Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

“That girl” was how she referred to Dina, toward whom she had never until that moment been anything but dismissive; now, all at once, she invoked in her own behalf not just Dina, but Grete and the Pembroke undergraduate who had been my girl friend during my senior year at Brown. All of them shared with Maureen the experience of being “discarded” when I had finished having my “way” with them. “But we are not leftovers, Peter; we’re not trash or scum and we will not be treated that way! We are human beings, and we will not be thrown into a garbage pail by you!” “You’re not pregnant, Maureen, and you know damn well you’re not. That’s what all this ‘we’ business is about,” I said, suddenly, with perfect confidence. And with that, she all but collapsed-“We’re not talking about me right now,” she said, “we’re talking about you. Don’t you know yet why you got rid of your Pembroke pal? Or your German girl friend? Or that girl who had everything? Or why you’re getting rid of me?” I said, “You’re not pregnant, Maureen. That is a lie.” “It is not-and listen to me! Do you have no idea at all why it is you are so afraid of marriage and children and a family and treat women the way that you do? Do you know what you really are, Peter, aside from being a heartless, selfish writing machine?” I said, “A fag.” “That’s right! And making light of it doesn’t make it any less true!” “I would think it makes it more true.” “It does! You are the most transparent latent homosexual I have ever run across in my life! Just like big brave Mezik who forced me to blow his buddy- so that he could watch. Because it’s really what he wanted to do himself-but he didn’t even have the guts for that!” “Forced you? Oh, come on, pal, you’ve got pointy teeth in that mouth of yours-I’ve felt your fangs. Why didn’t you bite it off and teach them both a lesson, if you were being forced to?” “I should have! Don’t you think I didn’t think of it! Don’t you think a woman doesn’t think of it every time! And don’t you worry, mister, if they weren’t twelve inches taller than me, I would have bitten the thing off at the root! And spit on the bleeding stump-just like I spit on you, you high and mighty Artist, for throwing me two months pregnant out into the street!” But she was weeping so, that the spittle meant for me just rolled down her lips onto her chin.

She slept in the bed that night (first bed in three days, I was reminded) and I sat at my desk in the living room, thinking about running away-not because she continued to insist she had missed two periods in a row, but because she was so tenaciously hanging on to what I was certain was a lie. I could leave right then for any number of places. I had friends up in Providence, a young faculty couple who’d gladly put me up for a while. I had an army buddy in Boston, graduate-school colleagues still out in Chicago, there was my sister Joan in California. And of course brother Morris uptown, if I should require spiritual comfort and physical refuge near at hand. He would take me in for as long as was necessary, no questions asked. Since I’d settled in New York, I had been getting phone calls from Moe every couple of weeks checking to see if there was anything I needed and reminding me to come to dinner whenever I was in the mood. At his invitation I had even taken Maureen up to their apartment one Sunday morning for bagels and the smoked fish spread. To my surprise, she had appeared rather cowed by my brother’s bearish manner (Moe is a great one to cross-examine strangers), and the general intensity of the family life seemed to make her morose; she did not have much to say after we left, except that Moe and I were very different people. I agreed; Moe was very much the public man (the university, the UN commissions, political meetings and organizations ever since high school) and very much the paterfamilias…She said, “I meant he’s a brute.” “A what?” “The way he treats that wife of his. It’s unspeakable.” “He’s nuts about her, for Christ’s sake.” “Oh? Is that why he walks all over her? What a little sparrow she is! Has she ever had an idea of her own in her life? She just sits there, eating his crumbs. And that’s her life.” “Oh, that’s not her life, Maureen.” “Sorry, I don’t like him-or her.”

Moe didn’t like Maureen either, but at the outset said nothing, assuming it was my affair not his, and that she was just the girl of the moment. As I had assumed myself. But when combat between Maureen and me stepped up dramatically, and I apparently began to look and sound as confused and embattled as I’d become, Moe tried on a couple of occasions to give me some brotherly advice; each time I shook him off. As I still couldn’t imagine any long-range calamity befalling me, I objected strenuously to being “babied,” as I thought of it-particularly by someone whose life, though admirable, was grounded in ways I was just too young to be concerned about. As I saw it, it was essential for me to be able to confront whatever troubles I’d made for myself without his, or anyone else’s, assistance. In brief, I was as arrogant (and blind) as youth and luck and an aristocratic literary bent could make me, and so, when he invited me up to Columbia for lunch I told him, “I’ll work it all out, don’t worry.” “But why should it be ‘work’? Your work, is your work, not this little Indian.” “I take it that’s some kind of euphemism. For the record, the mother’s family was Irish, the father’s German.” “Yeah? She looks a little Apache to me, with those eyes and that hair. There’s something savage there, Peppy. No? All right, don’t answer. Sneer now, pay later. You weren’t brought up for savagery, kid.” “I know. Nice boy. Jewish.” “What’s so bad about that? You are a nice civilized Jewish boy, with some talent and some brains. How much remains to be seen. Why don’t you attend to that and leave the lions to Hemingway.” “What is that supposed to mean, Moey?” “You. You look like you’ve been sleeping in the jungle.” “Nope. Just down on Ninth Street.” “I thought girls were for fun, Pep. Not to scare the shit out of you.” I was offended both by his low-mindedness and his meddling and refused to talk further about it. Afterward I looked in the mirror for the signs of fear-or doom. I saw nothing: still looked like Tarnopol the Triumphant to me.

The morning after Maureen had announced herself pregnant, I told her to take a specimen of urine to the pharmacy on Second and Ninth; that way, said I without hiding my skepticism, we could shortly learn just how pregnant she was. “In other words, you don’t believe me. You want to close your eyes to the whole thing!” “Just take the urine and shut up.” So she did as she was told: took a specimen of urine to the drugstore for the pregnancy test-only it wasn’t her urine. I did not find this out until three years later, when she confessed to me (in the midst of a suicide attempt) that she had gone from my apartment to the drugstore by way of Tompkins Square Park, lately the hippie center of the East Village, but back in the fifties still a place for the neighborhood poor to congregate and take the sun. There she approached a pregnant Negro woman pushing a baby carriage and told her she represented a scientific organization willing to pay the woman for a sample of her urine. Negotiations ensued. Agreement reached, they retired to the hallway of a tenement building on Avenue B to complete the transaction. The pregnant woman pulled her underpants down to her knees, and squatting in a corner of the unsavory hallway-still heaped with rubbish (just as Maureen had described it) when I paid an unsentimental visit to the scene of the crime upon my return to New York only a few years later-delivered forth into Maureen’s preserve jar the stream that sealed my fate. Here Maureen forked over two dollars and twenty-five cents. She drove a hard bargain, my wife.