by Philip Roth
“Look, if she dies I’d better be there.”
“Why?”
“I ought to be, that’s all.”
“But why? Because you’re her ‘husband’? Peter, what if the police are there? What if they arrest you—and put you in jail! Do you see what you’ve done—you could go to jail now. Oh, Lambchop, you wouldn’t last an hour in jail.”
“They’re not going to put me in jail,” I said, my heart quaking.
“You beat her, which was stupid enough—but this is even more stupid. You keep trying to do the ‘manly’ thing, and all you ever do is act like a child.”
“Oh, do I?”
“There is no ‘manly’ thing with her. Don’t you see that yet? There are only crazy things. Crazier and crazier! But you’re like a little boy in a Superman suit, with some little boy’s ideas about being big and strong. Every time she throws down the glove, you pick it up! If she phones, you answer! If she writes letters, you go crazy. If she does nothing, you go home and work on your novel about her! You’re like—like her puppet! She yanks —you jump! It’s—it’s pathetic.”
“Oh, is it?”
“Oh,” said Susan, brokenhearted, “why did you have to hit her? Why did you do that?”
“Actually, I thought it pleased you.”
“Did you really? Pleased me? I hated it. I just haven’t told you in so many words because you were so pleased with yourself. But why on earth did you do it? The woman is a psychopath, you tell me that yourself. What is gained by beating up someone who isn’t even responsible for what she says? What is the good of it?”
“I couldn’t take any more, that’s the good of it! She may be a psychopath, but I am the psychopath’s husband and 1 can’t take any more.”
“But what about your will? You’re the one who is always telling me about using my will. You’re the one who got me back to college, hitting me over the head with my will—and then you, you who hate violence, who are sweet and civilized, turn around and do something totally out of control like that. Why did you let her come to your apartment to begin with?”
“To get a divorce!”
“But that’s what your lawyer is for!”
“But she won’t cooperate with my lawyer.”
“And who will she cooperate with instead? You?”
“Look, I am trying to get out of a trap. I stepped into it back when I was twenty-five, and now I’m thirty-three and I’m still in it-”
“But the trap is you. You’re the trap. When she phoned you, why didn’t you just hang up? When she said no to the Algonquin, why didn’t you realize—“
“Because I thought I saw a way out! Because this alimony is bleeding me dry! Because going back and forth into court to have my income scrutinized and my check stubs checked is driving me mad! Because I am four thousand dollars in debt to my brother! Because I have nothing left of a twenty-thousand-dollar advance on a book that I cannot write! Because when little Judge Rosenzweig hears I teach only two classes a week, he’s ready to send me to Sing Sing! He has to sit on his ass all day to earn his keep, while coed seducers like me are out there abandoning their wives left and right—and teaching only two classes! They want me to get a paper route, Susan! They wouldn’t care if I sold Good Humors! Abandoned her? She’s with me day and night! The woman is unabandonable!” By you.
“Not by me—by them!”
“Peter, you’re going wild.”
“I am wild! I’ve gone!”
“But Lambchop,” she pleaded, “1 have money. You could use my money.”
“I could not.”
“But it’s not even mine. It’s no one’s, really. It’s Jamey’s. It’s my grandfather’s. And they’re all dead, and there’s tons of it, and why not? You can pay back your brother, you can pay back the publisher and forget that novel, and go on to something new. And you can pay her whatever the court says, and then just forget her—oh, do forget her, once and for all, before you ruin everything. If you haven’t already!”
Oh, I thought, would that be something. Pay them all off, and start in clean. Clean! Go back to Rome and start again…live with Susan and our pots of geraniums and our bottles of Frascati and our walls of books in a white-washed apartment on the Janiculum…get a new VW and go off on all those trips again, up through the mountains in a car with nobody grabbing at the wheel…gelati in peace in the Piazza Navona…marketing in peace in the Campo dei Fiori…dinner with friends in Trastevere, in peace: no ranting, no raving, no tears…and writing about something other than Maureen…oh, just think of all there is to write about in this world that is not Maureen…Oh, what luxe!
“We could arrange with the bank,” Susan was saying, “to send her a check every month. You wouldn’t even have to think about it. And, Lambchop, that would be that. You could just wipe the whole thing out, like that.”
“That wouldn’t be that, and I couldn’t wipe anything out like that, and that is that. Besides, she’s going to the anyway.”
“Not her,” said Susan, bitterly.
“Pack your stuff. Let’s go.”
“But why will you let her crucify you with money when there’s no need for it!”
“Susan, it is difficult enough borrowing from my big brother.”
“But I’m not your brother. I’m your—me.”
“Let’s go.”
“No!” And angrier than I could ever have imagined her, she marched off into the bathroom adjoining our room.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, I closed my eyes and tried to think clearly. My limbs weakened as I did so. She’s black and Hue. Couldn’t they say 1 killed her? Couldn’t they make the case that 1 stuffed the pills down her throat and left her there to croak? Can they find fingerprints on flesh? If so, they’ll find mine!
Here I experienced a cold shock on the top of the head.
Susan was standing over me, having just poured a glass of water, drawn from the tap, on my head. Violence breeds violence, as they say—for Susan, it was the most violent act she had ever dared to commit in her life.
“I hate you,” she said, stamping her foot.
And on that note we packed our bags and the box of salt water taffy I had bought for Dr. Spielvogel, and in a rented car we departed the seaside resort where many and many a year ago I had first encountered romantic love: Tarnopol Returns To Face The Music In New York.
At the hospital, blessedly, no Valducci and no police—no handcuffs, no squad car, no flashbulbs, no TV cameras grinding away at the mug of the prize-winning murderer…Paranoid fantasy, all that—grandiose delusions for the drive up the parkway, Narcissismo, with a capital N! Guilt and ambivalence over his specialness? Oh, Spielvogel, maybe you are right in ways you do not even know—maybe this Maureen of mine is just the Miss America of a narcissist’s dreams. I wonder: have I chosen this She-Wolf of a woman because I am, as you say, such a Gargantua of Self-Love? Because secretly I sympathize with the poor girl’s plight, know it is only right that she should lie, steal, deceive, risk her very life to have the likes of me? Because she says with every wild shriek and desperate scheme, “Peter Tarnopol, you are the cat’s meow.” Is that why I can’t call it quits with her, because I’m flattered so?
No, no, no, no more fancy self-lacerating reasons for how I am being destroyed. I can walk away all right—only let me!
I took the elevator to the intensive-care unit and gave my name to the young nurse at the desk there. “How,” I asked softly, “is my wife?” She told me to take a seat and wait to talk to the doctor who was presently in with Mrs. Tarnopol. “She’s alive,” I said. “Oh, yes,” the nurse answered, reaching out kindly to touch my elbow. “Good. Great,” I replied; “and there’s no chance of her—“ The nurse said, “You’ll have to ask the doctor, Mr. Tarnopol.”
Good. Great. She may the yet. And I will finally be free!
And in jail!
But I didn’t do it!
Someone was tapping me on the shoulder.
“Aren’t you Peter?”
>
A short, chubby woman, with graying hair and a pert, lined face, and neatly attired in a simple dark-blue dress and “sensible” shoes, was looking at me rather shyly; as I would eventually learn, she was only a few years older than I and a fifth-grade teacher in a Manhattan parochial school (and, astonishingly, in therapy because of a recurrent drinking problem); she looked no more threatening than the helpful librarian out of my childhood, but there in that hospital waiting room all I saw looking up at me was an enemy, Maureen’s avenger. I backed off a step.
“Aren’t you Peter Tarnopol the writer?”
The kindly nurse had lied. Maureen was dead. I was being placed under arrest for first-degree murder. By this policewoman. “Yes,” I said, “yes, I write.”
“I’m Flossie.”
“Who?”
“Flossie Koerner. From Maureen’s Group. I’ve heard so much about you.”
I allowed with a weak smile that that might be so.
“I’m so glad you got here,” she said. “She’ll want to see you as soon as she comes around…She has to come around, Peter —she has to!”
“Yes, yes, don’t you worry now…”
“She loves life so,” said Flossie Koerner, clutching at one of my hands. I saw now that the eyes behind the spectacles were red from weeping. With a sigh, and a sweet, an endearing smile really, she said, “She loves you so.”
“Yes, well…we’ll just have to see now…”
We sat down beside one another to wait for the doctor.
“I feel I practically know you,” said Flossie Koerner.
“Oh, yes?”
“When I hear Maureen talk about all those places you visited in Italy, it’s all so vivid, she practically makes me feel I was there, with the two of you, having lunch that day in Siena—and remember that little pensione you stayed at in Florence?”
“In Florence?”
“Across from the Boboli Gardens. That that sweet little old lady owned, the one who looked like Isak Dinesen?”
“Oh, yes.”
“And the little kitty with the spaghetti sauce on its face.”
“I don’t remember that…”
“By the Trevi Fountain. In Rome.”
“Don’t remember…”
“Oh, she’s so proud of you, Peter. She boasts about you like a little girl. You should hear when someone dares to criticize the tiniest thing in your book. Oh, she’s like a lioness protecting one of her cubs.”
“She is, eh?”
“Oh, that’s finally Maureen’s trademark, isn’t it? If I had to sum her up in one word, that would be it: loyalty.”
“Fierce loyalty,” I said.
“Yes, so fierce, so determined—so full of belief and passion. Everything means so much to her. Oh, Peter, you should have seen her up in Elmira, at her father’s funeral. It was you of course that she wanted to come with her—but she was afraid you’d misunderstand, and then she’s always been so ashamed of them with you, and so she never dared to call you. I went with her instead. She said, ‘Flossie, I can’t go up there alone—but I have to be there, I have to…’ She had to be there, Peter, to forgive him…for what he did.”
“I don’t know about any of this. Her father died?”
“Two months ago. He had a heart attack and died right on a bus.”
“And what had he done that she had to forgive?”
“I shouldn’t say.”
“He was a night watchman somewhere…wasn’t he? Some plant in Elmira…”
She had taken my hand again—“When Maureen was eleven years old…”
“What happened?”
“I shouldn’t be the one to tell it, to tell you.”
“What happened?”
“Her father…forced her…but at the graveside, Peter, she forgave him. I heard her whisper the words myself. You can’t imagine what it was like—it went right through me. ‘I forgive you, Daddy,’ she said.”
“Don’t you think it’s strange she never told me this herself?”
Don’t you think it might even be something she happened to read about in Tender Is the Night? Or Krafft-Ebing? Or in the “Hundred Neediest Cases” in the Christmas issue of the Sunday Times? Don’t you think that maybe she’s just trying to outdo the rest of you girls in the Group? Sounds to me, Flossie, like a Freudian horror story for those nights you all spend roasting marshmallows around the therapist’s campfire.
“Tell you?” said Flossie. “She was too humiliated to tell anyone, her whole life long, until she found the Group. All her life she was terrified people would find out, she felt so—so polluted by it. Not even her mother knew.”
“You met her mother?”
“We stayed overnight at their house. Maureen’s been back twice to see her. They spend whole days talking about the past. Oh, she’s trying so hard to forgive her too. To forgive, to forget.”
“Forget what? Forgive what?”
“Mrs. Johnson wasn’t much of a mother, Peter…”
Flossie volunteered no lurid details, nor did I ask.
“Maureen didn’t want you, above all, ever to know any of this. We would try so hard to tell her that they weren’t her fault. I mean intellectually of course she understood that…but emotionally it was just embedded in her from her earliest childhood, that shame. It was really a classic case history.”
“Sounds that way.”
“Oh, I told her you would understand.”
“I believe I do.”
“How can she die? How can a person with her will to live and to struggle against the past, someone who battles for survival the way she does, and for a future—how can she die! The last time she came down from Elmira, oh, she was so torn up. That’s why we all thought Puerto Rico might lift her spirits. She’s such a wonderful dancer.”
“Oh?”
“But all that dancing, and all that sun, and just getting away —and then she got back and just took a nose dive. And did this. She’s so proud. Too proud sometimes, I think. That’s why she takes things so much to heart. Where you’re concerned, especially. Well, you were everything to her, you know that. You see, intellectually she knows by now how sorry you are. She knows that girl was just a tramp, and one of those things men do. It’s partly Mr. Egan—I shouldn’t say it, but it’s being in his clutches. Every time you go plead with her to come back to you, he turns around and says no, you’re not to be trusted. Maybe I’m telling tales out of school—but we are talking about Maureen’s life. But you see, he’s such a devout Catholic, Mr. Egan, and Mrs. Egan even more so—and, Peter, being Jewish you may not understand what it means to them when a husband did what you did. My parents would react the same way. I grew up in that kind of atmosphere, and I know how strong it is. They don’t know how the world has changed—they don’t know about girls like that Karen, and they don’t want to know. But I see those college girls today, the kinds of morals they have, and their disrespect for everything. I know what they’re capable of. They get a beeline on an attractive man old enough to be their own father—“
The doctor appeared.
Tell me she is dead. I’ll go to jail forever. Just let that filthy ·psychopathic liar he dead. The world will be a better place.
But the news was “good.” Mr. Tarnopol could go in now to see his wife. She was out of danger—she had come around; the doctor had even gotten her to speak a few words, though she was so groggy she probably hadn’t understood what either of them had said. Fortunately, the doctor explained, the whiskey she had taken with the pills had made her sick and she’d thrown up most of “the toxic material” that otherwise would have killed her. The doctor warned me that her face was bruised—“Yes? It is?”—as she had apparently been lying for a good deal of the time with her mouth and nose pushed into the mattress and her own vomit. But that too was fortunate, for if she had not been on her stomach while throwing up, she probably would have strangulated. There were also bruises on the buttocks and thighs. “There are?” Yes, indicating that she had spent
a part of the two days on her back as well. All that movement, the doctor said, was what had kept her alive.
I was in the clear.
But so was Maureen.
“How did they find her?” I asked the doctor.
T found her,” Flossie said.
‘We have Miss Koerner to thank for that,” the doctor said.
T was calling there for days,” said Flossie, “and getting no answer. And then last night she missed Group. I got suspicious, even though she sometimes doesn’t come, when she gets all wrapped up in her flute or something—but I just got very suspicious, because I knew she was in this depression since coming back from Puerto Rico. And this afternoon I couldn’t stand worrying any more, and I told Sister Mary Rose that I had to leave and in the middle of an arithmetic class I just got in a taxi and came over to Maureen’s and knocked on the door. I just kept knocking and then I heard Delilah and I was sure something was up.”
“Heard who?”
“The cat. She was meowing away, but there was still no answer. So I got down on my hands and knees in the corridor there, and there’s a little space under the door, because it doesn’t fit right, which I always told Maureen was dangerous, and I called to the pussy and then I saw Maureen’s hand hanging down over the side of the bed. I could see her fingertips almost touching the carpet. And so I ran to a neighbor and phoned the police and they broke in the door, and there she was, just in her underwear, her bra too I mean, and all this…mess, like the doctor said.”
I wanted to find out from Flossie if a suicide note had been found, but the doctor was still with us, and so all I said was, “May I go in to see her now?”
“I think so,” he said. “Just for a few minutes.”
In the darkened room, in one of the half dozen criblike beds, Maureen lay with her eyes closed, under a sheet, hooked up by tubes and wires to various jugs and bottles and machines. Her nose was swollen badly, as though she’d been in a street brawl. Which she had been.
I looked silently down at her, perhaps for as long as a minute, before I realized that I had neglected to call Spielvogel. I wanted all at once to talk over with him whether I really ought to be here or not. I would like to ask him his opinion. I would like to know my own. What was I doing here? Rampant narcissismo—or, as Susan diagnosed it, just me being a boy again? Coming when called by my master Maureen! Oh, if so, tell me how I stop! How do I ever get to be what is described in the literature as a man? I had so wanted to be one, too—why then is it always beyond me? Or—could it be?—is this boy’s life a man’s life after all? Is this it? Oh, could be, I thought, could very well be that I have been expecting much too much from “maturity.” This quicksand is it—adult life!
