Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

I know he’s a southerner, but I got great faith in Lyndon Johnson. If it was Humphrey I’d breathe easier about Israel-but what can we do? Anyway, look, he was close to Roosevelt all those years, he had to learn something. He’s going to be all right. I don’t think we got anything to worry about. Do you?” “No.” “I hope you’re right. This is awful. And you take care of yourself. I don’t want you to be strapped, you understand?” “I’m fine.”

Susan and I stayed up to watch television until Mrs. Kennedy had arrived back in Washington on Air Force One. As the widow stepped from the plane onto the elevator platform, her fingers grazed the coffin, and I said, “Oh, the heroic male fantasies being stirred up around the nation.” “Yours too?” asked Susan. “I’m only human,” I said. In bed, with the lights off, and clasped in one another’s arms, we both started to cry. “I didn’t even vote for him,” Susan said. “You didn’t?” “I could never tell you before. I voted for Nixon.” “Jesus, but you were fucked up.” “Oh, Lambchop, Jackie Kennedy wouldn’t have voted for him if she hadn’t been his wife. It’s the way we were raised.”

In September 1964, the week after Spielvogel had published his findings on my case in the American Forum for Psychoanalytic Studies, the Warren Commission published theirs on the assassination. Lee Harvey Oswald, alone and on his own, was responsible for the murder of President Kennedy, the commission concluded; meanwhile Spielvogel had determined that because of my upbringing I suffered from “castration anxiety” and employed “narcissism” as my “primary defense.” Not everyone agreed with the findings either of the eminent jurist or of the New York analyst: so, in the great world and in the small, debate raged about the evidence, about the conclusions, about the motives and the methods of the objective investigators…And so those eventful years passed, with reports of disaster and cataclysm continuously coming over the wire services to remind me that I was hardly the globe’s most victimized inhabitant. I had only Maureen to contend with-what if I were of draft age, or Indochinese, and had to contend with LBJ? What was my Johnson beside theirs? I watched the footage from Selma and Saigon and Santo Domingo, I told myself that that was awful, suffering that could not be borne…all of which changed nothing between my wife and me. In October 1965, when Susan and I stood in the Sheep Meadow of Central Park, trying to make out what the Reverend Coffin was saying to the thousands assembled there to protest the war, who should I see no more than fifteen feet away, but Maureen. Wearing a button pinned to her coat: “Deliver Us Dr. Spock.” She was standing on the toes of her high boots, trying to see above the crowd to the speaker’s platform. The last word I’d had from her was that letter warning me about the deluxe nervous breakdown that I would soon be getting billed for because of my refusal “to be a man.” How nice to see she was still ambulatory-I supposed it argued for my virility. Oh, how it burned me up to see her here! I tapped Susan. “Well, look who’s against the war.” “Who?” “Tokyo Rose over there. That’s my wife, Suzie Q.” “That one?” she whispered. “Right, with the big heartfelt button on her breast.” “Why-she’s pretty, actually.” “In her driven satanic way, I suppose so. Come on, you can’t hear anything anyway. Let’s go.” “She’s shorter than I thought-from your stories.” “She gets taller when she stands on your toes. The bitch. Eternal marriage at home and national liberation abroad. Look,” I said, motioning up to the police helicopter circling in the air over the crowd, “they’ve counted heads for the papers-let’s get out of here.” “Oh, Peter, don’t be a baby-“ “Look, if anything could make me for bombing Hanoi, she’s it. With that button yet. Deliver me, Dr. Spock-from her!”

That antiwar demonstration was to be my last contact with her until the spring of 1966, when she phoned my apartment, and in an even and matter-of-fact voice said to me, “I want to talk to you about a divorce, Peter. I am willing to talk sensibly about all the necessary arrangements, but I cannot do it through that lawyer of yours. The man is a moron and Dan simply cannot get through to him.”

Could it be? Were things about to change? Was it about to be over?

“He is not a moron, he is a perfectly competent matrimonial lawyer.”

“He is a moron, and a liar, but that isn’t the point, and I’m not going to waste my time arguing about it. Do you or don’t you want a divorce?”

‘What kind of question is that? Of course I do.”

“Then why don’t the two of us sit down together and work it out?”

“I don’t know that we two could, ‘together.’”

“I repeat: do you or do you not want a divorce?”

“Look, Maureen-“

“If you do, then I will come to your apartment after my Group tonight and we can iron this thing out like adults. It’s gone on long enough and, frankly, I’m quite sick of it. I have other things to do with my life.”

‘Well, that’s good to hear, Maureen. But we surely can’t meet to settle it in my apartment.”

“Where then? The street?”

“We can meet on neutral ground. We can meet at the Algonquin.

“Really, what a baby you are. Little Lord Fauntleroy from Westchester-to this very day.”

“The word Westchester’ still gets you, doesn’t it? Just like ‘Ivy League.’ All these years in the big city and still the night watchman’s daughter from Elmira.”

“Ho hum. Do you want to go on insulting me, or do you want to get on with the business at hand? Truly, I couldn’t care less about you or your opinion of me at this point. I’m well over that. I have a life of my own. I have my flute.”

“The flute now?”

“I have my flute,” she went on, “I have Group. I’m going to the New School.”

“Everything but a job,” I said.

“My doctor doesn’t feel I can hold a job right now. I need time to think.”

“What is it you ‘think’ about?”

“Look, do you want to score points with your cleverness, or do you want a divorce?”

“You can’t come to my apartment.”

“Is that your final decision? I will not talk about a serious matter like this in the street or in some hotel bar. So if that is your final decision, I am hanging up. For God’s sake, Peter, I’m not going to eat you up.”

“Look,” I said, “all right, come here, if that’s all we’re going to talk about.”

“I assure you I have nothing else to converse about with a person like you. I’ll come right from Group.”

That word! “What time is ‘Group’ over?” I asked.

“I’ll be at your place at ten,” she said.

“I don’t like it,” said Spielvogel, when I phoned with the news of the rendezvous I’d arranged, all on my own.

“I don’t either,” I said. “But if she changes the subject, I’ll throw her out. I’ll have her go. But what else could I say? Maybe she finally means it. I can’t afford to say no.”

“Well, if you said yes, it’s yes.”

“I could still call her up and get out of it, of course.”

“You want to do that?”

“I want to be divorced, that’s what I want. That’s why I thought I had better grab hold of the opportunity while I had it. If it means risking a scene with her, well, I’ll have to risk it.”

“Yes? You are up to that? You won’t collapse in tears? You won’t tear your clothes off your back?”

“No, no. That’s over.”

“Well, then,” said Spielvogel, “good luck.”