by Philip Roth
“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 because 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 mistake. 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 exhibiting 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 h
ad 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.