Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

Early each summer there would generally be a knock on her apartment door: a man to ask if she would have dinner with him while his wife was away in the country. These were the husbands of the women in the building for whom she went around town all day picking up swatches of fabrics and straightening out errors in charge accounts. Their wives had told them what a lovely young person Susan was, and then they would themselves have caught sight of the five foot nine inch redhead when she was getting in and out of taxis in front of the building, her arms loaded with other people’s Bergdorf boxes and her dress shimmying up her slender legs. One of these men, a handsome and charming investment banker (“like a father to me,” the thirty-year-old widow told me, without blinking an eye), gave her a new electric range for a present when fall came and he wanted to be sure she kept her mouth shut; she didn’t need a new range (not even to keep her mouth shut), but because she did not want to hurt his feelings, she had the one she and Jamey and the decorator had bought ripped out and the new one installed. And not one of these hot-weather paramours of hers, afflicted as he might be with middle-age wife-weariness, ever wanted to run off with the rich and beautiful young woman and start a new life-and that to Susan was as damning a fact as any in the prosecution’s case against her self-esteem.

I didn’t want to run off with her either. Yet I came back, night after night, returned to her apartment to eat and read and sleep, which was not what young A., B., C, D., or E. had ever done. And for good reason: they obviously had too much going for them, too much confidence and vitality and hope for the future, to settle for more than a night with the likes of Susan the Submissive. I, on the other hand, at the age of thirty, with my prizes and my publication behind me, had had it. I sat at dinner in Jamey’s baronial chair, Susan serving me like a geisha. I shaved in Jamey’s lacquered brothel of a bathroom, my towels warming on the electrical heating stand while I discovered the luxury of his Rolls razor. I read in his gargantuan club chair, my feet up on the ottoman covered in Jamey’s mother’s favorite flame stitch, a gift for his twenty-second (and last) birthday. I drank those rare vintages of Jamey’s wine that Susan had kept at the proper temperature in an air-conditioned pantry all these years, as though she expected that he might rise from the grave one day and ask to taste his Richebourg. When my shoes got wet in a rainstorm, I stuffed them with his wooden shoe trees and padded around in his velvet slippers from Tripler’s. I borrowed stays from his shirts. I weighed myself on his scale. And was generally bored by his wife. But she did not make a single demand.

All Susan said to me about our arrangement was this, and being Susan, she didn’t even say it aloud: “I’m yours. I’ll do anything. Come and go as you like. Let me feed you. Let me sit with you at night and watch you read. You can do anything you want to my body. I’ll do anything you say. Just have dinner with me sometimes and use some of these things. And I’ll never utter a peep. I’ll be good as gold. I won’t ask what you do when you go away. You don’t have to take me anywhere. Just stay here sometimes and make use of whatever you want, including me. You see, I have all these thick bath-sized towels and Belgian lace tablecloths, all this lovely crockery, three bathrooms, two televisions, and two million dollars of Jamey’s money with more of my own to come, I have these breasts and this vagina, these limbs, this skin-and no life. Give me just a little bit of that, and in return whenever you want to you can come here and recover from your wife. Any hour of the day or night. You don’t even have to call beforehand.”

It’s a deal, I said. The broken shall succor the broken.

Of course, Susan was not the first young woman that I had met in New York since I’d come East seeking asylum in June of ‘62. She was just the first one I’d settled in with. According to the custom of that era-it is depressing to think that it may be the custom still-I had been to parties, befriended girls (which is to say, stood exchanging ironic quips with them in the corner of someone’s crowded West Side apartment), and then had gone to bed with them, either before or after taking them out to dinner a couple of times. Some were undoubtedly nice people, but I didn’t have the staying power or the confidence really to find out. Oftentimes during my first year in New York I discovered that I did not really want to take off my clothes or those of my new-found acquaintance, once we had gotten back to one or another of our apartments, and so I would fall into silent fits of melancholy that must have made me seem rather freakish-or at least affected. One young knockout, I remember, took it very personally and became incensed that I should suddenly have turned lugubrious on her after having been “so ferociously charming” with my back against the wall of one of those crowded living rooms; she asked if it was true that I was trying to kick being queer, and I, dim-witted as can be, began to struggle to remove her pantyhose, an act which turned out to consume such passion as I had. She took her leave shortly thereafter, and the following morning, going down for the paper and my seeded roll, I found wedged into the frame of the door an index card that had penciled on it, “Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here.” Those parties I went to, with their ongoing intersexual competition in self-defense, bred a lot of this sort of scuffling, or maybe a little bit went a long way with me then; eventually invitations from editors and writers to parties where there would be “a lot of girls” I mostly turned down; when I didn’t, I generally regretted it afterward.

Only months after my arrival, it became clear to me-depressingly so-that New York City was probably the worst possible place, outside of the Vatican, for a man in my predicament to try to put an end to his old life and begin a new one. As I was discovering at these parties, I was in no shape to get much pleasure out of my status as a “single” man; and, as I discovered in my lawyer’s office, the state of New York was hardly about to grant that status de jure recognition. Indeed, now that the Peter Tarnopols were New York residents, it looked as though they would be husband and wife forever. Too late I learned that had we gotten separated back in Wisconsin, we could, according to the law there, have been divorced after having voluntarily lived separate and apart for five years. (Of course, had I returned to Wisconsin in June of ‘62, rather than staying on at Morris’s apartment and from there launching into my career as Spielvogel’s patient, it is doubtful that I ever could have managed to set myself up in Madison separate and apart from Maureen.) But, as things turned out, in the sanctuary that I had taken New York to be, the only grounds for divorce was adultery, and since Maureen did not want to divorce me on any grounds, and I had no way of knowing whether she was an adulteress, or proving it even if I knew, it looked in all likelihood as though I would be celebrating my golden wedding anniversary on the steps of the State House in Albany. Moreover, because my lawyer had been unable to get Maureen and her attorney to agree to a legal separation or to any kind of financial settlement (let alone to a Mexican or Nevada divorce that would have required mutual consent to be incontestable), my official marital status in New York very shortly came to be that of the guilty party in a separation action brought by a wife against a husband who had “abandoned” her. Though we had lived together as husband and wife for only three years, I was ordered by the New York court to provide maintenance for my abandoned wife to the tune of one hundred dollars a week, and to provide it until death did us part. And in New York State what else could part us?