by Philip Roth
All Susan said to me about our arrangement was this, and being Susan, she didn’t even say it aloud: “I’m yours. I’ll do anything. Come and go as you like. Let me feed you. Let me sit with you at night and watch you read. You can do anything you want to my body. I’ll do anything you say. Just have dinner with me sometimes and use some of these things. And I’ll never utter a peep. I’ll be good as gold. I won’t ask what you do when you go away. You don’t have to take me anywhere. Just stay here sometimes and make use of whatever you want, including me. You see, I have all these thick bath-sized towels and Belgian lace tablecloths, all this lovely crockery, three bathrooms, two televisions, and two million dollars of Jamey’s money with more of my own to come, I have these breasts and this vagina, these limbs, this skin—and no life. Give me just a little bit of that, and in return whenever you want to you can come here and recover from your wife. Any hour of the day or night. You don’t even have to call beforehand.”
It’s a deal, I said. The broken shall succor the broken.
Of course, Susan was not the first young woman that I had met in New York since I’d come East seeking asylum in June of ‘62. She was just the first one I’d settled in with. According to the custom of that era—it is depressing to think that it may be the custom still—I had been to parties, befriended girls (which is to say, stood exchanging ironic quips with them in the corner of someone’s crowded West Side apartment), and then had gone to bed with them, either before or after taking them out to dinner a couple of times. Some were undoubtedly nice people, but I didn’t have the staying power or the confidence really to find out. Oftentimes during my first year in New York I discovered that I did not really want to take off my clothes or those of my new-found acquaintance, once we had gotten back to one or another of our apartments, and so I would fall into silent fits of melancholy that must have made me seem rather freakish—or at least affected. One young knockout, I remember, took it very personally and became incensed that I should suddenly have turned lugubrious on her after having been “so ferociously charming” with my back against the wall of one of those crowded living rooms; she asked if it was true that I was trying to kick being queer, and I, dim-witted as can be, began to struggle to remove her pantyhose, an act which turned out to consume such passion as I had. She took her leave shortly thereafter, and the following morning, going down for the paper and my seeded roll, I found wedged into the frame of the door an index card that had penciled on it, “Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here.” Those parties I went to, with their ongoing intersexual competition in self-defense, bred a lot of this sort of scuffling, or maybe a little bit went a long way with me then; eventually invitations from editors and writers to parties where there would be “a lot of girls” I mostly turned down; when I didn’t, I generally regretted it afterward.
Only months after my arrival, it became clear to me—depressingly so—that New York City was probably the worst possible place, outside of the Vatican, for a man in my predicament to try to put an end to his old life and begin a new one. As I was discovering at these parties, I was in no shape to get much pleasure out of my status as a “single” man; and, as I discovered in my lawyer’s office, the state of New York was hardly about to grant that status de jure recognition. Indeed, now that the Peter Tarnopols were New York residents, it looked as though they would be husband and wife forever. Too late I learned that had we gotten separated back in Wisconsin, we could, according to the law there, have been divorced after having voluntarily lived separate and apart for five years. (Of course, had I returned to Wisconsin in June of ‘62, rather than staying on at Morris’s apartment and from there launching into my career as Spielvogel’s patient, it is doubtful that I ever could have managed to set myself up in Madison separate and apart from Maureen.) But, as things turned out, in the sanctuary that I had taken New York to be, the only grounds for divorce was adultery, and since Maureen did not want to divorce me on any grounds, and I had no way of knowing whether she was an adulteress, or proving it even if I knew, it looked in all likelihood as though I would be celebrating my golden wedding anniversary on the steps of the State House in Albany. Moreover, because my lawyer had been unable to get Maureen and her attorney to agree to a legal separation or to any kind of financial settlement (let alone to a Mexican or Nevada divorce that would have required mutual consent to be incontestable), my official marital status in New York very shortly came to be that of the guilty party in a separation action brought by a wife against a husband who had “abandoned” her. Though we had lived together as husband and wife for only three years, I was ordered by the New York court to provide maintenance for my abandoned wife to the tune of one hundred dollars a week, and to provide it until death did us part. And in New York State what else could part us?
I could, of course, have moved and taken up residence in some state with a less restrictive divorce law, and for a while, with the aid of The Complete Guide to Divorce by Samuel G. Kling—the book that became my bedside Bible in that first bewildering phase of my life as a New York resident—I seriously investigated the possibilities. Reading Kling I found out that in some eleven states “separation without cohabitation and without reasonable expectation of reconciliation” was grounds for divorce, after anywhere from eighteen months to three years. One night I got out of bed at four A.M. and sat down and wrote letters to the state universities in each of the eleven states and asked if there might be a job open for me in their department of English; within the month I had received offers from the universities of Florida, Delaware, and Wyoming. According to Kling, in the first two states “voluntary three-year separation” provided grounds for divorce; in Wyoming, only two years’ separation was necessary. My lawyer was quick to advise me of the various means by which Maureen might attempt to contest such a divorce; he also let me know that upon granting me a divorce the out-of-state judge would in all probability order me to continue to pay the alimony set by the New York court in the separation judgment; furthermore (to answer my next question), if I refused after the divorce to make the alimony payments, I could be (and with Maureen as my antagonist, no doubt would be) hauled into court under state reciprocity agreements and held in contempt by the Florida or Delaware or Wyoming judge for failing to support my former spouse in New York. A divorce, my lawyer said, I might be able to pull off—but escape the alimony? never. Nonetheless, I went ahead and accepted a job teaching American literature and creative writing the following September in Laramie, Wyoming. I went immediately to the library and took out books on the West. I went up to the Museum of Natural History and walked among the Indian artifacts and the tableau of the American bison. I decided I would try to learn to ride a horse, at least a little, before I got out there. And I thought of the money I would not be paying to Dr. Spielvogel.
Some ten weeks later I wrote to tell the chairman of the English department in Laramie that because of unforeseen circumstances I would be unable to take the job. The unforeseen circumstance was the hopelessness I had begun to feel at the prospect of a two-year exile in Wyoming. After which I might be able to ride a horse, but I would still have to pay through the nose. If the divorce even went uncontested! And would Florida be any better? Less remote, but a year longer to qualify for the divorce, and the end result just as uncertain. It was about this time that I decided that the only way out was to leave America and its marital laws and reciprocal state agreements and begin my life anew as a stranger in a foreign country. Since I understood that Maureen could always attach future royalties if they were to come through a New York publishing house, I would have to sell world rights to my next book to my English publisher and receive all payment through him. Or why not start from scratch—grow a beard and change my name?…And who was to say there would ever be a next book?
I spent the following few months deciding whether to return to Italy, where I still had a few friends, or to try Norway, where chances were slim that anybody would ever find me (unless of course they went looking). How about
Finland? I read all about Finland in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. High rate of literacy, long winters, and many trees. I imagined myself in Helsinki, and, while I was at it, Istanbul, Marrakesh, Lisbon, Aberdeen, and the Shetland Islands. Very good place to disappear, the Shetland Islands. Pop. 19,343,and not that far, really, from the North Pole. Principal industries, sheep farming and fishing. Also raise famous ponies. No mention in Britannica of treat agreement with New York State for extradition of marital criminals…
But, oh, if I was outraged in New York over all I had lost in that marriage, imagine how I would feel when I woke up bearded in my cottage on the moors in Scalloway to discover I had lost my country as well. What “freedom” would I have won then, speaking American to the ponies? What “justice” would I have made, an ironical Jewish novelist with a crook and a pack of sheep? And what’s worse, suppose she found me out and followed me there, for all that my name is now Long Tom Dumphy? Not at all unlikely, given that I couldn’t shake her in this, a country of two hundred million. Oh, imagine what that would be like, me with me stick and Maureen with her rage in the middle of the roarin’ North Sea, and only 19,343 others to hold us apart?
So, unhappily (and not at all, really) I accepted my fate as a male resident of the state of New York of the republic of America who no longer cared to live with a wife whose preference it was to continue to live with (and off) him. I began, as they say, to try to make the best of it. Indeed, by the time I met Susan I was actually beginning to pass out of the first stages of shell shock (or was it fallout sickness?) and had even found myself rather taken with (as opposed to “taken by,” very much a preoccupation at the time) a bright and engaging girl named Nancy Miles, fresh out of college and working as a “checker” for the New Yorker. Nancy Miles was eventually to go off to Paris to marry an American journalist stationed there, and subsequently to publish a book of autobiographical short stories, most of them based upon her childhood as a U.S. Navy commander’s daughter in postwar Japan. However, the year I met her she was free as a bird, and soaring like one, too. I hadn’t been so drawn to anyone since the Wisconsin debacle, when I had thrown myself at the feet of my nineteen-year-old student Karen (for whom I intermittently continued to pine, by the way; I imagined her sometimes with me and the sheep in Scalloway), but after three consecutive evenings together of nonstop dinner conversation, the last culminating in lovemaking as impassioned as anything I’d known since those illicit trysts between classes in Karen’s room, I decided not to call Nancy again. Two weeks passed, and she sent me this letter:
Mr. Peter Tarnopol
Institute for Unpredictable Behavior
62 West 12th Street
New York, N.Y.
Dear Mr. Tarnopol:
With reference to our meeting of 5/6/63:
What happened?
Where are we?
While I fully recognize that numerous demands of this nature must strain the limits of your patience, I nonetheless make bold to request that you fill out the above questionnaire and return it to the address below as soon as it is convenient.
I remain,
yours,
Perplexed
Perplexed perhaps, but not broken. That was the last I heard from Nancy. I chose Susan.
It goes without saying that those seeking sanctuary have ordinarily to settle for something less than a seven-room apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in which to take refuge from the wolves or the cops or the cold. I for one had never lived in anything approaching Susan’s place for size or grandeur. Nor had I ever eaten so well in my life. Maureen’s cooking wasn’t that bad, but generally dinnertime was the hour reserved at our house for settling scores with me and my sex—unsettled scores that some evenings seemed to me to have been piling up ever since the first nucleic acid molecule went ahead and reproduced itself several billion years ago; consequently, even when the food was hot and tasty, the ambience was wrong. And in the years before I took to dining in each night on Maureen’s gall, there had been army chow or university cafeteria stew. But Susan was a pro, trained by masters at what she had not learned at Calpurnia’s knee: during the year she had been waiting for her fiancé to be graduated from Princeton and their life of beauty and abundance to begin, she had commuted up to New York to learn how to cook French, Italian, and Chinese specialties. The course in each cuisine lasted six weeks, and Susan stayed on (as she hadn’t at Wellesley) triumphantly to complete all three. To her great glee she discovered she could now at least outcook her mother. Oh, what a wonderful wife (she hoped and prayed) she was going to make for this fantastic stroke of luck named James McCall the Third!
During her widowhood Susan had only rarely had the opportunity to feed anyone other than herself, and so it was that I became the first dinner guest ever to appreciate in full a culinary expertise that spanned the continents. I had never tasted food so delicious. And not even my own dutiful mother had waited on me the way this upper-crust waitress did. I was under standing instructions to proceed to eat without her, so that she could scamper freely back and forth into the kitchen getting the next dish going in her wok. Good enough. We had little outside of the food to talk about anyway. I asked about her family, I asked about her analysis, I asked about Jamey and the McCalls. I asked why she had left Wellesley in her first year. She shrugged and she flushed and she averted her eyes. She replied, oh they’re very nice, and he’s very nice, and she’s such a sweet and thoughtful person, and “Why did I leave Wellesley? Oh, I just left.” For weeks I got no more information or animation than I had the night we met, when I was seated next to her at the dinner party I was invited to annually at my publisher’s town house: unswerving agreeableness, boundless timidity—a frail and terrified beauty. And in the beginning that was just fine with me. Bring on the blanquette de veau.
Each morning I headed back to the desk in my West Twelfth Street sublet, off to school to practice the three Rs—reading, writing, and angrily toting up yet again the alimony and legal bills. In the elevator, as I descended from 9D, I met up with the schoolchildren a third my age whom Susan took on weekends to the Planetarium and the puppet shows, and the successful business executives whose August recreation she had sometimes been. And what am I doing here, I would ask myself. With her! Just how debilitated can I be! My brother’s recent warning would frequently come back to me as I exited past the doorman, who always courteously raised his cap to Mrs. McCall’s gentleman caller, but had surmised enough about my bankroll not to make a move to hail a cab. Moe had telephoned me about Susan the night after I had come around with her to have dinner at his and Lenore’s invitation. He laid it right on the line. “Another Maureen, Pep?” “She’s hardly a Maureen.” “The gray eyes and the ‘fine’ bones have got you fooled, kiddo. Another fucked-up shiksa. First the lumpenproletariat, now the aristocracy. What are you, the Malinowski of Manhattan? Enough erotic anthropology. Get rid of her, Pep. You’re sticking your plug in the same socket.” “Moe, hold the advice, okay?” “Not this time. I don’t care to come home a year from now, Peppy, to find you shitting into your socks.” “But I’m all right.” “Oh, Christ, here we go again.” “Moey, I happen to know what I’m doing.” “With a woman you know what you’re doing? Look, what the hell is Spielvogel’s attitude toward this budding catastrophe—what is he doing to earn his twenty bucks an hour, anything?” “Moe, she is not Maureen!” “You’re letting the legs fool you, kid, the legs and the ass.” “I tell you I’m not in it for that.” “If not that, what? Her deep intelligence? Her quick wit? You mean on top of being tongue-tied, the ice cube can’t screw right either? Jesus! A pretty face must go an awful long way with you—that, plus a good strong dose of psychoneurosis, and a girl is in business with my little brother. You come over here tonight for dinner, Peppy, you come eat with us every night—I’ve got to talk some sense into you.” But each evening I turned up at Susan’s, not Moe’s, carrying with me my book to be read later by the fire, envisioning, as I stepped through the door, my blanque
tte, my bath, and my bed.
So the first months passed. Then one night I said, ‘Why don’t you go back to college?” “Oh, I couldn’t do that.” “Why couldn’t you?” “I have too much to do already.” “You have nothing to do.” “Are you kidding?” “Why don’t you go back to college, Susan?” “I’m too busy, really. Did you say you did want kirsch on your fruit?”
Some weeks later. “Look, a suggestion.” “Yes?” “Why don’t you move in bed?” “Haven’t you enough room?” “I mean move. Underneath me.” “Oh, that. I just don’t, that’s all.” “Well, try it. It might liven things up.” “I’m happy as I am, thank you. Don’t you like the spinach salad?” “Listen to me: why don’t you move your body when I fuck you, Susan?” “Oh, please, let’s just finish dinner.” “I want you to move when I fuck you.” “I told you, I’m happy as I am.” “You’re miserable as you are.” “I’m not, and it’s none of your business.” “Do you know how to move?” “Oh, why are you torturing me like this?” “Do you want me to show you what I mean by ‘move’?” “Stop this. I am not going to talk about it! I don’t have to be shown anything, certainly not by you! Your life isn’t such a model of order, you know.” “What about college? Why don’t you go back to college?” “Peter, stop. Please! Why are you doing this to me?” “Because the way you live is awful.” “It is not.” “It’s crazy, really.” “If it’s so crazy then what are you doing here every night? I don’t force you to spend the night. I don’t ask anything of you at all.” “You don’t ask anything of anyone, so that’s neither here nor there.” “That’s none of your business either.” “It is my business.” “Why? Why yours?” “Because I am here—because I do spend the night.” “Oh, please, you must stop right now. Don’t make me argue, please. I hate arguments and I refuse to participate in one. If you want to argue with somebody, go argue with your wife. I thought you come here not to fight.”
