My Life as a Man (31 page)

As I say, I believed all these reversals and recoveries, all this
movement
of hers, to be evidence of a game, audacious, and determined little spirit; and it was, it was. So too did this mess of history argue for a certain instability and lack of focus in her life. On the other hand, there was so much focus to my own, and always had been, that Maureen’s chaotic, daredevil background had a decidedly exotic and romantic appeal. She had been around—and around. I liked that idea; I hadn’t been anywhere really, not quite yet.

She was also something of a rough customer, and that was new to me too. At the time I took up with Maureen, I had for nearly a year been having a passionate affair with a college girl named Dina Dornbusch, a senior at Sarah Lawrence and the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family from Long Island. She was an ambitious literature and language major, and we met when she came to my basement apartment, along with four other coeds and a
Mademoiselle
editor, to interview me about my work. I had just gotten out of the army, and my “work” at the time consisted only of the six short stories that had been published in the quarterlies while I had been stationed in Frankfurt; that they had been read by these awed young girls was very nice to know. I already knew of course that they had been read with interest by New York book publishers and literary agents, for their numerous letters of inquiry had reached me in Germany, and upon returning to the U.S. after my discharge, I had chosen an agent and subsequently sig
ned a publisher’s contract that
provided me with a modest advance for
the
novel I was writing. But that I had, while serving as a draftee in Germany, achieved enough “fame” for these girls to settle on me as the young American writer they wished to interview for a feature in the magazine, well, needless to say, that opened up a fantasy or two in my head. To be sure, I talked to them about Flaubert, about Salinger, about Mann, about my experiences in Germany and how I thought I might put them to use in fiction, but nonetheless I was wondering throughout how to get the girl with the marvelous legs and the earnest questions to stay behind when the others left.

Oh, why did I forsake Dina Dombusch—for Maureen! Shall I tell you? Because Dina was still in college writing papers on “the technical perfection” of “Lycidas.” Because Dina listened to me so inten
tl
y, was so much my student, taking my opinions for her own. Because Dina’s father gave us front-row seats to Broadway musicals that we had to go to see for fear of offending him. Because—yes, this is true, too; incredible, but true—because when Dina came in to visit me from school, practically all we did, from the moment she stepped into
the
doorway, was fuck. In short, because she was rich, pretty, protected, smart, sexy, adoring, young, vibrant, clever, confident, ambitious—that’s why I gave her up for Maureen! She was a girl still, who had just about everything. I, I decided at twenty-five, was beyond “that.” I wanted something called “a woman.”

At twenty-nine, with two unhappy marriages behind her, with no rich, doting father, no gorgeous clothes, and no future, Maureen seemed to me to have earned all that was implied by that noun; she was certainly
the
first person of her sex I had ever known intimately to be so completely adrift and on her own. “I’ve always been more or less in business for myself,” she’d told me at the party where we’d met—straight, unsentimental talk, and I liked it. With Dina, everybody seemed always to be in business for her. Likewise with myself.

Prior to Maureen, the close
st I had come to a girl who had
known real upheaval in her life was Grete, the student nurse in Frankfurt, whose family had been driven from Pomerania by the advancing Russian army. I used to be fascinated by whatever she could tell me about her experience of the war, but that turned out to be next to nothing. Only a child of eight when the war ended, all she could remember of it was living in the country with her brothers and sisters and her mother, on a farm where they had eggs to eat, animals to play with, and spelling and arithmetic to learn in the village school. She remembered that when the family, in flight in the spring of ‘45, finally ran into
the
American army, a GI had given her an orange; and on the farm sometimes, when the children were being particularly noisy, her mother used to put her hands up to her ears and say, “Children, quiet, quiet, you sound like a bunch of Jews.” But that was as much contact as she seemed to have had with the catastrophe of the century. This did not make it so simple for me as one might think, nor did I in turn make it easy for Grete. Our affair frequently bewildered her because of my moodiness, and when she then appeared to be innocent of what it was that had made me sullen or short-tempered, I became even more difficult. Of course, she
had
been only eight when the European war ended—nonetheless, I could never really believe that she was simply a big, sweet, good-natured, commonsensical eighteen-year-old girl who did not care very much that I was a dark Jew and she a blonde Aryan. This suspiciousness, and my self-conscious struggle with it, turned up in the affair between
the
two young lovers depicted in
A Jewish Father.

What I liked, you see, was something taxing in my love affairs, something problematical and puzzling to keep the imagination going even while I was away from my books; I liked most being with young women who gave me something to think about, and not necessarily because we talked
together
about “ideas.”

So, Maureen was a rough customer—I thought about that. I wondered if I was “up”—nic
e word—to someone with her his
tory and determination. It would seem by the way I hung in there that I decided that I at least ought to be. I had been up to Grete and the problems she raised for me, had I not? Why back away from difficulties, or disorder, or even turbulence—what was there to be afraid of? I hones
tly
didn’t know.

Besides, for a very long time, the overwhelming difficulty-Maureen’s helplessness—was largely obscured by
the
fight in her and by the way in which she cast herself as the victim always of charlatans and ingrates, rather than as a person who hadn’t the faintest idea of the relationship of beginning, middle, and end. When she fought me, I was at first so busy fighting back I didn’t have time to see her defiance as the measure of her ineptitude and desperation. Till Maureen I had never even fought a man in anger—with my hands, that is; but I was much more combative at twenty-five than I am now and learned quickly enough how to disarm her of her favorite weapon, the spike of a high-heeled shoe. Eventually I came to realize that not even a good shaking such as parents administer to recalcitrant children was sufficient to stop her once she was on the warpath—it required a slap in the face to do
that
. “Just like Mezik!” screamed Maureen, dropping dramatically to the floor to cower before my violence (and pretending as best she could that it did not give her pleasure to have uncovered the brute in the high-minded young artist).

Of course by the time I got around to hitting her I was already in over my head and looking around for a way out of an affair
that
grew more distressing and bewildering—and frightening—practically by the hour. It was not only the depths of acrimony between us that had me reeling, but the shocking realization of this helplessness of hers, that which
drove
her to the episodes of wild and reckless rage. As the months passed I had gradually come to see that nothing she did ever worked—or, rather, I had finally come to penetrate the obfuscating rhetoric of betrayal and victimization in order to see it
that way:
the Christopher Street producer went back on his “p
romise” to lift
her from the ticket office into the cast;
the
acting teacher in the West Forties who needed an assistant turned out to be “a psychotic”; her boss at one job was “a slave driver,” at the next, “a fool,” at the next, “a lecher,” and invariably, whenever she quit in disgust or was fired and came home in angry tears—whenever yet another of those “promises” that people were forever making to her had been broken—she would return to my basement apartment in the middle of the day to find me over the typewriter, pouring sweat—as happens when I’m feeling fluent —and reeking through my button-down oxford shirt like a man who’d been out all day with the chain gang. At the sight of me working away feverishly at what I wanted most to do, her rage at the world of oppressors was further stoked by jealousy of me —even though, as it happened, she greatly admired my few published stories, defended them vehemently against all criticism, and enjoyed vicariously the small reputation that I was coming to have. But then vicariousness was her nemesis: what she got through men was all she got. No wonder she could
neither
forgive nor forget him who had wronged her by “forcing” her at sixteen into bed with his buddy, or him who preferred the flesh of Harvard freshmen to her own; and if she could not relinquish the bartender Mezik or the bit player Walker, imagine the meaning she must have found in one whose youthful earnestness and single-minded devotion to a high artistic calling might magically become her own if only she could partake forever of his flesh and blood.

Our affair was over (except that Maureen wouldn’t move out, and I hadn’t the sense, or the foresight, to bequeath to her my two rooms of secondhand furniture and take flight; having never before been defeated in my life in anything that mattered, I simply could not recognize defeat as a possibility for me, certainly not at the hands of someone seemingly so inept)—our affair was over, but for the shouting, when Maureen told me
…
Well, you can guess what she told me. Anybody could have seen it coming a mile away. Only I
didn’t. Why would a woman want
to fool Peter Tarnopol? Why would a woman want to tell me a lie in order to get me to marry her? What chance for happiness in such a union? No, no, it just could not be. No one would be so silly and stupid as to do a thing like that
and certainly not to me.
I Had Just Turned Twenty-Six. I Was Writing A Serious Novel. I Had My Whole Life Ahead Of Me. No-the way I pictured it, I would tell Maureen that
this
affair of ours had obviously been a mistake from the beginning and by now had become nothing but a nightmare for both of us. “As much my fault as yours, Maureen”—I didn’t believe it, but I would say it, for the sake of getting out without further altercation; the only sensible solution, I would say, was for each now to go his own separate way. How could we be any
thing
but better off without all this useless conflict and demeaning violence in our lives? “We just”—I would tell her, in straight, unsentimental talk such as she liked to use herself
—“
we just don’t have any business together any more.” Yes, that’s what I would say, and she would listen and nod in acquiescence (she would have to—I would be so decent about it, and so sensible) and she would go, with me wishing her good luck.

It didn’t work out that way. Actually it was in the midst of one of the ten or fifteen quarrels that we had per day, now that she had decided to stay at home and take up writing herself, that I told her to leave. The argument, which began with her accusing me of trying to prevent her from writing fiction because I was “frightened” of competition from a woman, ended with her sinking her teeth into my wrist—whereupon, with my free hand, I bloodied her nose. “You and Mezik! No difference
at all!”
The barkeeper, she claimed, used to draw blood from her every single day during the last year of their married life—he had turned her nose “into a faucet.” For me it was a first, however—and a shock. Likewise her teeth in my flesh was like nothing I had ever known before in my stable and unbloody past. I had been raised to be fearful and contemptuous of violence as a means of
settl
ing disputes or venting anger—my ide
a of manliness had little to do
with dishing out physical punishment or being able to absorb it. Nor was I ashamed that I could do neither. To find Maureen’s blood on my hand was in fact
un
manning, as disgraceful as her teeth marks on my wrist. “Go!” I screamed, “Get out of here!” And because she had never seen me in such a state before—I was so unhinged by rage that while she packed her suitcase I stood over her tearing the shirt off my own body—she left, borrowing my spare typewriter, however, so she could write a story about “a hear
tl
ess infantile son-of-a-bitch so-called artist just like you!”

“Leave that typewriter where it is!” “But what will I write on then?” “Are you kidding? Are you
crazy?
You’re going to ‘expose’ me, and you want me to give you the weapon to do it with?” “But you have
two
of them! Oh, I’m going to tell the world, Peter, I’ll tell them just what a selfish, self-important, ego-maniacal baby you are!” “Just go, Maureen—and
I’ll
tell them! But I won’t have any more fucking screaming and arguing and
biting
around here when I am trying to do my work!” “Oh fuck your high and mighty work! What about
my life!”
“Fuck your life, it’s not my affair any longer! Get out of here! Oh, take it —take it and just go!” Maybe she thought (now that my shirt was hanging off me in strips) that I might start in next tearing
her
to shreds—for all at once she backed off and was out of the apartment, taking with her, to be sure, the old gray Remington Royal portable that had been my parents’ bar mitzvah present to the hotshot assistant sports editor of the
Yonkers High Broadcaster.