Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

“Leave that typewriter where it is!” “But what will I write on then?” “Are you kidding? Are you crazy? You’re going to ‘expose’ me, and you want me to give you the weapon to do it with?” “But you have two of them! Oh, I’m going to tell the world, Peter, I’ll tell them just what a selfish, self-important, ego-maniacal baby you are!” “Just go, Maureen-and I’ll tell them! But I won’t have any more fucking screaming and arguing and biting around here when I am trying to do my work!” “Oh fuck your high and mighty work! What about my life!” “Fuck your life, it’s not my affair any longer! Get out of here! Oh, take it -take it and just go!” Maybe she thought (now that my shirt was hanging off me in strips) that I might start in next tearing her to shreds-for all at once she backed off and was out of the apartment, taking with her, to be sure, the old gray Remington Royal portable that had been my parents’ bar mitzvah present to the hotshot assistant sports editor of the Yonkers High Broadcaster.

Three days later she was back at the door, in blue duffel coat and knee socks, wan and scrappy looking as a street urchin. Because she could not face her top-floor room on Carmine Street alone, she had spent the three days with friends of hers, a Village couple in their early fifties whom I couldn’t stand, who in turn considered me and my narratives “square.” The husband (advertised by Maureen as “an old friend of Kenneth Patchen’s”) had been Maureen’s teacher when she first came to New York and went into wood sculpture. Months back she had declared that she had been badly misled by these two “schizorenos,” but never explained how.

As was her way the morning after even the most horrendous scenes, she laughed off the violent encounter of three days earlier, asking me (in wonderment at my naïveté) how I could take seriously anything she may have said or done in anger. One aspect of my squareness (according to those who worked in wood) was that I had no more tolerance for the irregular or the eccentric than George F. Babbitt of Zenith, Middle America. I was not open to experience in my basement apartment on East Ninth the way those middle-aged beatniks were in their Bleecker Street loft. I was a nice Jewish boy from Westchester who cared only about Success. I was their Dina Dornbusch.

“Lucky I am,” I told her, “otherwise you’d be at the bottom of the East River.” She was sitting in a chair, still in her duffel coat; I had given no sign that I had any intention of allowing her to move back in. When she had gone to peck me on the cheek in the doorway, I had-again, to her amusement-pulled my head away. “Where’s the typewriter?” I asked, my way of saying that as far as I was concerned the only excuse Maureen could have to be visiting me was to return what she had borrowed. “You middle-class monster!” she cried. “You throw me out into the street. I have to go sleep on somebody’s floor with sixteen cats lapping my face all night long-and all you can think about is your portable typewriter! Your things. It’s a thing, Peter, a thing -and I’m a human being!” “You could have slept at your own place, Maureen.” “I was lonely. You don’t understand that because you have ice in your heart instead of feelings. And my own place isn’t a ‘place,’ as you so blithely put it-it’s a shithole of an attic and you know it! You wouldn’t sleep there for half an hour.” “Where’s the typewriter?” “The typewriter is a thing, damn it, an inanimate object! What about me?” and leaping from the chair, she charged, swinging her pocketbook like a shillelagh. “CLIP ME WITH THAT, MAUREEN, AND I’LL KILL YOU!” “Do it!” was her reply. “Kill me! Some man’s going to-why not a ‘civilized’ one like you! Why not a follower of Flaubert!” Here she collapsed against me, and with her arms around my neck, began to sob. “Oh, Peter, I don’t have anything. Nothing at all. I’m really lost, baby. I didn’t want to go to them-I had to. Please, don’t make me go away again right now. I haven’t even had a shower in three days. Let me just take a shower. Let me just calm down-and this time I’ll go forever, I promise.” She then explained that the loft on Bleecker Street had been burglarized one night when all except the cats were out eating spaghetti on Fourteenth Street; my typewriter had been stolen, along with all of her friends’ wood-carving tools, their recorders, and their Blatstein, which sounded to me like an automatic rifle but was a painting.

I didn’t believe a word of it. She went off to the bathroom, and when I heard the shower running, I put my hand into the pocket of her duffel coat and after just a little fishing around in the crumpled Kleenex and the small change came up with a pawn ticket. If I hadn’t been living half a block from the Bowery, I don’t imagine it would have occurred to me that Maureen had taken the typewriter up the street for the cash. But I was learning-though not quite fast enough.

Now an even worldlier fellow than myself-George F. Babbitt, say, of Zenith-would have remembered the old business adage, “Cut your losses,” and after finding the pawn ticket, would have dropped it back into her pocket and said nothing. Shower her, humor her, and get her the hell out, George F. Babbitt would have said to himself, and peace and quiet will reign once again. Instead I rushed into the bathroom-no Babbitt I-where we screamed at each other with such ferocity that the young married couple upstairs, whose life we made a misery during these months (the husband, an editor at a publishing house, cuts me to this day), began to pound on the floor above with a broom handle. “You petty little thief! You crook!” “But I did it for you!” “For me? You pawned my typewriter for me?” “Yes!” “What are you talking about?” Here, with the water still beating down on her, she slumped to the bottom of the bathtub, and sitting on her haunches, began actually to keen in her woe. Unclothed, she would sometimes make me think of an alley cat-quick, wary, at once scrawny and strong; now, as she rocked and moaned with grief under the full blast of the shower, something about the weight and pointiness of her large conical breasts, and her dark hair plastered to her head, made her look to me like some woman out of the bush, a primitive whose picture you might come upon in National Geographic, praying to the sun-god to roll back the waters. “Because-“ she howled, “because I’m pregnant. Because-because I wasn’t going to tell you. Because I was going to get the money however I could and get an abortion and never bother you again. Peter, I’ve been shoplifting too.” “Stealing? Where?” “Altman’s-a little from Klein’s. I had, to!” “But you can’t be pregnant, Maureen-we haven’t slept together for weeks!” “BUT I AM! TWO MONTHS PREGNANT!” “Two months?” “Yes! And I never said a word, because I didn’t want to interfere with your ART!” “Well, you should have, goddam it, because I would have given you the money to go out and get an abortion!” “Oh, you are so generous-! But it’s too late-I’ve taken enough from men like you in my life! You’re going to marry me or I’m going to kill myself! And I will do it!” she cried, hammering defiantly on the rim of the tub with her two little fists. “This is no empty threat, Peter -I cannot take you people any more! You selfish, spoiled, immature, irresponsible Ivy League bastards, born with those spoons in your mouths!” The silver spoon was somewhat hyperbolic, and even she knew that much, but she was hysterical, and in hysteria, as she eventually made clear to me, anything goes. “With your big fat advance and your high Art-oh, you make me sick the way you hide from life behind that Art of yours! I hate you and I hate that fucking Flaubert, and you are going to marry me, Peter, because I have had enough! I’m not going to be another man’s helpless victim! You are not going to dump me the way you dumped that girl!”