Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

I was to stay away as long as Dan Egan remained in Chicago on business. My lawyer was waiting for Egan to get back to be absolutely certain he wasn’t going to press charges for assault with intent to kill-or to attempt to persuade him not to. In the meantime, I tried to show Susan a good time. We had breakfast in bed in our boardwalk hotel. I paid ten dollars to have her profile drawn in pastels. We ate big fried scallops and visited the Steel Pier. I recalled for her the night of V-J Day, when Sugar and I and my cousins and their friends had conga-ed up and down the boardwalk (with my aunt’s permission) to celebrate Japan’s defeat. Was I effusive! And free with the cash! But it’s my money, isn’t it? Not hers-mine! I still couldn’t grow appropriately serious about the grave legal consequences of my brutality, or remorseful, quite yet, about having done so cold-heartedly what, as a little Jewish boy, I had been taught to despise. A man beating a woman? What was more loathsome, except a man beating a child?

The first evening I checked in on the phone with Dr. Spielvogel at the hour I ordinarily would have been arriving at his office for my appointment. “I feel like the gangster hiding out with his moll,” I told him. “It sounds like it suits you,” he said. “All in all it was a rewarding experience. You should have told me about barbarism a long time ago.” “You seem to have taken to it very nicely on your own.”

In the late afternoon of our second full day, my lawyer phoned-no, Egan wasn’t back from Chicago, but his wife had called to say that Maureen had been found unconscious in her apartment and taken by ambulance to Roosevelt Hospital. She had been out for two days and there was a chance she would die.

And covered with bruises, I thought. From my hands.

“After she left me, she went home and tried to kill herself.”

“That’s what it sounds like.”

“I better get up there then.”

“Why?” asked the lawyer.

“Better that I’m there than that I’m not.” Even I wasn’t quite sure what I meant.

“The police might come around,” he told me.

Valducci might come around, I thought.

“You sure you want to do this?” he asked.

“I’d better.”

“Okay. But if the cops are there, call me. I’ll be home all night. Don’t say anything to anyone. Just call me and I’ll come over.”

I told Susan what had happened and that we were going back to New York. She too asked why. “She’s not your business any more, Peter. She is not your concern. She’s trying to drive you crazy, and you’re letting her.”

“Look, if she dies I’d better be there.”

“Why?”

“I ought to be, that’s all.”

“But why? Because you’re her ‘husband’? Peter, what if the police are there? What if they arrest you-and put you in jail! Do you see what you’ve done-you could go to jail now. Oh, Lambchop, you wouldn’t last an hour in jail.”

“They’re not going to put me in jail,” I said, my heart quaking.

“You beat her, which was stupid enough-but this is even more stupid. You keep trying to do the ‘manly’ thing, and all you ever do is act like a child.”

“Oh, do I?”

“There is no ‘manly’ thing with her. Don’t you see that yet? There are only crazy things. Crazier and crazier! But you’re like a little boy in a Superman suit, with some little boy’s ideas about being big and strong. Every time she throws down the glove, you pick it up! If she phones, you answer! If she writes letters, you go crazy. If she does nothing, you go home and work on your novel about her! You’re like-like her puppet! She yanks -you jump! It’s-it’s pathetic.”

“Oh, is it?”

“Oh,” said Susan, brokenhearted, “why did you have to hit her? Why did you do that?”

“Actually, I thought it pleased you.”

“Did you really? Pleased me? I hated it. I just haven’t told you in so many words because you were so pleased with yourself. But why on earth did you do it? The woman is a psychopath, you tell me that yourself. What is gained by beating up someone who isn’t even responsible for what she says? What is the good of it?”

“I couldn’t take any more, that’s the good of it! She may be a psychopath, but I am the psychopath’s husband and 1 can’t take any more.”

“But what about your will? You’re the one who is always telling me about using my will. You’re the one who got me back to college, hitting me over the head with my will- and then you, you who hate violence, who are sweet and civilized, turn around and do something totally out of control like that. Why did you let her come to your apartment to begin with?”

“To get a divorce!”

“But that’s what your lawyer is for!”

“But she won’t cooperate with my lawyer.”

“And who will she cooperate with instead? You?”

“Look, I am trying to get out of a trap. I stepped into it back when I was twenty-five, and now I’m thirty-three and I’m still in it-”

“But the trap is you. You’re the trap. When she phoned you, why didn’t you just hang up? When she said no to the Algonquin, why didn’t you realize-“

“Because I thought I saw a way out! Because this alimony is bleeding me dry! Because going back and forth into court to have my income scrutinized and my check stubs checked is driving me mad! Because I am four thousand dollars in debt to my brother! Because I have nothing left of a twenty-thousand-dollar advance on a book that I cannot write! Because when little Judge Rosenzweig hears I teach only two classes a week, he’s ready to send me to Sing Sing! He has to sit on his ass all day to earn his keep, while coed seducers like me are out there abandoning their wives left and right-and teaching only two classes! They want me to get a paper route, Susan! They wouldn’t care if I sold Good Humors! Abandoned her? She’s with me day and night! The woman is unabandonable!” By you.

“Not by me-by them!”

“Peter, you’re going wild.”

“I am wild! I’ve gone!”

“But Lambchop,” she pleaded, “1 have money. You could use my money.”

“I could not.”

“But it’s not even mine. It’s no one’s, really. It’s Jamey’s. It’s my grandfather’s. And they’re all dead, and there’s tons of it, and why not? You can pay back your brother, you can pay back the publisher and forget that novel, and go on to something new. And you can pay her whatever the court says, and then just forget her-oh, do forget her, once and for all, before you ruin everything. If you haven’t already!”

Oh, I thought, would that be something. Pay them all off, and start in clean. Clean! Go back to Rome and start again…live with Susan and our pots of geraniums and our bottles of Frascati and our walls of books in a white-washed apartment on the Janiculum…get a new VW and go off on all those trips again, up through the mountains in a car with nobody grabbing at the wheel… gelati in peace in the Piazza Navona…marketing in peace in the Campo dei Fiori…dinner with friends in Trastevere, in peace: no ranting, no raving, no tears…and writing about something other than Maureen…oh, just think of all there is to write about in this world that is not Maureen…Oh, what luxe!

“We could arrange with the bank,” Susan was saying, “to send her a check every month. You wouldn’t even have to think about it. And, Lambchop, that would be that. You could just wipe the whole thing out, like that.”