by Philip Roth
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 recalcitrant 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 “promise” 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 Tarnopol? 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 argument, which began with her accusing me of trying to prevent her from writing 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, self-important, 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 t
he 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 any more! You selfish, spoiled, immature, irresponsible 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 “discarded” 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 meetings and organizations ever since high school) and very much the paterfamilias…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, Maureen.” “Sorry, I don’t like him—or her.”
Moe didn’t like Maureen either, but at the outset said nothing, assuming 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 strenuously 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.