My Life as a Man

by Philip Roth

  “Early this morning.”

  “And how many’d she take with her?”

  “None. Nobody. She was the only one killed.”

  “And what’d you say your name was?”

  “Peter Tarnopol. I was her husband.”

  “Oh, is that so? Which are you? Number one, two, three, four, or five?”

  “Three. There were only three.”

  ‘Well, generally in this family there is only one. Good of you to call, Mr. Tarnopol.”

  “—What about the funeral?”

  But she’d hung up.

  Finally I telephoned Yonkers. The man whose son I am began to choke with emotion when he heard the news—you would have thought it was somebody he had cared for. “What an ending,” he said. “Oh, what an ending for that little person.”

  My mother listened in silence on the extension. Her first words were, “You’re all right?”

  “I’m doing all right, yes. I think so.”

  “When’s the funeral?” asked my father, recovered now, and into his domain, the practical arrangements. “Do you want us to come?”

  “The funeral—I tell you, I haven’t had time to think through the funeral. I think she always wanted to be cremated. I don’t know yet where…”

  “Maybe he’s not even going,” my mother said to my father.

  “You’re not going?” my father asked. “You think that’s a good idea, not going?” I could envision him reaching up to squeeze his temples with his free hand, a headache having all at once boiled up in his skull.

  “Dad, I haven’t thought it through yet. Okay? One thing at a time.

  “Be smart,” my father said. “Listen to me. You go. Wear a dark suit, put in an appearance, and that’ll be that.”

  “Let him decide,” my mother told him.

  “He decided to marry her without my advice—it wouldn’t hurt now if he listened when I told him how to stick her in the ground!”

  “He says she wanted to be cremated anyway. They put the ashes in the ground, Peter?”

  “They scatter them, they scatter them—I don’t know what they do to them. I’m new to this, you know.”

  “That’s why I’m telling you,” my father said, “to listen. You’re new to everything. I’m seventy-two and I’m not. You go to the funeral, Peter. That way nobody can ever call you pisher.”

  “I think they’ll call me pisher either way, those disposed in that direction.”

  “But they can never say you weren’t there. Listen to me, Peter, please—I’ve lived a life. Stop being out there on your own, please. You haven’t listened to anybody since you were four-and-a-half years old and went off to kindergarten to conquer the world. You were four-and-a-half years old and you thought you were the president of General Motors. What about the day there was that terrible thunderstorm? Four-and-a-half years old-”

  “Look, Dad, not now—“

  “Tell him,” he said to my mother, “tell him how long this has been going on with him.”

  “Oh, not now,” said my mother, beginning to cry.

  But he was fired up; miraculously, I was in the clear, and so he could finally let me know just how angry he was that I had squandered my familial inheritance of industriousness and stamina and pragmatism—all those lessons learned from him on Saturdays in the store, why had I tossed them to the wind? “No, no,” he would say to me from atop the ladder in the stockroom, as I handed up to him the boxes of Interwoven socks, “no, not like that, Peppy—you’re making it hard for yourself. Like this! Get it right! Always do a job right. Doing it wrong, son, don’t make sense at all!” All the entrepreneurial good sense, all that training in management and order, why hadn’t I seen it for the wisdom that it was? Why couldn’t a haberdashery store be a source of sacred knowledge too? Why, Peppy? Not profound enough to suit you? All too banal and unmomentous? Oh yes, what are Flagg Brothers shoes and Hickok belts and Swank tie clasps to a unique artistic spirit like yours!

  “—it was a terrible thunderstorm,” he was saying, “there was thunder and everything, and you were in school, Peter, in kindergarten. Four-and-a-half years old and you wouldn’t let anybody even take you, after the first week, not even Joannie. No, you had to do it alone. You don’t remember this, huh?”

  “No, no.”

  “Well, it was raining, I’ll tell you. And so your mother got your little raincoat, and your rainhat and your rubbers, and she ran to the school at the end of the day so you shouldn’t have to get soaked coming home. And you don’t remember what you did?”

  Well, at last I was crying too. “No, no, I guess I don’t.”

  “You balked. You gave her a look that could have killed.”

  “I did?”

  “Oh, you did! And told her off. ‘Go home!’ you told her. Four-and-a-half years old! And would not even so much as put on the hat. Walked out, right past her, and home in the storm, with her chasing after you. Everything you had to do by yourself, to show what a big shot you were—and look, Peppy, look what has come of it! At least now listen to your family once.”

  “Okay, I will,” I said, hanging up.

  Then, eyes leaking, teeth chattering, not at all the picture of a man whose nemesis has ceased to exist and who once again is his own lord and master, I turned to Susan, still sitting there huddled up in her coat, looking, to my abashment, as helpless as the day I had found her. Sitting there waiting. Oh, my God, I thought—now you. You being you! And me! This me who is me being me and none other!

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933. He is the author of eight books of fiction: Goodbye, Columbus (1959), Letting Go (1962), When She Was Good (1967), Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), Our Gang (1971), The Breast (1972), The Great American Novel (1973), and My Life as a Man (1974). Since 1965 he has been on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches literature one semester of each year. In 1970 he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

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