Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

In the kitchen one night a year later I sat on a stool near the stove sipping a glass of the last of Jamey’s Mouton-Rothschild, while Susan prepared ratatouille and practiced a talk she had to give the next morning in her introductory philosophy class, a five-minute discourse on the Skeptics. “I can’t remember what comes next-I can’t do it.” “Concentrate.” “But I’m cooking something.” “It will cook itself.” “Nothing cooks itself that tastes any good.” “Then stop a minute and let’s hear what you’re going to say.” “But I don’t care about the Skeptics. And you don’t, Peter. And nobody in my class cares, I can assure you of that. And what if I just can’t talk? What if I open my mouth and nothing comes out? That’s what happened to me at Wellesley.” And to me at Brooklyn College, but I didn’t tell her, not on that occasion. “Something,” I said confidently, “will come out.” “Yes? What?” “Words. Concentrate on the words the way you concentrate on the eggplant there-“ “Would you come with me? On the subway? Just till I get up there?” “I’ll even come to the class with you.” “No! You mustn’t! I’d be paralyzed if you were there.” “But I’m here.” “This is a kitchen,” she said, smiling, but not all that happy. And then, with some further prodding, she went ahead and delivered her philosophy report, though more to the ratatouille than to me. “Perfect.” “Yes?” “Yes.” “Then why,” asked Susan, who was turning out to be a wittier young widow than any of us had imagined, “then why do I have to do it again tomorrow? Why can’t this count?” “Because it’s a kitchen.” “Shit,” said Susan, “that’s not fair.”

Am I describing two people falling in love? If so, I didn’t recognize it for that at the time. Even after a year, Susan’s still seemed to me my hideout, my sanctuary from Maureen, her lawyer, and the courts of the state of New York, all of whom had designated me a defendant. But at Susan’s I needed no more defense than a king upon his throne. Where else could I go to be so revered? The answer, friends, is nowhere; it had been a long time between salaams. The least I could do in exchange was to tell her how to live right. Admittedly, A Lot I Knew, but then it did not take much to know that it is better to be a full-time student at City College than a matriculated customer at Bergdorf’s and Bonwit’s from nine to five, and better, I believed, to be alive and panting during the sex act than in a state of petrifaction, if you are going to bother to perform that act at all. So I, ironically enough, coached my student in remedial copulation and public speaking, and she nursed me with the tenderest tenderness and the sweetest regard. A new experience all around. So was the falling in love, if that’s what our mutual education and convalescence added up to. When she made the dean’s list I was as proud as any papa, bought her a bracelet and dinner; and when she tried and failed to come, I was crushed and disbelieving, like a high-school teacher whose brilliant, impoverished student has somehow been turned down for the scholarship to Harvard. How could it be, after all those study sessions we had put in together? All that dedication and hard work! Where had we gone wrong? I have suggested how unnerving it was for me to be accomplice to that defeat-the fact is that somewhere along the way Susan’s effort to reach an orgasm came to stand in my mind for the full recovery of us both. And maybe this, as much as anything, helped to make it unattainable, the responsibility for my salvation as well as her own being far too burdensome for her to bear…You see, I am not claiming here that I went about conducting this affair in the manner of a reclamation engineer-nor was I seeking to unseat Dr. Golding, who was paid to cure the sick and heal the wounded, and whose own theory, as it sifted through to me, seemed to be that the more paternal or patriarchal my influence upon Susan, the more remote the prospect of the orgasm. I thought one could make as good an argument against this line of speculation as for it, but I didn’t try. I was neither theoretician nor diagnostician, nor for that matter much of a “father figure” in my own estimation. It would have seemed to me that you hadn’t to penetrate very far beneath the surface of our affair to see that I was just another patient looking for the cure himself.

In fact, it required my doctor to get me to continue to take my medicine named Susan, when, along the way, I repeatedly complained that I’d had enough, that the medicine was exacerbating the ailment more than it might be curing it. Dr. Spielvogel did not take my brother Moe’s view of Susan-no, with Spielvogel I did. “She’s hopeless,” I would tell him, “a frightened little sparrow.” “You would prefer another vulture?” “Surely there must be something in between,” thinking, as I spoke, of Nancy Miles, that soaring creature, and the letter I’d never answered. “But you don’t have something in between. You have this.” “But all that timidity, all that fear…The woman is a slave, Doctor, and not just to me-to everyone.” “You prefer contentiousness? You miss the scenes of high drama, do you? With Maureen, so you told me, it was the Gotterdammerung at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. What’s wrong with a little peace and quiet with your meals?” “But there are times when she is a mouse.” “Good enough,” said Spielvogel, “who ever heard of a little mouse doing a grown man any serious harm?” “But what happens when the mouse wants to be married-and to me?” “How can she marry you? You are married already.” “But when I’m no longer married.” “There will be time to worry about that then, don’t you think?” “No. I don’t think that at all. What if when I should want to leave her, she tries to do herself in? She is not stable, Doctor, she is not strong-you must understand that.” ‘Which are you talking about now, Maureen or Susan?” “I can tell them apart, I assure you. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t beyond Susan, just because it happens also to be a specialty of Maureen’s.” “Has she threatened you with suicide if you should ever leave her?” “She wouldn’t threaten me with anything. That isn’t her way.” “But you are certain that she would do it, if at some future date, when the issue arose, you chose not to marry her. That is the reason you want to give her up now.” “I don’t particularly ‘want’ to. I’m telling you I ought to.” “But you are enjoying yourself somewhat, am I right?” “Somewhat, yes. More than somewhat. But I don’t want to lead her on. She is not up to it. Neither am I.” “But is it leading her on, to have an affair, two young people?” “Not in your eyes, perhaps.” “In whose then? Your own?” “In Susan’s, Doctor, in Susan’s! Look, what if after the affair is no more, she cannot accept the fact and commits suicide? Answer that, will you?” “Over the loss of you she commits suicide?” “Yes!” “You think every woman in the world is going to kill herself over you?” “Oh, please, don’t distort the point I’m making. Not ‘every woman’- just the two I’ve wound up with.” “Is this why you wind up with them?” “Is it? I’ll think about it. Maybe so. But then that is yet another reason to dissolve this affair right now. Why continue if there is anything like a chance of that coming to pass? Why would you want to encourage me to do a thing like that?” “Was I encouraging ‘that’? I was only encouraging you to find some pleasure and comfort in her compliant nature. I tell you, many a man would envy you. Not everybody would be so distressed as you by a mistress who is beautiful and submissive and rich, and a Cordon Bleu cook into the bargain.” “And, conceivably, a suicide.” “That remains to be seen. Many things are conceivable that have little basis in reality.” “I’m afraid in my position I can’t afford to be so cavalier about it.” “Not cavalier. Only no more convinced than is warranted, in the circumstances. And no more terrified.” “Look, I am not up to any more desperate stunts. I’ve got a right to be terrified. I was married to Maureen. I still am!” “Well then, if you feel so strongly, if you’ve been burned once and don’t want to take the chance-“ “I am saying, to repeat, that it may not be such a ‘chance’-and I don’t feel I have a right to take it. It’s her life that is endangered, not mine.” “‘Endangered’? What a narcissistic melodrama you are writing here, Mr. Tarnopol. If I may offer a literary opinion.” “Yes? Is that what it is?” “Isn’t it?” “I don’t always know, Doctor, exactly what you mean by ‘narcissism.’ What I think I am talking about is responsibility. You are the one who is talking about the pleasure and comforts in staying. You are the one who is talking about what is in it for me. You are the one who is telling me not to worry about Susan’s expectations or vulnerability. It would seem to me that it’s you who are inviting me to take the narcissistic line.” “All right, if that’s what you think, then leave her before it goes any further. You have this sense of responsibility to the woman-then act upon it.” “But just a second ago you were suggesting that my sense of responsibility was misplaced. That my fears were delusional. Or weren’t you?” “I think they are excessive, yes.”