My Life as a Man

by Philip Roth

  It was enough to make him cry; so he did, invariably after being heroically 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 theatricality, 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 beneath 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 departing 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 running with blood. Nor is it what is meant in literature, or even in life for that matter, by suffering or pain.