My Life as a Man

by Philip Roth

  I never made it to Wisconsin. Over my protests, Moe went down in the elevator with me, got in the taxi with me, and rode with me all the way out to LaGuardia Airport; he stood directly behind me in the Northwest ticket line, and when his turn came, bought a seat on the same plane I was to take back to Madison. “You going to sleep in bed with us too?” I asked, in anger. “I don’t know if I’ll sleep,” he said, “but I’ll get in there if I have to.” Whereupon I collapsed for the second time. In the taxi back to Manhattan I told him, through my tearful blubbering, about the deception that Maureen had employed to get me to marry her. “Good Christ,” he moaned, “you were really up against a pro, kiddo.” “Was I? Was I?” I had my face pressed into his chest, and he was holding me in his two arms. “And you were still going back to her,” he said, now with a groan. “I was going to kill her, Moey!” “You? You were?” “Yes! With an ax! With my bare hands!” “Oh, I’ll bet. Oh, you poor, pussy-whipped bastard, I’ll just bet you would have.” “I would have,” I croaked through my tears. “Look, you’re just the same as when you were a kid. You can give it, but you can’t take it. Only now, on top of that, you can’t give it either.” “Oh, why is that? What happened?” “The world didn’t turn out to be the sixth-grade classroom at P.S. 3, that’s what happened. With gribben on a fat slice of rye bread waiting for you when you got home from a day of wowing the teachers. You weren’t exactly trained to take punishment, Peppy.” Still weeping, but bitterly now, I asked him, “Is anybody?” “Well, from the look of things, your ‘wife’ got very good instruction in it—and I think she was planning to pass the torch on to you. She sounds to me just from our phone conversation like one of the great professors in the subject.” “Yes?” You see, driving back from the airport that day I felt like somebody being filled in on what had transpired on earth during the sabbatical year he had just spent on Mars; I could have just stepped off a space ship, or out of steerage—I felt so green and strange and lost and dumb.

  By late afternoon I was in Dr. Spielvogel’s office; out in the waiting room Moe sat like a bouncer with his arms folded and his feet planted solidly on the floor, watching to be sure I did not slip off by myself to the airport. By nightfall Maureen was on her way East. Within two days I had notified the chairman of my department that I would be unable to return to my job in the fall. By the end of the week Maureen—having failed in several attempts to get past the door to Moe’s apartment—had returned to Madison, cleared our stuff out of our apartment, and come East a second time; she moved into a hotel for transients on lower Broadway, and there she intended to remain, she said, until I had let go of my brother’s apron strings and returned to our life together. Failing that, she said, she would do what I was “forcing” her to do through the courts. She told me on the phone (when it rang, I picked it up, Moe’s instructions to the contrary notwithstanding) that my brother was a “woman hater” and my new analyst a “fraud.” “He’s not even licensed, Peter,” she said of Spielvogel. “I looked him up. He’s a European quack—practicing here without any credentials at all. He’s not attached to a single psychoanalytic institute—no wonder he tells you to leave your wife!” “You’re lying again, Maureen—you just made that up! You’ll say anything!” “But you’re the liar! You’re the betrayer! You’re the one who deceived me with that little student of yours! Carried on with her for months behind my back! While I cooked your dinner and washed your socks!” “And what did you do to get me to marry you in the first place! Just what!” “Oh, I knew I should never have told you that—I knew you would use that against me some day, to excuse yourself and your rotten philandering! Oh, how can you allow two such people to turn you against your own wife—when you were the guilty one, you were the one who was screwing those students left and right!” “I was not screwing students left and right—“ “Peter, I caught you red-handed with that girl with the braids!” “That is not left and right, Maureen! And you are the one who turned me against you, with your crazy fucking paranoia!” “When? When did I do that, I’d like to know?” “From the beginning! Before we were even married!” “Then why on earth did you marry me, if I was so hateful to you even then? Just to punish me like this?” “I married you because you tricked me into marrying you! Why else!” “But that didn’t mean you had to—you still could decide on your own! And you did, you liar! Don’t you even remember what happened? You asked me to be your wife. You proposed.”

  “Because among other things you threatened to kill yourself if 1 didn’t!” “And you mean to say you believed me?” “What?” “You actually believed that I would kill myself over you? Oh, you terrible narcissist! You selfish egomaniacal maniac! You actually do think that you are the be-all and end-all of human existence!” “No, no, it’s you who think I am! Why else won’t you leave me alone!” “Oh, Jesus,” she moaned, “oh Jesus—haven’t you ever heard of love?”

  2. SUSAN: 1963–1966

  It is now nearly a year since I decided that I would not marry Susan McCall and ended our long love affair. Until last year marrying Susan had been legally impossible because Maureen continued to refuse to grant me a divorce under the existing New York State matrimonial laws or to consent to a Mexican or out-of-state divorce. But then one sunny morning (only one short year ago), Maureen was dead, and I was a widower, free at last of the wife I had taken, entirely against my inclinations but in accordance with my principles, back in 1959. Free to take a new one, if I so desired.

  Susan’s own absurd marriage to the right Princeton boy had also ended with the death of her mate. It had been briefer even than my own, and also childless, and she wanted now to have a family before it was “too late.” She was into her thirties and frightened of giving birth to a mongoloid child; I hadn’t known how frightened until I happened by accident to come upon a secret stockpile of biology books that apparently had been picked up in a second-hand bookstore on Fourth Avenue. They were stuffed in a splitting carton on the floor of the pantry where I had gone in search of a fresh can of coffee one morning while Susan was off at her analyst’s. I assumed at first that they were books she had accumulated years ago at school; then I noticed that two of them, The Basic Facts of Human Heredity by Amram Scheinfeld and Human Heredity by Ashley Montagu, hadn’t been published until she was already living alone and widowed in her New York apartment.

  Chapter Six of the Montagu book, “The Effects of Environment Upon the Developing Human Being in the Womb,” was heavily marked with a black crayon, whether by Susan, or by whoever had owned the book before her, I had no sure way of knowing. “Studies of the reproductive development of the female show that from every point of view the best period during which the female may undertake the process of reproduction extends on the average from the age of twenty-one to about twenty-six years of age…From the age of thirty-five years onward there is a sudden jump in the number of defective children that are born, especially of the type known as mongoloids.…In mongolism we have the tragic example of what may be an adequately sound genetic system being provided; with an inadequate environment with resulting disordered development in the embryo.” If it was not Susan who had done the heavy underlining, it was she who had copied out into the margin, in her round, neat schoolgirlish hand, the words “an inadequate environment.”

  A single paragraph describing mongoloid children was the only one on the page that had not been framed and scored with the black crayon; in its own simple and arresting way, however, it gave evidence of having been read no less desperately. The seven words that I italicize here had, in the book, been underlined by a yellow felt-tipped pen, the kind that Susan liked to use to encourage correspondents to believe that she was in the highest of spirits. “Mongoloid children may or may not have the fold of skin over the inner angle of the eye (epicanthic fold) or the flat root of the nose that goes with this, but they do have smallish heads, fissured tongues, a transverse palmar crease, with extreme intellectual retardation. Their I.Q. ranges between 15 and 29 points, from idiocy to the upp
er limit of about seven years. Mongoloids are cheerful and very friendly personalities, with often remarkable capacities for imitation and memories for music and complex situations which far outrank their other abilities. The expectation of life at birth is about nine years.” After almost an hour with these books on the pantry floor, I returned them to the carton, and when I saw Susan again that evening said nothing about them. Nothing to her, but thereafter I was as haunted by the image of Susan buying and reading her biology books as she was of giving birth to a monstrosity.

  But I did not marry her. I had no doubt that she would be a loving and devoted mother and wife, but having been unable ever to extricate myself by legal means from a marriage into which I’d been coerced in the first place, I had deep misgivings about winding up imprisoned once again. During the four years that Maureen and I had been separated, her lawyer had three times subpoenaed me to appear in court in an attempt to get Maureen’s alimony payments raised and my “hidden” bank accounts with their hidden millions revealed to the world. On each occasion I appeared, as summoned, with my packet of canceled checks, my bank statements, and my income tax returns to be grilled about my earnings and my expenses, and each time I came away from those proceedings swearing that I would never again put authority over my personal life into the hands of some pious disapproving householder known as a New York municipal judge. Never again would I be so stupid and reckless as to allow some burgher in black robes to tell me that I ought to “switch” to writing movies so as to make sufficient money to support the wife I had “abandoned.” Henceforth I would decide with whom I would live, whom I would support, and for how long, and not the state of New York, whose matrimonial laws, as I had experienced them, seemed designed to keep a childless woman who refused to hold a job off the public dole, while teaching a lesson to the husband (me!) assumed to have “abandoned” his innocent and helpless wife for no other reason than to writhe in the fleshpots of Sodom. At those prices, would that it were so!

  As my tone suggests, I had found myself as humiliated and compromised, and nearly as disfigured, by my unsuccessful effort to get unmarried as I had ever been by the marriage itself: over the four years of separation I had been followed to dinner by detectives, served with subpoenas in the dentist’s chair, maligned in affidavits subsequently quoted in the press, labeled for what seemed like all eternity “a defendant,” and judged by a man with whom I would not eat my dinner—and I did not know if I could undergo these indignities again, and the accompanying homicidal rage, without a stroke finishing me off on the witness stand. Once I even took a swing at Maureen’s dapper (and, let it be known, elderly) lawyer in the corridor of the courthouse, when I learned that it was he who had invited the reporter from the Daily News to attend the hearing at which Maureen (for the occasion, in Peter Pan collar and tears) testified that I was “a well-known seducer of college girls.” But that story of my swashbuckling in its turn. My point is that I had not responded with much equanimity to the role in which I was cast by the authorities and did not want to be tested by their system of sexual justice ever again.

  But there were other, graver reasons not to marry, aside from my fear of divorce. Though I had never taken lightly Susan’s history of emotional breakdown, the fact is that as her lover it had not weighed upon me as I expected it would if I were to become her husband and her offspring’s father. In the years before we met, Susan had gone completely to pieces on three occasions: first, in her freshman (and only) year at Wellesley; then after her husband had been killed in a plane crash eleven months into their marriage; and most recently, when her father, whom she had doted upon, had died in great pain of bone cancer. Each time she fell into a kind of waking coma and retired to a corner (or a closet) to sit mutely with her hands folded in her lap until someone saw fit to lift her onto a stretcher and carry her away. Under ordinary circumstances she managed to put down what she called her “everyday run-of-the-mill terror” with pills: she had through the years discovered a pill for just about every phobia that overcame her in the course of a day, and had been living on them, or not-living on them, since she had left home for college. There was a pill for the classroom, a pill for “dates,” a pill for buying clothes, a pill for returning clothes, and needless to say, pills for getting started in the morning and dropping into oblivion at night. And a whole mixed bag of pills which she took like M&Ms when she had to converse, even on the phone, with her formidable mother.

  After her father’s death she had spent a month in Payne Whitney, where she’d become the patient of a Dr. Golding, reputedly a specialist with broken china. He had been her analyst for two years by the time I came along and had by then gotten her off everything except Ovaltine, her favorite childhood narcotic; in fact, he had encouraged the drinking of Oval-tine at bedtime and during the day when she was feeling distressed. Actually during the course of our affair Susan did not take so much as an aspirin for a headache, a perfect record, and one that might have served to assure me that that past was past. But then so had her record been “perfect” when she had enrolled at Wellesley at the age of eighteen, an A student from Princeton’s Miss Fine’s School for Young Ladies, and immediately developed such a fear of her German professor, a caustic young European refugee with a taste for leggy American girls, that instead of going off to his class she took a seat in the closet of her room every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at ten A.M., and until the hour was over, hid out there, coasting along on the belladonna that she regularly obtained from Student Health for her menstrual cramps. By chance one day (and a merciful day it was) a dormitory chambermaid opened the closet door during Susan’s German hour, and her Mother was summoned from Princeton to take her out from behind her winter coats and away from Wellesley for good.

  The possibility of such episodes recurring in the future alarmed me. I believe my sister and brother would argue that Susan’s history of breakdowns was largely what had intrigued me and attracted me, and that my apprehension over what might happen to her, given the inevitable tensions and pressures of marriage, was the first sign I had displayed, since coming of age, that I had a modicum of common sense in matters pertaining to women. My own attitude toward my apprehensiveness is not so unambiguously approving; I still do not know from day to day whether it is cause for relief or remorse.

  Then there is the painful matter of the elusive orgasm: no matter how she struggled to reach a climax, “it” never happened. And of course the harder she worked at it, the more like labor and the less like pleasure erotic life became. On the other hand, the intensity of her effort was as moving as anything about her —for in the beginning, she had been altogether content just to open her legs a little way and lie there, a well to pump if anyone should want to, and she herself couldn’t imagine why anyone would, lovely and well-formed as she was. It took much encouragement and, at the outset, much berating, to get her to be something more than a piece of meat on a spit that you turned this way and that until you were finished; she was never finished, but then she had never really begun.

  What a thing it was to watch the appetite awaken in this shy and timid creature! And the daring—for if only she dared to, she might actually have what she wanted! I can see her still, teetering on the very edge of success. The pulse beats erratically in her throat, the jaw strains upward, the gray eyes yearn—just a yard, a foot, an inch to the tape, and victory over the self-denying past! Oh yes, I remember us well at our honest toil—pelvises grinding as though to grind down bone, fingers clutching at one another’s buttocks, skin slick with sweat from forehead to feet, and our flushed cheeks (as we near total collapse) pressing so forcefully into one another that afterward her face is blotchy and bruised and my own is tender to the touch when I shave the’ following morning. Truly, I thought more than once that I might the of heart failure. “Though in a good cause,” I whisper, when Susan had signaled at last a desire to throw in the towel for the night; drawing a finger over the cheekbone and across the bridge of the nose, I would check for tears—
rather, the tear; she would rarely allow more than one to be shed, this touching hybrid of courage and fragility. “Oh,” she whispers, “I was almost almost almost…” “Yes?” Then that tear. “Always,” she says, “almost.” “It’ll happen.” “It won’t. You know it won’t. What I consider almost is probably where everybody else begins.” “I doubt it.” “You don’t…Peter, next time—what you were doing…do it—harder.” So I did it, whatever it was, harder, or softer, or faster, or slower, or deeper, or shallower, or higher, or lower, as directed. Oh, how Mrs. Susan Seabury McCall of Princeton and Park Avenue tried to be bold, to be greedy, to be low (“Put it…” “Yes, say it, Suzie—“ “Oh, in me from behind, but don’t hurt—!”)—not of course that living on bennies in a Wellesley dormitory in 1951 hadn’t constituted an act of boldness for a society-bred, mother-disciplined, father-pampered young heiress from a distinguished New Jersey family, replete on the father’s side with a U.S. senator and an ambassador to England, and on the mother’s, with nineteenth-century industrial barons. But that diversion had been devised to annihilate temptation; now she wanted to want…Exhilarating to behold, but over the long haul utterly exhausting, and the truth was that by the third year of our affair both of us were the worse for wear and came to bed like workers doing overtime night after night in a defense plant: in a good cause, for good wages, but Christ how we wished the war was over and won and we could rest and be happy.