Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

During her widowhood Susan had only rarely had the opportunity to feed anyone other than herself, and so it was that I became the first dinner guest ever to appreciate in full a culinary expertise that spanned the continents. I had never tasted food so delicious. And not even my own dutiful mother had waited on me the way this upper-crust waitress did. I was under standing instructions to proceed to eat without her, so that she could scamper freely back and forth into the kitchen getting the next dish going in her wok. Good enough. We had little outside of the food to talk about anyway. I asked about her family, I asked about her analysis, I asked about Jamey and the McCalls. I asked why she had left Wellesley in her first year. She shrugged and she flushed and she averted her eyes. She replied, oh they’re very nice, and he’s very nice, and she’s such a sweet and thoughtful person, and “Why did I leave Wellesley? Oh, I just left.” For weeks I got no more information or animation than I had the night we met, when I was seated next to her at the dinner party I was invited to annually at my publisher’s town house: unswerving agreeableness, boundless timidity-a frail and terrified beauty. And in the beginning that was just fine with me. Bring on the blanquette de veau.

Each morning I headed back to the desk in my West Twelfth Street sublet, off to school to practice the three Rs-reading, writing, and angrily toting up yet again the alimony and legal bills. In the elevator, as I descended from 9D, I met up with the schoolchildren a third my age whom Susan took on weekends to the Planetarium and the puppet shows, and the successful business executives whose August recreation she had sometimes been. And what am I doing here, I would ask myself. With her! Just how debilitated can I be! My brother’s recent warning would frequently come back to me as I exited past the doorman, who always courteously raised his cap to Mrs. McCall’s gentleman caller, but had surmised enough about my bankroll not to make a move to hail a cab. Moe had telephoned me about Susan the night after I had come around with her to have dinner at his and Lenore’s invitation. He laid it right on the line. “Another Maureen, Pep?” “She’s hardly a Maureen.” “The gray eyes and the ‘fine’ bones have got you fooled, kiddo. Another fucked-up shiksa. First the lumpenproletariat, now the aristocracy. What are you, the Malinowski of Manhattan? Enough erotic anthropology. Get rid of her, Pep. You’re sticking your plug in the same socket.” “Moe, hold the advice, okay?” “Not this time. I don’t care to come home a year from now, Peppy, to find you shitting into your socks.” “But I’m all right.” “Oh, Christ, here we go again.” “Moey, I happen to know what I’m doing.” “With a woman you know what you’re doing? Look, what the hell is Spielvogel’s attitude toward this budding catastrophe-what is he doing to earn his twenty bucks an hour, anything?” “Moe, she is not Maureen!” “You’re letting the legs fool you, kid, the legs and the ass.” “I tell you I’m not in it for that.” “If not that, what? Her deep intelligence? Her quick wit? You mean on top of being tongue-tied, the ice cube can’t screw right either? Jesus! A pretty face must go an awful long way with you-that, plus a good strong dose of psychoneurosis, and a girl is in business with my little brother. You come over here tonight for dinner, Peppy, you come eat with us every night-I’ve got to talk some sense into you.” But each evening I turned up at Susan’s, not Moe’s, carrying with me my book to be read later by the fire, envisioning, as I stepped through the door, my blanquette, my bath, and my bed.

So the first months passed. Then one night I said, ‘Why don’t you go back to college?” “Oh, I couldn’t do that.” “Why couldn’t you?” “I have too much to do already.” “You have nothing to do.” “Are you kidding?” “Why don’t you go back to college, Susan?” “I’m too busy, really. Did you say you did want kirsch on your fruit?”

Some weeks later. “Look, a suggestion.” “Yes?” “Why don’t you move in bed?” “Haven’t you enough room?” “I mean move. Underneath me.” “Oh, that. I just don’t, that’s all.” “Well, try it. It might liven things up.” “I’m happy as I am, thank you. Don’t you like the spinach salad?” “Listen to me: why don’t you move your body when I fuck you, Susan?” “Oh, please, let’s just finish dinner.” “I want you to move when I fuck you.” “I told you, I’m happy as I am.” “You’re miserable as you are.” “I’m not, and it’s none of your business.” “Do you know how to move?” “Oh, why are you torturing me like this?” “Do you want me to show you what I mean by ‘move’?” “Stop this. I am not going to talk about it! I don’t have to be shown anything, certainly not by you! Your life isn’t such a model of order, you know.” “What about college? Why don’t you go back to college?” “Peter, stop. Please! Why are you doing this to me?” “Because the way you live is awful.” “It is not.” “It’s crazy, really.” “If it’s so crazy then what are you doing here every night? I don’t force you to spend the night. I don’t ask anything of you at all.” “You don’t ask anything of anyone, so that’s neither here nor there.” “That’s none of your business either.” “It is my business.” “Why? Why yours?” “Because I am here-because I do spend the night.” “Oh, please, you must stop right now. Don’t make me argue, please. I hate arguments and I refuse to participate in one. If you want to argue with somebody, go argue with your wife. I thought you come here not to fight.”

She had a point, the point-here I need contend with nothing -but it stopped me only for a while. Eventually one night some two months later she jumped up from the table and, popping her one tear, said, “I can’t go back to school, and leave me alone about it-I’m too old and I’m too stupid! What school would even take me!”

It turned out to be C.C.N.Y. They gave her credit for one semester’s work at Wellesley. “This is just too silly. I’m practically thirty-one. People will laugh.” “Which people are those?” “People. I’m not going to do it. By the time I graduated I’d be fifty.” ‘What are you going to do instead till you’re fifty, shop?” “I help my friends.” “Those friends can hire fellows pulling rickshaws to help them the way you do.” “That’s just being cynical about people you don’t like. I have a huge apartment to take care of, besides.” ‘What are you so frightened of?” “That’s not the issue.” “What is then?” “That you won’t just let me do things the way I want to. Everything I do is wrong in your eyes. You’re just like my mother. She never thinks I can do anything right either.” “Well, I think you can.” “Only because you’re embarrassed by my stupidity. It doesn’t do for your ‘self-image’ to be seen with such a sap-so the upshot is that in order to save your face, I have to go to college! And move in bed! I don’t even know where C.C.N.Y. is- on a map! What if I’m the only person there who’s white?” ‘Well, you may be the only person there quite so white-“ “Don’t joke-not now!” “You’re going to be fine.” “Oh, Peter,” she moaned, and clinging to her napkin crawled into my lap to be rocked like a child-“what if I have to talk in class? What if they call on me?” Through my shirt I could feel ice packs on my back-her two hands. “What do I do then?” she pleaded. “Speak.” “But if I can’t. Oh, why are you putting me through this misery?” “You told me why. My self-image. So I can fuck you with a clear conscience.” “Oh, you, you couldn’t fuck anybody with a clear conscience-dumb, smart, or in between. And be serious. I’m so terrified I feel faint.” Though not too terrified to utter aloud, for the first time in her life, that most dangerous of American words. The next afternoon I had one of those mock headlines printed up in a Times Square amusement palace and presented it to her at dinner, a phony tabloid with a black three-inch banner reading: SUSAN SAYS IT!