Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

I told Spielvogel what Maureen had confessed to me from the living-room floor. Because this had happened only two months earlier, I found with Spielvogel, as I had that morning with Moe in the taxi back from the airport, that I could not recount the story of the false urine specimen without becoming woozy and weak, as though once the story surfaced in my mind, it was only a matter of seconds before the fires of rage had raced through me, devouring all vitality and strength. It is not that easy for me to tell it today without at least a touch of vertigo. And I have never been able to introduce the story into a work of fiction, not that I haven’t repeatedly tried and failed in the five years since I received Maureen’s confession. I cannot seem to make it credible-probably because I still don’t entirely believe it myself. How could she? To me! No matter how I may contrive to transform low actuality into high art, that is invariably what is emblazoned across the face of the narrative, in blood: HOW COULD SHE? TO ME!

“And then,” I told Spielvogel, “do you know what she said next? She was on the floor with the blade of the razor right on her wrist. In her panties and bra. And I was just standing over her. Dumbstruck. Dumbstruck. I could have kicked her head in. I should have!”

“And what did she say?”

“Say? She said, ‘If you forgive me for the urine, I’ll forgive you for your mistress. I’ll forgive you for deceiving me with that girl on the bicycle and begging her to run away with you to Rome.’”

“And what did you do?” asked Spielvogel.

“Did I kick her, you mean? No. No, no, no, no, no. I didn’t do anything-to her. Just stood there for a while. I couldn’t right off get over the ingenuity of it. The relentlessness. That she had though t of such a thing and then gone ahead and done it. I actually felt admiration. And pity, pity! That’s true. I thought, ‘Good Christ, what are you? To do this thing, and then to keep it a secret for three years!’ And then I saw my chance to get out. As though it required this, you see, nothing less, for me to feel free to go. Not that I went. Oh, I told her I was going, all right. I said, I’m leaving, Maureen, I can’t live any more with somebody who would do such a thing, and so on. But she was crying by then and she said, ‘Leave me and I’ll cut my wrists. I’m full of sleeping pills already.’ And I said, and this is true, I said, ‘Cut them, why should I care?’ And so she pressed down with the razor-and blood came out. It turned out that she had only scratched herself, but what the hell did I know? She could have gone through to the bone. I started shouting, ‘Don’t-don’t do that!’ and I began wrestling with her for the razor. I was terrified that I was going to get my own veins slashed in the rolling around, but I kept trying to get it away, grabbing at the damn thing-and I was crying. That goes without saying. All I do now is cry, you know-and she was crying, of course, and finally I got the thing away from her and she said, ‘Leave me, and I’ll ruin that girl of yours! I’ll have that pure little face in every paper in Wisconsin!’ And then she began to scream about my ‘deceiving’ her and how I couldn’t be trusted and she always knew it-and this is just three minutes after describing in detail to me buying the urine from that Negro woman on Avenue B!”

“And what did you do then?”

“Did I slit her throat from ear to ear? No. No! I fell apart. Completely. I went into a tantrum. The two of us were smeared with blood-my left palm had been cut, up by the thumb, and her wrist was dripping, and God only knows what we looked like-like a couple of Aztecs, fucking up the sacrificial rites. I mean, it’s comical when you think about it. I am the Dagwood Bumstead of fear and trembling!”

“You had a tantrum.”

“That’s not the half of it. I got down on my knees-I begged her to let me go. I banged my head on the floor, Doctor. I began running from room to room. Then-then I did what she told me Walker used to do. Maybe Walker never even did it; that was probably a lie too. Anyway, I did it. At first I was just running around looking for some place to hide the razor from her. I remember unscrewing the head and dropping the blade into the toilet and flushing and flushing and the damn thing just lying there at the bottom of the bowl. Then I ran into our bedroom-I was screaming all this time, you see, ‘Let me go! Let me go!’ and sobbing, and so on. And all the while I was tearing my clothes off. I’d done that before, in a rage with her, but this time I actually tore everything off me. And I put on Maureen’s underwear. I pulled open her dresser and I put on a pair of her underpants- I could just get them up over my prick. Then I tried to get into one of her brassieres. I put my arms through the shoulder loops, that is. And then I just stood there like that, crying-and bleeding. Finally she came into the room-no, she just got as far as the doorway and stood there, looking at me. And, you see, that’s all she was wearing, too, her underwear. She saw me and she broke into sobs again, and she cried, ‘Oh, sweetheart, no, no…

“Is that all she said?” asked Spielvogel. “Just called you ‘sweetheart’?”

“No. She said, ‘Take that off. I’ll never tell anybody. Just take that off right now.’”

“That was two months ago,” said Dr. Spielvogel, when it appeared that I had nothing more to say.

“Yes.”

“And?”

“It’s not been good, Doctor.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve done some other strange things.”

“Such as?”

“Such as staying with Maureen-that’s the strangest thing of all! Three years of it, and now I know what I know, and I’m still living with her! And if I don’t fly back tomorrow, she says she’s going to tell the world ‘everything.’ That’s what she told my brother to tell me on the phone. And she will. She will do it.”

“Any other ‘strange things’?”

“…with my sperm.”

“I didn’t hear you. Your sperm? What about your sperm?”

“My semen-I leave it places.”

“Yes?”

“I smear it places. I go to people’s houses and I leave it-places.”

“You break into people’s houses?”

“No, no,” I said sharply-what did he think I was, a madman? “I’m invited. I go to the bathroom. I leave it somewhere…on the tap. In the soap dish. Just a few drops…”

“You masturbate in their bathrooms.”

“Sometimes, yes. And leave…”

“Your signature.”

“Tarnopol’s silver bullet.”

He smiled at my joke; I did not. I had still more to tell. “I’ve done it in the university library. Smeared it on the bindings of books.”

“Of books? Which books?”

“Books! Any books! Whatever books are handy!”

“Anywhere else?”

I sighed.

“Speak up, please,” said the doctor.

“I sealed an envelope with it,” I said in a loud voice. “My bill to the telephone company.”

Again Spielvogel smiled. “Now that is an original touch, Mr. Tarnopol.”

And again I broke into sobs. “What does it mean!”

“Come now,” said Dr. Spielvogel, “what do you think it ‘means’? You don’t require a soothsayer, as far as I can see.”

“That I’m completely out of control!” I said, sobbing. “That I don’t know what I’m doing any more!”

“That you’re angry,” he said, slapping the arm of his chair. “That you are furious. You are not out of control-you are under control. Maureen’s control. You spurt the anger everywhere, except where it belongs. There you spurt tears.”

“But she’ll ruin Karen! She will! She knows who she is-she used to check out my students like a hawk! She’ll destroy that lovely innocent girl!”