My Life as a Man

by Philip Roth

  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 dangerous 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 report, 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 matriculated 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 encouraging ‘that’? I was only encouraging you to find some pleasure and comfort 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 conceivable 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 relentless 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 Woman 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, contriving 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 prestige 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 s
et themselves 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? Particularly 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 women 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 office, 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.