by Philip Roth
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 anything,” 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 he.
Only it was. Two months pregnant, by me.
Only how? I could not even remember the last time we two had had intercourse. 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—especially 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 literatu
re 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 everyday 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 favorite 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 somewhere, 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 thereafter. “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 unpredictable 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 1 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 anticipation 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 tol
d 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.”