been eight, a holster around my sixteen-inch waist and a Lone
Ranger gun, made in Japan and hollow as a chocolate bunny, poking me in
the ribs--a weapon belonging to my little pal from next door, Barry
Edelstein, wearing his chaps and his sombrero, and telling me, in the accent
of the Cisco Kid, "Steeck 'em up, amigo." That, by and large, was my
preparation for this dangerous life I now led.

"I'm Peter Tarnopol," I hurriedly explained. "I'm Maureen Tarnopol's
husband. She's the one who lives here. We're separated. Legally, legally.
I just came from the hospital. I came to get my wife's toothbrush and some
things. She's my wife still, you see; she's in the hospital--"

"I know who's in the hospital."

"Yes, well, I'm her husband. The door was open. I thought I better stay
here until I can get it fixed. Anybody could walk right in. I was sitting
here. Reading. I was going to call a locksmith."

The cop just stood there, pointing his pistol. I should never have told
him we were separated. I should never have told Rosenzweig I'd had "a
love affair" with a student. I should never have gotten involved with
Maureen. Yes, that was my biggest mistake.

I said some more words about a locksmith.

"He's on his way," the cop told me.

"Yes? He is? Good. Great. Look, if you still don't believe me, I have a
driver's license."

"On you?"

"Yes, yes, in my wallet. May I reach for my wallet?"

"All right, never mind, it's okay…just got to be careful," he mumbled,
and lowering his pistol, took a step into the room. "I just went down for
a Coke. I seen she had her own, but I didn't want to take it. That ain't
right."

"Oh," said I, as he dropped the pistol into his holster, "you should
have."

"Fuckin' locksmith." He looked at his watch.

When he stepped all the way into the apartment I saw how very young
he was: a pug-nosed kid off the subway, with a gun and a badge and dressed
up in a blue uniform. Not so unlike Barry Edelstein as I'd thought while the
pistol was pointed at my head. Now he wouldn't engage my eyes directly,
embarrassed it seemed for having drawn the gun, movie style, or for having
spoken obscenely to an innocent man, or, most likely, for having been
discovered by me away from his post. Yet another member of the sex,
abashed to be revealed as unequal to his task.

"Well," I said, closing the three-ring notebook and tucking it under my
arm, "I'll just get those things now, and be off--"

"Hey," he said, motioning to the bedroom, "don't worry about the mattress
in there. I just couldn't take the stink no more, so I washed it out. That's
how come it's wet like that. Ajax and a little Mr. Clean, and that did
it. Don't worry--it won't leave no mark when it dries."

"Well, thank you. That was very nice of you."

He shrugged. "I put all the stuff back in the kitchen, under the sink
there." hne.

"That Mr. Clean is some stuff."

"I know. I've heard them say that. I'll just get a few things and go." We
were friends now. He asked, "What is the missus anyway? An actress?"

'Well…yes."

"On TV?"

"No, no, just around."

"What? Broadway?"

"No, no, not yet anyway."

"Well, that takes time, don't it? She shouldn't be discouraged."

I went into Maureen's bedroom, a tiny cell just big enough for a bed
and a night table with a lamp on it. Because the closet door could only be
opened halfway before it banged against the foot of the bed, I had to reach
blindly around inside until I came up with a nightdress that was hanging on
a hook. "Ah," I said, nice and loud, "here it is--right…where…she said!"
To complete the charade, I decided to open and then shut loudly the drawer
to the little night table.

A can opener. In the drawer there was a can opener. I did not immediately
deduce its function. That is, I thought it must be there to open cans.

Let me describe the instrument. The can-opening device itself is
screwed to a smooth, grainy-looking wooden handle, about two and a half
inches around and some five inches long, tapering slightly to its blunt end.
The opening device consists of a square aluminum case, approximately the
size of a cigarette lighter, housing on its underside a small metal tooth and a
little ridged gear; projecting upward from the top side of the case is an inch
long shaft to which is attached a smaller wooden handle, about three inches
long. Placing the can opener horizontally over the edge of the can, you
press the pointed metal tooth down into the rim, and proceed to open the
can by holding the longer handle in one hand, and rotating the smaller
handle with the other; this causes the tooth to travel around the rim until it
has severed the top of the can from the cylinder. It is a type of can opener
that you can buy in practically any hardware store for between a dollar and
a dollar and a quarter. I have priced them since. They are manufactured by
the Eglund Co., Inc., of Burlington, Vermont--their "No. 5 Junior" model. I
have Maureen's here on my desk as I write.

"How ya' doin'?" the cop called.

"Oh, fine."

I slammed the drawer shut, having first deposited the No. 5 Junior in
my pocket.

"So that's it," I said, coming back around into the living room, Delilah
glued to my trouser cuff.

"Mattress look okay to you?"

"Great. Perfect. Thanks again. I'll be off, you know--I'll leave the
locksmith to you then, right?"

I was one flight down and flying, when the young cop appeared at the
landing over my head. "Hey!"

"What!"

"Toothbrush!"

"Oh!"

"Here!"

I caught it and kept going.

The taxi I flagged down to take me crosstown to Susan's was one of those
fitted out like the prison cell of an enterprising convict or the den of
an adolescent boy: framed family photographs lined up on the windshield, a
large round alarm clock strapped atop the meter, and some ten or fifteen
sharpened Eberhard pencils jammed upright in a white plastic cup fastened
by a system of thick elastic bands to the grill separating the passenger
in the back seat from the driver up front. The grill was itself festooned
with blue-and-white tassels, and an arrangement of gold-headed upholstery
tacks stuck into the roof above the driver's head spelled out "Gary, Tina &
Roz"--most likely the names of the snappily dressed children smiling out
from the family photographs of weddings and bar mitzvahs. The driver, an
elderly man, must have been their grandfather.

Ordinarily I suppose I would have commented, like every other passenger,
on the elaborate decor. But all I could look at and think about then
was the Eglund Company's No. 5 Junior can opener. Holding the aluminum
end in my left hand, I passed the larger handle through a circle formed
out of the thumb and index finger of my right hand; then, wrapping the
other three fingers loosely around it, I moved the handle slowly down
the channel.

Next I placed the handle of the can opener between my thighs and crossed
one leg over the other, locking it in place. Only the square metallic
opening device, with its sharp little tooth facing up, poked out from
between my legs.

The cab veered sharply over to the curb.

"Get out," the driver said.

"Do what?"

He was glaring at me through the grill, a little man, with dark pouches
under his eyes and bushy gray eyebrows, wearing a heavy wool sweater
under a suit. His voice quivered with rage-- "Get the hell out! None of that
stuff in my cab!"

"None of what? I'm not doing anything."

"Get out, I told you! Out, you, before I use the tire iron on your head!"
"What do you think I was doing, for Christ's sake!"

But by now I was on the sidewalk.

"You filthy son of a bitch!" he cried, and drove off.

Clutching the can opener in my pocket and holding the diary in my lap,
I eventually made it to Susan's--though not without further incident. As
soon as I had gotten settled in the back seat of a second cab, the driver,
this one a young fellow with a wispy yellow beard, fixed me in the rearview
mirror and said, "Hey, Peter Tarnopol." "What's that?" "You're Peter
Tarnopol-right?"

"Wrong." "You look like him." "Never heard of him." "Come on,
you're putting me on, man. You're him. You're really him. Wow, man.
What a coincidence. I just had Jimmy Baldwin in here last night." "Who's
he?" "The writer, man. You're putting me on. You know who else I had in
here?" I didn't answer. "Mailer. I get all you fuckin' guys. I had another
guy in here, I swear to fuck he musta weighed eighty-two pounds. This tall
string bean with a crew cut. I took him out to Kennedy. You know who it
was?" "Who?" "Fuckin' Beckett. You know how I know it was him? I said
to him, 'You're Samuel Beckett, man.' And you know what he said? He
says, 'No, I'm Vladimir Nabokov.' What do you think of that?" "Maybe it
was Vladimir Nabokov." "No, no, I never had Nabokov. Not yet. What are
you writin' these days, Tarnopol?" "Checks." We had arrived at Susan's
building. "Right here," I told him, "that awning." "Hey, you live all right,
Tarnopol. You guys do okay, you know that?" I paid him, while he shook
his head in wonderment; as I was leaving the taxi, he said, "Watch this,
I'll turn the corner and pick up fuckin' Mala-mud. I wouldn't put it past
me." "Good evening, sir," said Susan's elevator man, appearing out of no-
where and startling me in the lobby, just as I had made it gravely past the
doorman and was removing the can opener from my pocket…But once inside
the apartment I pulled it from my pocket again and cried out, "Wait'll
you see what I got!"

"She's alive?" asked Susan.

"And kicking."

"--the police?"

"Weren't there. Look--look at this!"

"It's a can opener."

"It's also what she masturbates with! Look! Look at this nice sharp
metal tooth. How she must love that protruding out of her--how she must
love to look down at that!"

"Oh, Peter, where ever did you--"

"From her apartment--next to her bed."

Out popped the tear.

"What are you crying about? It's perfect--don't you see? Just what she
thinks a man is--a torture device. A surgical instrument!"

"But where--"

"I told you. From her bedside table!"

"You stole it, from her apartment?"

"Yes!"

I described to her then in detail my adventures at the hospital and after.

When I finished she turned and went off to the kitchen. I followed her
and stood by the stove as she began to brew herself a cup of Ovaltine.

"Look, you yourself tell me I shouldn't be defenseless with her."

She would not speak to me.

"I am only doing what I have to do, Susan, to get sprung from this
trap."

No reply.

"I am tired, you see, of being guilty of sex crimes in the eyes of every
hypocrite, lunatic, and--"

"But the only one who thinks you're guilty of anything is you."

"Yes? Is that why they've got me supporting her for the rest of my life,
a woman I was married to for three years? A woman who bore me no
children? Is that why they will not let me get divorced? Is that why I am
being punished like this, Susan? Because I think I'm guilty? I think I'm
innocent!."

"Then if you do, why do you need to steal something like that?"

"Because nobody believes me!"

"I believe you."

"But you are not the judge in this case! You are not the sovereign state
of New York! I have got to get her fangs out of my neck! Before I drown
in this rage!"

"But what good is a can opener? How do you even know it is what you
say it is? You don't! Probably, Peter, she just uses it to open cans."

"In her bedroom?"

"Yes! People can open cans in bedrooms."

"And they can play with themselves in the kitchen, but usually it's the
other way around. It's a dildo, Susan--whether you like that idea or not.
Maureen's very own surrogate dick!"

"And so what if it is? What business is it of yours? It's not your affair!"

"Oh, isn't it? Then why is everything in my life her affair? And Judge
Rosenzweig's affair! And the affair of her Group! And the affair of her
class at the New School! I get caught with Karen and the judge has me
down for Lucifer. She, on the other hand, fucks household utensils--"

"But you cannot bring this thing into court--they'd think you were
crazy. It is crazy. Don't you see that? What do you think you would
accomplish by waving it around in the judge's face? What?"

"But I have her diary, too!"

"But you told me you read it--you said there's nothing there."

"I haven't read it all."

"But if you do, it's only going to make you crazier than you are now!"

"I AM NOT THE ONE WHO'S CRAZY!"

Said Susan, "You both are. And I can't take it. Because I'll go mad too.
I cannot drink any more Ovaltine in one day! Oh, Peter, I can't take you
any more like this. I can't stand you this way. Look at you, with that
thing. Oh, throw it away!"

"No! No! This way you can't stand me is the way that I am! This is the
way that I am going to be--until I win!"

"Win what?"

"My balls back, Susan!"

"Oh, how can you use that cheap expression? Oh, Lambchop, you're a
sensible, sweet, civilized, darling man. And I love you as you are!"

"But I don't."

"But you should. What possible use can those--"

"I don't know yet! Maybe none! Maybe some! But I'm going to find
out! And if you don't like it, I'll leave. Is that what you want?"
She shrugged. "…if this is the way you're going to be--"

"This is the way I am going to be! And have to be! It's too rough
out there, Susan, to be darling!"

"…then I think you better."

"Leave?"

"…Yes."

"Good! Fine!" I said, utterly astonished. "Then I'll go!"

To which she made no reply.

So I left, taking Maureen's can opener and diary with me. I spent
the rest of the night back in the bedroom of my own apartment --the
living room faintly redolent still of Maureen's bowel movement-- read-
ing the diary, a dreary document, as it turned out, about as interesting
on the subject of a woman's life as "Dixie Dugan." The sporadic entries
rambled on without focus, or stopped abruptly in the midst of a sentence or
a word, and the prose owed everything to the "Dear Diary" school, the pure
expression of self-delusion and unknowingness. In one so cunning, how
bizarre! But then writers are forever disappointing readers by being so
"different" from their work, though not usually because the work fails to be
as compelling as the person. I was mildly surprised--but only mildly--by
the persistence with which Maureen had secretly nursed the idea of "a
writing career," or at least tantalized herself with it in her semi-con-
scious way, throughout the years of our marriage. Entries began: "I won't
apologize this time for not writing for now I see that even V. Woolf let
her journal go for months at a time." And: "I must set down my strange
experience in New Milford this morning which I'm sure would make a
good story, if one could write it in just the right way." And: "I realized
today for the first time--how naive of me!--that if I were to write a story,
or a novel, that was published, P. would have awful competitive feelings.
Could I do that to him? No wonder I'm so reluctant to launch upon a
writing career--it all has to do with sparing his ego."

Along the way there were a dozen or so newspaper clippings stapled or
Scotch-taped to the loose-leaf pages, most of them about me and my work,
dating back to the publication of my novel in the first year of our marriage.
Pasted neatly on one page there was an article clipped from the Times when
Faulkner died, a reprint of his windy Nobel Prize speech. Maureen had
underlined the final grandiose paragraph: "The poet's voice need not merely
be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him
endure and prevail." Beside it she had penciled a bit of marginalia to make
the head swim: "P. and me?"

To me the most intriguing entry recounted her visit two years earlier to
Dr. Spielvogel's office. She had gone there to talk to him about "how to get
Peter back," or so Spielvogel had reported it to me, following the call on
him, which she had made unannounced at the end of the day. According to
Spielvogel, he had told her that he did not think getting me back was
possible any longer--to which she had, by his report, replied, "But I can
do anything. I can play it weak or strong, whichever will work."

Maureen's version:

April 29, 1964 I must record my conversation with Spielvogel yesterday,
for I don't want to forget any more than is inevitable. He said I had made
one serious mistake: confessing to P. I realize that too. If I had not been
so desolated by learning about him and that little student of his, I
would never have made such an unforgivable error. If I had never told him
we would still be together. That gave him just the sort of excuse he could
use against me. Spielvogel agrees. Spielvogel said that he thinks he knows
what course Peter would take if we were to come back together and remain
married, and I understood him to mean that he would be constantly unfaith-
ful to me with one student after another. S. has rather settled theories
about the psyche and neuroses of the artist and it's hard to know whether
he's right or not. He advised me very directly to "work through" my feel-
ings for Peter and to find someone else. I told him I felt too old but he
said not to think in terms of chronological age but how I look. He thinks
I'm "charming and attractive" and "gaminlike." S.'s feeling is that it's
impossible to be married to an actor or writer happily, that in other words,
"they're all alike." He gave Lord Byron and Marlon Brando as examples,
but is Peter really like that? I'm possessed today with these thoughts,
I can hardly do anything. He emphasized that I wasn't facing the extreme
narcissism of the writer, that he focuses such an enormous amount of
attention on himself. I told him my own theory that I worked out in Group
that P.'s unfaithfulness to me is the result of the fact that he felt me
so high-powered that he felt it necessary to "practice" with his little stu-
dent. That he could only really feel like a potent male with such an un-
threatening nothing. S. seemed very interested in my theory. S. said that
Peter goes back over and over again to the confession in order to ration-
alize his inability to love me, or to love anyone for that matter. S. in-
dicates that this lovelessness is characteristic of the narcissistic type.
I wonder if S. is fitting Peter into a preconceived mold, tho' it does
make great sense when I think of how rejecting of me P. has been from the
very beginning.

I thought, upon coming to the end of that entry, "What a thing--every-
body in the world can write fiction about that marriage, except me! Oh,
Maureen, you should never have spared my ego your writing career--
better you should have written down everything in that head of
yours and spared me all this reality! On the printed page, instead of
on my hide! Oh, my one and only and eternal wife, is this what you real-
ly think? Believe? Do these words describe to you who and what you are?
It's almost enough to make a person feel sorry for you. Some person,
somewhere." During the night I paused at times in reading Maureen to read
Faulkner. "I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.
He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible
voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and
sacrifice and endurance." I read that Nobel Prize speech from beginning
to end, and I thought, "And what the hell are you talking about? How
could you write The Sound and the Fury, how could you write The Hamlet,
how could you write about Temple Drake and Popeye, and write that?"

Intermittently I examined the No. 5 Junior can opener, Maureen's
corncob. At one point I examined my own corncob. Endure? Prevail? We
are lucky, sir, that we can get our shoes on in the morning. That's what I
would have said to those Swedes! (If they'd asked.)

Oh, there was bitterness in me that night! And much hatred. But what was
I to do with it? Or with the can opener? Or with the diary confessing to
a "confession"? What was I supposed to do to prevail? Not "man," but
Tarnopol!

The answer was nothing. "Tolerate it," said Spielvogel. "Lambchop,"
said Susan, "forget it." "Face facts," my lawyer said, "you're the man
andshe's the woman." "Are you still sure of that?" I said. "Piss standing
up and you're the man." "I'll sit down." "It's too late," he told me.

Six months later, on a Sunday morning, only minutes after I had return-
ed from breakfast and the Times at Susan's and was settling down at my
desk to work--the liquor carton had just been dragged from the closet,
and I was stirring around in that dispiriting accumulation of discon-
nected beginnings, middles, and endings--Flossie Koerner telephoned my
apartment to tell me that Maureen was dead.

I didn't believe her. I thought it was a ruse cooked up by Maureen to
get me to say something into the telephone that could be tape-recorded and
used to incriminate me in court. I thought, "She's going back in again for
more alimony--this is another trick." All I had to say was, "Maureen dead?
Great!" or anything even remotely resembling that for Judge Rosenzweig or
one of his lieutenants to reason that I was an incorrigible enemy of the
social order still, my unbridled and barbaric male libido in need of yet
stronger disciplinary action.

"Dead?"

"Yes. She was killed in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At five in the
morning."

"Who killed her?"

"The car hit a tree. Bill Walker was driving. Oh, Peter," said Flossie,
with a rasping sob, "she loved life so."

"And she's dead…?" I had begun to tremble.

"Instantly. At least she didn't suffer…Oh, why didn't she have the seat
belt on?"

'What happened to Walker?"

"Nothing bad. A cut. But his whole Porsche was destroyed. Her head…
her head…"

"Yes, what?"

"Hit the windshield. Oh, I knew she shouldn't go up there. The Group
tried to stop her, but she was just so terribly hurt."

"By what? Over what?"

"What he did with the shirt."

'What shirt?"

"Oh…I hate to say it…given who he is…and I'm not accusing him…"

"What is it, Flossie?"

"Peter, Bill Walker is a bisexual person. Maureen herself didn't even
know. She--" She broke down sobbing here. I meanwhile had to clamp my
mouth shut to stop my teeth from chattering. "She--" said Hossie, starting
in again, "she gave him this beautiful, expensive lisle shirt, you know
for a present? And it didn't fit--or so he said afterward--and instead of
returning it for a bigger size, he gave it to a man he knows. And she
went up to tell him what she thought of that kind of behavior, to have a
frank confrontation…And they must have been drinking late, or something.
They had been to a party…"

"Yes?"

"I'm not blaming anyone," said Flossie. "I'm sure it was nobody's
deliberate fault."

Was it true then? Dead? Really dead? Dead in the sense of nonexistent?
Dead as the dead are dead? Dead as in death? Dead as in dead men tell
no tales? Maureen is dead? Dead dead? Deceased? Extinct? Called to her
eternal rest, the miserable bitch? Crossed the bar?

"Where's the body?" I asked.

"In Boston. In a morgue. I guess…I think…you'll have to go get her,
Peter. And take her home to Elmira. Someone will have to call her
mother…Oh, Peter, you'll have to deal with Mrs. Johnson--I couldn't."

Peter get her? Peter take her to Elmira? Peter deal with her mother?
Why, if it's true, Flossie, if this isn't the most brilliant bit of dissimu-
lation yet staged and directed by Maureen Tarnopol, if you are not the
best supporting soap-opera actress of the Psychopathic Broadcast-
ing Network, then Peter leave her. Why Peter even bother with her?
Peter let her lie there and rot!

As I still didn't know for sure whether our conversation was being record-
ed for Judge Rosenzweig's edification, I said, "Of course I'll get her,
Flossie. Do you want to come with me?"

"I'll do anything at all. I loved her so. And she loved you, more than
you could ever know--" But here a noise came out of Flossie that struck
me as indistinguishable from the wail of an animal over the carcass of
its mate.

I knew then that I wasn't being had. Or probably wasn't.

I was on the phone with Flossie for five minutes more; as soon as I
could get her to hang up--with the promise that I would be over at her
apartment to make further plans within the hour--I telephoned my lawyer
at his weekend place in the country.

"I take it that I am no longer married. Is that correct? Now tell me, is
that right?"

"You are a widower, friend."

"And there's no two ways about it, is there? This is it."

"This is it. Dead is dead."

"In New York State?"

"In New York State."

Next I telephoned Susan, whom I had left only half an hour earlier.

"Do you want me to come down?" she asked, when she could ask anything.

"No. No. Stay where you are. I have to make some more phone calls, then
I'll call you back. I have to go to Flossie Koerner's. I'll have to go up
to Boston with her."

"Why?"

"To get Maureen."

"Why?"

"Look, I'll call you later."

"You sure you don't want me to come?"

"No, no, please. I'm fine. I'm shaking a little but aside from that every-
thing's under control. I'm all right." But my teeth were chattering still,
and there seemed nothing I could do to stop them.

Next, Spielvogel. Susan arrived in the middle of the call: had she flown
from Seventy-ninth Street? Or had I just gone blank there at my desk for ten
minutes? "I had to come," she whispered, touching my cheek with her hand.
"I'll just sit here."

"--Dr. Spielvogel, I'm sorry to bother you at home. But something has
happened. At least I am assuming that it happened because somebody told
me that it happened. This is not the product of imagination, at least not
mine. Flossie Koerner called, Maureen's friend from group therapy.
Maureen is dead. She was killed in Boston at five in the morning. In a car
crash. She's dead."

Spielvogel's voice came back loud and clear. "My goodness."

"Driving with Walker. She went through the windshield. Killed instantly.
Remember what I told you, how she used to carry on in the car in Italy?
How she loved grabbing that wheel? You thought I was exaggerating when
I said she used to actually try to kill us both, that she would say as
much. But I wasn't! Christ! Oh, Christ! She could go wild, like a tiger--
in that little VW! I told you how she almost killed us on that mountain
when we were driving from Sorrento--do you remember? Well, she finally
did it. Only this time I wasn't there."

"Of course," Spielvogel reminded me, "you don't know all the details
quite yet."

"No, no. Just that she's dead. Unless they're lying."

"Who would be lying?"

"I don't know any more. But things like this don't happen. This is as
unlikely as the way I got into it. Now the whole thing doesn't make any
sense."

"A violent woman, she died violently."

"Oh, look, a lot of people who aren't violent die violently and a lot of
violent people live long, happy lives. Don't you see--it could be a ruse,
some new little fiction of hers--"

"Designed to do what?"

"For the alimony. To catch me--off guard--again!"

"No, I wouldn't think so. Caught you are not. Released is the word you
are looking for. You have been released."

"Free," I said.

"That I don't know about," said Spielvogel, "but certainly released."

Next I dialed my brother's number. Susan hadn't yet taken off her coat.
She was sitting in a straight chair by the wall with her hands folded neatly
in her lap like a kindergartener. At the sight of her in that posture an
alarm went off in me, but too much else was happening to pay more than
peripheral attention to its meaning. Only why hasn't she taken off her
coat? "Morris?"

"Yes."

"Maureen's dead."

"Good," my brother said.

Oh, they will get us for that--but who, who will get us?

I have been released.

Next I got her mother's number from Elmira information.

"Mrs. Charles Johnson?"

"That's right."

"This is Peter Tarnopol calling. I'm afraid I have some bad news.
Maureen is dead. She was killed in a car crash."

"Well, that's what usually comes of runnin' around. I could have
predicted it. When did this happen?"

"Early this morning."

"And how many'd she take with her?"

"None. Nobody. She was the only one killed."

"And what'd you say your name was?"

"Peter Tarnopol. I was her husband."

"Oh, is that so? Which are you? Number one, two, three, four, or five?"

"Three. There were only three."

"Well, generally in this family there is only one. Good of you to call,
Mr. Tarnopol."

"--What about the funeral?"

But she'd hung up.

Finally I telephoned Yonkers. The man whose son I am began to choke
with emotion when he heard the news--you would have thought it was
somebody he had cared for. "What an ending," he said. "Oh, what an
ending for that little person."

My mother listened in silence on the extension. Her first words were,
"You're all right?"

"I'm doing all right, yes. I think so."

"When's the funeral?" asked my father, recovered now, and into his
domain, the practical arrangements. "Do you want us to come?"

"The funeral--I tell you, I haven't had time to think through the
funeral. I think she always wanted to be cremated. I don't know yet
where…"

"Maybe he's not even going," my mother said to my father.

"You're not going?" my father asked. "You think that's a good idea, not
going?" I could envision him reaching up to squeeze his temples with
his free hand, a headache having all at once boiled up in his skull.

"Dad, I haven't thought it through yet. Okay? One thing at a time.

"Be smart," my father said. "Listen to me. You go. Wear a dark suit,
put in an appearance, and that'll be that."

"Let him decide," my mother told him.

"He decided to marry her without my advice--it wouldn't hurt now if
he listened when I told him how to stick her in the ground!"

"He says she wanted to be cremated anyway. They put the ashes in the
ground, Peter?"

"They scatter them, they scatter them--I don't know what they do to
them. I'm new to this, you know."

"That's why I'm telling you," my father said, "to listen. You're new to
everything. I'm seventy-two and I'm not. You go to the funeral, Peter.
That way nobody can ever call you pisher."

"I think they'll call me pisher either way, those disposed in that
direction."

"But they can never say you weren't there. Listen to me, Peter, please
--I've lived a life. Stop being out there on your own, please. You haven't
listened to anybody since you were four-and-a-half years old and went off
to kindergarten to conquer the world. You were four-and-a-half years old
and you thought you were the president of General Motors. What about the
day there was that terrible thunderstorm? Four-and-a-half years old-"

"Look, Dad, not now--"

"Tell him," he said to my mother, "tell him how long this has been
going on with him."

"Oh, not now," said my mother, beginning to cry.

But he was fired up; miraculously, I was in the clear, and so he could
finally let me know just how angry he was that I had squandered my
familial inheritance of industriousness and stamina and pragmatism--all
those lessons learned from him on Saturdays in the store, why had I tossed
them to the wind? "No, no," he would say to me from atop the ladder in the
stockroom, as I handed up to him the boxes of Interwoven socks, "no, not
like that, Peppy--you're making it hard for yourself. Like this! Get it
right!Always do a job right. Doing it wrong, son, don't make sense at all!"

All the entrepreneurial good sense, all that training in management and
order, why hadn't I seen it for the wisdom that it was? Why couldn't a
haberdashery store be a source of sacred knowledge too? Why, Peppy? Not
profound enough to suit you? All too banal and unmomentous? Oh yes,
what are Flagg Brothers shoes and Hickok belts and Swank tie clasps to a
unique artistic spirit like yours!

"--it was a terrible thunderstorm," he was saying, "there was thunder
and everything, and you were in school, Peter, in kindergarten. Four-and-a
half years old and you wouldn't let anybody even take you, after the first
week, not even Joannie. No, you had to do it alone. You don't remember
this, huh?"

"No, no."

"Well, it was raining, I'll tell you. And so your mother got your little
raincoat, and your rainhat and your rubbers, and she ran to the school at the
end of the day so you shouldn't have to get soaked coming home. And you
don't remember what you did?"

Well, at last I was crying too. "No, no, I guess I don't."

"You balked. You gave her a look that could have killed."

"I did?"

"Oh, you did! And told her off. 'Go home!' you told her. Four-and-a
half years old! And would not even so much as put on the hat. Walked out,
right past her, and home in the storm, with her chasing after you.
Everything you had to do by yourself, to show what a big shot you were--
and look, Peppy, look what has come of it! At least now listen to your
family once."

"Okay, I will," I said, hanging up.

Then, eyes leaking, teeth chattering, not at all the picture of a man
whose nemesis has ceased to exist and who once again is his own lord and
master, I turned to Susan, still sitting there huddled up in her coat, look-
ing, to my abashment, as helpless as the day I had found her. Sitting there
waiting. Oh, my God, I thought--now you. You being you! And me! This
me who is me being me and none other!