Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

“That wouldn’t be that, and I couldn’t wipe anything out like that, and that is that. Besides, she’s going to the anyway.”

“Not her,” said Susan, bitterly.

“Pack your stuff. Let’s go.”

“But why will you let her crucify you with money when there’s no need for it!”

“Susan, it is difficult enough borrowing from my big brother.”

“But I’m not your brother. I’m your- me .”

“Let’s go.”

“No!” And angrier than I could ever have imagined her, she marched off into the bathroom adjoining our room.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, I closed my eyes and tried to think clearly. My limbs weakened as I did so. She’s black and Hue. Couldn’t they say 1 killed her? Couldn’t they make the case that 1 stuffed the pills down her throat and left her there to croak? Can they find fingerprints on flesh? If so, they’ll find mine!

Here I experienced a cold shock on the top of the head.

Susan was standing over me, having just poured a glass of water, drawn from the tap, on my head. Violence breeds violence, as they say-for Susan, it was the most violent act she had ever dared to commit in her life.

“I hate you,” she said, stamping her foot.

And on that note we packed our bags and the box of salt water taffy I had bought for Dr. Spielvogel, and in a rented car we departed the seaside resort where many and many a year ago I had first encountered romantic love: Tarnopol Returns To Face The Music In New York.

At the hospital, blessedly, no Valducci and no police-no handcuffs, no squad car, no flashbulbs, no TV cameras grinding away at the mug of the prize-winning murderer…Paranoid fantasy, all that-grandiose delusions for the drive up the parkway, Narcissismo, with a capital N! Guilt and ambivalence over his specialness? Oh, Spielvogel, maybe you are right in ways you do not even know-maybe this Maureen of mine is just the Miss America of a narcissist’s dreams. I wonder: have I chosen this She-Wolf of a woman because I am, as you say, such a Gargantua of Self-Love? Because secretly I sympathize with the poor girl’s plight, know it is only right that she should lie, steal, deceive, risk her very life to have the likes of me? Because she says with every wild shriek and desperate scheme, “Peter Tarnopol, you are the cat’s meow.” Is that why I can’t call it quits with her, because I’m flattered so?

No, no, no, no more fancy self-lacerating reasons for how I am being destroyed. I can walk away all right-only let me!

I took the elevator to the intensive-care unit and gave my name to the young nurse at the desk there. “How,” I asked softly, “is my wife?” She told me to take a seat and wait to talk to the doctor who was presently in with Mrs. Tarnopol. “She’s alive,” I said. “Oh, yes,” the nurse answered, reaching out kindly to touch my elbow. “Good. Great,” I replied; “and there’s no chance of her-“ The nurse said, “You’ll have to ask the doctor, Mr. Tarnopol.”

Good. Great. She may the yet. And I will finally be free!

And in jail!

But I didn’t do it!

Someone was tapping me on the shoulder.

“Aren’t you Peter?”

A short, chubby woman, with graying hair and a pert, lined face, and neatly attired in a simple dark-blue dress and “sensible” shoes, was looking at me rather shyly; as I would eventually learn, she was only a few years older than I and a fifth-grade teacher in a Manhattan parochial school (and, astonishingly, in therapy because of a recurrent drinking problem); she looked no more threatening than the helpful librarian out of my childhood, but there in that hospital waiting room all I saw looking up at me was an enemy, Maureen’s avenger. I backed off a step.

“Aren’t you Peter Tarnopol the writer?”

The kindly nurse had lied. Maureen was dead. I was being placed under arrest for first-degree murder. By this policewoman. “Yes,” I said, “yes, I write.”

“I’m Flossie.”

“Who?”

“Flossie Koerner. From Maureen’s Group. I’ve heard so much about you.”

I allowed with a weak smile that that might be so.

“I’m so glad you got here,” she said. “She’ll want to see you as soon as she comes around…She has to come around, Peter -she has to!”

“Yes, yes, don’t you worry now…”

“She loves life so,” said Flossie Koerner, clutching at one of my hands. I saw now that the eyes behind the spectacles were red from weeping. With a sigh, and a sweet, an endearing smile really, she said, “She loves you so.”

“Yes, well…we’ll just have to see now…”

We sat down beside one another to wait for the doctor.

“I feel I practically know you,” said Flossie Koerner.

“Oh, yes?”

“When I hear Maureen talk about all those places you visited in Italy, it’s all so vivid, she practically makes me feel I was there, with the two of you, having lunch that day in Siena-and remember that little pensione you stayed at in Florence?”

“In Florence?”

“Across from the Boboli Gardens. That that sweet little old lady owned, the one who looked like Isak Dinesen?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And the little kitty with the spaghetti sauce on its face.”

“I don’t remember that…”

“By the Trevi Fountain. In Rome.”

“Don’t remember…”

“Oh, she’s so proud of you, Peter. She boasts about you like a little girl. You should hear when someone dares to criticize the tiniest thing in your book. Oh, she’s like a lioness protecting one of her cubs.”

“She is, eh?”

“Oh, that’s finally Maureen’s trademark, isn’t it? If I had to sum her up in one word, that would be it: loyalty.”

“Fierce loyalty,” I said.

“Yes, so fierce, so determined-so full of belief and passion. Everything means so much to her. Oh, Peter, you should have seen her up in Elmira, at her father’s funeral. It was you of course that she wanted to come with her-but she was afraid you’d misunderstand, and then she’s always been so ashamed of them with you, and so she never dared to call you. I went with her instead. She said, ‘Flossie, I can’t go up there alone-but I have to be there, I have to…’ She had to be there, Peter, to forgive him…for what he did.”

“I don’t know about any of this. Her father died?”

“Two months ago. He had a heart attack and died right on a bus.”

“And what had he done that she had to forgive?”

“I shouldn’t say.”

“He was a night watchman somewhere…wasn’t he? Some plant in Elmira…”

She had taken my hand again-“When Maureen was eleven years old…”

“What happened?”

“I shouldn’t be the one to tell it, to tell you.”

“What happened?”

“Her father…forced her…but at the graveside, Peter, she forgave him. I heard her whisper the words myself. You can’t imagine what it was like-it went right through me. ‘I forgive you, Daddy,’ she said.”

“Don’t you think it’s strange she never told me this herself?”

Don’t you think it might even be something she happened to read about in Tender Is the Night? Or Krafft-Ebing? Or in the “Hundred Neediest Cases” in the Christmas issue of the Sunday Times? Don’t you think that maybe she’s just trying to outdo the rest of you girls in the Group? Sounds to me, Flossie, like a Freudian horror story for those nights you all spend roasting marshmallows around the therapist’s campfire.

“Tell you?” said Flossie. “She was too humiliated to tell anyone, her whole life long, until she found the Group. All her life she was terrified people would find out, she felt so-so polluted by it. Not even her mother knew.”