Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

It had to do with a move we had made during the war, when Moe was off in the merchant marine. To make way for the landlord’s newlywed daughter and her husband, we had been dispossessed from the second-floor apartment of the two-family house where we had been living ever since the family had moved to Yonkers from the Bronx nine years earlier, when I’d been born. My parents had been able to find a new apartment very like our old one, and fortunately only a little more expensive, some six blocks away in the same neighborhood; nonetheless, they had been infuriated by the high-handed treatment they had received from the landlord, particularly given the loving, proprietary care that my mother had taken of the building, and my father of the little yard, over the years. For me, being uprooted after a lifetime in the same house was utterly bewildering; to make matters even worse, the first night in our new apartment I had gone to bed with the room in a state of disarray that was wholly foreign to our former way of life. Would it be this way forever-more? Eviction? Confusion? Disorder? Were we on the skids? Would this somehow result in my brother’s ship, off in the dangerous North Atlantic, being sunk by a German torpedo? The day after the move, when it came time to go home from school for lunch, instead of heading off for the new address, I “unthinkingly” returned to the house in which I had lived all my life in perfect safety with brother, sister, mother, and father. At the second-floor landing I was astonished to find the door to our apartment wide open and to hear men talking loudly inside. Yet standing in the hallway on that floor planed smooth over the years by my mother’s scrub brush, I couldn’t seem to get myself to remember that we had moved the day before and now lived elsewhere. “It’s Nazis!” I thought. The Nazis had parachuted into Yonkers, made their way to our street, and taken everything away. Taken my mother away. So I suddenly perceived it. I was no braver than the ordinary nine-year-old, and no bigger, and so where I got the courage to peek inside I don’t know. But when I did, I saw that “the Nazis” were only the house-painters sitting on a drop cloth on what used to be our living-room floor, eating their sandwiches out of wax-paper wrappings. I ran-down that old stairwell, the feel of the rubber treads on each stair as familiar to me as the teeth in my head, and through the neighborhood to our new family sanctum, and at the sight of my mother in her apron (unbeaten, unbloodied, unraped, though visibly distressed from imagining what might have happened to delay her punctual child on his way home from school), I collapsed into her arms in a fit of tears.

Now, as Spielvogel interpreted this incident, I cried in large part because of “guilt over the aggressive fantasies directed toward the mother.” As I construed it-in the short story in journal form, entitled “The Diary of Anne Frank’s Contemporary”- I cry with relief to find that my mother is alive and well, that the new apartment has been transformed during the morning I have been in school into a perfect replica of the old one-and that we are Jews who live in the haven of Westchester County, rather than in our ravaged, ancestral, Jew-hating Europe.

Susan finally came in from the kitchen to see what I was doing off by myself.

“Why are you standing there like that? Peter, what’s happened?”

I held the journal in the air. “Spielvogel has written an article about something he calls creativity.’ And I’m in it.”

“By name?”

“No, but identifiably me. Me coming home to the wrong house when I was nine. He knew I was using it. I talked about that story to him, and still he goes ahead and has some fictitious Italian-American poet-!”

“Who? I can’t follow you.”

“Here!” I handed her the magazine. “Here! This straw fucking patient is supposed to be me! Read it! Read this thing!”

She sat down on the ottoman and began to read. “Oh, Peter.”

“Keep going.”

“It says…”

“What?”

“It says here-you put on Maureen’s underwear and stockings. Oh, he’s out of his mind.”

“He’s not-I did. Keep reading.”

Her tear appeared. “You did?”

“Not the stockings, no-that’s him, writing his banal fucking fiction! He makes it sound like I was dressing up for the drag-queen ball! All I was doing, Susan, was saying, ‘Look, I wear the panties in this family and don’t you forget it!’ That’s all it boils down to! Keep reading! He doesn’t get anything right. It’s all perfectly off!”

She read a little further, then put the magazine in her lap. “Oh, sweetheart.”

“What? What?”

It says…

“My sperm?”

“Yes.”

“I did that too. But I don’t anymore! Keep reading!”

“Well,” said Susan, wiping away her tear with a fingertip, “don’t shout at me. I think it’s awful that he’s written this and put it in print. It’s unethical, it’s reckless-and I can’t even believe he would do such a thing. You tell me he’s so smart. You make him sound so wise. But how could anybody wise do something so insensitive and uncaring as this?”

“Just read on. Read the whole hollow pretentious meaningless tiling, right on down to the footnotes from Goethe and Baudelaire to prove a connection between ‘narcissism’ and ‘art’! So what else is new? Oh, Jesus, what this man thinks of as evidence! ‘As Sophocles has written,’-and that constitutes evidence! Oh, you ought to go through this thing, line by line, and watch the ground shift beneath you! Between every paragraph there’s a hundred-foot drop!”

“What are you going to do?”

“What can I do? It’s printed-it’s out.”

“Well, you just can’t sit back and take it. He’s betrayed your confidence!”

“I know that.”

“Well, that’s terrible.”

“I know that!”

“Then do something!” she pleaded.

On the phone Spielvogel said that if I was as “distressed” as I sounded-“I am!” I assured him-he would stay after his last patient to see me for the second time that day. So, leaving Susan (who had much to be distressed about, too), I took a bus up

Madison to his office and sat in the waiting room until seven thirty, constructing in my mind angry scenes that could only culminate in leaving Spielvogel forever.

The argument between us was angry, all right, and it went on unabated through my sessions for a week, but it was Spielvogel, not I, who finally suggested that I leave him. Even while reading his article, I hadn’t been so shocked-so unwilling to believe in what he was doing-as when he suddenly rose from his chair (even as I continued my attack on him from the couch) and took a few listing steps around to where I could see him. Ordinarily I addressed myself to the bookcase in front of the couch, or to the ceiling overhead, or to the photograph of the Acropolis that I could see on the desk across the room. At the sight of him at my side, I sat straight up. “Look,” he said, “this has gone far enough. I think either you will have now to forget this article of mine, or leave me. But we cannot proceed with treatment under these conditions.”

“What kind of choice is that?” I asked, my heart beginning to beat wildly. He remained in the middle of the room, supporting himself now with a hand on the back of a chair. “I have been your patient for over two years. I have an investment here -of effort, of time, of hope, of money. I don’t consider myself recovered. I don’t consider myself able to go at my life alone just yet. And neither do you.”

“But if as a result of what I have written about you, you find me so ‘untrustworthy’ and so ‘unethical,’ so absolutely ‘wrong’ and, as you put it, ‘off’ about relations between you and your family, then why would you want to stay on as a patient any longer? It is clear that I am too flawed to be your doctor.”