My Life as a Man

by Philip Roth

  Maureen opened her eyes. She had to work to bring me into focus. I gave her time. Then I leaned over the bed’s side bars, and with my face looming over hers, said, “This is Hell, Maureen. You are in Hell. You have been consigned to Hell for all eternity.”

  I meant for her to believe every word.

  But she began to smile. A sardonic smile for her husband, even in extremis. Faindy, she said, “Oh, delicious, if you’re here too.”

  “This is Hell, and I am going to look down at you for all of Time and tell you what a lying bitch you are.”

  “Just like back in Life Itself.”

  I said, shaking a fist, “What if you had died!”

  For a long time she didn’t answer. Then she wet her lips and said, “Oh, you would have been in such hot water.”

  “But you would have been dead.”

  That roused her anger, that brought her all the way around. Yep, she was alive now. “Please, don’t bullshit me. Don’t give me ‘Life is Sacred.’ It is not sacred when you are constantly in pain.” She was weeping. “My life is just pain.”

  You’re lying, you hitch. You’re lying to me, like you lie to Flossie Koerner, like you lie to your Group, like you lie to everyone. Cry, hut I won’t cry with you!

  So swore he who aspired to manhood; but the little boy who will not the began to go to pieces.

  “The pain, Maureen,”—the tears from my face plopped onto the sheet that covered her—“the pain comes from all this lying that you do. Lying is the form your pain takes. If only you would make an effort, if only you would give it up—“

  “Oh, how can you? Oh get out of here, you, with your crocodile tears. Doctor,” she cried feebly, “help.”

  Her head began to thrash around on the pillow—“Okay,” I said, “calm down, calm yourself. Stop.” I was holding her hand.

  She squeezed my fingers, clutched them and wouldn’t let go. It had been a while now since we’d held hands.

  “How,” she whimpered, “how…”

  “Okay, just take it easy.”

  “—How can you be so heartless when you see me like this?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m only alive two minutes…and you’re over me calling me a liar. Oh, boy,” she said, just like somebody’s little sister.

  “I’m only trying to suggest to you how to alleviate the pain. I’m trying to tell you…” ah, go on with it, go on, “the lying is the source of your self-loathing.”

  “Bullshit,” she sobbed, pulling her fingers from mine. “You’re trying to get out of paying the alimony. I see right through you, Peter. Oh thank God I didn’t die,” she moaned. “I forgot all about the alimony. That’s how mortified and miserable you left me!”

  “Oh, Maureen, this is fucking hell.”

  “Who said no?” said she, and exhausted now, closed her eyes, though not for oblivion, not quite yet. Only to sleep, and rise in a rage one last time.

  When I came back into the waiting room there was a man with Flossie Koerner, a large blond fellow in gleaming square-toed boots and wearing a beautifully cut suit in the latest mode. He was so powerfully good-looking—charismatic is the word these days—that I did not immediately separate out the tan from the general overall glow. I thought momentarily that he might be a detective, but the only detectives who look like him are in the movies.

  I got it: he too must just be back from vacationing in Puerto Rico!

  He extended a hand, big and bronzed, for me to shake. Soft wide French cuffs; gold cuff links cast in the form of little microphones; strange animalish tufts of golden hair on the knuckles…Why, just from the wrists to the fingernails he was something to conjure with—now how in hell did she get him? Surely to catch this one would require the piss of a pregnant contessa. “I’m Bill Walker,” he said. “I flew here as soon as I got the news. How is she? Is she able to talk?”

  It was my predecessor, it was Walker, who had “promised” to give up boys after the marriage, and then had gone back on his word. My, what a dazzler he was! In my lean and hungry Ashkenazic way I am not a bad-looking fellow, but this was beauty.

  “She’s out of danger,” I told Walker. “Oh yes, she’s talking; don’t worry, she’s her old self.”

  He flashed a smile warmer and larger than the sarcasm warranted; he didn’t even see it as sarcasm, I realized. He was just plain overjoyed to hear she was alive.

  Flossie, also in seventh heaven, pointed appreciatively to the two of us. “You can’t say she doesn’t know how to pick ‘em.”

  It was a moment before I understood that I was only being placed alongside Walker in the category of Good-Looking Six-Footers. My face flushed—not just at the thought that she who had picked Walker had picked me, but that both Walker and I had picked her.

  “Look, maybe we ought to have a drink afterwards, and a little chat,” Walker suggested.

  “I have to run,” I replied, a line that Dr. Spielvogel would have found amusing.

  Here Walker removed a billfold from the side-vented jacket that nipped his waist and swelled over his torso, and handed me a business card. “If you get up to Boston,” he said, “or if for any reason you want to get in touch about Maur.”

  Was a pass being made? Or did he actually care about “Maur”? “Thanks,” I said. I saw from the card that he was with a television station up there.

  “Mr. Walker,” said Flossie, as he started for the nurse’s desk. She was still beaming with joy at the way things had worked out. “Mr. Walker—would you?” She handed him a piece of scratch paper she had drawn hastily from her purse. “It’s not for me—it’s for my little nephew. He collects them.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Oh, that’s so kind. His name is Bobby.”

  Walker signed the paper and, smiling, handed it back to her.

  “Peter, Peter.” She was plainly chagrined and embarrassed, and touched my hand with her fingertips. “Would you? I couldn’t ask earlier, not with Maureen still in danger…you understand…don’t you? But, now, well, I’m just so elated…so relieved.” With that she handed me a piece of paper. Perplexed, I signed my name to it. I thought: Now all she needs is Mezik’s X and Bobby will have the set. What’s going on with this signature business? A trap? Flossie and Walker in cahoots with—with whom? My signature to be used for what? Oh, please, relax. That’s paranoid madness. More narcissismo.

  Says who.

  “By the way,” Walker told me, “I admired A Jewish Father tremendously. Powerful stuff. I thought you really captured the moral dilemma of the modern American Jew. When can we expect another?”

  “As soon as I can shake that bitch out of my life.”

  Flossie couldn’t (and consequently wouldn’t) believe her ears.

  “She’s not such a bad gal, you know,” said Walker, in a low stern voice, impressive now for its restraint as well as its timbre. “She happens to be one of the gamest people I know, as a matter of fact. She’s been through a lot, that girl, and survived it all.”

  “So have I been through it, pal. At her hands!” A film of perspiration had formed on my forehead and beneath my nose—I was greatly enraged by this tribute to Maureen’s guts, particularly coming from this guy.

  “Oh,” he said icily, and swelling a little as he spoke, “I understand you know how to take care of yourself, all right. You’ve got hands too, from what I hear.” He lifted one corner of his mouth, a contemptuous smile…tinged slightly (unless I was imagining things) with a coquettish invitation. “If you can’t stand the heat, as they say—“

  “Gladly. Gladly,” I interrupted. “Just go in there and tell her to unlock the kitchen door!”

  Flossie, a hand now on either of us, jumped in—“He’s just upset, Mr. Walker, from everything that’s happened.”

  “I should hope so,” said Walker. He took three long strides to the nurse’s desk, where he announced, “I’m Bill Walker. I spoke earlier to Dr. Maas.”

  “Oh. Yes. You can see her now. But onl
y for a few minutes.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Mr. Walker?” The nurse, a stout, pretty twenty-year-old, till then all tact and good sense, turned shy and awkward suddenly. Flushing, she said to him, “Would you mind? I’m going off duty. Would you, please?” And she too produced a piece of paper for him to sign.

  “Of course.” Walker leaned over the desk toward the nurse. ‘What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Oh, that doesn’t matter,” she said, going even a deeper scarlet. “Just say ‘Jackie’—that’d be enough.”

  Walker signed the paper, slowly, with concentration, and then headed off into the intensive-care room.

  “Who’s he?” I asked Flossie.

  My question confused her. “Why, Maureen’s husband, between you and that Mr. Mezik.”

  “And that’s why all the world wants his autograph?” I asked sourly.

  “Don’t—don’t you really know?”

  “Know what?”

  “He’s the Huntley-Brinkley of Boston. He’s the anchorman of their six o’clock news. He was just on the cover of the last TV Guide. He’s the one that used to be a Shakespearean actor.”

  “I see.”

  “Peter, I’m sure it’s that Maureen just didn’t want to make you jealous by mentioning him right now. He’s just been helping her over the rough spots, that’s really all there is to it.”

  “And he’s the one who took her to Puerto Rico.”

  Flossie, out of her depth completely now, and not at all sure any longer what was to be said to smooth life over for this triumvirate with whose fate she was intimately involved, shrugged and nearly wilted. We, I realized, were her own private soap opera: she was the audience to our drama, our ode-singing chorus; this was the Fortinbras my Deep Seriousness had called forth. Fair enough, I thought—this Fortinbras for this farce!

  Flossie said, “Well—“

  “Well, what?”

  “Well, I think so, that they were together there, yes. But, believe me, he’s just somebody, well, that she could turn to…after you did…what you did…with Karen.”

  “I get it,” I said, and pulled on my coat.

  “Oh, please don’t be jealous. It’s a brother-sister relationship more than anything else—someone close, lending her a helping hand. She’s over him, I swear to you. She knew long ago that with him it would always be career-career. He can propose from now till doomsday, she’d never go back to a man whose work and talent is his everything. That’s true. Please don’t jump to conclusions because of him, it’s not fair. Peter, you must have faith—she will take you back, I’m sure of it.”

  I passed a phone booth on my way through the hospital lobby, but didn’t stop to call anyone to ask if I was about to do the wrong thing again or the right thing at last—I saw a way out (I thought) and so I ran. This time to Maureen’s apartment on West Seventy-eighth Street, only a few blocks from the hospital to which the ambulance had carried her some hours earlier. There had to be evidence against her somewhere in that apartment—in the diary she kept, some entry describing how she had laid this trap from which I still could not escape. A confession about the urine written in her own hand—that we would submit in evidence to the court, to Judge Milton Rosenzweig, whose mission it was to prevent phallic havoc from being unleashed on the innocent and defenseless abandoned women of the county of New York of the state of New York. Oh, little robed Rosenzweig, he would have kept the primal horde in line! How he bent over backwards not to show favoritism to his, the Herculean sex…Prior to my own separation hearing there had been the case of Kriegel v. Kriegel; it was still in session when I arrived with my lawyer at the courthouse on Centre Street. “Your Honor,” pleaded Kriegel, a heavyset businessman of fifty, addressing himself (when we entered the courtroom) directly to the judge; his attorney, standing beside him, made sporadic attempts to quiet his client down, but from Kriegel’s posture and tone it was clear that he had decided to Throw Himself Upon the Mercy of the Court. “Your Honor,” he said, “I understand full well that she lives in a walk-up. But I didn’t tell her to get a walk-up. That was her choice. She could get an elevator building on what I give her a week, I assure you. But, Your Honor, I cannot give her what I do not have.” Judge Rosenzweig, up by his bootstraps from Hell’s Kitchen to N.Y.U. Law, and still a burly little harder for all his sixty-odd years, flicked continually with one index finger at an earlobe as he listened—as though over the decades he had found this the best means to prevent the bullshit addressed to the bench from passing down into the Eustachian tube and poisoning his system. His humorous bantering side and his stern contemptuous side were all right there in that gesture. He wore the gown of a magistrate, but the manner (and the hide) was that of an old Marine general who had spent a lifetime hitting the beaches in defense of Hearth and Home. “Your Honor,” said Kriegel, “I’m in the feather business, as the court knows. That’s it, sir. I buy and I sell feathers. I’m not a millionaire like she tells you.” Judge Rosenzweig, obviously pleased by the opportunity for light banter provided him by Mr. Kriegel, said, “Still, that’s a nice suit you got on your back. That’s a Hickey-Freeman suit. Unless my eyes deceive me, that’s a two-hundred-dollar suit.” “Your Honor—“ said Kriegel, spreading his hands deferentially before the judge, as though he held in each palm the three or four feathers that he passed on to the pillow people in the course of a day, “Your Honor, please, I would not come to court in rags.” “Thank you.” “I mean it, Your Honor.” “Look, Kriegel, I know you. You own more colored property in Harlem than Carter has little liver pills.” “Me? No, not me, Your Honor. I beg to differ with Your Honor. That’s my brother. That’s Louis Kriegel. I’m Julius.” “You’re not in with your bother? Are you sure that’s what you want to tell the court, Mr. Kriegel?” “In with him?” “In with him.” “Well, if so, only on the side, Your Honor.” Then me. I don’t shilly-shally quite so long as Kriegel; no, no Judge Rosenzweig has to badger forever a man of my calling—and Thomas Mann’s and Leo Tolstoy’s—to get at the Truth! “What’s it mean here, Mr. Tarnopol, ‘a well-known seducer of college girls’? What’s that mean?” “Your Honor, I think that’s an exaggeration.” “You mean you’re not well-known for it, or you’re not a seducer of college girls?” “I’m not a ‘seducer’ of anybody.” “So what do they mean here, do you think?” “I don’t know, sir.” My lawyer nods approvingly at me from the defense table; I have done just as I was instructed to in the taxi down to the courthouse: “…just say you don’t know and you have no idea…make no accusations…don’t call her a liar…don’t call her anything but Mrs. Tarnopol . . Rosenzweig has a great feeling for abandoned women…he won’t permit name-calling of abandoned women in his court…just shrug it off, Peter, and don’t admit a thing—because he is a prick of the highest order under the best of circumstances. And this isn’t the best of circumstances, a teacher fucking his students.” “I didn’t fuck my students.” “Fine. Good. That’s just what you tell him. The judge has a granddaughter at Barnard College, her picture, Peter, is all over his chambers. Friend, this old gent is the Stalin of Divorce Court Communism: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to her need.’ And with a vengeance. So watch it, Peter, will you?” On the witness stand I unfortunately forgot to. “Are you telling me then,” asked Rosenzweig, “that Mr. Egan, in his affidavit prepared for Mrs. Tarnopol, has lied to the court? Is this an outright lie—yes or no?” “As stated, it is, yes.” “Well, how would you state it to make it true? Mr. Tarnopol, I’m asking you a question. Give me an answer, please, so we can get on here!” “Look, I have nothing to hide—I have nothing to feel guilty about—“ “Your Honor,” interrupted my lawyer, even as I told the judge, “I had a love affair.” “Yes?” said Rosenzweig, smiling, his ear-flicking finger poised now at the side of his head—“How nice. With whom?” “A girl in my class—whom I loved, Your Honor—a young woman.” And that of course helped the cause enormously, that qualification.

  But now we w
ould all find out just who the guilty party was, just who had committed a crime against whom! “Judge Rosenzweig, you may remember that the last time I appeared before you, I brought no charges against Mrs. Tarnopol. I was cautioned by my attorney, and rightly so, to say nothing whatsoever about a fraud that had been perpetrated on me by my wife, because at that time, Your Honor, we had nothing in the way of evidence to support so damning an accusation. And we realized that, understandably, His Honor would not take kindly to unsubstantiated charges being brought against an ‘abandoned’ woman, who was here only to seek the protection that the law rightfully provides her. But now, Your Honor, we have the proof, a confession written in the ‘abandoned’ woman’s own hand, that on March 1,1959, she purchased, for two dollars and twenty-five cents in cash, several ounces of urine from a pregnant Negro woman with whom she made contact in Tompkins Square Park, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. We have proof that she did then take said urine to a drugstore at the corner of Second Avenue and Ninth Street, and that she submitted it, in the name of ‘Mrs. Peter Tarnopol,’ to the pharmacist for a pregnancy test. We further have proof…” No matter that my lawyer had already told me that it was much too late for evidence of a fraud to do me any good, if ever it would have. I had to get the goods on her! Find something to restrain her, something that would make her quit and go away! Because I could not take any longer playing the role of the Archenemy, Divorcing Husband as Hooligan, Moth in the Fabric of Society and Housewrecker in the Householder’s State!