by Philip Roth
I told Spielvogel what Maureen had confessed to me from the living-room floor. Because this had happened only two months earlier, I found with Spielvogel, as I had that morning with Moe in the taxi back from the airport, that I could not recount the story of the false urine specimen without becoming woozy and weak, as though once the story surfaced in my mind, it was only a matter of seconds before the fires of rage had raced through me, devouring all vitality and strength. It is not that easy for me to tell it today without at least a touch of vertigo. And I have never been able to introduce the story into a work of fiction, not that I haven’t repeatedly tried and failed in the five years since I received Maureen’s confession. I cannot seem to make it credible—probably because I still don’t entirely believe it myself. How could she? To me! No matter how I may contrive to transform low actuality into high art, that is invariably what is emblazoned across the face of the narrative, in blood: HOW COULD SHE? TO ME!
“And then,” I told Spielvogel, “do you know what she said next? She was on the floor with the blade of the razor right on her wrist. In her panties and bra. And I was just standing over her. Dumbstruck. Dumbstruck. I could have kicked her head in. I should have!”
“And what did she say?”
“Say? She said, ‘If you forgive me for the urine, I’ll forgive you for your mistress. I’ll forgive you for deceiving me with that girl on the bicycle and begging her to run away with you to Rome.’”
“And what did you do?” asked Spielvogel.
“Did I kick her, you mean? No. No, no, no, no, no. I didn’t do anything—to her. Just stood there for a while. I couldn’t right off get over the ingenuity of it. The relentlessness. That she had though t of such a thing and then gone ahead and done it. I actually felt admiration. And pity, pity! That’s true. I thought, ‘Good Christ, what are you? To do this thing, and then to keep it a secret for three years!’ And then I saw my chance to get out. As though it required this, you see, nothing less, for me to feel free to go. Not that I went. Oh, I told her I was going, all right. I said, I’m leaving, Maureen, I can’t live any more with somebody who would do such a thing, and so on. But she was crying by then and she said, ‘Leave me and I’ll cut my wrists. I’m full of sleeping pills already.’ And I said, and this is true, I said, ‘Cut them, why should I care?’ And so she pressed down with the razor—and blood came out. It turned out that she had only scratched herself, but what the hell did I know? She could have gone through to the bone. I started shouting, ‘Don’t—don’t do that!’ and I began wrestling with her for the razor. I was terrified that I was going to get my own veins slashed in the rolling around, but I kept trying to get it away, grabbing at the damn thing—and I was crying. That goes without saying. All I do now is cry, you know—and she was crying, of course, and finally I got the thing away from her and she said, ‘Leave me, and I’ll ruin that girl of yours! I’ll have that pure little face in every paper in Wisconsin!’ And then she began to scream about my ‘deceiving’ her and how I couldn’t be trusted and she always knew it—and this is just three minutes after describing in detail to me buying the urine from that Negro woman on Avenue B!”
“And what did you do then?”
“Did I slit her throat from ear to ear? No. No! I fell apart. Completely. I went into a tantrum. The two of us were smeared with blood—my left palm had been cut, up by the thumb, and her wrist was dripping, and God only knows what we looked like—like a couple of Aztecs, fucking up the sacrificial rites. I mean, it’s comical when you think about it. I am the Dagwood Bumstead of fear and trembling!”
“You had a tantrum.”
“That’s not the half of it. I got down on my knees—I begged her to let me go. I banged my head on the floor, Doctor. I began running from room to room. Then—then I did what she told me Walker used to do. Maybe Walker never even did it; that was probably a lie too. Anyway, I did it. At first I was just running around looking for some place to hide the razor from her. I remember unscrewing the head and dropping the blade into the toilet and flushing and flushing and the damn thing just lying there at the bottom of the bowl. Then I ran into our bedroom—I was screaming all this time, you see, ‘Let me go! Let me go!’ and sobbing, and so on. And all the while I was tearing my clothes off. I’d done that before, in a rage with her, but this time I actually tore everything off me. And I put on Maureen’s underwear. I pulled open her dresser and I put on a pair of her underpants— I could just get them up over my prick. Then I tried to get into one of her brassieres. I put my arms through the shoulder loops, that is. And then I just stood there like that, crying—and bleeding. Finally she came into the room—no, she just got as far as the doorway and stood there, looking at me. And, you see, that’s all she was wearing, too, her underwear. She saw me and she broke into sobs again, and she cried, ‘Oh, sweetheart, no, no…
“Is that all she said?” asked Spielvogel. “Just called you ‘sweetheart’?”
“No. She said, ‘Take that off. I’ll never tell anybody. Just take that off right now.’”
“That was two months ago,” said Dr. Spielvogel, when it appeared that I had nothing more to say.
“Yes.”
“And?”
“It’s not been good, Doctor.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve done some other strange things.”
“Such as?”
“Such as staying with Maureen—that’s the strangest thing of all! Three years of it, and now I know what I know, and I’m still living with her! And if I don’t fly back tomorrow, she says she’s going to tell the world ‘everything.’ That’s what she told my brother to tell me on the phone. And she will. She will do it.”
“Any other ‘strange things’?”
“…with my sperm.”
“I didn’t hear you. Your sperm? What about your sperm?”
“My semen—I leave it places.”
“Yes?”
“I smear it places. I go to people’s houses and I leave it-places.”
“You break into people’s houses?”
“No, no,” I said sharply—what did he think I was, a madman? “I’m invited. I go to the bathroom. I leave it somewhere…on the tap. In the soap dish. Just a few drops…”
“You masturbate in their bathrooms.”
“Sometimes, yes. And leave…”
“Your signature.”
“Tarnopol’s silver bullet.”
He smiled at my joke; I did not. I had still more to tell. “I’ve done it in the university library. Smeared it on the bindings of books.”
“Of books? Which books?”
“Books! Any books! Whatever books are handy!”
“Anywhere else?”
I sighed.
“Speak up, please,” said the doctor.
“I sealed an envelope with it,” I said in a loud voice. “My bill to the telephone company.”
Again Spielvogel smiled. “Now that is an original touch, Mr. Tarnopol.”
And again I broke into sobs. “What does it mean!”
“Come now,” said Dr. Spielvogel, “what do you think it ‘means’? You don’t require a soothsayer, as far as I can see.”
“That I’m completely out of control!” I said, sobbing. “That I don’t know what I’m doing any more!”
“That you’re angry,” he said, slapping the arm of his chair. “That you are furious. You are not out of control—you are under control. Maureen’s control. You spurt the anger everywhere, except where it belongs. There you spurt tears.”
“But she’ll ruin Karen! She will! She knows who she is—she used to check out my students like a hawk! She’ll destroy that lovely innocent girl!”
“Karen sounds as if she can take care of herself.”
“But you don’t know Maureen once she gets going. She could murder somebody. She used to grab the wheel of our VW in Italy and try to run us off the side of a mountain—because I hadn’t opened a door for her leaving the hotel in Sorrento! She could ca
rry a grudge like that for days—then she would erupt with it, in the car, weeks later! You can’t imagine what it’s like when she goes wild!”
“Well, then, Karen should be properly warned, if that is the case.
“It is the case! It’s hair-raising! Grabbing the wheel from my hands and spinning it the other way when we’re winding down a mountain road! You must believe what I’ve been through—I am not exaggerating! To the contrary, I’m leaving things out!”
Now, with my avenger dead and her ashes scattered from a plane into the Atlantic Ocean, now with all that rage stilled, it seems to me that I simply could not have been so extensively unmanned by Maureen Johnson Mezik Walker Tarnopol, dropout from Elmira High, as I indicated (and demonstrated) to Spielvogel during our first hour together. I was, after all, bigger than she was, more intelligent than she was, better educated than she was, and far more accomplished. What then (I asked the doctor) had made me such a willing, or will-less, victim? Why couldn’t I find the strength, or just the simple survival mechanism, to leave her once it became obvious that it was no longer she who needed rescuing from her disasters, but I from mine? Even after she had confessed to committing the urine fraud, even then I couldn’t get up and go! Now why? Why should someone who had battled so determinedly all his life to be independent— his own child, his own adolescent, his own man—why should someone with my devotion to “seriousness” and “maturity” knuckle under like a defenseless little boy to this cornball Clytemnestra?
Dr. Spielvogel invited me to look to the nursery for the answer. The question with which he began our second session was, “Does your wife remind you of your mother?”
My heart sank. Psychoanalytic reductivism was not going to save me from the IRT tracks, or worse, from returning to Wisconsin at the end of the week to resume hostilities with Maureen. In reply to the question I said, no, she did not. My wife reminded me of no one I had ever known before, anywhere. Nobody in my entire lifetime had ever dared to deceive, insult, threaten, or blackmail me the way she did—certainly no woman I had ever known. Nor had anyone ever hollered at me like that, except perhaps the basic training cadre at Fort Dix. I suggested to Spielvogel that it wasn’t because she was like my mother that I couldn’t deal with her, but, if anything, because she was so unlike her. My mother was not aggrieved, contentious, resentful, violent, helpless, or suicidal, and she did not ever want to see me humbled—far from it. Certainly, for our purposes, the most telling difference between the two was that my mother adored me, worshipped me across the board, and I had basked in that adoration. Indeed, it was her enormous belief in my perfection that had very likely helped to spawn and nourish whatever gifts I had. I supposed that it could be said that I had knuckled under to my mother when I was still a little boy—but in a little boy that is not knuckling under, is it? That is just common sense and a feel for family life: childhood realpolitik. One does not expect to be treated like a thirty-year-old at five. But at fifteen I certainly did expect deferential treatment of a kind, and from my mother I got it. As I remember it, I could sweet-talk that lady into just about anything during my high-school years, without too much effort get her to agree to the fundamental soundness of my position on just about every issue arising out of my blooming sense of prerogatives; in fact, it was with demonstrable delight (as I recalled it) that she acquiesced to the young prince whom she had been leading all these years toward the throne.
It was the supernumerary father I’d had to struggle with back then. He was anxious for me in my ambitiousness and cockiness. He had seen less of me as a child—off in the store all day, and in bad times selling roofing and siding for his brother-in-law door to door at night—and understandably he had some trouble when he first discovered that the little bird’s beak he’d been feeding all those years had been transformed overnight into a yapping adolescent mouth that could outtalk him, outreason him, and generally outsmart him with the aid of “logic,” “analogy,” and assorted techniques of condescension. But then came my four-year scholarship to Brown, and that crown of crowns, straight As in college, and gradually he too gave in and left off even trying to tell me what to think and do. By my seventeenth year it was already pretty clear tiiat I did not mean to use my freedom from parental constraint and guidance to become a bum, and so, to his credit, he did the best an aggressive entrepreneur and indestructible breadwinner and loving father could, to let me be.
Spielvogel wouldn’t see it that way. He questioned my “fairly happy childhood,” suggesting that people could of course delude themselves about the good old days that had never been. There might be a harsher side to it all that I was conveniently forgetting—the threatening aspect of my mother’s competence and vigor and attentiveness, and the “castration anxiety,” as he called it, that it had fostered in her baby boy, the last, and emotionally the most fragile, of her offspring. From my descriptions of Morris’s life and my few vivid childhood recollections of him, Dr. Spielvogel concluded that my brother had been “constitutionally” a much tougher specimen than I to begin with, and that tins biological endowment had been reinforced in his formative years when he had virtually to raise himself while my mother was off working most of each day in the store with my father. As for Joan, it was Spielvogel’s educated guess that as the ugly duckling and the girl in the family she had hardly been in danger of being overwhelmed by my mother’s attention; to the contrary, she had probably felt herself at the periphery of the family circle, neglected and useless as compared with the hearty older brother and the clever younger one. If so (he continued, writing his Tarnopol family history), it would not be surprising to find her in her forties still so avid to have—famous friends, modish beauty, exotic travels, fancy and expensive clothes: to have, in a word, the admiration and envy of the crowd. He shocked me by asking if my sister also took lovers with such avidity. “Joannie? It never occurred to me.” “Much hasn’t,” the doctor assured the patient.
Now I for one had never denied that my mother might have been less than perfect; of course I remembered times when she seemed to have scolded me too severely or needlessly wounded my pride or hurt my feelings; of course she had said and done her share of thoughtless things while bringing me up, and at times, in anger or uncertainty, had like any parent taken the tyrannical way out. But not until I came under the influence of Dr. Spielvogel could I possibly have imagined a child any more valued or loved than Mrs. Tarnopol’s little boy. Any more, in fact, and I really would have been in trouble. My argument with this line the doctor began to take on my past was that if I had suffered anything serious from having had a mother like my own, it was because she had nourished in me a boundless belief in my ability to win whatever I wanted, an optimism and innocence about my charmed life that (now that I thought about it) could very well have left me less than fortified against the realities of setback and frustration. Yes, perhaps what made me so pathetic at dealing with Maureen in her wildest moments was that I simply could not believe that anybody like her could exist in the world that had been advertised to me as Peter’s oyster. It wasn’t the repetition of an ancient “trauma” that rendered me so helpless with my defiant wife—it was its uniqueness. I might as well have been dealing with a Martian, for all the familiarity I had with female rage and resentment.
I admitted readily to Dr. Spielvogel that of course I had been reduced in my marriage to a bewildered and defenseless little boy, but that, I contended, was because I had never been a bewildered little boy before. I did not see how we could account for my downfall in my late twenties without accounting simultaneously for all those years of success and good fortune that had preceded it. Wasn’t it possible that in my “case,” as I willingly called it, triumph and failure, conquest and defeat derived from an indestructible boyish devotion to a woman as benefactress and celebrant, protectress and guide? Could we not conjecture that what had made me so available to the Bad Older Woman was the reawakening in me of that habit of obedience that had stood me in such good stead with the Good Older
Woman of my childhood? A small boy, yes, most assuredly, no question about it—but not at all, I insisted, because the protecting, attentive, and regulating mother of my fairly happy memories had been Spielvogel’s “phallic threatening mother figure” to whom I submitted out of fear and whom a part of me secretly loathed. To be sure, whoever held absolute power over a child had inevitably to inspire hatred in him at times, but weren’t we standing the relationship on its head by emphasizing her fearsome aspect, real as it may have been, over the lovingness and tenderness of the mother who dominated the recollections of my first ten years? And weren’t we drastically exaggerating my submissiveness as well, when all available records seemed to indicate that in fact I had been a striving, spirited little boy, nicknamed Peppy, who hardly behaved in the world like a whipped dog? Children, I told Spielvogel (who I assumed knew as much), had undergone far worse torment than I ever had for displeasing adults.