Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

My trouble in my middle twenties was that rich with confidence and success, I was not about to settle for complexity and depth in books alone. Stuffed to the gills with great fiction-entranced not by cheap romances, like Madame Bovary, but by Madame Bovary-I now expected to find in everyday experience that same sense of the difficult and the deadly earnest that informed the novels I admired most. My model of reality, deduced from reading the masters, had at its heart intractability. And here it was, a reality as obdurate and recalcitrant and (in addition) as awful as any I could have wished for in my most bookish dreams. You might even say that the ordeal that my daily life was shortly to become was only Dame Fortune smiling down on “the golden boy of American literature” (New York Times Book Review, September 1959) and dishing out to her precocious favorite whatever literary sensibility required. Want complexity? Difficulty? Intractability? Want the deadly earnest? Yours!

Of course what I also wanted was that my intractable existence should take place at an appropriately lofty moral altitude, an elevation somewhere, say, between The Brothers Karamazov and The Wings of the Dove. But then not even the golden can expect to have everything: instead of the intractability of serious fiction, I got the intractability of soap opera. Resistant enough, but the wrong genre. Though maybe not, given the leading characters in the drama, of which Maureen, I admit, was only one.

I returned to Ninth Street a little after eleven; I had been gone nearly three hours. Maureen, to my surprise, was now completely dressed and sitting at my desk in her duffel coat.

“You didn’t do it,” she said, and lowering her face to the desk, began to cry.

“Where were you going, Maureen?” Probably back to her room; I assumed to the East River, to jump in.

“I thought you were on a plane to Frankfurt.”

“What were you going to do, Maureen?”

“What’s the difference…”

“Maureen! Look up at me.”

“Oh, what’s the difference any more, Peter. Go, go back to that Long Island girl, with her pleated skirts and her cashmere sweaters.”

“Maureen, listen to me: I want to marry you. I don’t care whether you’re pregnant or not. I don’t care what the test says tomorrow. I want to marry you.” I sounded to myself about as convincing as the romantic lead in a high-school play. I think it may have been in that moment that my face became the piece of stone I was to carry around on my neck for years thereafter. “Let’s get married,” I said, as if saying it yet again, another way, would fool anyone about my real feelings.

Yet it fooled Maureen. I could have proposed in Pig Latin and fooled Maureen. She could of course carry on in the most bizarre and unpredictable ways, but in all those years of surprises, I would never be so stunned by her wildest demonstration of rage, her most reckless public ravings, as I was by the statement with which she greeted this proposal so obviously delivered without heart or hope.

She erupted, “Oh, darling, we’ll be happy as kings!”

That was the word-“kings,” plural-uttered wholly ingenuously. I don’t think she was lying this time. She believed that to be so. We would be happy as kings. Maureen Johnson and Peter Tarnopol.

She threw her arms around me, as happy as I had ever seen her-and for the first time I realized that she was truly mad. I had just proposed marriage to a madwoman. In deadly earnest.

“Oh, I always knew it,” she said joyously.

“Knew what?”

“That you loved me. That you couldn’t hold out forever against that kind of love. Not even you.”

She was crazy.

And what did that make of me? A “man”? How?

She went on and on about the paradise that lay before us. We could move to the country and save money by growing our own vegetables. Or continue to live in the city where she could become my agent (I had an agent, but no matter). Or she could just stay home and bake bread and type my manuscripts (I typed my own, but no matter) and get back to her wood sculpture.

“You’ll have to stay at home anyway,” I said. “The baby.”

“Oh, lovey,” she said. “I’ll do it-for you. Because you do love me. You see, that’s all I had to find out-that you loved me. That you weren’t Mezik, that you weren’t Walker. That 1 could trust you. Don’t you understand? Now that I know, I’ll do anything.”

“Meaning?”

“Peter, stop being suspicious-you don’t have to be any more. I’ll have an abortion. If the test comes back tomorrow saying that I’m pregnant-and it will, I’ve never missed two periods before in my life, never-but don’t worry, I’ll go off and get an abortion. Whatever you want, I’ll do it. I know of a doctor. In Coney Island. And I’ll go to him, if you want me to.”

I wanted her to, all right. I’d wanted her to right at the outset, and had she agreed then, I would never have made my “manly” proposal of marriage. But better now than not at all. And so the next day, after I phoned the drugstore and pretended to be hearing for the first time the lab report verifying Mrs. Tarnopol’s pregnancy, I went to the bank and withdrew ten weeks’ worth of advance and another twenty dollars for the round-trip taxi fare to Coney Island. And on Saturday morning, I put Maureen in a taxi and she went off to Coney Island by herself, which she said was the only way the abortionist would receive his patients. I stood out on Second Avenue watching the cab move south, and I thought: “Now get out. Take a plane to anywhere, but go while the going is good.” But I didn’t, because that isn’t what a man like myself did. Or so I “reasoned.”

Besides, in bed the night before, Maureen had wept in fearful anticipation of the illegal operation (had she had the abortion, it would actually have been her third, I eventually found out) and clinging to me, she begged, “You won’t desert me, will you? You’ll be here when I get home-won’t you? Because I couldn’t take it if you weren’t…” “I’ll be here,” said I, manfully.

And there I was when she returned at four that afternoon, my fond lover, pale and wan (the strain of sitting six hours at the movies), wearing a Kotex between her legs to absorb the blood (said she), and still in pain from the abortion she had undergone (said she) without an anesthetic. She went immediately to bed to ward off the hemorrhage that she feared was coming on, and there she lay, on into the night, teeth chattering, limbs trembling, in an old, washed-out sweatshirt of mine and a pair of my pajamas. I piled blankets on top of her, but that still didn’t stop her shaking. “He just stuck his knife up there,” she said, “and wouldn’t give me anything for the pain but a tennis ball to squeeze. He promised he would put me out, on the phone he promised me, and then when I was on the table and said, ‘Where’s the anesthetic?’, he said, ‘What do you think, girlie, I’m out of my mind?’ I said, ‘But you promised. How else can I possibly stand the pain?’ And you know what he told me, that smelly old bastard? ‘Look, you want to get up and go, fine with me. You want me to get rid of the baby, then squeeze the magic ball and shut up. You had your fun, now you’re going to have to pay.’ So I stayed, I stayed and I squeezed down on the ball, and I tried to think just about you and me, but it hurt, oh, he hurt me so much.”

A horrifying tale of humiliation and suffering at the hands of yet another member of my sex, and a lie from beginning to end. Only it took me a while to find out. In actuality, she had pocketed the three hundred dollars (against the day I would leave her penniless) and after disembarking from the cab when it got to Houston Street, had gone back up to Times Square by subway to see Susan Hayward in I Want to Live, saw it three times over, the morbid melodrama of a cocktail waitress (if I remember correctly-I had already taken her to see it once myself) who gets the death penalty in California for a crime she didn’t commit: right up Maureen’s alley, that exemplary little tale. Then she’d donned a Kotex in the washroom and had come on home, weak in the knees and white around the gills. As who wouldn’t be, after a day in a Times Square movie house?