by Philip Roth
‘Why? Why?” That he could seriously ask this question just took the heart out of me; I felt the tears welling up. “Because, among other things, I am the subject of that writing! I am the one your imprecise language has misrepresented! Because I come here each day and turn over the day’s receipts, every last item out of my most personal life, and in return I expect an accurate accounting!” I had begun to cry. “You were my friend, and I told you the truth. I told you everything.”
“Look, let me disabuse you of the idea that the whole world is waiting with bated breath for the newest issue of our little journal in which you claim you are misrepresented. I assure you that is not the case. It is not the New Yorker magazine, or even the Kenyon Review. If it is any comfort to you, most of my colleagues don’t even bother to read it. But this is your narcissism again. Your sense that the whole world has nothing to look forward to but the latest information about the secret life of Peter Tarnopol.”
The tears had stopped. “And that is your reductivism again, if I may say so, and your obfuscation. Spare me that word ‘narcissism,’ will you? You use it on me like a club.”
“The word is purely descriptive and carries no valuation,” said the doctor.
“Oh, is that so? Well, you be on the receiving end and see how little ‘valuation’ it carries! Look, can’t we grant that there is a difference between self-esteem and vanity, between pride and megalomania? Can we grant that there actually is an ethical matter at stake here, and that my sensitivity to it, and your apparent indifference to it, cannot be explained away as a psychological aberration of mine? You’ve got a psychology too, you know. You do this with me all the time, Dr. Spielvogel. First you shrink the area of moral concern, you say that what I, for instance, call my responsibility toward Susan is so much camouflaged narcissism—and then if I consent to see it that way, and I leave off with the moral implications of my conduct, you tell me I’m a narcissist who thinks only about his own welfare. Maureen, you know, used to do something similar—only she worked the hog-tying game from the other way round. She made the kitchen sink into a moral issue! Everything in the whole wide world was a test of my decency and honor—and the moral ignoramus you’re looking at believed her! If driving out of Rome for Frascati, I took a wrong turn, she had me pegged within half a mile as a felon, as a fiend up from Hell by way of Westchester and the Ivy League. And I believed her!…Look, look—let’s talk about Maureen a minute, let’s talk about the possible consequences of all this for me, ‘narcissistic’ as that must seem to you. Suppose Maureen were to get hold of this issue and read what you’ve written here. It’s not unlike her, after all, to be on her toes where I’m concerned—where alimony is concerned. I mean it won’t do, to go back a moment to what you just said—it won’t do to say that nobody reads the magazine anyway. Because if you really believed that, then you wouldn’t publish your paper there to begin with. What good are your findings published in a magazine that has no readers? The magazine is around, and it’s read by somebody, surely here in New York it is—and if it somehow came to Maureen’s attention…well, just imagine how happy she would be to read those pages about me to the judge in the courtroom. Just imagine a New York municipal judge taking that stuff in. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“Oh, I see very well what you’re saying.”
“Where you write, for instance, that I was ‘acting out’ sexually with other women ‘almost from the beginning of the marriage.’ First off, that is not accurate either. Stated like that, you make it seem as though I’m just another Italian-American who sneaks off after work each day for a quick bang on the way home from the poetry office. Do you follow me? You make me sound like somebody who is simply fucking around with women all the time. And that is not so. God knows what you write here is not a proper description of my affair with Karen. That was nothing if it wasn’t earnest—and earnest in part because I was so new at it!”
“And the prostitutes?”
“Two prostitutes—in three years. That breaks down to about half a prostitute a year, which is probably, among miserably married men, a national record for not acting out. Have you forgotten? I was miserable! See the thing in context, will you? You seem to forget that the wife I was married to was Maureen. You seem to forget the circumstances under which we married. You seem to forget that we had an argument in every piazza, cathedral, museum, trattoria, pensione, and hotel on the Italian peninsula. Another man would have beaten her head in! My predecessor Mezik, the Yugoslav barkeep, would have ‘acted out’ with a right to the jaw. I am a literary person. I went forth and did the civilized thing—I laid a three-thousand-lire whore! Ah, and that’s how you came up with ‘Italian-American’ for me, isn t it?
He waved a hand to show what he thought of my aperçu— then said, “Another man might have confronted his wife more directly, that is true, rather than libidinizing his anger.”
“But the only direct way to confront that woman was to kill her! And you yourself have told me that killing people is against the law, crazy wives included. I was not ‘sexually acting out,’ whatever that means—I was trying to stay alive in all that madness. Stay me! ‘Let me shun that,’ and so on!”
“And,” he was saying, “you conveniently forget once again the wife of your young English department colleague in Wisconsin.”
“Good Christ, who are you, Cotton Mather? Look, I may be childish and a weakling, I may even be the narcissist of your fondest professional dreams—but 1 am not a slob! I am not a bum or a lecher or a gigolo or some kind of walking penis. Why do you want to portray me that way? Why do you want to characterize me in your writing as some sort of heartless rapist manqué? Surely, surely there is another way to describe my affair with Karen—“
“But I said nothing about Karen. I only reminded you of the wife of your colleague, whom you ran into that afternoon at the shopping center in Madison.”
“You’ve got such a good memory, why don’t you also remember that I didn’t even fuck her! She blew me, in the car. So what? So what? I tell you, it was a surprise to the two of us. And what’s it to you, anyway? I mean that! We were friends. She wasn’t so happily married either. That, for Christ’s sake, wasn’t ‘sexually acting out.’ It was friendship! It was heartbrokenness! It was generosity! It was tenderness! It was despair! It was being adolescents together for ten secret minutes in the rear of a car before we both went nobly back into Adulthood! It was a sweet and harmless game of Let’s Pretend! Smile, if you like, smile from your pulpit, but that’s still closer to a proper description of what was going on there than what you call it. And we did not let it go any further, which was a possibility, you know; we let it remain a kind of happy, inconsequential accident and returned like good soldiers to the fucking front lines. Really, Your Holiness, really, Your Excellency, does that in your mind add up to ‘acting out sexually with other women from the beginning of the marriage’?”
“Doesn’t it?”
“Two street whores in Italy, a friend in a car in Madison…and Karen? No! I call it practically monkish, given the fact of my marriage. I call it pathetic, that’s what! From the beginning of his marriage, the Italian-American poet had some crazy idea that now that he was a husband his mission in life was to “be faithful—to whom never seemed to cross his mind. It was like keeping his word and doing his duty—what had gotten him married to this shrew in the first place! Once again the Italian-American poet did what he thought to be ‘manly’ and ‘upright’ and ‘principled’—which, needless to say, was only what was cowardly and submissive. Pussy-whipped, as my brother so succinctly puts it! As a matter of fact, Dr. Spielvogel, those two Italian whores and my colleague’s wife back of the shopping center, and Karen, constituted the only praiseworthy, the only manly, the only moral…oh, the hell with it.”
“I think at this point we are only saying the same thing in our different vocabularies. Isn’t that what you just realized?”
“No, no, no, no, no. I just realized that you are never going
to admit to me that you could be mistaken in any single particular of diction, or syntax, let alone in the overriding idea of that paper. Talk about narcissism as a defense!”
He did not bristle at my tone, contemptuous as it had become. His voice throughout had been strong and even—a touch of sarcasm, some irony, but no outrage, and certainly no tears. Which was as it should be. What did he have to lose if I left?
“I am not a student any longer, Mr. Tarnopol. I do not look to my patients for literary criticism. You would prefer that I leave the professional writing to you, it would seem, and confine my activities to this room. You remember how distressed you were several years ago to discover that I occasionally went out into the streets to ride the bus.”
“That was awe. Don’t worry, I’m over it.”
“Good. No reason for you to think I’m perfect.”
“I don’t.”
“On the other hand, the alternative is not necessarily to think I am another Maureen, out to betray and deceive you for my own sadistic and vengeful reasons.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“You may nonetheless drink that I am.”
“If you mean do I think that I have been misused by you, the answer is yes. Maureen is not the issue—that article is.”
“All right, that is your judgment. Now you must decide what you are going to do about the treatment. If you want to continue with your attack upon me, treatment will be impossible—it would be foolish even to try. If you want to return to the business at hand, then of course I am prepared to go forward. Or perhaps there is a third alternative that you may wish to consider—perhaps you will choose to take up treatment with somebody else. This is for you to decide before the next session.”
Susan was enraged by the decision I did reach. I never had heard her argue about anything as she did against Spielvogel’s “brutal” handling of me, nor had she ever dared to criticize me so forthrightly either. Of course her objections were in large part supplied by Dr. Golding, who, she told me, had been “appalled” by the way Spielvogel had dealt with me in the article in the Forum; however, she would never even have begun to communicate Golding’s position to me if it were not for startling changes that were taking place in her attitude toward herself. Now, maybe reading about me walking around in Maureen’s underwear did something to boost her confidence with me, but whatever had triggered it, I found myself delighted by the emergence of the vibrant and emphatic side so long suppressed in her—at the same time that I was greatly troubled by the possibility that what she and her doctor were suggesting about my decision to stay with Spielvogel constituted more of the humbling truth. Certainly in my defense I offered up to Susan what sounded even to me like the feeblest of arguments.
“You should leave him,” she said.
“I can’t. Not at this late date. He’s done me more good than harm.”
“But he’s got you all wrong. How could that do anybody any good?”
“I don’t know—but it did me. Maybe he’s a lousy analyst and a good therapist.”
“That makes no sense, Peter.”
“Look, I’m not getting into bed with my worst enemy any more, am I? I am out of that, am I not?”
“But any doctor would have helped you to leave her. Any doctor who was the least bit competent would have seen you through that.”
“But he happens to be the one who did it.”
“Does that mean he can just get away with anything as a result? His sense of what you are is all wrong. Publishing that article without consulting you about it first was all wrong. His attitude when you confronted him with what he had done, the way he said, ‘Either shut up or go’—that was as wrong as wrong can be. And you know it! Dr. Golding said that was as reprehensible as anything he had ever heard of between a doctor and his patient. Even his writing stinks—you said it was just jargon and crap.”
“Look, I’m staying with him. I don’t want to talk about it any more.”
“If I answered you like that, you’d hit the ceiling. You’d say, ‘Stop backing away! Stand up for yourself, twerp!’ Oh, I don’t understand why you are acting like this, when the man has so clearly abused you. Why do you let people get away with such things?”
“Which people?”
‘Which people? People like Maureen. People like Spielvogel. People who…”
“What?”
“Well, walk all over you like that.”
“Susan, I cannot put in any more time thinking of myself as someone who gets walked over. It gets me nowhere.”
“Then don’t be one! Don’t let them get away with it!”
“It doesn’t seem to me that in this case anybody is getting away with anything.”
“Oh, Lambchop, that isn’t what Dr. Golding says.”
Spielvogel simply shrugged off what Dr. Golding said, when I passed it on to him. “I don’t know the man,” he grunted, and that was that. Settled. As though if he did know him, he could tell me Golding’s motives for taking such a position—otherwise, why bother? As for Susan’s anger, and her uncharacteristic vehemence about my leaving him, well, I understood that, did I not? She hated Spielvogel for what Spielvogel had written about the Peter who was to her so inspirational and instructive, the man she had come to adore for the changes he was helping to bring about in her life. Spielvogel had demythologized her Pygmalion—of course Galatea was furious. Who expected otherwise?
I must say, his immunity to criticism was sort of dazzling. Indeed, the imperviousness of this pallid doctor with the limping gait seemed to me, in those days of uncertainty and self-doubt, a condition to aspire to: I am right and you are wrong, and even if I’m not, I’ll just hold out and hold out and not give a single inch, and that will make it so. And maybe that’s why I stayed on with him—out of admiration for his armor, in the hope that some of that impregnability would rub off on me. Yes, I thought, he is teaching me by example, the arrogant German son of a bitch. Only I won’t give him the satisfaction of telling him. Only who is to say he doesn’t know it? Only who is to say he does, other than I?
As the weeks passed and Susan continued to grimace at the mention of Spielvogel’s name, I sometimes came close to making what seemed to me the best possible defense of him—and thereby of myself, for if it turned out that I had been as deluded about Spielvogel as about Maureen, it was going to be awfully hard ever to believe in my judgment again. In order to substantiate my own claim to sanity and intelligence, and to protect my sense of trust from total collapse (or was it just to perpetuate my childish illusions? to cherish and protect my naïveté right on down to the last good drop?), I felt I had to make as strong a case as I could for him. And even if that meant accepting as valid his obfuscating defense—even if it meant looking back myself with psychoanalytic skepticism upon my own valid objections! “Look,” I wanted to say to Susan, “if it weren’t for Spielvogel, I wouldn’t even be here. If it weren’t for Spielvogel saying Why not stay?’ every time I say ‘Why not leave?’ I would have been out of this affair long ago. We have him to thank for whatever exists between us—he’s the one who was your advocate, not me.” But that it was largely because of Spielvogel’s encouragement that I had continued to visit her almost nightly during that first year, when I was so out of sympathy with her way of living, was really not her business, even if she wouldn’t let up about his “reprehensible” behavior; nor would it do her fragile sense of self-esteem any good to know that even now, several years into our affair—with me her Lambchop and her my Suzie Q., with all that tender lovers’ playfulness between us—that it was Spielvogel who prevented me from leaving her whenever I became distressed about those burgeoning dreams of marriage and family that I did not share. “But she wants to have children—and now, before she gets any older.” “But you don’t want to.” “Right. And I can’t allow her to nurse these expectations. That just won’t do.” “Then tell her not to.” “I do. I have. She can’t bear hearing it any more. She says, ‘I know, I know, you’re not goi
ng to marry me—do you have to tell me that every hour?’” “Well, every hour is perhaps a little more frequent than necessary.” “Oh, it isn’t every hour-it just sounds that way to her. You see, because I tell her where things stand doesn’t mean she takes it to heart.” “Yes, but what more can you do?” “Go. I should.” T wouldn’t think she thinks you should.” “But if I stay…” “You might really fall in love with her. Does it ever occur to you that maybe this is what you are running away from? Not the children, not the marriage…but the love?” “Oh, Doctor, don’t start practicing psychoanalysis. No, that doesn’t occur to me. I don’t think it should, because I don’t think it’s true.” “No? But you are somewhat in love already—are you not? You tell me how sweet she is, how kind she is. How gentle. You tell me how beautiful she is when she sits there reading. You tell me what a touching person she is. Sometimes you are positively lyrical about her.” “Am I?” “Yes, yes, and you know that.” “But there is still too much that’s wrong there, you know that.” “Yes, well, this I could have warned you about at the outset.” “Please, the husband of Maureen Tarnopol understands that the other gender is also imperfect.” “Knowing this, the husband of Maureen Tarnopol should be grateful perhaps for a woman, who despite her imperfections, happens to be tender and appreciative and absolutely devoted to him. She is all these things, am I right?” “She is all these tilings. She also turns out to be smart and charming and funny.” “And in love with you.” “And in love with me.” “And a cook—such a cook. You tell me about her dishes, you make my mouth water.” “You’re very hung up on the pleasure principle, Dr. Spielvogel.” “And you? Tell me, where are you running again? To what? To whom? Why?” “To no one, to nothing—but ‘why?’ I’ve told you why: suppose she tries to commit suicide!” “Still with the suicide?” “But what if she does it!” “Isn’t that her responsibility? And Dr. Golding’s? She is in therapy after all. Are you going to run for fear of this remote possibility?” “I can’t take it hanging over my head. Not after all that’s gone on. Not after Maureen.” “Maybe you are too thin-skinned, you know? Maybe it is time at thirty to develop a thicker hide.” “No doubt. I’m sure you rhinoceroses lead a better life. But my hide is my hide. I’m afraid you can shine a flashlight through it. So give me some other advice.” “What other advice is there? The choice is yours. Stay or run.” “This choice that is mine you structure oddly.” “All right, you structure it.” “The point, you see, is that if I do stay, she must realize that I am marrying no one unless and until I want to do it. And everything conspires to make me think that 1 don’t want to do it.” “Mr. Tarnopol, somehow I feel I can rely on you to put that proviso before her from time to time.”
