Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

“But if I’m all those things, then why are you throwing me away like this? Please, I don’t understand-make it clear to me! If I’m so exemplary, why don’t you want me? Oh, Nathan,” she said, now openly weeping again, “you know what I think? That underneath all that scrupulousness and fairness and reasonableness, you’re a madman! Sometimes I think that underneath all that ‘maturity’ you’re just a crazy little boy!”

When I returned from the kitchen phone to the living room, Lydia was sitting up in my sofa bed. “It was that girl, wasn’t it?” But without a trace of jealousy, though I knew she hated her, if only abstractly. “You want to go back to her, don’t you?”

“No.”

“But you know you’re sorry you ever started up with me. 1 know it. Only now you can’t figure how to get out of it. You’re afraid you’ll disappoint me, or hurt me, and so you let the weeks go by-and I can’t stand the suspense, Nathan, or the confusion. If you’re going to leave me, please do it now, tonight, this minute. Send me packing, please, I beg you-because I don’t want to be endured, or pitied, or rescued, or whatever it is that’s going on here! What are you doing with me-what am I doing with someone like you! You’ve got success written all over-it’s in every breath you take! So what is this all about? You know you’d rather sleep with that girl than with me-so stop pretending otherwise, and go back to her, and do it!”

Now she cried, as hopeless and bewildered as Sharon. I kissed her, I tried to comfort her. I told her that nothing she was saying was so, when of course it was true in every detail: I loathed making love to her, I wished to be rid of her, I couldn’t bear the thought of hurting her, and following the phone call, I did indeed want more than ever to go back to the one Lydia referred to always as “that girl.” Yet I refused to confess to such feelings or act upon them.

“She’s sexy, young, Jewish, rich-“

“Lydia, you’re only torturing yourself-“

“But I’m so hideous. I have nothing.”

No, if anyone was “hideous,” it was I, yearning for Sharon’s sweet lewdness, her playful and brazen sensuality, for what I used to think of as her perfect pitch, that unfailingly precise responsiveness to whatever our erotic mood-wanting, remembering, envisioning all this, even as I labored over Lydia’s flesh, with its contrasting memories of physical misery. What was “hideous” was to be so queasy and finicky about the imperfections of a woman’s body, to find oneself an adherent of the most Hollywoodish, cold-blooded notions of what is desirable and what is not; what was “hideous”-alarming, shameful, astonishing-was the significance that a young man of my pretensions should attach to his lust.

And there was more which, if it did not cause me to feel so peculiarly desolated as I did by what I took to be my callow sexual reflexes, gave me still other good reasons to distrust myself. There were, for instance, Monica’s Sunday visits-how brutal they were! And how I recoiled from what I saw! Especially when I remembered-with the luxurious sense of having been blessed- the Sundays of my own childhood, the daylong round of visits, first to my two widowed grandmothers in the slum where my parents had been born, and then around Camden to the households of half a dozen aunts and uncles. During the war, when gasoline was rationed, we would have to walk to visit the grandmothers, traversing on foot five miles of city streets in all-a fair measure of our devotion to those two queenly and prideful workhorses, who lived very similarly in small apartments redolent of freshly ironed linen and stale coal gas, amid an accumulation of antimacassars, bar mitzvah photos, and potted plants, most of them taller and sturdier than I ever was. Peeling wallpaper, cracked linoleum, ancient faded curtains, this nonetheless was my Araby, and I their little sultan…what is more, a sickly sultan whose need was all the greater for his Sunday sweets and sauces. Oh how I was fed and comforted, washerwoman breasts for my pillows, deep grandmotherly laps, my throne!

Of course, when I was ill or the weather was bad, I would have to stay at home, looked after by my sister, while my father and mother made the devotional safari alone, in galoshes and under umbrellas. But that was not so unpleasant either, for Sonia would read aloud to me, in a very actressy way, from a book she owned entitled Two Hundred Opera Plots; intermittently she would break into song. “ “The action takes place in India,’” she read, “ ‘and opens in the sacred grounds of the Hindoo priest, Nilakantha, who has an inveterate hatred for the English. During his absence, however, a party of English officers and ladies enter, out of curiosity, and are charmed with the lovely garden. They soon depart, with the exception of the officer, Gerald, who remains to make a sketch, in spite of the warning of his friend, Frederick. Presently the priest’s lovely daughter, Lakme, enters, having come by the river…’” The phrase “having come by the river,” the spelling of Hindu in Sunny’s book with those final twin o’s (like a pair of astonished eyes; like the middle vowels in “hoot” and “moon” and “poor”; like a distillation of everything and anything I found mysterious), appealed strongly to this invalid child, as did her performing so wholeheartedly for an audience of one…Lakme is taken by her father, both of them disguised as beggars, to the city market: “‘He forces Lakme to sing, hoping thus to attract the attention of her lover, should he be amongst the party of English who are buying in the bazaars.’” I am still barely recovered from the word “bazaars” and its pair of as (the sound of “odd,” the sound of a sigh), when Sunny introduces “The Bell Song,” the aria “De la fille du faria,” says my sister in Bresslenstein’s French accent: the ballad of the pariah’s daughter who saves a stranger in the forest from the wild beasts by the enchantment of her magic bell. After struggling with the soaring aria, my sister, flushed and winded from the effort, returns to her highly dramatic reading of the plot: “‘And this cunning plan succeeds, for Gerald instantly recognizes the thrilling voice of the fair Hindoo maiden-’” And is stabbed in the back by Lakme’s father; and is nursed back to health by her “‘in a beautiful jungle’”; only there the fellow “ ‘remembers with remorse the fair English girl to whom he is betrothed’”; and so decides to leave my sister, who kills herself with poisonous herbs, “‘the deadly juices of which she drinks.’” I could not decide whom to hate more, Gerald, with his remorse for “the fair English girl,” or Lakme’s crazy father, who would not let his daughter love a white man. Had I been “in India” instead of at home on a rainy Sunday, and had I weighed something more than sixty pounds, I would have saved her from them both, I thought.

Later, at the back landing, my Mother and father shake the water off themselves like dogs-our loyal Dalmatians, our life-saving Saint Bernards. They leave their umbrellas open in the bathtub to dry. They have carried home to me-two and a half miles through a storm, and with a war on-a jar of my grandmother Zuckerman’s stuffed cabbage, a shoe box containing my grandmother Ackerman’s strudel: food for a starving Nathan, to enrich his blood and bring him health and happiness. Later still, my exhibitionistic sister will stand exactly in the center of the living-room rug, on the “oriental” medallion, practicing her scales, while my father reads the battlefront news in the Sunday Inquirer and my mother gauges the temperature of my forehead with her lips, each hourly reading ending in a kiss. And I, all the while, an Ingres odalisque languid on the sofa. Was there ever anything like it, since the day of rest began?