Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

These surprise visits continued sporadically over a period of four months and would have gone on indefinitely, I thought, if I just stayed on there in New York. Certainly, I could refuse to respond to the doorbell, pretend when she came by that I wasn’t at home, but as I reminded Dr. Spielvogel when he suggested somewhat facetiously that I “marshal” my strength and forget about the bell-“it’ll stop soon enough”-this was Susan I was dealing with, not Maureen. Eventually I packed a bag and, marshaling my strength, came up here.

Just before I left my apartment, however, I spent several hours writing Susan notes telling her where I was going-and then tearing them up. But what if she “needed” me? How could I just pick up and disappear? I ended up finally telling a couple who were our friends where I would be hiding out, assuming that the wife would pass this confidence on to Susan before my bus had even passed over the New York State line.

I did not hear a word from Susan for six weeks. Because she had been told where I was or because she hadn’t?

Then one morning I was summoned from breakfast to the phone here at the Colony-it was our friends informing me that Susan had been found unconscious in her apartment and rushed by ambulance to the hospital. It seemed that the previous night she had finally accepted an invitation to dinner with a man; he had left her at her door around eleven, and she had come back into the apartment and swallowed all the Seconal and Tuinal and Placidyl that she had been secreting under her lingerie over the years. The cleaning lady had found her in the morning, befouled and in a heap on the bathroom floor, surrounded by empty vials and envelopes.

I got an afternoon flight from Rutland and was at the hospital by the evening visiting hours. When I arrived at the psychiatric ward, I was told she had just been transferred and was directed to a regular private room. The door was slightly ajar and I peered in-she was sitting up in bed, gaunt and scraggly looking and still very obviously dazed and disoriented, like a prisoner, I thought, who has just been returned from an all-night session with her interrogators. When she saw that it was me rapping on the door, out came the tear, and despite the presence of the formidable mother, who coolly took my measure from the bedside, she said, T love you, that’s why I did it.”

After ten days in the hospital getting her strength back-and assuring Dr. Golding when he came around to visit each morning, that she would never again lay in a secret cache of sleeping pills-she was released in the care of her mother and went back home to New Jersey, where her father had been a professor of classics at Princeton until his death. Mrs. Seabury, according to Susan, was a veritable Calpurnia; in grace, in beauty, in carriage, in icy grandeur (and, said Susan, “in her own estimation”) very much a Caesar’s wife-and to top it off, Susan added hopelessly, she happened also to be smart. Yes, top marks, it turned out, from the very college where Susan hadn’t been able to make it through her freshman year. I had always suspected that Susan might be exaggerating somewhat her mother’s majesty-it was, after all, her mother-but at the hospital, when by chance our daily visits overlapped, I found myself not a little awed by the patrician confidence radiated by this woman from whom Susan had obviously inherited her own striking good looks, though not a Calpurnian presence. Mrs. Seabury and I had next to nothing to say to one another. She looked at me in fact (or so I imagined it, in those circumstances) as though she did not see there much opposition to be brooked. Only further evidence of her daughter’s prodigality. “Of course,” her silence seemed to me to say, “of course it would be over the loss of a hysterical Jewish ‘poet.’” In the corridors outside the hospital room of my suicidal mistress, it was difficult to rise to my own defense.

When I came down to Princeton to visit Susan, we two sat in the garden back of the brick house on Mercer Street, next door to where Einstein had lived (legend had it that as a little red-headed charmer, back in the years before she was just “symptoms,” Susan used to give him candy to do her arithmetic homework); Madame Seabury, wearing pearls, sat with a book just inside the terrace door, no more than ten yards away-it was not A Jewish Father she was reading, I was sure. I had taken the train to Princeton to tell Susan that now that she was being looked after by her mother, I would be going back to Vermont. So long as she had been in the hospital, I had, at Dr. Golding’s suggestion, been deliberately vague about my plans. “You don’t have to tell her anything, one way or another.’’ “What if she asks?” “I don’t think she will,” Golding said; “for the time being she’s content that she got you down here. She won’t push her luck.” “Not yet. But what about when she gets out? What if she tries it again?” “I’ll take care of that,” said Golding, with a businesslike smile meant to close off conversation. I wanted to say: “You didn’t take such marvelous care of ‘that’ last time!” But who was the runaway lover to blame the devoted doctor for the castoff mistress’s suicide attempt?

It was a warmish March day, and Susan was wearing a clinging yellow jersey dress, looking very slinky for a young woman who generally preferred to keep her alluring body inconspicuous. Her hair, unknotted for the occasion, was a thick mane down her back; a narrow band of girlish freckles faintly showed across the bridge of her nose and her cheekbones. She had been out in the sun every afternoon-in her bikini, she let me know-and looked gorgeous. She could not keep her hands from her hair, and continuously, throughout our conversation, took it from behind her neck and pulled it like a thick, auburn rope over either shoulder; then, raising her chin just a touch, she would push the mass of hair back behind her neck with two open palms. The wide mouth and slightly protrusive jaw that gave a decisive and womanly quality to her delicate beauty, struck me suddenly as prehistoric, the sign of what was still raw and forceful in this bridled daughter of propriety and wealth. I had always found her beauty stirring, but never before had it seemed so thoroughly dominated by the sensuous. That was new. Where was Susan the interrogated prisoner? Susan the mousy widow? Susan the awesome mother’s downtrodden Cinderella? All gone! Was it having toyed with suicide and gotten away with it that gave her the courage to be so blatantly tempting? Was it the proximity of the disapproving mother that was goading her on? Or was this her calculated last-ditch effort to arouse and lure back the fugitive from matrimony?

Whatever, I was aroused.

With her legs thrown over the filigreed arm of the white wrought-iron chaise, Susan’s yellow dress rode high on her tanned thigh-I thought it must be the way she used to sit at age eight with Einstein, before she had begun to be educated by her fears. When she shifted in the chaise, or simply raised her arms to fool with her hair, the edge of her pale underpants came into view.

“Coming on very shameless,” I said. “For my benefit or your mother’s?”

“Both. Neither.”

“I don’t think she thinks the world of me to begin with.”

“Nor of me.”

“Then that won’t help any, will it?”

“Please, you’re ‘coming on’ like somebody’s nanny.”

Silence, while I watch that hair fan out in her two hands. One of her tanned legs is swinging to the slowest of beats over the arm of the garden chaise. This is not at all the scenario that I had constructed on the train coming down. I had not counted on a temptress, or an erection.

“She always thought I had the makings of a whore anyway,” says Susan, frowning like any victimized adolescent.