by Philip Roth
“I am only doing what I have to do, Susan, to get sprung from this trap.”
No reply.
“I am tired, you see, of being guilty of sex crimes in the eyes of every hypocrite, lunatic, and—“
“But the only one who thinks you’re guilty of anything is you.”
“Yes? Is uhat why they’ve got me supporting her for the rest of my life, a woman I was married to for three years? A woman who bore me no children? Is that why they will not let me get divorced? Is that why I am being punished like this, Susan? Because I think I’m guilty? I think I’m innocent1.”
“Then if you do, why do you need to steal something like that?”
“Because nobody believes me!”
“I believe you.”
“But you are not the judge in this case! You are not the sovereign state of New York! I have got to get her fangs out of my neck! Before I drown in this rage!”
“But what good is a can opener? How do you even know it is what you say it is? You don’t! Probably, Peter, she just uses it to o-pen cans.”
“In her bedroom?”
“Yes! People can open cans in bedrooms.”
“And they can play with themselves in the kitchen, but usually it’s the other way around. It’s a dildo, Susan—whether you like that idea or not. Maureen’s very own surrogate dick!”
“And so what if it is? What business is it of yours? It’s not your affair!”
“Oh, isn’t it? Then why is everything in my life her affair? And Judge Rosenzweig’s affair! And the affair of her Group! And the affair of her class at the New School! I get caught with Karen and the judge has me down for Lucifer. She, on the other hand, fucks household utensils—“
“But you cannot bring this thing into court—they’d think you were crazy. It is crazy. Don’t you see that? What do you think you would accomplish by waving it around in the judge’s face? What?”
“But I have her diary, too!”
“But you told me you read it—you said there’s nothing there.”
“I haven’t read it all.”
“But if you do, it’s only going to make you crazier than you are now!”
“I AM NOT THE ONE WHO’S CRAZY!”
Said Susan, “You both are. And I can’t take it. Because I’ll go mad too. I cannot drink any more Ovaltine in one day! Oh, Peter, I can’t take you any more like this. I can’t stand you this way. Look at you, with that thing. Oh, throw it away!”
“No! No! This way you can’t stand me is the way that I am! This is the way that I am going to be—until I win!”
‘Win what?”
“My balls back, Susan!”
“Oh, how can you use that cheap expression? Oh, Lambchop, you’re a sensible, sweet, civilized, darling man. And I love you as you are!”
“But I don’t.”
“But you should. What possible use can those—“
“I don’t know yet! Maybe none! Maybe some! But I’m going to find out! And if you don’t like it, I’ll leave. Is that what you want?”
She shrugged. “…if this is the way you’re going to be—“
“This is the way I am going to be! And have to be! It’s too rough out there, Susan, to be darling!”
“…then I think you better.”
“Leave?”
“…Yes.”
“Good! Fine!” I said, utterly astonished. “Then I’ll go!”
To which she made no reply.
So I left, taking Maureen’s can opener and diary with me.
I spent the rest of the night back in the bedroom of my own apartment—the living room faintly redolent still of Maureen’s bowel movement—reading the diary, a dreary document, as it turned out, about as interesting on the subject of a woman’s life as “Dixie Dugan.” The sporadic entries rambled on without focus, or stopped abruptly in the midst of a sentence or a word, and the prose owed everything to the “Dear Diary” school, the pure expression of self-delusion and unknowingness. In one so cunning, how bizarre! But then writers are forever disappointing readers by being so “different” from their work, though not usually because the work fails to be as compelling as the person. I was mildly surprised—but only mildly—by the persistence with which Maureen had secretly nursed the idea of “a writing career,” or at least tantalized herself with it in her semiconscious way, throughout the years of our marriage. Entries began: “I won’t apologize this time for not writing for now I see that even V. Woolf let her journal go for months at a time.” And: “I must set down my strange experience in New Milford this morning which I’m sure would make a good story, if one could write it in just the right way.” And: “I realized today for the first time-how naive of me!—that if I were to write a story, or a novel, that was published, P. would have awful competitive feelings. Could I do that to him? No wonder I’m so reluctant to launch upon a writing career—it all has to do with sparing his ego.”
Along the way there were a dozen or so newspaper clippings stapled or Scotch-taped to the loose-leaf pages, most of them about me and my work, dating back to the publication of my novel in the first year of our marriage. Pasted neatly on one page there was an article clipped from the Times when Faulkner died, a reprint of his windy Nobel Prize speech. Maureen had underlined the final grandiose paragraph: “The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.” Beside it she had penciled a bit of marginalia to make the head swim: “P. and me?”
To me the most intriguing entry recounted her visit two years earlier to Dr. Spielvogel’s office. She had gone there to talk to him about “how to get Peter back,” or so Spielvogel had reported it to me, following the call on him, which she had made unannounced at the end of the day. According to Spielvogel, he had told her that he did not think getting me back was possible any longer—to which she had, by his report, replied, “But I can do anything. I can play it weak or strong, whichever will work.”
Maureen’s version:
April 29, 1964 I must record my conversation with Spielvogel yesterday, for I don’t want to forget any more than is inevitable. He said I had made one serious mistake: confessing to P. I realize that too. If I had not been so desolated by learning about him and that little student of his, I would never have made such an unforgivable error. If I had never told him we would still be together. That gave him just the sort of excuse he could use against me. Spielvogel agrees. Spielvogel said that he thinks he knows what course Peter would take if we were to come back together and remain married, and I understood him to mean that he would be constantly unfaithful to me with one student after another. S. has rather settled theories about the psyche and neuroses of the artist and it’s hard to know whether he’s right or not. He advised me very directly to “work through” my feelings for Peter and to find someone else. I told him I felt too old but he said not to think in terms of chronological age but how I look. He thinks I’m “charming and attractive” and “gaminlike.” S.’s feeling is that it’s impossible to be married to an actor or writer happily, that in other words, “they’re all alike.” He gave Lord Byron and Marlon Brando as examples, but is Peter really like that? I’m possessed today with these thoughts, I can hardly do anything. He emphasized that I wasn’t facing the extreme narcissism of the writer, that he focuses such an enormous amount of attention on himself. I told him my own theory that I worked out in Group that P.’s unfaithfulness to me is the result of the fact that he felt me so high-powered that he felt it necessary to “practice” with his little student. That he could only really feel like a potent male with such an unthreatening nothing. S. seemed very interested in my theory. S. said that Peter goes back over and over again to the confession in order to rationalize his inability to love me, or to love anyone for that matter. S. indicates that this lovelessness is characteristic of the narcissistic type. I wonder if S. is fitting Peter into a preconceived mold, tho’ it does make great sense when I think of how rejecting of me P. has be
en from the very beginning.
I thought, upon coming to the end of that entry, “What a thing— everybody in the world can write fiction about that marriage, except me! Oh, Maureen, you should never have spared my ego your writing career—better you should have written down everything in that head of yours and spared me all this reality! On the printed page, instead of on my hide! Oh, my one and only and eternal wife, is this what you really think? Believe? Do these words describe to you who and what you are? It’s almost enough to make a person feel sorry for you. Some person, somewhere.” During the night I paused at times in reading Maureen to read Faulkner. “I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” I read that Nobel Prize speech from beginning to end, and I thought, “And what the hell are you talking about? How could you write The Sound and the Fury, how could you write The Hamlet, how could you write about Temple Drake and Popeye, and write that?”
Intermittently I examined the No. 5 Junior can opener, Maureen’s corncob. At one point I examined my own corncob. Endure? Prevail? We are lucky, sir, that we can get our shoes on in the morning. That’s what I would have said to those Swedes! (If they’d asked.)
Oh, there was bitterness in me that night! And much hatred. But what was I to do with it? Or with the can opener? Or with the diary confessing to a “confession”? What was I supposed to do to prevail? Not “man,” but Tarnopol!
The answer was nothing. “Tolerate it,” said Spielvogel. “Lambchop,” said Susan, “forget it.” “Face facts,” my lawyer said, “you’re the man and she’s the woman.” “Are you still sure of that?” I said. “Piss standing up and you’re the man.” “I’ll sit down.” “It’s too late,” he told me.
Six months later, on a Sunday morning, only minutes after I had returned from breakfast and the Times at Susan’s and was settling down at my desk to work—the liquor carton had just been dragged from the closet, and I was stirring around in that dispiriting accumulation of disconnected beginnings, middles, and endings—Flossie Koerner telephoned my apartment to tell me that Maureen was dead.
I didn’t believe her. I thought it was a ruse cooked up by Maureen to get me to say something into the telephone that could be tape-recorded and used to incriminate me in court. I thought, “She’s going back in again for more alimony—this is another trick.” All I had to say was, “Maureen dead? Great!” or anything even remotely resembling that for Judge Rosenzweig or one of his lieutenants to reason that I was an incorrigible enemy of the social order still, my unbridled and barbaric male libido in need of yet stronger disciplinary action.
“Dead?”
“Yes. She was killed in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At five in the morning.”
“Who killed her?”
“The car hit a tree. Bill Walker was driving. Oh, Peter,” said Flossie, with a rasping sob, “she loved life so.”
“And she’s dead…?” I had begun to tremble.
“Instantly. At least she didn’t suffer…Oh, why didn’t she have the seat belt on?”
‘What happened to Walker?”
“Nothing bad. A cut. But his whole Porsche was destroyed. Her head…her head…”
“Yes, what?”
“Hit the windshield. Oh, I knew she shouldn’t go up there. The Group tried to stop her, but she was just so terribly hurt.”
“By what? Over what?”
“What he did with the shirt.”
‘What shirt?”
“Oh…I hate to say it…given who he is…and I’m not accusing him…”
“What is it, Hossie?”
“Peter, Bill Walker is a bisexual person. Maureen herself didn’t even know. She—“ She broke down sobbing here. I meanwhile had to clamp my mouth shut to stop my teeth from chattering. “She—“ said Hossie, starting in again, “she gave him this beautiful, expensive lisle shirt, you know for a present? And it didn’t fit—or so he said afterward—and instead of returning it for a bigger size, he gave it to a man he knows. And she went up to tell him what she thought of that kind of behavior, to have a frank confrontation…And they must have been drinking late, or something. They had been to a party…”
“Yes?”
“I’m not blaming anyone,” said Flossie. “I’m sure it was nobody’s deliberate fault.”
Was it true then? Dead? Really dead? Dead in the sense of nonexistent? Dead as the dead are dead? Dead as in death? Dead as in dead men tell no tales? Maureen is dead? Dead dead? Deceased? Extinct? Called to her eternal rest, the miserable bitch? Crossed the bar?
“Where’s the body?” I asked.
“In Boston. In a morgue. I guess…I think…you’ll have to go get her, Peter. And take her home to Elmira. Someone will have to call her mother…Oh, Peter, you’ll have to deal with Mrs. Johnson—I couldn’t.”
Peter get her? Peter take her to Elmira? Peter deal with her mother? Why, if it’s true, Flossie, if this isn’t the most brilliant bit of dissimulation yet staged and directed by Maureen Tarnopol, if you are not the best supporting soap-opera actress of the Psychopathic Broadcasting Network, then Peter leave her. Why Peter even bother with her? Peter let her lie there and rot!
As I still didn’t know for sure whether our conversation was being recorded for Judge Rosenzweig’s edification, I said, “Of course I’ll get her, Flossie. Do you want to come with me?”
“I’ll do anything at all. I loved her so. And she loved you, more than you could ever know—“ But here a noise came out of Flossie that struck me as indistinguishable from the wail of an animal over the carcass of its mate.
I knew then that I wasn’t being had. Or probably wasn’t.
I was on the phone with Flossie for five minutes more; as soon as I could get her to hang up—with the promise that I would be over at her apartment to make further plans within the hour—I telephoned my lawyer at his weekend place in the country.
“I take it that I am no longer married. Is that correct? Now tell me, is that right?”
“You are a widower, friend.”
“And there’s no two ways about it, is there? This is it.”
“This is it. Dead is dead.”
“In New York State?”
“In New York State.”
Next I telephoned Susan, whom I had left only half an hour earlier.
“Do you want me to come down?” she asked, when she could ask anything.
“No. No. Stay where you are. I have to make some more phone calls, then I’ll call you back. I have to go to Flossie Koerner’s. I’ll have to go up to Boston with her.”
“Why?”
“To get Maureen.”
“Why?”
“Look, I’ll call you later.”
“You sure you don’t want me to come?”
“No, no, please. I’m fine. I’m shaking a little but aside from that everything’s under control. I’m all right.” But my teeth were chattering still, and there seemed nothing I could do to stop them.
Next, Spielvogel. Susan arrived in the middle of the call: had she flown from Seventy-ninth Street? Or had I just gone blank there at my desk for ten minutes? “I had to come,” she whispered, touching my cheek with her hand. “I’ll just sit here.”
“—Dr. Spielvogel, I’m sorry to bother you at home. But something has happened. At least I am assuming that it happened because somebody told me that it happened. This is not the product of imagination, at least not mine. Flossie Koerner called, Maureen’s friend from group therapy. Maureen is dead. She was killed in Boston at five in the morning. In a car crash. She’s dead.”
Spielvogel’s voice came back loud and clear. “My goodness.
“Driving with Walker. She went through the windshield. Killed instandy. Remember what I told you, how she used to carry on in the car in Italy? How she loved grabbing that wheel? You thought I was exaggerating when I said she used to actually try
to kill us both, that she would say as much. But I wasn’t! Christ! Oh, Christ! She could go wild, like a tiger—in that little VW! I told you how she almost killed us on that mountain when we were driving from Sorrento—do you remember? Well, she finally did it. Only this time I wasn’t there.”
“Of course,” Spielvogel reminded me, “you don’t know all the details quite yet.”
“No, no. Just that she’s dead. Unless they’re lying.”
“Who would be lying?”
“I don’t know any more. But things like this don’t happen. This is as unlikely as the way I got into it. Now the whole thing doesn’t make any sense.”
“A violent woman, she died violently.”
“Oh, look, a lot of people who aren’t violent the violently and a lot of violent people live long, happy lives. Don’t you see—it could be a ruse, some new little fiction of hers—“
“Designed to do what?”
“For the alimony. To catch me—off guard—again!”
“No, I wouldn’t think so. Caught you are not. Released is the word you are looking for. You have been released.”
“Free,” I said.
“That I don’t know about,” said Spielvogel, “but certainly released.”
Next I dialed my brother’s number. Susan hadn’t yet taken off her coat. She was sitting in a straight chair by the wall with her hands folded neatly in her lap like a kindergartener. At the sight of her in that posture an alarm went off in me, but too much else was happening to pay more than peripheral attention to its meaning. Only why hasn’t she taken off her coat?
“Morris?”
“Yes.”
“Maureen’s dead.”
“Good,” my brother said.
Oh, they will get us for that—but who, who will get us?
I have been released.
Next I got her mother’s number from Elmira information.
“Mrs. Charles Johnson?”
“That’s right.”
“This is Peter Tarnopol calling. I’m afraid I have some bad news. Maureen is dead. She was killed in a car crash.”
“Well, that’s what usually comes of runnin’ around. I could have predicted it. When did this happen?”
