Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

Mrs. Seabury said, “Staying any longer will only make it more difficult for her. It was very good of you,” she said in her cool and unruffled way, “to visit her at the hospital every day. Dr. Golding agreed. That was the best thing to do in the situation, and we appreciate it. But now she must really make an effort to come to grips with reality. She must not be allowed to continue to act in ways that are not in her own interest. You must not let her work on your sympathies with her helplessness. She has been wooing people that way all her life. I tell you this for your own good-you must not imagine yourself in any way responsible for Susan’s predicament. She has always been all too willing to collapse in other people’s arms. We have tried to be kind and intelligent about this behavior always-she is what she is-but one must also be firm. And I don’t think it would be kind, intelligent, or firm for you to forestall the inevitable any longer. She must begin to forget you, and the sooner the better. I am going to ask you to go now, Mr. Tarnopol, before my daughter once again does something that she will regret. She cannot afford much more remorse or humiliation. She hasn’t the stamina for it.”

Out in the garden, Susan had turned over and was lying now on her back, her legs as well as her arms dangling over the sides of the chaise-four limbs seemingly without strength.

I said to Mrs. Seabury, “I’ll go out and say goodbye. I’ll tell her I’m going.”

“I could as easily tell her you’ve gone. She knows how to be weak but she also knows something about how to be strong. It’s a matter of continually making it clear to her that people are not going to be manipulated by the childish ploys of a thirty-four-year-old woman.”

“I’ll just say goodbye.”

“All right. I won’t make an issue over a few more minutes,” she said, though it was altogether clear how little she liked being crossed by a hysterical Jewish poet. “She has been carrying on in that swimsuit for a week now. She greets the mailman in it every morning. Now she is exhibiting herself in it for you. Given that less than two weeks ago she tried to take her life, I would hope that you could summon up as much self-control as our mailman does and ignore the rather transparent display of teenage vampirism.”

“That is not what I am responding to. I lived with Susan for over three years.”

“I don’t wish to hear about that. I was never delighted by that arrangement. I deplored it, in fact.”

“I was only explaining to you why I’d prefer not to leave without at least telling her that I’m going.”

She said, “It is not possible for you to leave because she is lying on her back with her legs spread apart and-“

“And,” I replied, my face ablaze, “suppose that were the reason?”

“Is that all you people can think about?”

“Which ‘people’ are you referring to?”

“People like yourself and my daughter, experimenting with one another’s genitals, up there in New York. When do you stop being adolescent transgressors and grow up? You know you never had the slightest intention of making Susan your wife. You are too much of a ‘swinger’ for that. Such people used to be called ‘bohemians.’ They don’t believe in marriage, with its risks and its trials and its difficulties-only in sex, till it bores them. Well, that is your business-and your prerogative, I am sure, as an artist. But you should not be so reckless as to foist your elitist values upon someone like Susan, who happens to come from a different background and was raised according to more traditional standards of conduct. Look at her out there, trying so hard to be a sexpot for your benefit. How could you have wanted to put such a ridiculous idea in that girl’s head? Of all the things to encourage a person like Susan to become! Why on earth couldn’t you have left such an unlikely candidate alone? Must she be driven crazy with sex too? Must every last woman in the world be ‘turned on’ by you modern Don Juans? To what end, Mr. Tarnopol, other than to quench your unquenchable sexual vanity? Wasn’t she confused and broken enough-without this?”

“I don’t know where to begin to tell you that you’re wrong.”

I walked out into the garden and looked down at a body as familiar to me as my own.

“I’m going now,” I said.

She opened her eyes against the sun, and she laughed, a small, rather surprisingly cynical laugh; then after a moment’s contemplation, she raised the hand nearest to me from where it dangled to the ground and placed it between the legs of my trousers, directly on my penis. And she held me like that, her face now stolid and expressionless in the strong light. I did nothing but stand there, being held. From where she had stepped out onto the patio, Mrs. Seabury looked on.

This all couldn’t have lasted as long as a minute.

She lowered her hand to her own bare stomach. “Go ahead,” Susan whispered. “Go.” But just before I moved away she raised her body and pressed her cheek to my trousers.

“And I was ‘wrong,’” said Mrs. Seabury, her voice harsh at last, as I passed through the living room to the street.

At the time we met, Susan was just thirty and had been living for eleven years in the co-op apartment at Park and Seventy-ninth that had become hers (along with the eighteenth-century English marquetry furniture, the heavy velvet draperies, the Aubusson carpets, and two million dollars’ worth of securities in McCall and McGee Industries) when the company plane bearing her young husband to a board meeting crashed into a mountainside in upstate New York eleven months into the marriage. In that marrying the young heir had been considered by everyone (excepting her father, who, characteristically, had remained silent) a fantastic stroke of luck for a girl who hadn’t enough on the ball to survive two semesters at college, Susan (who eventually confided to me that she really hadn’t liked McCall that much) took his death very hard. Believing that her chances were all used up at twenty, she retired to her bed and lay there, mute and motionless, every single day during the month of mourning. As a result she wound up doing woodwork for six months at a fashionable “health farm” down in Bucks County known as the Institute for Better Living. Her father would have preferred that she return to the house on Mercer Street after she had completed her convalescence, but Susan’s “counselor” at the Institute had long talks with her about maturity and by the end of her stay had convinced her to return to the apartment at Park and Seventy-ninth and “give it a try on her own.” To be sure, she too would have preferred to return to Princeton and the father she adored-doing “research” for him in the library, lunching with him at Lahiere’s, hiking with him on weekends along the canal-if only living with her father didn’t entail living under the gaze of her mother, that gaze that frightened her largely because it said, “You must grow up and you must go away.”

In Manhattan, the rich and busy ladies in her building who “adopted” her made it their business to keep Susan occupied-running their errands for them during the week, and on Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays accompanying schoolchildren around town to be sure they didn’t lose their mufflers and were home in time for supper (to which Susan, having sung her servile little lungs out for it, would sometimes be invited). That was what she did for eleven years- and, of course, she “fixed up” the apartment that she and this ghost named “Jamey” had never really “finished.” Every few years she enrolled in a course at the night division at Columbia. Always she would take copious notes and diligently do all the reading, until such time as she began to fear that the professor was going to call upon her to speak. She would disappear then from the class, for a time, however, keeping up with the reading at home-even giving herself tests of her own devising. Men made some use of her over these eleven years, mostly after charity dinners and dances, which she attended on the arm of a bachelor nephew or some young cousin of the chairwoman, a rising something or other in the world. That was easy enough, and after a while did not even require eight hundred milligrams of Miltown for her to be able to “cope”: she just opened her legs a little way, and he who was rising in the world did what little remained to be done. Sometimes the cousins and nephews (or maybe it was just the thoughtful chairwomen) sent her flowers the next day: she saved the cards in a folder in the file cabinet that contained her lecture notes and self-administered, ungraded examinations. “Will call. Great night. Love, A.” or B. or C.