Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

As my tone suggests, I had found myself as humiliated and compromised, and nearly as disfigured, by my unsuccessful effort to get unmarried as I had ever been by the marriage itself: over the four years of separation I had been followed to dinner by detectives, served with subpoenas in the dentist’s chair, maligned in affidavits subsequently quoted in the press, labeled for what seemed like all eternity “a defendant,” and judged by a man with whom I would not eat my dinner-and I did not know if I could undergo these indignities again, and the accompanying homicidal rage, without a stroke finishing me off on the witness stand. Once I even took a swing at Maureen’s dapper (and, let it be known, elderly) lawyer in the corridor of the courthouse, when I learned that it was he who had invited the reporter from the Daily News to attend the hearing at which Maureen (for the occasion, in Peter Pan collar and tears) testified that I was “a well-known seducer of college girls.” But that story of my swashbuckling in its turn. My point is that I had not responded with much equanimity to the role in which I was cast by the authorities and did not want to be tested by their system of sexual justice ever again.

But there were other, graver reasons not to marry, aside from my fear of divorce. Though I had never taken lightly Susan’s history of emotional breakdown, the fact is that as her lover it had not weighed upon me as I expected it would if I were to become her husband and her offspring’s father. In the years before we met, Susan had gone completely to pieces on three occasions: first, in her freshman (and only) year at Wellesley; then after her husband had been killed in a plane crash eleven months into their marriage; and most recently, when her father, whom she had doted upon, had died in great pain of bone cancer. Each time she fell into a kind of waking coma and retired to a corner (or a closet) to sit mutely with her hands folded in her lap until someone saw fit to lift her onto a stretcher and carry her away. Under ordinary circumstances she managed to put down what she called her “everyday run-of-the-mill terror” with pills: she had through the years discovered a pill for just about every phobia that overcame her in the course of a day, and had been living on them, or not-living on them, since she had left home for college. There was a pill for the classroom, a pill for “dates,” a pill for buying clothes, a pill for returning clothes, and needless to say, pills for getting started in the morning and dropping into oblivion at night. And a whole mixed bag of pills which she took like M &Ms when she had to converse, even on the phone, with her formidable mother.

After her father’s death she had spent a month in Payne Whitney, where she’d become the patient of a Dr. Golding, reputedly a specialist with broken china. He had been her analyst for two years by the time I came along and had by then gotten her off everything except Ovaltine, her favorite childhood narcotic; in fact, he had encouraged the drinking of Oval-tine at bedtime and during the day when she was feeling distressed. Actually during the course of our affair Susan did not take so much as an aspirin for a headache, a perfect record, and one that might have served to assure me that that past was past. But then so had her record been “perfect” when she had enrolled at Wellesley at the age of eighteen, an A student from Princeton’s Miss Fine’s School for Young Ladies, and immediately developed such a fear of her German professor, a caustic young European refugee with a taste for leggy American girls, that instead of going off to his class she took a seat in the closet of her room every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at ten A.M., and until the hour was over, hid out there, coasting along on the belladonna that she regularly obtained from Student Health for her menstrual cramps. By chance one day (and a merciful day it was) a dormitory chambermaid opened the closet door during Susan’s German hour, and her Mother was summoned from Princeton to take her out from behind her winter coats and away from Wellesley for good.

The possibility of such episodes recurring in the future alarmed me. I believe my sister and brother would argue that Susan’s history of breakdowns was largely what had intrigued me and attracted me, and that my apprehension over what might happen to her, given the inevitable tensions and pressures of marriage, was the first sign I had displayed, since coming of age, that I had a modicum of common sense in matters pertaining to women. My own attitude toward my apprehensiveness is not so unambiguously approving; I still do not know from day to day whether it is cause for relief or remorse.

Then there is the painful matter of the elusive orgasm: no matter how she struggled to reach a climax, “it” never happened. And of course the harder she worked at it, the more like labor and the less like pleasure erotic life became. On the other hand, the intensity of her effort was as moving as anything about her -for in the beginning, she had been altogether content just to open her legs a little way and lie there, a well to pump if anyone should want to, and she herself couldn’t imagine why anyone would, lovely and well-formed as she was. It took much encouragement and, at the outset, much berating, to get her to be something more than a piece of meat on a spit that you turned this way and that until you were finished; she was never finished, but then she had never really begun.

What a thing it was to watch the appetite awaken in this shy and timid creature! And the daring-for if only she dared to, she might actually have what she wanted! I can see her still, teetering on the very edge of success. The pulse beats erratically in her throat, the jaw strains upward, the gray eyes yearn- just a yard, a foot, an inch to the tape, and victory over the self-denying past! Oh yes, I remember us well at our honest toil-pelvises grinding as though to grind down bone, fingers clutching at one another’s buttocks, skin slick with sweat from forehead to feet, and our flushed cheeks (as we near total collapse) pressing so forcefully into one another that afterward her face is blotchy and bruised and my own is tender to the touch when I shave the’ following morning. Truly, I thought more than once that I might the of heart failure. “Though in a good cause,” I whisper, when Susan had signaled at last a desire to throw in the towel for the night; drawing a finger over the cheekbone and across the bridge of the nose, I would check for tears-rather, the tear; she would rarely allow more than one to be shed, this touching hybrid of courage and fragility. “Oh,” she whispers, “I was almost almost almost…” “Yes?” Then that tear. “Always,” she says, “almost.” “It’ll happen.” “It won’t. You know it won’t. What I consider almost is probably where everybody else begins.” “I doubt it.” “You don’t…Peter, next time-what you were doing…do it-harder.” So I did it, whatever it was, harder, or softer, or faster, or slower, or deeper, or shallower, or higher, or lower, as directed. Oh, how Mrs. Susan Seabury McCall of Princeton and Park Avenue tried to be bold, to be greedy, to be low (“Put it…” “Yes, say it, Suzie-“ “Oh, in me from behind, but don’t hurt-!”)-not of course that living on bennies in a Wellesley dormitory in 1951 hadn’t constituted an act of boldness for a society-bred, mother-disciplined, father-pampered young heiress from a distinguished New Jersey family, replete on the father’s side with a U.S. senator and an ambassador to England, and on the mother’s, with nineteenth-century industrial barons. But that diversion had been devised to annihilate temptation; now she wanted to want…Exhilarating to behold, but over the long haul utterly exhausting, and the truth was that by the third year of our affair both of us were the worse for wear and came to bed like workers doing overtime night after night in a defense plant: in a good cause, for good wages, but Christ how we wished the war was over and won and we could rest and be happy.