My Life as a Man

by Philip Roth

  A horrifying tale of humiliation and suffering at the hands of yet another member of my sex, and a lie from beginning to end. Only it took me a while to find out. In actuality, she had pocketed the three hundred dollars (against the day I would leave her penniless) and after disembarking from the cab when it got to Houston Street, had gone back up to Times Square by subway to see Susan Hayward in I Want to Live, saw it three times over, the morbid melodrama of a cocktail waitress (if I remember correctly—I had already taken her to see it once myself) who gets the death penalty in California for a crime she didn’t commit: right up Maureen’s alley, that exemplary little tale. Then she’d donned a Kotex in the washroom and had come on home, weak in the knees and white around the gills. As who wouldn’t be, after a day in a Times Square movie house?

  All this she confessed three years later in Wisconsin.

  The next morning I went alone to a booth—Maureen charging, as I left the apartment, that I was running away, leaving her bleeding and in pain while I disappeared forever with “that girl”—and telephoned my parents to tell them I was getting married.

  “Why?” my father demanded to know.

  “Because I want to.” I was not about to tell my father, in whom I had not confided anything since I was ten, what I had been through in the past week. I had loved him dearly as a child, but he was only a small-time haberdasher, and I now wrote short stories published in the high-brow magazines and had a publisher’s advance on a serious novel dense with moral ambiguity. So which of us could be expected to understand the principle involved? Which was what again? Something to do with my duty, my courage, my word.

  “Peppy,” my mother said, after having received the news in silence, “Peppy, I’m sorry, but I have to say it—there’s something wrong with that woman. Isn’t there?”

  “She’s over thirty years old,” said my father.

  “She’s twenty-nine.”

  “And you’re just twenty-six, you’re a babe in the woods. Son, she’s kicked around too long for my money. Your mother is right—something ain’t right there with her.”

  My parents had met my intended just once, in my apartment; on the way home from a Wednesday matinee, they had stopped off to say hello, and there was Maureen, on my sofa, reading the script of a TV serial in which someone had “promised” her a part. Ten minutes of amiable, if self-conscious talk, and then they took the train back home. What they were saying about Maureen I assumed grew out of conversations with Morris and Lenore. I was wrong. Morris had never mentioned Maureen to them. They had figured her out on their own—after only ten minutes.

  I tried acting lighthearted; laughing, I said, “She’s not the girl across the street, if that’s what you mean.”

  “What does she even do for a living? Anything?”

  “She told you. She’s an actress.”

  “Where?”

  “She’s looking for work.”

  “Son, listen to me: you’re a college graduate. You’re a summa cum laude. You had a four-year scholarship. The army is behind you. You’ve traveled in Europe. The world is before you, and it’s all yours. You can have anything, anything—why are you settling for this? Peter, are you listening?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Peppy,” asked my mother, “do you—love her?”

  “Of course I do.” And what did I want to shout into the phone at that very moment? I’m coming home. Take me home. This isn’t what I want to do. You’re right, there’s something wrong with her: the woman is mad. Only I gave my word!

  My father said, “Your voice don’t sound right to me.”

  “Well, I didn’t expect this kind of reaction, frankly, when I said I would be getting married.”

  “We want you to be happy, that’s all,” said my mother.

  “This is going to make you happy, marrying her?” asked my father. “I’m not talking about that she’s Gentile. I’m not a narrow-minded dope, I never was. I don’t live in a dead world. The German girl in Germany was something else, and her I never disliked personally, you know that. But that’s water under the bridge.”

  “I know. I agree.”

  “I’m talking about happiness now, with another human being.”

  “Yes, I follow you.”

  “You don’t sound right,” he said, his own voice getting huskier with emotion. “You want me to come down to the city? I’ll come in a minute—“

  “No, don’t be silly. Good Christ, no. I know what I’m doing. I’m doing what I want.”

  “But why so sudden?” my father asked, fishing. “Can you answer me that? I’m sixty-five years old, Peppy, I’m a grown man—you can talk to me, and the truth.”

  “What’s ‘sudden’ about it? I’ve known her nearly a year. Please, don’t fight me on this.”

  “Peter,” said my mother, teary now, “we don’t fight you on anything.”

  “I know, I know. I appreciate that. So let’s not start now. I just called to tell you. A judge is marrying us on Wednesday at City Hall.”

  My mother’s voice was weak now, almost a whisper, when she asked, “You want us to come?” It didn’t sound as though she cared to be told yes. What a shock that was!

  “No, there’s no need for you to be there. It’s just a formality. I’ll call you afterwards.”

  “Peppy, are you still on the outs with your brother?”

  “I’m not on the outs with him. He lives his life and I live mine.”

  “Peter, have you spoken to him about this? Peppy, your older brother is a brother boys dream about having. He adores you. Call him, at least.”

  “Look, it’s not a point I want to debate with Moe. He’s a great arguer—and I’m not. There’s nothing to argue over.”

  “Maybe he wouldn’t argue. Maybe at least he’d like to know, to come to whatever it is—the wedding ceremony.”

  “He won’t want to come.”

  “And you won’t talk to him, only for a few minutes? Or to Joan?”

  “What does Joan know about my life? Dad, just let me get married, okay?”

  “You make it sound like nothing, like marrying a person for the rest of your life is an everyday affair. It ain’t.”

  “I’m summa cum laude. I know that.”

  “Don’t joke. You left us when you were too young, that’s the problem. You always had your way. The apple of your mother’s eye—you could have anything. The last of her babies…”

  “Look, look—“

  “You thought you already knew everything at fifteen—remember? We should never have let you skip all those grades and get ahead of yourself—that was our first mistake.”

  On the edge of tears now, I said, “That may be. But I would have been out of grade school by now anyway. Look, I’m getting married. It’ll be all right.” And I hung up, before I lost control and told my father to come down and take back to his home his twenty-six-year-old baby boy.

  4. DR. SPIELVOGEL

  We may incite [the patient] to jealousy or inflict upon him the pain of disappointed love, but no special technical design is necessary for that purpose. These things happen spontaneously in most analyses.

  —Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable”

  I first met Dr. Spielvogel the year Maureen and I were married. We had moved out of my Lower East Side basement apartment to a small house in the country near New Milford, Connecticut, not far from where Spielvogel and his family were summering at Candlewood Lake. Maureen was going to grow vegetables and I was going to write the final chapters of A Jewish Father. As it turned out, the seeds never got in the ground (or the bread in the oven, or the preserves in the jar), but because there was a twelve-by-twelve shack at the edge of the woods back of the house with a holt on the door, somehow the hook got finished. I saw Spielvogel maybe three times that summer at parties given by a New York magazine editor who was living nearby. I don’t remember that the doctor and I had much to say to each other. He wore a yachting cap, this New York analyst summering in rura
l Connecticut, but otherwise he seemed at once dignified and without airs—a tall, quiet, decorous man, growing stout in his middle forties, with a mild German accent and that anomalous yachting cap. I never even noticed which woman was his wife; I discovered later that he had noticed which was mine.

  When, in June of ‘62, it became necessary, according to my brother, for me to remain in New York and turn myself over to a psychiatrist, I came up with Spielvogel’s name; friends in Connecticut that summer had spoken well of him, and, if I remembered right, treating “creative” people was supposed to be his specialty. Not that that made much difference to me in the shape I was in. Though I continued to write every day, I had really stopped thinking of myself as capable of creating anything other than misery for myself. I was not a writer any longer, no matter how I filled the daylight hours—I was Maureen’s husband, and I could not imagine how I could get to be anything else ever again.

  His appearance, like mine, had changed for the worse in three years. While I had been battling with Maureen, Spielvogel had been up against cancer. He had survived, though tire disease appeared to have shrunk him down some. I remembered him of course in the yachting cap and with a summer tan; in his office, he wore a drab suit bought to fit a man a size larger, and an unexpectedly bold striped shirt whose collar now swam around his neck. His skin was pasty, and the heavy black frames of the glasses he wore tended further to dramatize this shrinkage he had undergone—beneath them, behind them, his head looked like a skull. He also walked now with a slight dip, or list, to the left, the cancer having apparently damaged his hip or leg. In all, the doctor he reminded me of most was Dr. Roger Chillingworth in Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. Appropriate enough, because I sat facing him as full of shameful secrets as the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale.

  Maureen and I had lived a year in western Connecticut, a year at the American Academy in Rome, and a year at the university in Madison, and as a result of all that moving around I had never been able to find anyone in whom I was willing to confide. By the end of three years I had convinced myself that it would be “disloyal,” a “betrayal,” to tell even the closest friends I had made in our wanderings what went on between Maureen and me in private, though I imagined they could guess plenty from what often took place right out on the street or in other people’s houses. Mostly I didn’t open up to anyone because I was so ashamed of my defenselessness before her wrath and frightened of what she might do either to herself or to me, or to the person in whom I’d confided, if she ever found out what I had said. Sitting in a chair immediately across from Spielvogel, looking in embarrassment from his shrunken skull to the framed photograph of the Acropolis that was the only picture on his cluttered desk, I realized that I still couldn’t do it: indeed, to tell this stranger the whole sordid story of my marriage seemed to me as reprehensible as committing a serious crime.

  “You remember Maureen?” I asked. “My wife?”

  “I do. Quite well.” His voice, in contrast to his appearance, was strong and vigorous, causing me to feel even more puny and self-conscious…the little stool pigeon about to sing. My impulse was to get up and leave, my shame and humiliation (and my disaster) still my own—and simultaneously to crawl into his lap. “A small, pretty, dark-haired young woman,” he said. “Very determined looking.”

  “Very.”

  “A lot of spunk there, I would think.”

  “She’s a lunatic, Doctor!” I began to cry. For fully five minutes I sobbed into my hands—until Spielvogel asked, “Are you finished?”

  There are lines from my five years of psychoanalysis as memorable to me as the opening sentence of Anna Karenina—“Are you finished?” is one of them. The perfect tone, the perfect tactic. I turned myself over to him, then and there, for good or bad.

  Yes, yes, I was finished. “All I do these days is collapse in tears…” I wiped my face with a Kleenex from a box that he offered me and proceeded to “spill”—though not about Maureen (I couldn’t, right off) but about Karen Oakes, the Wisconsin coed with whom I had been maniacally in love during the winter and early spring of that year. I had been watching her bicycle around the campus for months before she showed up in my undergraduate writing section in the second semester to become the smartest girl in the class. Good-natured, gentle, a beguiling mix of assertive innocence and shy adventurousness, Karen had a small lyrical gift as a poet and wrote clever, somewhat magisterial literary analyses of the fiction that we read in class; her candor and lucidity, I told Spielvogel, were as much a balm to me as her mild temperament, her slender limbs, her pretty and composed American girl’s face. Oh, I went on and on about Ka-reen (the pet name for the pillow talk), growing increasingly intoxicated, as I spoke, with memories of our ardent “passion” and brimming “love”—I did not mention that in all we probably had not been alone with one another more than forty-eight hours over the course of the three months, and rarely for more than forty-five minutes at a clip; we were together either in the classroom with fifteen undergraduates for chaperones, or in her bed. Nonetheless she was, I said, “the first good thing” to happen in my private life since I’d been discharged from the army and come to New York to write. I told Spielvogel how she had called herself “Miss Demi-Womanhood of 1962”; he did not appear to be one-hundredth as charmed by the remark as I had been, but then he had not just disrobed for the first time the demi-woman who had said it. I recounted to him the agonies of doubt and longing that I had experienced before I went ahead, three weeks into the semester, and wrote “See me” across the face of one of her A+ papers. She came, as directed, to my office, and accepted my courtly, professorial invitation to be seated. In the first moments, courtliness was rampant, as a matter of fact. “You wanted to see me?” “Yes, I did, Miss Oakes.” A silence ensued, long and opaquely eloquent enough to satisfy Anton Chekhov. “Where do you come from, Miss Oakes?” “Racine.” “And what does your father do?” “He’s a physician.” And then, as though hurling myself off a bridge, I did it: reached forward and laid a hand upon her straw-colored hair. Miss Oakes swallowed and said nothing. “I’m sorry,” I told her, “I couldn’t help it.” She said: “Professor Tarnopol, I’m not a sophisticated person.” Whereupon I proceeded to apologize profusely. “Oh, please, don’t worry,” she said, when I wouldn’t stop, “a lot of teachers do it.” “Do they?” the award-winning novelist asked. “Every semester so far,” said she, nodding a little wearily; “and usually it’s English.” “What happens then, usually?” “I tell them I’m not a sophisticated person. Because I’m not.” “And then?” “That’s it, generally.” “They get conscience-stricken and apologize profusely.” “They have second thoughts, I suppose.” “Just like me.” “And me,” she said, without blinking; “the doctrine of in loco parentis works both ways.” “Look, look—“ “Yes?” “Look, I’m taken with you. Terribly.” “You don’t even know me, Professor Tarnopol.” “I don’t and I do. I’ve read your papers. I’ve read your stories and poems.” “I’ve read yours.” Oh my God, Dr. Spielvogel, how can you sit there like an Indian? Don’t you appreciate the charm of all this? Can’t you see what a conversation like that meant to me in my despair? “Look, Miss Oakes, I want to see you—I have to see you!” “Okay.” “Where?” “I have a room—“ “I can’t go into a dormitory, you know that.” “I’m a senior. I don’t live in the dorm any more. I moved out.” “You did?” “I have my own room in town.” “Can I come to talk to you there?” “Sure.”

  Sure! Oh, what a wonderful, charming, disarming, engaging little word that one is! I went around sibilating it to myself all through the rest of the day. “What are you so bouncy about?” asked Maureen. Shoor. Shewer. Shur. Now just how did that beautiful and clever and willing and healthy young girl say it anyway? Sure! Yes, like that—crisp and to the point. Sure! Oh yes, sure as sure is sure, Miss Oakes is going to have an adventure, and Professor Tarnopol is going to have a breakdown…How many hours before I decided that when the semester was over we would run off together? Not
that many. The second time we were in bed I proposed the idea to Ka-reen. We would go to Italy in June—catch the Pan Am flight from Chicago (I’d checked on it by phone) the evening of the day she’d taken her last exam; I could send my final grades in from Rome. Wouldn’t that be terrific? Oh, I would say to her, burying my face in her hair, I want to take you somewhere, Ka-reen, I want to go away with you! And she would murmur softly, “Mmmmmm, mmmmmm,” which I interpreted as delicious acquiescence. I told her about all the lovely Italian piazzas in which Maureen and I had screamed bloody murder at one another: the Piazza San Marco in Venice, the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, the Piazza del Campo in Siena…Karen went home for spring vacation and never came back. That’s how overbearing and frightening a character I had become. That murmuring was just the sound her good mind gave off as it gauged the dreadful consequences of having chosen this particular member of the conscience-stricken English faculty to begin sophisticated life with outside of a college dorm. It was one thing reading Tolstoy in class, another playing Anna and Vronsky with the professor. After she failed to return from spring recess, I made desperate phone calls to Racine practically daily. When I call at lunchtime I am told she is “out.” I refuse to believe it—where does she eat then? “Who is this, please?” I am asked. I mumble, “A friend from school…are you sure she isn’t…?” “Would you care to leave your name?” “No.” After dinner each night I last about ten minutes in the living room with Maureen before I begin to feel myself on the brink of cracking up; rising from my reading chair, I throw down my pencil and my book—as though I am Rudolph Hess, twenty years in Spandau Prison, I cry, “I have to take a walk! I have to see some faces! I’m suffocating in here!” Once out the door, I break into a sprint, and crossing back lawns and leaping low garden fences, I head for the dormitory nearest our apartment, where there is a telephone booth on the first floor. I will catch Karen at the dinner hour and beg her at least to come back to school for the rest of this semester, even if she will not run away in June to live in Trastevere with me. She says, “Hang on a sec—let me take it on another phone.” A few moments later I hear her call, “Will you hang up the downstairs phone, please, Mom?” “Karen! Karen!” “Yes, I’m back.” “Ka-reen, I can’t bear it—I’ll meet you somewhere in Racine! I’ll hitch! I can be there by nine-thirty!” But she was the smartest girl in my class and had no intention of letting some overwrought creative writing teacher with a bad marriage and a stalled career ruin her life. She could not save me from my wife, she said, I would have to do that myself. She had told her family she had had an unhappy love affair, but, she assured me, she had not and would not tell them with whom. “But what about your degree?” I demanded, as though I were the dean of students. “That’s not important right now,” said Karen, speaking as calmly from her bedroom in Racine as she did in class. “But I love you! I want you!” I shouted at the slender girl who only the week before had bicycled in sneakers and a poplin skirt to English 312, her straw-colored hair in braids and her innards still awash with semen from our lunchtime assignation in her rented room. “You just can’t leave, Karen! Not now! Not after how marvelous it’s been!” “But I can’t save you, Peter. I’m only twenty years old.” In tears I cried, “I’m only twenty-nine!” “Peter, I should never have started up. I had no idea what was at stake. That’s my fault. Forgive me. I’m as sorry as I can be.” “Christ, don’t be ‘sorry’—just come back!” One night Maureen followed me out of the house and across the backyards to the dormitory, and after standing out of sight for a minute with her ear to the telephone booth, threw back the door while I was pleading with Karen yet again to change her mind and come with me to Europe on the Pan Am night flight from O’Hare. “Liar!” screamed Maureen, “whore-mongering liar!” and ran back to the apartment to swallow a small handful of sleeping pills. Then, on hands and knees, she crawled into the living room in her underwear and knelt there on the floor with my Gillette razor in her hand, waiting patiently for me to finish talking with my undergraduate harlot and come on home so that she could get on with the job of almost killing herself.