Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

I was drawn to Lydia, not out of a passion for Monica-not yet-but because she had suffered so and because she was so brave. Not only that she had survived, but what she had survived, gave her enormous moral stature, or glamor, in my eyes: on the one hand, the puritan austerity, the prudery, the bland-ness, the xenophobia of the women of her clan; on the other, the criminality of the men. Of course, I did not equate being raped by one’s father with being raised on the wisdom of the Chicago Tribune; what made her seem to me so valiant was that she had been subjected to every brand of barbarity, from the banal to the wicked, had been exploited, beaten, and betrayed by every last one of her keepers, had finally been driven crazy- and in the end had proved indestructible: she lived now in a neat little apartment within earshot of the bell in the clock tower of the university whose atheists, Communists, and Jews her people had loathed, and at the kitchen table of that apartment wrote ten pages for me every week in which she managed, heroically I thought, to recall the details of that brutal life in the style of one a very long way from rage and madness. When I told the class that what I admired most in Mrs. Ketterer’s fiction was her “control,” I meant something more than those strangers could know.

Given all there was to move me about her character, it seemed to me curious that I should be so repelled by her flesh as I was that first night. I was able myself to achieve an orgasm, but afterward felt terrible for the “achievement” it had had to be. Earlier, caressing her body, I had been made uneasy by the unexpected texture of her genitals. To the touch, the fold of skin between her legs felt abnormally thick, and when I looked, as though to take pleasure in the sight of her nakedness, the vaginal lips appeared withered and discolored in a way that was alarming to me. I could even imagine myself to be staring down at the sexual parts of one of Lydia’s maiden aunts, rather than at a physically healthy young woman not yet into her thirties. I was tempted to imagine some connection here to the childhood victimization by her father, but of course that was too literary, too poetic an idea to swallow-this was no stigma, however apprehensive it might make me.

The reader may by now be able to imagine for himself how the twenty-four-year-old I was responded to his alarm: in the morning, without very much ado, I performed cunnilingus upon her.

“Don’t,” said Lydia. “Don’t do that.”

“Why not?” I expected the answer: Because I’m so ugly there.

“I told you. I won’t reach a climax. It doesn’t matter what you do.”

Like a sage who’d seen everything and been everywhere, I said, “You make too much of that.”

Her thighs were not as long as my forearm (about the length, I thought, of one of Mrs. Slater’s Pappagallos) and her legs were open only so far as I had been able to spread them with my two hands. But where she was dry, brownish, weatherworn, I pressed my open mouth. I took no pleasure in the act, she gave no sign that she did; but at least I had done what I had been frightened of doing, put my tongue to where she had been brutalized, as though-it was tempting to put it this way-that would redeem us both.

As though that would redeem us both. A notion as inflated as it was shallow, growing, I am certain, out of “serious literary studies.” Where Emma Bovary had read too many romances of her period, it would seem that I had read too much of the criticism of mine. That I was, by “eating” her, taking some sort of sacrament was a most attractive idea-though one that I rejected after the initial momentary infatuation. Yes, I continued to resist as best I could all these high-flown, prestigious interpretations, whether of my migraines or my sexual relations with Lydia; and yet it surely did seem to me that my life was coming to resemble one of those texts upon which certain literary critics of that era used to enjoy venting their ingenuity. I could have done a clever job on it myself for my senior honors thesis in college: “Christian Temptations in a Jewish Life: A Study in the Ironies of ‘Courting Disaster.’”

So: as often during a week as I could manage it, I “took the sacrament,” conquering neither my fearful repugnance nor the shame I felt at being repelled, and neither believing nor disbelieving the somber reverberations.

During the first months of my love affair with Lydia, I continued to receive letters and, on occasion, telephone calls from Sharon Shatzky, the junior at Pembroke with whom I had concluded a passionate romance prior to my return to Chicago. Sharon was a tall, handsome, auburn-haired girl, studious, enthusiastic, and lively, an honor student in literature, and the daughter of a successful zipper manufacturer with country-club affiliations and a hundred-thousand-dollar suburban home who had been impressed with my credentials and entirely hospitable to me, until I began to suffer from migraines. Then Mr. Shatzky grew fearful that if he did not intervene, his daughter might one day find herself married to a man she would have to nurse and support for the rest of her life. Sharon was enraged by her father’s “lack of compassion.” “He thinks of my life,” she said, angrily, “as a business investment.” It enraged her even more when I came to her father’s defense. I said that it was as much his paternal duty to make clear to a young daughter what might be the long-range consequences of my ailment as it had been years before to see that she was inoculated against smallpox; he did not want her to suffer for no reason. “But I love you,” Sharon said, “that’s my ‘reason.’ I want to be with you if you’re ill. I don’t want to run out on you then, I want to take care of you.” “But he’s saying that you don’t know all that ‘taking care of could entail.” “But I’m telling you-I love you.”

Had I wanted to marry Sharon (or her family’s money) as much as her father assumed I did, I might not have been so tolerant of his opposition. But as I was just into my twenties then, the prospect of marriage, even to a lovely young woman toward whom I had so strong an erotic attachment, did not speak to the range of my ambitions. I should say, particularly because of this strong erotic attachment was I suspicious of an enduring union. For without that admittedly powerful bond, what was there of consequence, of importance, between Sharon and myself? Only three years my junior, Sharon seemed to me vastly younger, and to stand too much in my shadow, with few attitudes or interests that were her own; she read the books I recommended to her, devouring them by the dozen the summer we met, and repeated to her friends and teachers, as hers, judgments she had borrowed from me; she had even switched from a government to a literature major under my influence, a satisfaction to me at first, in the fatherly stage of my infatuation, but afterward a sign, among others, of what seemed to me an excess of submissiveness and malleability.

It did not, at that time, occur to me to find evidence of character, intelligence, and imagination in the bounteousness of her sexuality or in the balance she managed to maintain between a bold and vivacious animality and a tender, compliant nature. Nor did I begin to understand that it was in that tension, rather than in the sexuality alone, that her appeal resided. Rather, I would think, with something like despair, “That’s all we really have,” as though unselfconsciously fervent lovemaking, sustained over a period of several years, was a commonplace phenomenon.

One night, when Lydia and I were already asleep in my apartment, Sharon telephoned to speak with me. She was in tears and didn’t try to hide it. She could not bear any longer the stupidity of my decision. Surely I could not hold her accountable for her father’s cold-blooded behavior, if that was the explanation for what I was doing. What was I doing anyway? And how was I doing? Was I well? Was I ill? How was my writing, my teaching -I had to let her fly to Chicago…But I told her she must stay where she was. I remained throughout calm and firm. No, I did not hold her accountable for anybody’s behavior but her own, which was exemplary. I reminded her that it was not I who had judged her father “cold-blooded.” When she continued to appeal to me to come to “my senses,” I said that it was she who had better face facts, especially as they were not so unpleasant as she was making them out to be: she was a beautiful, intelligent, passionate young woman, and if she would stop this theatrical grieving and make herself available to life once again-