Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

“Do it!”

“Now-“ I said, striking at the back of her skull with the flat of my palm, “now-“ I hit her again, same spot, “now when you go to court, you won’t have to make it all up: now you’ll have something real to cry about to the good Judge Rosenzweig! A real beating, Maureen! The real thing, at last!” I was on the floor, astraddle her, cuffing her head with my open hand. Her blood was smeared everywhere: over her face, my hands, the rush matting, all over the front of her suit, down her silk blouse, on her bare throat. And the pages of the story were strewn around us, most of them bloodied too. The real thing-and it was marvelous. I was loving it.

I, of course, had no intention of killing her right then and there, not so long as those jails that Spielvogel had warned me about still existed. I was not even really in a rage any longer. Just enjoying myself thoroughly. All that gave me pause-oddly- was that I was ruining the suit in which she’d looked so attractive. But overlook the suit, I managed to tell myself. “I’m going to kill you, my beloved wife, I’m going to end life for you here today at the age of thirty-six, but in my own sweet time. Oh, you should have agreed to the Algonquin, Maureen.”

“Go ahead-“ drooling now down her chin, “my life, my life is such shit, let me the already…”

“Soon, soon now, very soon now you’re going to be nice and dead.” I hadn’t to wonder for very long where to assault her next. I rolled her onto her face and began to pound with a stiff palm at her behind. The skirt of the red suit and her half-slip were hiked up in the back, and there was her little alley cat’s behind, encased in tight white underpants, perhaps the very pair about which her class at the New School had heard so much of late. I beat her ass. Ten, fifteen, twenty strokes-I counted them out for her, aloud-and then while she lay there sobbing, I stood up and went to the fireplace and picked up the black wrought-iron poker that Susan had bought for me in the Village. “And now,” I announced, “I am going to kill you, as promised.”

No word from the floor, just a whimper.

“I’m afraid they are going to have to publish your fiction posthumously, because I am about to beat your crazy, lying head in with this poker. I want to see your brains, Maureen. I want to see those brains of yours with my own eyes. I want to step in them with my shoes-and then I’ll pass them along to Science. God only knows what they’ll find. Get ready, Maureen, you’re about to the horribly.”

I could make out now the barely audible words she was whimpering: “Kill me,” she was saying, “kill me kill me-“ as oblivious as I was in the first few moments to the fact that she had begun to shit into her underwear. The smell had spread around us before I saw the turds swelling the seat of her panties. “The me,” she babbled deliriously-“the me good, the me long-“

“Oh, Christ.”

All at once she screamed, “Make me dead!”

“Maureen. Get up, Maureen. Maureen, come on now.”

She opened her eyes. I wondered if she had passed over at last into total madness. To be institutionalized forever-at my expense. Ten thousand bucks more a year! I was finished!

“Maureen! Maureen!”

She managed a bizarre smile.

“Look.” I pointed between her legs. “Don’t you see? Don’t you know? Look, please. You’ve shit all over yourself. Do you hear me, do you understand me? Answer me!”

She answered. “You couldn’t do it.”

“What?”

“You couldn’t do it. You coward.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“Big brave man.”

“Well, at least you’re yourself, Maureen. Now get wp . Use the bathroom!”

“A yellow coward.”

“Wash yourself!”

She pushed up on her elbows and tried to bring herself to her feet, but with an agonized groan, slumped backward. “I-I have to use your phone.”

“After,” I said, reaching down with a hand to help lift her.

“I have to phone now.”

I gagged and averted my head. “Later-!”

“You beat me”-as though the news had just that moment reached her. “Look at this blood! My blood! You beat me like some Harlem whore!”

I had now to step away from the odor she gave off. Oh, this was just too much madness, too much all around. The tears started rolling out of me.

‘Where is your phone!”

“Look, who are you calling?”

“Whoever I want! You beat me! You filthy pig, you beat me!” She had made it now up onto her knees. One blow with the poker-still in my right hand, by the way-and she would phone no one.

I watched her stumbling over her own feet to the bedroom. One shoe on and one shoe off. “No, the bathroom!”

“1 have to phone…”

“You’re leaking your shit all over!”

“You beat me, you monster! Is that all you can think of? The shit on your House and Garden rug? Oh, you middle-class bastard, I don’t believe it!”

“WASH YOURSELF!”

“NO!”

From the bedroom came the sound of the casters rolling into the worn grooves in the wooden floor. She had collapsed onto the bed, as though dropping from the George Washington Bridge.

She was dialing-and sobbing.

“Hello? Mary? It’s Maureen. He beat up on me, Mary-he-hello? No? Hello?” With an animalish whine of frustration, she hung up. Then she was dialing again, so slowly and fitfully she might have been falling off to sleep between every other digit.

“Hello? Hello, is this the Egans? Is this 201-236-2890? Isn’t this Egans? Hello?” She let out another whine and threw the receiver at the hook. “I want to talk to the Egans! I want the Egans!” she cried, banging the receiver up and down now in its cradle.

I stood in the doorway to the bedroom with my poker.

“What the hell are you crying about?” she said, looking up at me. “You wanted to beat me, and you beat me, so stop crying. Why can’t you be a man for a change and do somedung, instead of being such a crybaby!”

“Do what? Do what?”

“You can dial the Egans! You broke my fingers! I have no feeling in my fingers!”

“1 didn’t touch your fingers!”

“Then why can’t I dial! DIAL FOR ME! STOP CRYING FOR FIVE SECONDS AND DIAL THE RIGHT NUMBER!”

So I did it. She told me to do it, and I did it. 201-236-2890. Ding-a-ling. Ding-a-ling.

“Hello?” a woman said.

“Hello,” said I, “is this Mary Egan?”

“Yes. Who is this, please?”

“Just a moment, Maureen Tarnopol wants to talk to you.” I handed my wife the phone, gagging as her aroma reached me again.

“Mary?” Maureen said. “Oh Mary,” and wretchedly, she was sobbing once again. “Is, is Dan home? I have to talk to Dan, oh Mary, he, he beat me, Peter, that was him, he beat up on me, bad-”

And I, fully armed, stood by and listened. Who was I to phone for her next, the police to come and arrest me, or Valducci to write it up in the Daily News?

I left her to herself in the bedroom, and with a sponge and a pan of water from the kitchen began to clean the blood and feces from the rush matting on the living room floor. I kept the poker by my side-now, ridiculously, for protection.

I was on my knees, the fifteenth or twentieth wad of paper toweling in my hand, when Maureen came out of the bedroom.

“Oh, what a good little boy,” she said.

“Somebody has to clean up your shit.”

“Well, you’re in trouble now, Peter.”

I imagined that she was right-my stomach felt all at once as though I were the one who had just evacuated in his pants- but I pretended otherwise. “Oh, am I?”