by Philip Roth
“Go ahead! What do I care. The story’s still in Dan’s safe! Go ahead! Kill me, why don’t you!”
“Okay, I will,” and cuffed her head, first one side, then the other. “If that’s what you want, I will!”
“Do it!”
“Now—“ I said, striking at the back of her skull with the flat of my palm, “now—“ I hit her again, same spot, “now when you go to court, you won’t have to make it all up: now you’ll have something real to cry about to the good Judge Rosenzweig! A real beating, Maureen! The real thing, at last!” I was on the floor, astraddle her, cuffing her head with my open hand. Her blood was smeared everywhere: over her face, my hands, the rush matting, all over the front of her suit, down her silk blouse, on her bare throat. And the pages of the story were strewn around us, most of them bloodied too. The real thing—and it was marvelous. I was loving it.
I, of course, had no intention of killing her right then and there, not so long as those jails that Spielvogel had warned me about still existed. I was not even really in a rage any longer. Just enjoying myself thoroughly. All that gave me pause—oddly— was that I was ruining the suit in which she’d looked so attractive. But overlook the suit, I managed to tell myself. “I’m going to kill you, my beloved wife, I’m going to end life for you here today at the age of thirty-six, but in my own sweet time. Oh, you should have agreed to the Algonquin, Maureen.”
“Go ahead—“ drooling now down her chin, “my life, my life is such shit, let me the already…”
“Soon, soon now, very soon now you’re going to be nice and dead.” I hadn’t to wonder for very long where to assault her next. I rolled her onto her face and began to pound with a stiff palm at her behind. The skirt of the red suit and her half-slip were hiked up in the back, and there was her little alley cat’s behind, encased in tight white underpants, perhaps the very pair about which her class at the New School had heard so much of late. I beat her ass. Ten, fifteen, twenty strokes—I counted them out for her, aloud—and then while she lay there sobbing, I stood up and went to the fireplace and picked up the black wrought-iron poker that Susan had bought for me in the Village. “And now,” I announced, “I am going to kill you, as promised.”
No word from the floor, just a whimper.
“I’m afraid they are going to have to publish your fiction posthumously, because I am about to beat your crazy, lying head in with this poker. I want to see your brains, Maureen. I want to see those brains of yours with my own eyes. I want to step in them with my shoes—and then I’ll pass them along to Science. God only knows what they’ll find. Get ready, Maureen, you’re about to the horribly.”
I could make out now the barely audible words she was whimpering: “Kill me,” she was saying, “kill me kill me—“ as oblivious as I was in the first few moments to the fact that she had begun to shit into her underwear. The smell had spread around us before I saw the turds swelling the seat of her panties. “The me,” she babbled deliriously—“the me good, the me long—“
“Oh, Christ.”
All at once she screamed, “Make me dead!”
“Maureen. Get up, Maureen. Maureen, come on now.”
She opened her eyes. I wondered if she had passed over at last into total madness. To be institutionalized forever—at my expense. Ten thousand bucks more a year! I was finished!
“Maureen! Maureen!”
She managed a bizarre smile.
“Look.” I pointed between her legs. “Don’t you see? Don’t you know? Look, please. You’ve shit all over yourself. Do you hear me, do you understand me? Answer me!”
She answered. “You couldn’t do it.”
“What?”
“You couldn’t do it. You coward.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“Big brave man.”
“Well, at least you’re yourself, Maureen. Now get wp. Use the bathroom!”
“A yellow coward.”
“Wash yourself!”
She pushed up on her elbows and tried to bring herself to her feet, but with an agonized groan, slumped backward. “I—I have to use your phone.”
“After,” I said, reaching down with a hand to help lift her.
“I have to phone now.”
I gagged and averted my head. “Later—!”
“You beat me”—as though the news had just that moment reached her. “Look at this blood! My blood! You beat me like some Harlem whore!”
I had now to step away from the odor she gave off. Oh, this was just too much madness, too much all around. The tears started rolling out of me.
‘Where is your phone!”
“Look, who are you calling?”
“Whoever I want! You beat me! You filthy pig, you beat me!” She had made it now up onto her knees. One blow with the poker—still in my right hand, by the way—and she would phone no one.
I watched her stumbling over her own feet to the bedroom. One shoe on and one shoe off. “No, the bathroom!”
“1 have to phone…”
“You’re leaking your shit all over!”
“You beat me, you monster! Is that all you can think of? The shit on your House and Garden rug? Oh, you middle-class bastard, I don’t believe it!”
“WASH YOURSELF!”
“NO!”
From the bedroom came the sound of the casters rolling into the worn grooves in the wooden floor. She had collapsed onto the bed, as though dropping from the George Washington Bridge.
She was dialing—and sobbing.
“Hello? Mary? It’s Maureen. He beat up on me, Mary—he-hello? No? Hello?” With an animalish whine of frustration, she hung up. Then she was dialing again, so slowly and fitfully she might have been falling off to sleep between every other digit.
“Hello? Hello, is this the Egans? Is this 201-236-2890? Isn’t this Egans? Hello?” She let out another whine and threw the receiver at the hook. “I want to talk to the Egans! I want the Egans!” she cried, banging the receiver up and down now in its cradle.
I stood in the doorway to the bedroom with my poker.
“What the hell are you crying about?” she said, looking up at me. “You wanted to beat me, and you beat me, so stop crying. Why can’t you be a man for a change and do somedung, instead of being such a crybaby!”
“Do what? Do what?”
“You can dial the Egans! You broke my fingers! I have no feeling in my fingers!”
“1 didn’t touch your fingers!”
“Then why can’t I dial! DIAL FOR ME! STOP CRYING FOR FIVE SECONDS AND DIAL THE RIGHT NUMBER!”
So I did it. She told me to do it, and I did it. 201-236-2890. Ding-a-ling. Ding-a-ling.
“Hello?” a woman said.
“Hello,” said I, “is this Mary Egan?”
“Yes. Who is this, please?”
“Just a moment, Maureen Tarnopol wants to talk to you.” I handed my wife the phone, gagging as her aroma reached me again.
“Mary?” Maureen said. “Oh Mary,” and wretchedly, she was sobbing once again. “Is, is Dan home? I have to talk to Dan, oh Mary, he, he beat me, Peter, that was him, he beat up on me, bad-”
And I, fully armed, stood by and listened. Who was I to phone for her next, the police to come and arrest me, or Valducci to write it up in the Daily News?
I left her to herself in the bedroom, and with a sponge and a pan of water from the kitchen began to clean the blood and feces from the rush matting on the living room floor. I kept the poker by my side—now, ridiculously, for protection.
I was on my knees, the fifteenth or twentieth wad of paper toweling in my hand, when Maureen came out of the bedroom.
“Oh, what a good little boy,” she said.
“Somebody has to clean up your shit.”
“Well, you’re in trouble now, Peter.”
I imagined that she was right—my stomach felt all at once as though I were the one who had just evacuated in his pants— but I pretended otherwise. “Oh, am I?”
‘When Dan Egan gets ho
me, I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes.”
“That remains to be seen.”
“You better run, my dear. Fast and far.”
“You better wash yourself—and then go!”
“I want a drink.”
“Oh, Maureen, please. You stink!”
“I NEED A DRINK! YOU TRIED TO MURDER ME!”
“YOU’RE TRACKING SHIT EVERYWHERE!”
“Oh, that’s typical of you!”
“DO AS I SAY! WASH YOURSELF!”
“NO!”
I brought out a bottle of bourbon and poured each of us a big drink. She took the glass and before I could say “No!” sat right down on Susan’s slipcover.
“Oh, you bitch.”
“Fuck it,” she said, hopelessly, and threw down the drink, barroom style.
“You call me the baby, Maureen, and sit there in your diaper-ful, defying me. Why must you defy me like this? Why?”
“Why not,” she said, shrugging. “What else is there to do.” She held the glass out for another shot.
I closed my eyes, I didn’t want to look at her. “Maureen,” I pleaded, “get out of my life, will you? Will you please? I beg you. How much more time are we going to use up in this madness? Not only my time but yours.”
“You had your chance. You chickened out.”
“Why must it end in murder?”
Coldly: “I’m only trying to make a man out of you, Peppy, that’s all.
“Oh, give it up then, will you? It’s a lost cause. You’ve won, Maureen, okay? You’re the winner.”
“Bullshit I am! Oh, don’t you pull that cheap bullshit on me.”
“But what more do you want?”
“What I don’t have. Isn’t that what people want? What’s coming to me.”
“But nothing is coming to you. Nothing is coming to anyone.”
“And that also includes you, golden boy!” And leaking through her underpants, she finally, fifteen minutes after the initial request, marched off to the bathroom—where she slammed and locked the door.
I ran up and hammered on it—“And don’t you try to kill yourself in there! Do you hear me?”
“Oh, don’t worry, mister—you ain’t gettin’ off that easy this time!”
It was nearly midnight when she decided on her own that she was ready to leave: I had to sit and watch her try to clean the blood from the pages of “Dressing Up in Mommy’s Clothes” (by Maureen J. Tarnopol) with a damp sponge; I had to find her a large paper clip and a clean manila envelope for the manuscript; I had to give her two more drinks, and then listen to myself compared, not entirely to my advantage, with Messrs. Mezik and Walker. While I went about removing the odoriferous slipcovers and bedspread to the bathroom clothes hamper, I was berated at length for my class origins and allegiances, as she understood them; my virility she analyzed while I sprinkled the rush matting with Aqua Velva. Only when I threw all the windows open and stood there in the breeze, preferring to breathe fumes from outside rather than inside the apartment, did Maureen finally get up to go. “Am I now supposed to oblige you, Peter, by jumping?” “Just airing the place—but exit however you like.” “I came in through the door and I will now go out through the door.” “Always the lady.” “Oh, you won’t get away with this!” she said, breaking into tears as she departed.
I double-locked and chained the door behind her, and immediately telephoned Spielvogel at his home.
“Yes, Mr. Tarnopol. What can I do for you?”
“I’m sorry to wake you, Dr. Spielvogel. But I thought I’d better talk to you. Tell you what happened. She came.”
“Yes?”
“And I beat her up.”
“Badly?”
“She’s still walking.”
“Well, that’s good to hear.”
I began to laugh. “Literally beat the shit out of her. I’d bloodied her nose, you see, and spanked her ass, and then I told her I was going to kill her with the fireplace poker, and apparently the idea excited her so, she crapped all over the apartment.”
“I see.”
I couldn’t stop laughing. “It’s a longer story than that, but that’s the gist of it. She just started to shit!”
Spielvogel said, after a moment, “Well, you sound as though you had a good time.”
“I did. The place still stinks, but actually, it was terrific. In retrospect, one of the high points of my life! I thought, ‘This is it, I’m going to do it. She wants a beating, I’ll give it to her!’ The minute she came in, you see, the minute she sat down, she virtually asked for it. Do you know what she told me? ‘I’m not going to divorce you, ever.’”
“I expected as much.”
“Yes? Then why didn’t you say something?”
“You indicated to me it was worth the risk. You assured me you wouldn’t collapse, however things went.”
“Well, I didn’t…did I?”
“Did you?”
“I don’t know. Before she left—after the beating—she called her lawyer. I dialed the number for her.”
“You did?”
“And I cried, I’m afraid. Not torrentially, but some. I tell you, though, it wasn’t for me, Doctor—believe it or not, it was for her. You should have seen that performance.”
“And now what?”
“Now?”
“Now you ought to call your lawyer, yes?”
“Of course!”
“You sound a little unstrung,” said Spielvogel.
“I’m really all right. I feel fine, surprisingly enough.”
“Then telephone the lawyer. If you want, call me back and tell me what he said. I’ll be up.”
What my lawyer said was that I was to leave town immediately and stay away until he told me to come back. He informed me that for what I had done I could be placed under arrest. In my euphoria, I had neglected to think of it that way.
I called Spielvogel back to give him the news and cancel my sessions for the coming week; I said that I assumed (please no haggling, I prayed) that I wouldn’t have to pay for the hours that I missed—“likewise if I get ninety days for this.” “If you are incarcerated,” he assured me, “I will try my best to get someone to take over your hours.” Then I telephoned Susan, who had been waiting by her phone all night to learn the outcome of my meeting with Maureen—was I getting divorced? No, we were getting out of town. Pack a bag. “At this hour? How? Where?” I picked her up in a taxi and for sixty dollars (it would have gone for three sessions with Spielvogel anyway, said I to comfort myself) the driver agreed to take us down the Garden State Parkway to Atlantic City, where I had once spent two idyllic weeks as a twelve-year-old in a seaside cottage with my cousins from Camden, my father’s family. There, within the first twelve hours, I had fallen in love with Sugar Wasserstrom, a sprightly curly-haired girl from New Jersey, a schoolmate of my cousin’s, prematurely fitted out with breasts just that spring (April, my cousin told me from his bed that night). That I came from New York made me something like a Frenchman in Sugar’s eyes; sensing this, I told lengthy stories about riding the subway, till shortly she began to fall in love with me too. Then I let her have my Gene Kelly version of “Long Ago and Far Away,” crooned it right into her ear as we snuggled down the boardwalk arm in arm, and with that, I believe, I finished her off. The girl was gone. I kissed her easily a thousand times in two weeks. Atlantic City, August 1945: my kingdom by the sea. World War Two ended with Sugar in my arms—I had an erection, which she tactfully ignored, and which I did my best not to bring to her attention. Doubled-up with the pain of my unfired round, I nonetheless kept on kissing. How could I let suffering stop me at a time like this? Thus the postwar era dawned, and, at twelve, my adventures with girls had begun.
I was to stay away as long as Dan Egan remained in Chicago on business. My lawyer was waiting for Egan to get back to be absolutely certain he wasn’t going to press charges for assault with intent to kill—or to attempt to persuade him not to. In the meantime, I tried to show Susan a good
time. We had breakfast in bed in our boardwalk hotel. I paid ten dollars to have her profile drawn in pastels. We ate big fried scallops and visited the Steel Pier. I recalled for her the night of V-J Day, when Sugar and I and my cousins and their friends had conga-ed up and down the boardwalk (with my aunt’s permission) to celebrate Japan’s defeat. Was I effusive! And free with the cash! But it’s my money, isn’t it? Not hers—mine! I still couldn’t grow appropriately serious about the grave legal consequences of my brutality, or remorseful, quite yet, about having done so cold-heartedly what, as a little Jewish boy, I had been taught to despise. A man beating a woman? What was more loathsome, except a man beating a child?
The first evening I checked in on the phone with Dr. Spielvogel at the hour I ordinarily would have been arriving at his office for my appointment. “I feel like the gangster hiding out with his moll,” I told him. “It sounds like it suits you,” he said. “All in all it was a rewarding experience. You should have told me about barbarism a long time ago.” “You seem to have taken to it very nicely on your own.”
In the late afternoon of our second full day, my lawyer phoned—no, Egan wasn’t back from Chicago, but his wife had called to say that Maureen had been found unconscious in her apartment and taken by ambulance to Roosevelt Hospital. She had been out for two days and there was a chance she would die.
And covered with bruises, I thought. From my hands.
“After she left me, she went home and tried to kill herself.”
“That’s what it sounds like.”
“I better get up there then.”
“Why?” asked the lawyer.
“Better that I’m there than that I’m not.” Even I wasn’t quite sure what I meant.
“The police might come around,” he told me.
Valducci might come around, I thought.
“You sure you want to do this?” he asked.
“I’d better.”
“Okay. But if the cops are there, call me. I’ll be home all night. Don’t say anything to anyone. Just call me and I’ll come over.”
I told Susan what had happened and that we were going back to New York. She too asked why. “She’s not your business any more, Peter. She is not your concern. She’s trying to drive you crazy, and you’re letting her.”
