Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

“And he’s the one who took her to Puerto Rico.”

Flossie, out of her depth completely now, and not at all sure any longer what was to be said to smooth life over for this triumvirate with whose fate she was intimately involved, shrugged and nearly wilted. We, I realized, were her own private soap opera: she was the audience to our drama, our ode-singing chorus; this was the Fortinbras my Deep Seriousness had called forth. Fair enough, I thought-this Fortinbras for this farce!

Flossie said, “Well-“

“Well, what?”

“Well, I think so, that they were together there, yes. But, believe me, he’s just somebody, well, that she could turn to…after you did…what you did…with Karen.”

“I get it,” I said, and pulled on my coat.

“Oh, please don’t be jealous. It’s a brother-sister relationship more than anything else-someone close, lending her a helping hand. She’s over him, I swear to you. She knew long ago that with him it would always be career-career. He can propose from now till doomsday, she’d never go back to a man whose work and talent is his everything. That’s true. Please don’t jump to conclusions because of him, it’s not fair. Peter, you must have faith-she will take you back, I’m sure of it.”

I passed a phone booth on my way through the hospital lobby, but didn’t stop to call anyone to ask if I was about to do the wrong thing again or the right thing at last-I saw a way out (I thought) and so I ran. This time to Maureen’s apartment on West Seventy-eighth Street, only a few blocks from the hospital to which the ambulance had carried her some hours earlier. There had to be evidence against her somewhere in that apartment-in the diary she kept, some entry describing how she had laid this trap from which I still could not escape. A confession about the urine written in her own hand-that we would submit in evidence to the court, to Judge Milton Rosenzweig, whose mission it was to prevent phallic havoc from being unleashed on the innocent and defenseless abandoned women of the county of New York of the state of New York. Oh, little robed Rosenzweig, he would have kept the primal horde in line! How he bent over backwards not to show favoritism to his, the Herculean sex…Prior to my own separation hearing there had been the case of Kriegel v. Kriegel; it was still in session when I arrived with my lawyer at the courthouse on Centre Street. “Your Honor,” pleaded Kriegel, a heavyset businessman of fifty, addressing himself (when we entered the courtroom) directly to the judge; his attorney, standing beside him, made sporadic attempts to quiet his client down, but from Kriegel’s posture and tone it was clear that he had decided to Throw Himself Upon the Mercy of the Court. “Your Honor,” he said, “I understand full well that she lives in a walk-up. But I didn’t tell her to get a walk-up. That was her choice. She could get an elevator building on what I give her a week, I assure you. But, Your Honor, I cannot give her what I do not have.” Judge Rosenzweig, up by his bootstraps from Hell’s Kitchen to N.Y.U. Law, and still a burly little harder for all his sixty-odd years, flicked continually with one index finger at an earlobe as he listened-as though over the decades he had found this the best means to prevent the bullshit addressed to the bench from passing down into the Eustachian tube and poisoning his system. His humorous bantering side and his stern contemptuous side were all right there in that gesture. He wore the gown of a magistrate, but the manner (and the hide) was that of an old Marine general who had spent a lifetime hitting the beaches in defense of Hearth and Home. “Your Honor,” said Kriegel, “I’m in the feather business, as the court knows. That’s it, sir. I buy and I sell feathers. I’m not a millionaire like she tells you.” Judge Rosenzweig, obviously pleased by the opportunity for light banter provided him by Mr. Kriegel, said, “Still, that’s a nice suit you got on your back. That’s a Hickey-Freeman suit. Unless my eyes deceive me, that’s a two-hundred-dollar suit.” “Your Honor-“ said Kriegel, spreading his hands deferentially before the judge, as though he held in each palm the three or four feathers that he passed on to the pillow people in the course of a day, “Your Honor, please, I would not come to court in rags.” “Thank you.” “I mean it, Your Honor.” “Look, Kriegel, I know you. You own more colored property in Harlem than Carter has little liver pills.” “Me? No, not me, Your Honor. I beg to differ with Your Honor. That’s my brother. That’s Louis Kriegel. I’m Julius.” “You’re not in with your bother? Are you sure that’s what you want to tell the court, Mr. Kriegel?” “In with him?” “In with him.” “Well, if so, only on the side, Your Honor.” Then me. I don’t shilly-shally quite so long as Kriegel; no, no Judge Rosenzweig has to badger forever a man of my calling-and Thomas Mann’s and Leo Tolstoy’s-to get at the Truth! “What’s it mean here, Mr. Tarnopol, ‘a well-known seducer of college girls’? What’s that mean?” “Your Honor, I think that’s an exaggeration.” “You mean you’re not well-known for it, or you’re not a seducer of college girls?” “I’m not a ‘seducer’ of anybody.” “So what do they mean here, do you think?” “I don’t know, sir.” My lawyer nods approvingly at me from the defense table; I have done just as I was instructed to in the taxi down to the courthouse: “…just say you don’t know and you have no idea…make no accusations…don’t call her a liar…don’t call her anything but Mrs. Tarnopol.. Rosenzweig has a great feeling for abandoned women…he won’t permit name-calling of abandoned women in his court…just shrug it off, Peter, and don’t admit a thing-because he is a prick of the highest order under the best of circumstances. And this isn’t the best of circumstances, a teacher fucking his students.” “I didn’t fuck my students.” “Fine. Good. That’s just what you tell him. The judge has a granddaughter at Barnard College, her picture, Peter, is all over his chambers. Friend, this old gent is the Stalin of Divorce Court Communism: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to her need.’ And with a vengeance. So watch it, Peter, will you?” On the witness stand I unfortunately forgot to. “Are you telling me then,” asked Rosenzweig, “that Mr. Egan, in his affidavit prepared for Mrs. Tarnopol, has lied to the court? Is this an outright lie-yes or no?” “As stated, it is, yes.” “Well, how would you state it to make it true? Mr. Tarnopol, I’m asking you a question. Give me an answer, please, so we can get on here!” “Look, I have nothing to hide-I have nothing to feel guilty about-“ “Your Honor,” interrupted my lawyer, even as I told the judge, “I had a love affair.” “Yes?” said Rosenzweig, smiling, his ear-flicking finger poised now at the side of his head-“How nice. With whom?” “A girl in my class-whom I loved, Your Honor-a young woman.” And that of course helped the cause enormously, that qualification.

But now we would all find out just who the guilty party was, just who had committed a crime against whom! “Judge Rosenzweig, you may remember that the last time I appeared before you, I brought no charges against Mrs. Tarnopol. I was cautioned by my attorney, and rightly so, to say nothing whatsoever about a fraud that had been perpetrated on me by my wife, because at that time, Your Honor, we had nothing in the way of evidence to support so damning an accusation. And we realized that, understandably, His Honor would not take kindly to unsubstantiated charges being brought against an ‘abandoned’ woman, who was here only to seek the protection that the law rightfully provides her. But now, Your Honor, we have the proof, a confession written in the ‘abandoned’ woman’s own hand, that on March 1,1959, she purchased, for two dollars and twenty-five cents in cash, several ounces of urine from a pregnant Negro woman with whom she made contact in Tompkins Square Park, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. We have proof that she did then take said urine to a drugstore at the corner of Second Avenue and Ninth Street, and that she submitted it, in the name of ‘Mrs. Peter Tarnopol,’ to the pharmacist for a pregnancy test. We further have proof…” No matter that my lawyer had already told me that it was much too late for evidence of a fraud to do me any good, if ever it would have. I had to get the goods on her! Find something to restrain her, something that would make her quit and go away! Because I could not take any longer playing the role of the Archenemy, Divorcing Husband as Hooligan, Moth in the Fabric of Society and Housewrecker in the Householder’s State!