Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

“I doubt that.”

“Oh, are you siding with my mother these days? It’s a regular phalanx. Only you’re the one who turned me against her.”

“That tack won’t work,” I said flatly.

“What will then? Living here in my old room like the crazy daughter? Having college boys ask me for dates over the card catalogue in the library? Watching the eleven o’clock news, with my Ovaltine and my mom? What ever has worked?”

I didn’t answer.

“I ruin everything,” she announced.

“You want to tell me that I do?”

“I want to tell you that Maureen does-still! Now why did she have to go and get killed? What are all these people trying to do anyway, dying off on me this way? Everything was really just fine, until she upped and departed this life. But out of her clutches, Peter, you’re even more haywire than you were in. Leaving me like that was crazy.”

“I’m not haywire, I’m not crazy, and everything was not ‘just fine.’ You were biding your time. You want to be married and a mother. You dream about it.”

“You’re the one who dreams about it. You’re the one who’s obsessed with marriage. I told you I was willing to go ahead without-“

“But I don’t want you going ahead ‘without’! I don’t want to be responsible for denying you what you want.”

“But that’s my worry, not yours. And I don’t want it any more, I told you that. If I can’t, I won’t.”

“Yes?-then what am I to make of all those books, Susan?”

“Which books?”

“Your volumes on human heredity.”

She winced. “Oh.” But the mildness of what she said next, the faint air of self-mockery, surprised me. And relieved me too, for in my impatience with what I took to be rather self-deluded assertions about living “without,” I had gone further than I’d meant to. “Are they still around?” she asked, as though it was a teddy bear that I’d uncovered from a secret hiding place.

“Well, I didn’t move them.”

“I was going through a stage…as they say.”

“What stage?”

“Pathetic. Morbid. Blue. That stage…When did you find them?”

“One morning. Only about a year ago.”

“I see…Well-“ All at once she seemed crushed by my discovery; I thought that she might scream. “Well,” she said, inhaling deeply, “what next? What else have you found out about me?”

I shook my head.

“You should know-“ she stopped.

I said nothing. But what should I know? What should I know?

“A Princeton hippie,” said Susan, slyly smiling, “is taking me to a movie tonight. You should know that.”

“Very nice,” I said. “A new life.”

“He picked me up at the library. Want to know what I’m reading these days?”

“Sure. What?”

“Everything about matricide I can get my hands on,” she told me, through her teeth.

“Well, reading about matricide in a college library never killed anybody.”

“Oh, I just went there because I was bored.”

“In that dress?”

“Yes, in this dress. Why not? It’s just a little dress to wear around the stacks, you know.”

“I can see that.”

“I’m thinking of marrying him, by the way.”

“Who?”

“My hippie. He’d probably ‘dig’ a two-headed baby. And a decrepit ‘old lady.’”

“That thigh staring me and your mother in the face doesn’t look too decrepit.”

“Oh,” said Susan, “it won’t kill you to look at it.”

“Oh, it’s not killing me,” I said, and suppressed an urge to reach out and up and stroke what I saw.

“Okay,” she said abruptly-“you can tell me what you came to tell me, Peter. I’m ‘ready.’ To use a serviceable phrase of my mother’s, I’ve come to grips with reality. Shoot. You’re never going to see me again.”

“I don’t see what’s changed,” I answered.

“You don’t-I know you don’t. You still think I’m Maureen. You still think I’m that terrible person.”

“Hardly, Susan.”

“But how can you go around never trusting anyone ever again just because of a screwball like that! I don’t lie, Peter. I don’t deceive. I’m me. And don’t give me that look.”

‘What look?”

“Oh, let’s go up to my bedroom. The hell with Mother. I want to make love to you, terribly.”

“What look?”

She closed her eyes. “Stop,” she whispered. “Don’t be furious with me. I swear to you, I didn’t mean it that way. It was not blackmail, truly. I just could not bear any longer Being Brave.”

“Then why didn’t you call your doctor-instead of taking Maureen’s favorite home remedy!”

“Because I didn’t want him-I wanted you. But I didn’t pursue you, did I? For six weeks you were up there in Vermont, and I didn’t write, and I didn’t phone, and I didn’t get on an airplane-did I? Instead I went around day after day Being Brave, and not in Vermont either, but in the apartment where I used to eat and sleep with you. Finally I even came to grips with reality and accepted an invitation for dinner-and that was my biggest mistake. I tried to Start My Life Again, just like Dr. Golding told me to, and this very upright man that I went out with went ahead and gave me a lecture on how I oughtn’t to depend upon people who were ‘lacking in integrity.’ He told me that he heard from a reliable source in publishing that you were lacking in integrity. Oh, he made me furious, Peter, and I told him I was going home, and so he got up and left with me, and when I got home I wanted to call you so, I wanted to speak to you so badly, and the only way I couldn’t do it was to take the pills. I know it makes no sense, it was so utterly stupid, and I would never ever do it again. You don’t know how sorry I am. And you may tell yourself that I did it out of anger with you, or to try to blackmail you, or to punish you, or because I actually took what that man said about you to heart-but it was none of that. It was just that I was so worn down from going around for six weeks Being Brave! Oh, let’s go somewhere, to a motel room or somewhere. I want terribly to be fucked. That’s all I’ve been thinking about down here for days. I feel like-a fiend. Oh, please, I’m going to scream, living with this mother of mine!

Here that mother of hers was out through the terrace doors, across the patio, and into the garden before Susan could even brush away the tear or I could respond to her appeal. And what response would I have made? Her explanation did seem to me at that moment truthful and sufficient. Of course she did not lie or deceive, of course she was not Maureen. If I didn’t want Susan, I realized then, it was not because I didn’t want her to sacrifice for me her dream of a marriage and a family; it was because I didn’t want Susan any more, under any conditions. Nor did I want anyone else. I wanted only to be placed in sexual quarantine, to be weaned from the other sex forever.

Yet everything she said was so convincing.

Mrs. Seabury asked if I could come inside with her a moment.

“I take it,” she said, when we were standing together just inside the terrace doors, “that you told her you don’t plan to see her again.”

“That’s right.”

“Then perhaps the best thing now would be to go.”

“I think she’s expecting me to take her to lunch.”

“She has no such expectation that I know of. I can see to her lunch. And her welfare generally.”

Outside Susan was now standing up beside the chaise. Both Mrs. Seabury and I were looking her way when she pulled the yellow jersey dress up over her head and let it fall to the lawn. It wasn’t pale underpants I’d seen earlier beneath the skimpy dress, but a white bikini. She adjusted the back rest of the chaise until it was level with the seat and the foot rest, and then stretched herself out on it, face down. An arm hung limply over either side.