by Philip Roth
I have of course to wonder now if Susan wouldn’t have been better off if I had deferred to her and simply left her alone about coming. “I don’t care about that,” she had told me, when I first broached the distressing subject. I suggested that perhaps she should care. “Why don’t you just worry about your own fun…” said she. I told her that I was not worrying about “fun.” “Oh, don’t be pretentious,” she dared to mumble—then, begging: “Please, what difference does it make to you anyway?” The difference, I said, would be to her. “Oh, stop trying to sound like the Good Sex Samaritan, will you? I’m just not a nymphomaniac and I never was. I am what I am, and if it’s been good enough for everyone else—“ “Has it?” “No!” and out came the tear. So the resistance began to crumble, and the struggle, which I initiated and to which I was accomplice and accessory, began.
I should point out here that the distressing subject had been a source of trouble between Maureen and myself as well: she too was unable to reach a climax, but maintained that what stood in her way was my “selfishness.” Characteristically she had confused the issue somewhat by leading me to believe for the longest while that she and orgasms were on the very best of terms—that I, in fact, had as much chance of holding her back as a picket fence has of obstructing an avalanche. Well into the first year of our marriage, I continued to look on in wonder at the crescendo of passion that would culminate in her sustained outcry of ecstasy when I began to ejaculate; you might even say that my ejaculations sort of faded off into nothing beside her clamorous writhings. It came as a surprise then (to coin a phrase appropriate to these adventures) to learn that she had actually been pretending, faking those operatic orgasms, she explained, so as to protect me from the knowledge of just how inadequate a lover I was. But how long could she keep up that pretense in order to bolster my sense of manliness? What about her, she wanted to know. Thereafter I was to hear repeatedly how even Mezik, the brute who was her first husband, even Walker, the homosexual who was her second, knew more about how to satisfy a woman than the selfish, inept, questionable heterosexual who was I.
Oh, you crazy bitch (if the widower may take a moment out to address the ghost of his wife), death is too good for you, really.
Why isn’t there a hell, with fire and brimstone? Why isn’t there a devil and damnation? Why isn’t there sin any more? Oh, if I were Dante, Maureen, I’d go about writing this another way!
At any rate: in that Maureen’s accusations, no matter how patently bizarre, had a way of eating into my conscience, it very well might be that what Susan derided as my sexual good samaritanism was in part an attempt by me to disprove the allegations brought against me by a monumentally dissatisfied wife. I don’t really know. I believe I meant well, though at the time I came to Susan there is no denying how dismayed I was by my record as a pleasure-giving man.
Obviously what drew me to Susan to begin with—only a year into my separation and still reeling—was that in temperament and social bearing she was as unlike Maureen as a woman could be. There was no confusing Maureen’s recklessness, her instinct for scenes of wild accusation, her whole style of moral overkill, with Susan’s sedate and mannerly masochism. To Susan McCall, speaking aloud and at length of disappointment, even to one’s lover, was like putting an elbow on the dinner table, something One Just Didn’t Do. She told herself that by making her heartache her business and nobody else’s, she was being decorous and tactful, sparing another the inconsequential bellyaching of “a poor little rich girl,” though of course the person she was sparing (and deluding) by being so absurdly taciturn and stoically blind about her life was herself. She was the one who didn’t want to hear about it, or think about it, or do anything about it, even as she continued to suffer it in her own resigned and baffled way. The two women were wholly antithetical in their response to deprivation, one like a dumb, frightened kid in a street fight who knows no way to save his hide but to charge into the melee, head down and skinny arms windmilling before him, the other docile and done in, resigned to being banged around or trampled over. Even when Susan came to realize that she needn’t settle any longer for a diet of bread and water, that it wasn’t simply “okay” with me (and the rest of mankind) that she exhibit a more robust appetite, but that it made her decidedly more attractive and appealing, there was the lifelong style of forbearance, abstemiousness in all things but pharmaceuticals, there was the fadeaway voice, the shy averted glance, the auburn hair drawn austerely back in a knot at the back of the slender neck, there was the bottomless patience, the ethereal silence, that single tear, to mark her clearly as a member of another tribe, if not another sex, from Maureen.
It need hardly be pointed out that to me hers was a far more poignant straggle to witness (and be a party to) than that one in which Maureen had been so ferociously engaged—for where Maureen generally seemed to want to have something largely because someone else was able to have it (if I had been impotent, there is no doubt she would have been content to be frigid), Susan now wanted what she wanted in order to rid herself of the woman she had been. Her rival, the enemy whom she hoped to dispossess and drive into exile, if not extinction, was her own constrained and terrified self.
Poignant, moving, admirable, endearing—in the end, too much for me. I couldn’t marry her. I couldn’t do it. If and when I was ever to marry again, it would have to be someone in whose wholeness I had abounding faith and trust. And if no one drawing breath was that whole—admittedly I wasn’t, my own capacity for faith and trust, among other things, in a state of serious disrepair—maybe that meant I would never remarry. So be it. Worse things had happened, one of them, I believed, to me.
So: freed from Maureen by her death, it seemed to me that I had either to go ahead and make Susan a wife and mother at thirty-four, or leave her so that she might find a man who would do just that before she became, in Dr. Montagu’s words, a totally “inadequate environment” for procreation. Having been to battle for nearly all of my adult life, first with Maureen and then with the divorce laws of the state of New York—laws so rigid and punitive they came to seem to me the very codification of Maureen’s “morality,” the work of her hand—I no longer had the daring, or the heart, or the confidence to marry again. Susan would have to find some man who was braver, or stronger, or wiser, or maybe just more foolish and deluded—
Enough. I still don’t know how to describe my decision to leave her, nor have I stopped trying to. As I asked at the outset: Has anything changed?
Susan tried to kill herself six months after I had pronounced the affair over. I was here in Vermont. After I left her, my days in New York, till then so bound up with hers, had become pointless and empty. I had my work, I had Dr. Spielvogel, but I had become used to something more, this woman. As it turned out, I was no less lonely for her here in my cabin, but at least I knew that the chances were greatly reduced that she would show up in the Vermont woods at midnight, as she did at my apartment on West Twelfth Street, where she could call into the intercom, “It’s me, I miss you.” And what do you do at that hour, not let her in? “You could,” Dr. Spielvogel advised me, “take her home in a taxi, yes.” “I did—at two.” “Try it at midnight.” So I did, came downstairs in my coat, to escort her out of the building and back to Park and Seventy-ninth. Sunday the buzzer went off in the morning. “Who is it?” “I brought you the Times. It’s Sunday.” “I know it’s Sunday.” “Well, I miss you like mad. How can we be apart on Sunday?” I released the lock on the downstairs door (“Take her home in a taxi; there are taxis on Sunday”—“But I miss her!”) and she came on up the stairs, beaming, and invariably, Sunday after Sunday, we wound up making love in our earnest and strenuous way. “See,” says Susan. “What?” “You do want me. Why are you acting as though you don’t?” “You want to be married. You want to have children. And if that’s what you want you should have it. But I myself don’t, can’t, and won’t!” “But I’m not her. I’m me. I’m not out to torture you or coerce you into anything. Have I ever? C
ould I possibly? I only want to make you happy.” “I can’t do it. I don’t want to.” “Then don’t. You’re the one who brought up marriage. I didn’t say a word about it. You just said I can’t do it and I have to go— and you went! But this is intolerable. Not living with you doesn’t make sense. Not even seeing each other—it’s just too bizarre.” “I don’t want to stand between you and a family, Susan.” “Oh, Peter, you sound like some dope on a soap opera when you say that. If I have to choose between you and a family, I choose you.” “But you want to be married, and if you want to be married, and if you want to have children, then you should have them. But 1 don’t, can’t, and won’t.” “It’s because I don’t come, isn’t it? And never will. Not even if you put it in my ear. Well, isn’t it?” “No.” “It’s because I’m a junkie.” “You are hardly a junkie.” “But it is that, it’s those pills I pop. You’re afraid of having somebody like me on your hands forever—you want somebody better, somebody who comes like the postman, through rain and snow and gloom of night, and doesn’t sit in closets and can live without her Ovaltine at the age of thirty-four— and why shouldn’t you? I would too, if I were you. I mean that. I understand completely. You’re right about me.” And out rolled the tear, and so I held her and told her no-no-it-isn’t-so (what else, Dr. Spielvogel, is there to say at that moment—yes, you’re absolutely correct?). “Oh, I don’t blame you,” said Susan, ‘Tm not even a person, really.” “Oh, what are you then?” “I haven’t been a person since I was sweet sixteen. I’m just symptoms. A collection of symptoms, instead of a human being.”
These surprise visits continued sporadically over a period of four months and would have gone on indefinitely, I thought, if I just stayed on there in New York. Certainly, I could refuse to respond to the doorbell, pretend when she came by that I wasn’t at home, but as I reminded Dr. Spielvogel when he suggested somewhat facetiously that I “marshal” my strength and forget about the bell—“it’ll stop soon enough”—this was Susan I was dealing with, not Maureen. Eventually I packed a bag and, marshaling my strength, came up here.
Just before I left my apartment, however, I spent several hours writing Susan notes telling her where I was going—and then tearing them up. But what if she “needed” me? How could I just pick up and disappear? I ended up finally telling a couple who were our friends where I would be hiding out, assuming that the wife would pass this confidence on to Susan before my bus had even passed over the New York State line.
I did not hear a word from Susan for six weeks. Because she had been told where I was or because she hadn’t?
Then one morning I was summoned from breakfast to the phone here at the Colony—it was our friends informing me that Susan had been found unconscious in her apartment and rushed by ambulance to the hospital. It seemed that the previous night she had finally accepted an invitation to dinner with a man; he had left her at her door around eleven, and she had come back into the apartment and swallowed all the Seconal and Tuinal and Placidyl that she had been secreting under her lingerie over the years. The cleaning lady had found her in the morning, befouled and in a heap on the bathroom floor, surrounded by empty vials and envelopes.
I got an afternoon flight from Rutland and was at the hospital by the evening visiting hours. When I arrived at the psychiatric ward, I was told she had just been transferred and was directed to a regular private room. The door was slightly ajar and I peered in—she was sitting up in bed, gaunt and scraggly looking and still very obviously dazed and disoriented, like a prisoner, I thought, who has just been returned from an all-night session with her interrogators. When she saw that it was me rapping on the door, out came the tear, and despite the presence of the formidable mother, who coolly took my measure from the bedside, she said, T love you, that’s why I did it.”
After ten days in the hospital getting her strength back—and assuring Dr. Golding when he came around to visit each morning, that she would never again lay in a secret cache of sleeping pills—she was released in the care of her mother and went back home to New Jersey, where her father had been a professor of classics at Princeton until his death. Mrs. Seabury, according to Susan, was a veritable Calpurnia; in grace, in beauty, in carriage, in icy grandeur (and, said Susan, “in her own estimation”) very much a Caesar’s wife—and to top it off, Susan added hopelessly, she happened also to be smart. Yes, top marks, it turned out, from the very college where Susan hadn’t been able to make it through her freshman year. I had always suspected that Susan might be exaggerating somewhat her mother’s majesty—it was, after all, her mother—but at the hospital, when by chance our daily visits overlapped, I found myself not a little awed by the patrician confidence radiated by this woman from whom Susan had obviously inherited her own striking good looks, though not a Calpurnian presence. Mrs. Seabury and I had next to nothing to say to one another. She looked at me in fact (or so I imagined it, in those circumstances) as though she did not see there much opposition to be brooked. Only further evidence of her daughter’s prodigality. “Of course,” her silence seemed to me to say, “of course it would be over the loss of a hysterical Jewish ‘poet.’” In the corridors outside the hospital room of my suicidal mistress, it was difficult to rise to my own defense.
When I came down to Princeton to visit Susan, we two sat in the garden back of the brick house on Mercer Street, next door to where Einstein had lived (legend had it that as a little red-headed charmer, back in the years before she was just “symptoms,” Susan used to give him candy to do her arithmetic homework); Madame Seabury, wearing pearls, sat with a book just inside the terrace door, no more than ten yards away—it was not A Jewish Father she was reading, I was sure. I had taken the train to Princeton to tell Susan that now that she was being looked after by her mother, I would be going back to Vermont. So long as she had been in the hospital, I had, at Dr. Golding’s suggestion, been deliberately vague about my plans. “You don’t have to tell her anything, one way or another.’’ “What if she asks?” “I don’t think she will,” Golding said; “for the time being she’s content that she got you down here. She won’t push her luck.” “Not yet. But what about when she gets out? What if she tries it again?” “I’ll take care of that,” said Golding, with a businesslike smile meant to close off conversation. I wanted to say: “You didn’t take such marvelous care of ‘that’ last time!” But who was the runaway lover to blame the devoted doctor for the castoff mistress’s suicide attempt?
It was a warmish March day, and Susan was wearing a clinging yellow jersey dress, looking very slinky for a young woman who generally preferred to keep her alluring body inconspicuous. Her hair, unknotted for the occasion, was a thick mane down her back; a narrow band of girlish freckles faintly showed across the bridge of her nose and her cheekbones. She had been out in the sun every afternoon—in her bikini, she let me know—and looked gorgeous. She could not keep her hands from her hair, and continuously, throughout our conversation, took it from behind her neck and pulled it like a thick, auburn rope over either shoulder; then, raising her chin just a touch, she would push the mass of hair back behind her neck with two open palms. The wide mouth and slightly protrusive jaw that gave a decisive and womanly quality to her delicate beauty, struck me suddenly as prehistoric, the sign of what was still raw and forceful in this bridled daughter of propriety and wealth. I had always found her beauty stirring, but never before had it seemed so thoroughly dominated by the sensuous. That was new. Where was Susan the interrogated prisoner? Susan the mousy widow? Susan the awesome mother’s downtrodden Cinderella? All gone! Was it having toyed with suicide and gotten away with it that gave her the courage to be so blatantly tempting? Was it the proximity of the disapproving mother that was goading her on? Or was this her calculated last-ditch effort to arouse and lure back the fugitive from matrimony?
Whatever, I was aroused.
With her legs thrown over the filigreed arm of the white wrought-iron chaise, Susan’s yellow dress rode high on her tanned thigh—I thoug
ht it must be the way she used to sit at age eight with Einstein, before she had begun to be educated by her fears. When she shifted in the chaise, or simply raised her arms to fool with her hair, the edge of her pale underpants came into view.
“Coming on very shameless,” I said. “For my benefit or your mother’s?”
“Both. Neither.”
“I don’t think she thinks the world of me to begin with.”
“Nor of me.”
“Then that won’t help any, will it?”
“Please, you’re ‘coming on’ like somebody’s nanny.”
Silence, while I watch that hair fan out in her two hands. One of her tanned legs is swinging to the slowest of beats over the arm of the garden chaise. This is not at all the scenario that I had constructed on the train coming down. I had not counted on a temptress, or an erection.
“She always thought I had the makings of a whore anyway,” says Susan, frowning like any victimized adolescent.
“I doubt that.”
“Oh, are you siding with my mother these days? It’s a regular phalanx. Only you’re the one who turned me against her.”
“That tack won’t work,” I said flatly.
“What will then? Living here in my old room like the crazy daughter? Having college boys ask me for dates over the card catalogue in the library? Watching the eleven o’clock news, with my Ovaltine and my mom? What ever has worked?”
I didn’t answer.
“I ruin everything,” she announced.
