Authors: Philip Roth
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.
8
“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 doo
r 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
appar
en
tly
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 A
tl
antic 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 th
at 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 shor
tly
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. Spiel
vogel 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
b
ruises,
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.”
“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?”