Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

I could, of course, have moved and taken up residence in some state with a less restrictive divorce law, and for a while, with the aid of The Complete Guide to Divorce by Samuel G. Kling-the book that became my bedside Bible in that first bewildering phase of my life as a New York resident-I seriously investigated the possibilities. Reading Kling I found out that in some eleven states “separation without cohabitation and without reasonable expectation of reconciliation” was grounds for divorce, after anywhere from eighteen months to three years. One night I got out of bed at four A.M. and sat down and wrote letters to the state universities in each of the eleven states and asked if there might be a job open for me in their department of English; within the month I had received offers from the universities of Florida, Delaware, and Wyoming. According to Kling, in the first two states “voluntary three-year separation” provided grounds for divorce; in Wyoming, only two years’ separation was necessary. My lawyer was quick to advise me of the various means by which Maureen might attempt to contest such a divorce; he also let me know that upon granting me a divorce the out-of-state judge would in all probability order me to continue to pay the alimony set by the New York court in the separation judgment; furthermore (to answer my next question), if I refused after the divorce to make the alimony payments, I could be (and with Maureen as my antagonist, no doubt would be) hauled into court under state reciprocity agreements and held in contempt by the Florida or Delaware or Wyoming judge for failing to support my former spouse in New York. A divorce, my lawyer said, I might be able to pull off-but escape the alimony? never. Nonetheless, I went ahead and accepted a job teaching American literature and creative writing the following September in Laramie, Wyoming. I went immediately to the library and took out books on the West. I went up to the Museum of Natural History and walked among the Indian artifacts and the tableau of the American bison. I decided I would try to learn to ride a horse, at least a little, before I got out there. And I thought of the money I would not be paying to Dr. Spielvogel.

Some ten weeks later I wrote to tell the chairman of the English department in Laramie that because of unforeseen circumstances I would be unable to take the job. The unforeseen circumstance was the hopelessness I had begun to feel at the prospect of a two-year exile in Wyoming. After which I might be able to ride a horse, but I would still have to pay through the nose. If the divorce even went uncontested! And would Florida be any better? Less remote, but a year longer to qualify for the divorce, and the end result just as uncertain. It was about this time that I decided that the only way out was to leave America and its marital laws and reciprocal state agreements and begin my life anew as a stranger in a foreign country. Since I understood that Maureen could always attach future royalties if they were to come through a New York publishing house, I would have to sell world rights to my next book to my English publisher and receive all payment through him. Or why not start from scratch-grow a beard and change my name?…And who was to say there would ever be a next book?

I spent the following few months deciding whether to return to Italy, where I still had a few friends, or to try Norway, where chances were slim that anybody would ever find me (unless of course they went looking). How about Finland? I read all about Finland in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. High rate of literacy, long winters, and many trees. I imagined myself in Helsinki, and, while I was at it, Istanbul, Marrakesh, Lisbon, Aberdeen, and the Shetland Islands. Very good place to disappear, the Shetland Islands. Pop. 19,343,and not that far, really, from the North Pole. Principal industries, sheep farming and fishing. Also raise famous ponies. No mention in Britannica of treat agreement with New York State for extradition of marital criminals…

But, oh, if I was outraged in New York over all I had lost in that marriage, imagine how I would feel when I woke up bearded in my cottage on the moors in Scalloway to discover I had lost my country as well. What “freedom” would I have won then, speaking American to the ponies? What “justice” would I have made, an ironical Jewish novelist with a crook and a pack of sheep? And what’s worse, suppose she found me out and followed me there, for all that my name is now Long Tom Dumphy? Not at all unlikely, given that I couldn’t shake her in this, a country of two hundred million. Oh, imagine what that would be like, me with me stick and Maureen with her rage in the middle of the roarin’ North Sea, and only 19,343 others to hold us apart?

So, unhappily (and not at all, really) I accepted my fate as a male resident of the state of New York of the republic of America who no longer cared to live with a wife whose preference it was to continue to live with (and off) him. I began, as they say, to try to make the best of it. Indeed, by the time I met Susan I was actually beginning to pass out of the first stages of shell shock (or was it fallout sickness?) and had even found myself rather taken with (as opposed to “taken by,” very much a preoccupation at the time) a bright and engaging girl named Nancy Miles, fresh out of college and working as a “checker” for the New Yorker. Nancy Miles was eventually to go off to Paris to marry an American journalist stationed there, and subsequently to publish a book of autobiographical short stories, most of them based upon her childhood as a U.S. Navy commander’s daughter in postwar Japan. However, the year I met her she was free as a bird, and soaring like one, too. I hadn’t been so drawn to anyone since the Wisconsin debacle, when I had thrown myself at the feet of my nineteen-year-old student Karen (for whom I intermittently continued to pine, by the way; I imagined her sometimes with me and the sheep in Scalloway), but after three consecutive evenings together of nonstop dinner conversation, the last culminating in lovemaking as impassioned as anything I’d known since those illicit trysts between classes in Karen’s room, I decided not to call Nancy again. Two weeks passed, and she sent me this letter:

Mr. Peter Tarnopol

Institute for Unpredictable Behavior

62 West 12th Street

New York, N.Y.

Dear Mr. Tarnopol:

With reference to our meeting of 5/6/63:

1. What happened?

2. Where are we?

While I fully recognize that numerous demands of this nature must strain the limits of your patience, I nonetheless make bold to request that you fill out the above questionnaire and return it to the address below as soon as it is convenient.

I remain,

yours,

Perplexed

Perplexed perhaps, but not broken. That was the last I heard from Nancy. I chose Susan.

It goes without saying that those seeking sanctuary have ordinarily to settle for something less than a seven-room apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in which to take refuge from the wolves or the cops or the cold. I for one had never lived in anything approaching Susan’s place for size or grandeur. Nor had I ever eaten so well in my life. Maureen’s cooking wasn’t that bad, but generally dinnertime was the hour reserved at our house for settling scores with me and my sex-unsettled scores that some evenings seemed to me to have been piling up ever since the first nucleic acid molecule went ahead and reproduced itself several billion years ago; consequently, even when the food was hot and tasty, the ambience was wrong. And in the years before I took to dining in each night on Maureen’s gall, there had been army chow or university cafeteria stew. But Susan was a pro, trained by masters at what she had not learned at Calpurnia’s knee: during the year she had been waiting for her fiancé to be graduated from Princeton and their life of beauty and abundance to begin, she had commuted up to New York to learn how to cook French, Italian, and Chinese specialties. The course in each cuisine lasted six weeks, and Susan stayed on (as she hadn’t at Wellesley) triumphantly to complete all three. To her great glee she discovered she could now at least outcook her mother. Oh, what a wonderful wife (she hoped and prayed) she was going to make for this fantastic stroke of luck named James McCall the Third!