by Philip Roth
And luck (I thought) was with me! The door broken in by the police late that afternoon had not yet been repaired—the door (just as I’d been hoping and praying) was ajar, freedom a footstep away! Bless the mismanagement of this megalopolis!
A light was burning in the apartment. I knocked very gently. I did not want to rouse the neighbors in the other two apartments on the landing. But no one appeared to check out the door of their hospitalized neighbor—bless too this city’s vast indifference! The only one I aroused was a fluffy black Persian cat who slithered up to greet me as I slipped into the empty apartment. The recent acquisition named Delilah. Nothing subtle there, Maureen. I never said I was, she answers as I push the door shut behind me. You want subtlety, read The Golden Bowl. This is life, bozo, not high art.
More luck! There, right out on the dining table, the three-ring school notebook in which Maureen used to scribble her “droughts”—generally in the hours immediately following a quarrel. Keeping “a record,” she once warned me, of who it was that “started” all our arguments, the proof of what “a madman” I was. When we were living together at the Academy in Rome and later in Wisconsin, she used to keep the diary carefully hidden away— it was “private property,” she told me, and if I should ever try to “steal” it, she would not hesitate to call in the local constabulary, be it Italian or middle western. This, though she herself had no compunction about opening mail that came for me when I wasn’t home: “I’m your wife, aren’t I? Why shouldn’t D Do you have something to hide from your own wife?” I expected then that, when I did get my hands on it, the diary would contain much that she wanted to hide from her husband. I rushed to the dining table, anticipating a gold mine.
I turned to an entry dated “8/15/58,” written in the early weeks of our “courtship.” “It’s hard to sketch my own personality really, since personality implies the effect one has on others, and it’s difficult to know truly what that effect is. However, I think I can guess some of this effect correctly. I have a moderately compelling personality.” And on in that vein, describing her moderately compelling personality as though she were a freshman back in high school in Elmira. “At best I can be quite witty and bright and I think at best I can be a winning per-son…
The next entry was dated “Thursday, October 9, 1959.” We were by then already married, living in the little rented house in the country outside New Milford. “It’s almost a year—“ actually it was over a year, unless she had removed a page, the one I was looking for, describing the purchase of the urine!—since I’ve written here and my life is different in every way. It’s a miracle how change of circumstances can truly change your essential self. I still have awful depressions, but I truly have a more optimistic outlook and only at the blackest moments do I feel hopeless. Strangely tho’, I do think more often about suicide, it seems to grow as a possibility altho’ I really wouldn’t do it now, I’m certain. I feel P. needs me more than ever now, tho’ that of course is something he would never admit to. If it weren’t for me he’d still be hiding behind his Flaubert and wouldn’t know what real life was like if he fell over it. What did he ever think he was going to write about, knowing and believing nothing but what he read in books? Oh, he can be such a self-important snob and fool! Why does he fight me like this? I could be his Muse, if only he’d let me. Instead he treats me like the enemy. When all I’ve ever really wanted is for him to be the best writer in the world. It’s all too brutally ironic.
That missing page, where was it? Why was there no mention made of what she had done to get P. to need her so!
“Madison, May 24, 1962.” A month after she had discovered me in the phone booth telephoning Karen; a month after she had taken the pills and the whiskey, put a razor to her wrist, and then confessed about the urine. An entry that caused a wave of nausea to come over me as I read it. I had been leaning over the table all this time, reading on my feet; now I sat down and read three times over her revelations of May 24, 1962: “Somehow”—somehow!—
P. has a deep hostile feeling for me and when face to face the emotion I sense now is hatred. Somehow I’ve finally become despairing and hopeless about it all and feel utterly cheerless most of the time. I love P. and our life together—or what our life could be if only he weren’t so neurotic, but it seems impossible. It’s so joyless. His emotional coldness grows in leaps and bounds. His inability to love is positively frightening. He simply does not touch, kiss, smile, etc., let alone make love, a most unsatisfying state for me. I felt fed up with everything this morning and ready to throw it all over. Yet I know I must not lose heart. Life is not easy —P.’s naive expectations to the contrary. However, I sometimes think that to think about and try to ferret out P.’s neurosis is fruitless, for accurate as I may be, even if he were analyzed it would take years and years with a case like his, and no doubt I’d be discarded in the process anyway, though he might at last see what a madman he is. The only satisfaction is that I know perfectly well that if he does give me up, he will inevitably marry next someone who has her own talent and ego to match, who will care for that instead of him. Would he be surprised then! I almost wish it for him except I don’t wish it for myself. But he is killing my feeling so that if all this coldness from him should continue, finally my star will ascend and my heart will be stony instead of his. What a pity that would be, tho’.
“West 78th St., 3/22/66.” The next-to-last entry, written just three weeks earlier. After our day in court with Judge Rosenzweig. After the two go-rounds with the court-appointed referee. After Valducci. After Egan. After alimony. Four years after I’d left her, seven years after the urine. The entry, in its entirety:
Where have I been? Why haven’t I realized this? Peter doesn’t care for me. He never did! He married me only because he thought he had to. My God! It seems so plain now, how could I have been mistaken before? Is this insight a product of Group? I wish I could go away. It’s so degrading. I wonder if I’ll ever have the luck to be in love with someone who loves me, the real me, and not some cockeyed idea of me, a la the Meziks, Walkers, and Tarnopols of this world. That seems to me now nearly all I could want, though I now know how practical I really am—or how practical it’s necessary to be to survive.
And the last entry. She had written a suicide note, but it would seem that no one had thought to look for it in her three-ring school notebook. The handwriting, and the prose, indicated that she was already under the influence of the pills, and/or the whiskey, when she began to write her final message to herself:
Marilyn Monroe Marilyn Monroe Marilyn Monroe Marilyn Monroe why do they do these Marilyn Monroe why to use Marilyn why to use us Marilyn
That was it. Somehow she had then made it from the table back to the bed, nearly to die there like the famous movie star herself. Nearly!
A policeman had been watching me from the door for I didn’t know how long. He had his pistol drawn.
“Don’t shoot!” I cried.
“Why not?” he asked. “Get up, you.”
“It’s okay, Officer,” I said. I rose on boneless legs. I rose on air. Without even being asked I put my hands over my head. The last time I’d done that I’d been eight, a holster around my sixteen-inch waist and a Lone Ranger gun, made in Japan and hollow as a chocolate bunny, poking me in the ribs—a weapon belonging to my little pal from next door, Barry Edelstein, wearing his chaps and his sombrero, and telling me, in the accent of the Cisco Kid, “Steeck ‘em up, amigo.” That, by and large, was my preparation for this dangerous life I now led.
“I’m Peter Tarnopol,” I hurriedly explained. “I’m Maureen Tarnopol’s husband. She’s the one who lives here. We’re separated. Legally, legally. I just came from the hospital. I came to get my wife’s toothbrush and some things. She’s my wife still, you see; she’s in the hospital—“
“I know who’s in the hospital.”
“Yes, well, I’m her husband. The door was open. I thought I better stay here until I can get it fixed. Anybody could walk right
in. I was sitting here. Reading. I was going to call a locksmith.”
The cop just stood there, pointing his pistol. I should never have told him we were separated. I should never have told Rosenzweig I’d had “a love affair” with a student. I should never have gotten involved with Maureen. Yes, that was my biggest mistake.
I said some more words about a locksmith.
“He’s on his way,” the cop told me.
“Yes? He is? Good. Great. Look, if you still don’t believe me, I have a driver’s license.”
“On you?”
“Yes, yes, in my wallet. May I reach for my wallet?”
“All right, never mind, it’s okay…just got to be careful,” he mumbled, and lowering his pistol, took a step into the room. “I just went down for a Coke. I seen she had her own, but I didn’t want to take it. That ain’t right.”
“Oh,” said I, as he dropped the pistol into his holster, “you should have.”
“Fuckin’ locksmith.” He looked at his watch.
When he stepped all the way into the apartment I saw how very young he was: a pug-nosed kid off the subway, with a gun and a badge and dressed up in a blue uniform. Not so unlike Barry Edelstein as I’d thought while the pistol was pointed at my head. Now he wouldn’t engage my eyes directly, embarrassed it seemed for having drawn the gun, movie style, or for having spoken obscenely to an innocent man, or, most likely, for having been discovered by me away from his post. Yet another member of the sex, abashed to be revealed as unequal to his task.
“Well,” I said, closing the three-ring notebook and tucking it under my arm, “I’ll just get those things now, and be off—”
“Hey,” he said, motioning to the bedroom, “don’t worry about the mattress in there. I just couldn’t take the stink no more, so I washed it out. That’s how come it’s wet like that. Ajax and a little Mr. Clean, and that did it. Don’t worry—it won’t leave no mark when it dries.”
“Well, thank you. That was very nice of you.”
He shrugged. “I put all the stuff back in the kitchen, under the sink there.” hne.
“That Mr. Clean is some stuff.”
“I know. I’ve heard them say that. I’ll just get a few things and go.”
We were friends now. He asked, “What is the missus anyway? An actress?”
‘Well…yes.”
“On TV?”
“No, no, just around.”
“What? Broadway?”
“No, no, not yet anyway.”
“Well, that takes time, don’t it? She shouldn’t be discouraged.”
I went into Maureen’s bedroom, a tiny cell just big enough for a bed and a night table with a lamp on it. Because the closet door could only be opened halfway before it banged against the foot of the bed, I had to reach blindly around inside until I came up with a nightdress that was hanging on a hook. “Ah,” I said, nice and loud, “here it is—right…where…she said!” To complete the charade, I decided to open and then shut loudly the drawer to the little night table.
A can opener. In the drawer there was a can opener. I did not immediately deduce its function. That is, I thought it must be there to open cans.
Let me describe the instrument. The can-opening device itself is screwed to a smooth, grainy-looking wooden handle, about two and a half inches around and some five inches long, tapering slightly to its blunt end. The opening device consists of a square aluminum case, approximately the size of a cigarette lighter, housing on its underside a small metal tooth and a little ridged gear; projecting upward from the top side of the case is an inch-long shaft to which is attached a smaller wooden handle, about three inches long. Placing the can opener horizontally over the edge of the can, you press the pointed metal tooth down into the rim, and proceed to open the can by holding the longer handle in one hand, and rotating the smaller handle with the other; this causes the tooth to travel around the rim until it has severed the top of the can from the cylinder. It is a type of can opener that you can buy in practically any hardware store for between a dollar and a dollar and a quarter. I have priced them since. They are manufactured by the Eglund Co., Inc., of Burlington, Vermont—their “No. 5 Junior” model. I have Maureen’s here on my desk as I write.
“How ya’ doin’?” the cop called.
“Oh, fine.”
I slammed the drawer shut, having first deposited the No. 5 Junior in my pocket.
“So that’s it,” I said, coming back around into the living room, Delilah glued to my trouser cuff.
“Mattress look okay to you?”
“Great. Perfect. Thanks again. I’ll be off, you know—I’ll leave the locksmith to you then, right?”
I was one flight down and flying, when the young cop appeared at the landing over my head. “Hey!”
“What!”
“Toothbrush!”
“Oh!”
“Here!”
I caught it and kept going.
The taxi I flagged down to take me crosstown to Susan’s was one of those fitted out like the prison cell of an enterprising convict or the den of an adolescent boy: framed family photographs lined up on the windshield, a large round alarm clock strapped atop the meter, and some ten or fifteen sharpened Eberhard pencils jammed upright in a white plastic cup fastened by a system of thick elastic bands to the grill separating the passenger in the back seat from the driver up front. The grill was itself festooned with blue-and-white tassels, and an arrangement of gold-headed upholstery tacks stuck into the roof above the driver’s head spelled out “Gary, Tina & Roz”—most likely the names of the snappily dressed children smiling out from the family photographs of weddings and bar mitzvahs. The driver, an elderly man, must have been their grandfather.
Ordinarily I suppose I would have commented, like every other passenger, on the elaborate decor. But all I could look at and think about then was the Eglund Company’s No. 5 Junior can opener. Holding the aluminum end in my left hand, I passed the larger handle through a circle formed out of the thumb and index finger of my right hand; then, wrapping the other three fingers loosely around it, I moved the handle slowly down the channel.
Next I placed the handle of the can opener between my thighs and crossed one leg over the other, locking it in place. Only the square metallic opening device, with its sharp little tooth facing up, poked out from between my legs.
The cab veered sharply over to the curb.
“Get out,” the driver said.
“Do what?”
He was glaring at me through the grill, a little man, with dark pouches under his eyes and bushy gray eyebrows, wearing a heavy wool sweater under a suit. His voice quivered with rage— “Get the hell out! None of that stuff in my cab!”
“None of what? I’m not doing anything.”
“Get out, I told you! Out, you, before I use the tire iron on your head!”
“What do you think I was doing, for Christ’s sake!”
But by now I was on the sidewalk.
“You filthy son of a bitch!” he cried, and drove off.
Clutching the can opener in my pocket and holding the diary in my lap, I eventually made it to Susan’s—though not without further incident. As soon as I had gotten settled in the back seat of a second cab, the driver, this one a young fellow with a wispy yellow beard, fixed me in the rearview mirror and said, “Hey, Peter Tarnopol.” “What’s that?” “You’re Peter Tarnopol-right?”
“Wrong.” “You look like him.” “Never heard of him.” “Come on, you’re putting me on, man. You’re him. You’re really him. Wow, man. What a coincidence. I just had Jimmy Baldwin in here last night.” “Who’s he?” “The writer, man. You’re putting me on. You know who else I had in here?” I didn’t answer. “Mailer. I get all you fuckin’ guys. I had another guy in here, I swear to fuck he musta weighed eighty-two pounds. This tall string bean with a crew cut. I took him out to Kennedy. You know who it was?” “Who?” “Fuckin’ Beckett. You know how I know it was him? I said to him, ‘You’re Sa
muel Beckett, man.’ And you know what he said? He says, ‘No, I’m Vladimir Nabokov.’ What do you think of that?” “Maybe it was Vladimir Nabokov.” “No, no, I never had Nabokov. Not yet. What are you writin’ these days, Tarnopol?” “Checks.” We had arrived at Susan’s building. “Right here,” I told him, “that awning.” “Hey, you live all right, Tarnopol. You guys do okay, you know that?” I paid him, while he shook his head in wonderment; as I was leaving the taxi, he said, “Watch this, I’ll turn the corner and pick up fuckin’ Mala-mud. I wouldn’t put it past me.”
“Good evening, sir,” said Susan’s elevator man, appearing out of nowhere and startling me in the lobby, just as I had made it gravely past the doorman and was removing the can opener from my pocket…But once inside the apartment I pulled it from my pocket again and cried out, “Wait’ll you see what I got!”
“She’s alive?” asked Sysan.
“And kicking.”
“—the police?”
“Weren’t there. Look—look at this!”
“It’s a can opener.”
“It’s also what she masturbates with! Look! Look at this nice sharp metal tooth. How she must love that protruding out of her—how she must love to look down at that!”
“Oh, Peter, where ever did you—“
“From her apartment—next to her bed.”
Out popped the tear.
“What are you crying about? It’s perfect—don’t you see? Just what she thinks a man is—a torture device. A surgical instrument!”
“But where—“
“I told you. From her bedside table!”
“You stole it, from her apartment?”
“Yes!”
I described to her then in detail my adventures at the hospital and after.
When I finished she turned and went off to the kitchen. I followed her and stood by the stove as she began to brew herself a cup of Ovaltine.
“Look, you yourself tell me I shouldn’t be defenseless with her.”
She would not speak to me.