Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

“Wrong.” “You look like him.” “Never heard of him.” “Come on, you’re putting me on, man. You’re him. You’re really him. Wow, man. What a coincidence. I just had Jimmy Baldwin in here last night.” “Who’s he?” “The writer, man. You’re putting me on. You know who else I had in here?” I didn’t answer. “Mailer. I get all you fuckin’ guys. I had another guy in here, I swear to fuck he musta weighed eighty-two pounds. This tall string bean with a crew cut. I took him out to Kennedy. You know who it was?” “Who?” “Fuckin’ Beckett. You know how I know it was him? I said to him, ‘You’re Samuel Beckett, man.’ And you know what he said? He says, ‘No, I’m Vladimir Nabokov.’ What do you think of that?” “Maybe it was Vladimir Nabokov.” “No, no, I never had Nabokov. Not yet. What are you writin’ these days, Tarnopol?” “Checks.” We had arrived at Susan’s building. “Right here,” I told him, “that awning.” “Hey, you live all right, Tarnopol. You guys do okay, you know that?” I paid him, while he shook his head in wonderment; as I was leaving the taxi, he said, “Watch this, I’ll turn the corner and pick up fuckin’ Mala-mud. I wouldn’t put it past me.”

“Good evening, sir,” said Susan’s elevator man, appearing out of nowhere and startling me in the lobby, just as I had made it gravely past the doorman and was removing the can opener from my pocket…But once inside the apartment I pulled it from my pocket again and cried out, “Wait’ll you see what I got!”

“She’s alive?” asked Sysan.

“And kicking.”

“-the police?”

“Weren’t there. Look-look at this!”

“It’s a can opener.”

“It’s also what she masturbates with! Look! Look at this nice sharp metal tooth. How she must love that protruding out of her-how she must love to look down at that!”

“Oh, Peter, where ever did you-“

“From her apartment-next to her bed.”

Out popped the tear.

“What are you crying about? It’s perfect-don’t you see? Just what she thinks a man is-a torture device. A surgical instrument!”

“But where-“

“I told you. From her bedside table!”

“You stole it, from her apartment?”

“Yes!”

I described to her then in detail my adventures at the hospital and after.

When I finished she turned and went off to the kitchen. I followed her and stood by the stove as she began to brew herself a cup of Ovaltine.

“Look, you yourself tell me I shouldn’t be defenseless with her.”

She would not speak to me.

“I am only doing what I have to do, Susan, to get sprung from this trap.”

No reply.

“I am tired, you see, of being guilty of sex crimes in the eyes of every hypocrite, lunatic, and-“

“But the only one who thinks you’re guilty of anything is you.”

“Yes? Is uhat why they’ve got me supporting her for the rest of my life, a woman I was married to for three years? A woman who bore me no children? Is that why they will not let me get divorced? Is that why I am being punished like this, Susan? Because I think I’m guilty? I think I’m innocent1.”

“Then if you do, why do you need to steal something like that?”

“Because nobody believes me!”

“I believe you.”

“But you are not the judge in this case! You are not the sovereign state of New York! I have got to get her fangs out of my neck! Before I drown in this rage!”

“But what good is a can opener? How do you even know it is what you say it is? You don’t! Probably, Peter, she just uses it to o-pen cans.”

“In her bedroom?”

“Yes! People can open cans in bedrooms.”

“And they can play with themselves in the kitchen, but usually it’s the other way around. It’s a dildo, Susan-whether you like that idea or not. Maureen’s very own surrogate dick!”

“And so what if it is? What business is it of yours? It’s not your affair!”

“Oh, isn’t it? Then why is everything in my life her affair? And Judge Rosenzweig’s affair! And the affair of her Group! And the affair of her class at the New School! I get caught with Karen and the judge has me down for Lucifer. She, on the other hand, fucks household utensils-“

“But you cannot bring this thing into court-they’d think you were crazy. It is crazy. Don’t you see that? What do you think you would accomplish by waving it around in the judge’s face? What?”

“But I have her diary, too!”

“But you told me you read it-you said there’s nothing there.”

“I haven’t read it all.”

“But if you do, it’s only going to make you crazier than you are now!”

“I AM NOT THE ONE WHO’S CRAZY!”

Said Susan, “You both are. And I can’t take it. Because I’ll go mad too. I cannot drink any more Ovaltine in one day! Oh, Peter, I can’t take you any more like this. I can’t stand you this way. Look at you, with that thing. Oh, throw it away!”

“No! No! This way you can’t stand me is the way that I am! This is the way that I am going to be-until I win!”

‘Win what?”

“My balls back, Susan!”

“Oh, how can you use that cheap expression? Oh, Lambchop, you’re a sensible, sweet, civilized, darling man. And I love you as you are!”

“But I don’t.”

“But you should. What possible use can those-“

“I don’t know yet! Maybe none! Maybe some! But I’m going to find out! And if you don’t like it, I’ll leave. Is that what you want?”

She shrugged. “…if this is the way you’re going to be-“

“This is the way I am going to be! And have to be! It’s too rough out there, Susan, to be darling!”

“… then I think you better.”

“Leave?”

“…Yes.”

“Good! Fine!” I said, utterly astonished. “Then I’ll go!”

To which she made no reply.

So I left, taking Maureen’s can opener and diary with me.

I spent the rest of the night back in the bedroom of my own apartment-the living room faintly redolent still of Maureen’s bowel movement-reading the diary, a dreary document, as it turned out, about as interesting on the subject of a woman’s life as “Dixie Dugan.” The sporadic entries rambled on without focus, or stopped abruptly in the midst of a sentence or a word, and the prose owed everything to the “Dear Diary” school, the pure expression of self-delusion and unknowingness. In one so cunning, how bizarre! But then writers are forever disappointing readers by being so “different” from their work, though not usually because the work fails to be as compelling as the person. I was mildly surprised-but only mildly-by the persistence with which Maureen had secretly nursed the idea of “a writing career,” or at least tantalized herself with it in her semiconscious way, throughout the years of our marriage. Entries began: “I won’t apologize this time for not writing for now I see that even V. Woolf let her journal go for months at a time.” And: “I must set down my strange experience in New Milford this morning which I’m sure would make a good story, if one could write it in just the right way.” And: “I realized today for the first time-how naive of me!-that if I were to write a story, or a novel, that was published, P. would have awful competitive feelings. Could I do that to him? No wonder I’m so reluctant to launch upon a writing career-it all has to do with sparing his ego.”

Along the way there were a dozen or so newspaper clippings stapled or Scotch-taped to the loose-leaf pages, most of them about me and my work, dating back to the publication of my novel in the first year of our marriage. Pasted neatly on one page there was an article clipped from the Times when Faulkner died, a reprint of his windy Nobel Prize speech. Maureen had underlined the final grandiose paragraph: “The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.” Beside it she had penciled a bit of marginalia to make the head swim: “P. and me?”