My Life as a Man (34 page)

“Oh, I always knew it,” she said joyously.

“Knew what?”

“That you loved me. That you couldn’t hold out forever against that kind of love. Not even you.”

She was crazy.

And what did that make of me? A “man”?
How?

She went on and on about the paradise that lay before us. We could move to the country and save money by growing our own vegetables. Or continue to live in the city where she could become my agent (I had an agent, but no matter). Or she could just stay home and bake bread and type my manuscripts (I typed my own, but no matter) and get back to her wood sculpture.

“You’ll have to stay at home anyway,” I said. “The baby.”

“Oh, lovey,” she said. “I’ll do it—for you. Because you
do
love me. You see, that’s all I had to find out—that you loved me. That you weren’t Mezik, that you weren’t Walker.
That 1 could trust
you.
Don’t you understand? Now that I know, I’ll do anything.”

“Meaning?”

“Peter, stop being suspicious—you don’t
have
to be any more. I’ll have an abortion. If the test comes back tomorrow saying that I’m pregnant—and it will, I’ve never missed two periods before in my life, never—but don’t worry, I’ll go off and get an abortion. Whatever you want, I’ll do it. I know of a doctor. In Coney Island. And I’ll go to him, if you want me to.”

I wanted her to, all right. I’d wanted her to right at
the
outset, and had she agreed then, I would never have made my “manly” proposal of marriage. But better now than not at all. And so the next day, after I phoned the drugstore and pretended to be hearing for the first time the lab report verifying Mrs. Tarnopol’s pregnancy, I went to the bank and withdrew ten weeks’ worth of advance and another twenty dollars for the round-trip taxi fare to Coney Island. And on Saturday morning, I put Maureen in a taxi and she went off to Coney Island by herself, which she said was the only way the abortionist would receive his patients. I stood out on Second Avenue watching the cab move south, and I thought: “Now get out. Take a plane to anywhere, but go while the going is good.” But I didn’t, because that isn’t what a man like myself did. Or so I “reasoned.”

Besides, in bed the night before, Maureen had wept in fearful anticipation of the illegal operation (had she had the abortion, it would actually have been her third, I eventually found out) and clinging to me, she begged, “You won’t desert me, will you? You’ll be here when I get home—won’t you? Because I couldn’t take it if you weren’t
…
” “I’ll be here,” said I, manfully.

And there I was when she returned at four that afternoon, my fond lover, pale and wan (the strain of sitting six hours at the movies), wearing a Kotex between her legs to absorb the blood (said she), and still in pain from the abortion she had undergone (said she) without an anesthetic. She went
imme
diat
ely
to bed to ward off the hemorrhage that she feared was coming on, and there she lay, on in
to the night, teeth chattering,
limbs trembling, in an old, washed-out sweatshirt of mine and a pair of my pajamas. I piled blankets on top of her, but that still didn’t stop her shaking. “He just stuck his knife up there,” she said, “and wouldn’t give me any
thing
for the pain but a tennis ball to squeeze. He promised he would put me out, on the phone he promised me, and then when I was on the table and said, ‘Where’s the anesthetic?’, he said, ‘What do you think, girlie, I’m out of my mind?’ I said, ‘But you promised. How else can I possibly stand the pain?’ And you know what he told me, that smelly old bastard? ‘Look, you want to get up and go, fine with me. You want me to get rid of the baby,
then
squeeze the magic ball and shut up. You had your fun, now you’re going to have to pay.’ So I stayed, I stayed and I squeezed down on the ball, and I tried to think just about you and me, but it hurt, oh, he hurt me so much.”

A horrifying tale of humiliation and suffering at the hands of yet another member of my sex, and a lie from beginning to end. Only it took me a while to find out. In actuality, she had pocketed the three hundred dollars (against
the
day I would leave her penniless) and after disembarking from the cab when it got to Houston Street, had gone back up to Times Square by subway to see Susan Hayward in I
Want to Live,
saw it three times over, the morbid melodrama of a cocktail waitress (if I remember correctly—I had already taken her to see it once myself) who gets the death penalty in California for a crime she didn’t commit: right up Maureen’s alley, that exemplary little tale. Then she’d donned a Kotex in the washroom and had come on home, weak in the knees and white around the gills. As who wouldn’t be, after a day in a Times Square movie house?

All this she confessed three years later in Wisconsin.

The next morning I went alone to a booth—Maureen charging, as I left the apartment, that I was running away, leaving her bleeding and in pain while I disappeared forever with “that girl”—and telephoned my parents to tell
them
I was getting married.

“Why?” my father demanded to know.

“Because I want to.” I was not about to tell my father, in whom I had not confided anything since I was ten, what I had been
through
in the past week. I had loved him dearly as a child, but he was only a small-time haberdasher, and I now wrote short stories published in
the
high-brow magazines and had a publisher’s advance on a serious novel dense with moral ambiguity. So which of us could be expected to understand the principle involved? Which was what again? Something to do with my duty, my courage, my word.

“Peppy,” my mother said, after having received
the
news in silence, “Peppy, I’m sorry, but I have to say it—there’s something wrong with that woman. Isn’t there?”

“She’s over thirty years old,” said my father.

“She’s twenty-nine.”

“And you’re just twenty-six, you’re a babe in the woods. Son, she’s kicked around too long for my money. Your mother is right—something ain’t right there with her.”

My parents had met my intended just once, in my apartment; on the way home from a Wednesday matinee, they had stopped off to say hello, and there was Maureen, on my sofa, reading the script of a TV serial in which someone had “promised” her a part. Ten minutes of amiable, if self-conscious talk, and then they took the train back home. What they were saying about Maureen I assumed grew out of conversations with Morris and Lenore. I was wrong. Morris had never mentioned Maureen to them. They had figured her out on their own—after only ten minutes.

I tried acting lighthearted; laughing, I said, “She’s not the girl across the street, if that’s what you mean.”

“What does she even do for a living? Any
thing
?”

“She told you. She’s an actress.”

“Where?”

“She’s looking for work.”

“Son, listen to me: you’re a college graduate. You’re a summa cum laude. You had a four-year
scholarship. The army is behind
you. You’ve traveled in Europe. The world is before you,
and it’s all yours.
You can have anything,
anything—why
are you settling for
this
? Peter, are you listening?”

“I’m listening.”

“Peppy,” asked my mother, “do you—love her?”

“Of course I do.” And what did I want to shout into the phone at that very moment?
I’m coming home. Take me home. This isn’t what I want to do. You’re right, there’s something wrong with her: the woman is mad. Only
I
gave my word
!

My father said, “Your voice don’t sound right to me.”

“Well, I didn’t expect this kind of reaction, frankly, when I said I would be getting married.”

“We want you to be happy, that’s all,” said my mother.

“This is going to make you happy, marrying her?” asked my father. “I’m not talking about that she’s Gentile. I’m not a narrow-minded dope, I never was. I don’t live in a dead world. The German girl in Germany was something else, and her I never disliked personally, you know that. But that’s water under the bridge.”

“I know. I agree.”

“I’m talking about happiness now, with another human being.”

“Yes, I follow you.”

“You don’t sound right,” he said, his own voice getting huskier with emotion. “You want me to come down to the city? I’ll come in a minute
—“

“No, don’t be silly. Good Christ, no. I know what I’m doing. I’m doing what I want.”

“But why so sudden?” my father asked, fishing. “Can you answer me that? I’m sixty-five years old, Peppy, I’m a grown man—you can talk to me, and the truth.”

“What’s ‘sudden’ about it? I’ve known her nearly a year. Please, don’t fight me on this.”

“Peter,” said my mother, teary now, “we don’t fight you on anything.”

“I know, I know. I appreciate that. So let’s not start now. I just called to tell you. A judge is marrying us on Wednesday at City Hall.”

My mother’s voice was weak now, almost a whisper, when she asked, “You want us to come?” It didn’t sound as though she cared to be told yes. What a shock that was!

“No, there’s no need for you to be there. It’s just a formal
ity. I’ll call you afterwards.”

“Peppy, are you still on the outs with your brother?”

“I’m not on the outs with him. He lives his life and I live mine.”

“Peter, have you spoken to him about this? Peppy, your older brother is a brother boys dream about having. He adores you. Call him, at least.”

“Look, it’s not a point I want to debate with Moe. He’s a great arguer—and I’m not. There’s nothing to argue over.”

“Maybe he wouldn’t argue. Maybe at least he’d like to know, to come to whatever it is—the wedding ceremony.”

“He won’t want to come.”

“And you won’t talk to him, only for a few minutes? Or to Joan?”

“What does Joan know about my life? Dad, just let me get married, okay?”

“You make it sound like nothing, like marrying a person for the rest of your life is an everyday affair. It ain’t.”

“I’m summa cum laude. I know that.”

“Don’t joke. You left us when you were too young, that’s the problem. You always had your way. The apple of your
mother’s
eye—you could have anything. The last of her babies
…
”

“Look, look
—“

“You thought you already knew everything at fifteen—remember? We should never have let you skip all those grades and get ahead of yourself—that was our first mistake.”

On the edge of tears now, I said, “That may be. But I would have been out of grade school b
y now anyway. Look, I’m getting
married. It’ll be all right.” And I hung up, before I lost control and told my father to come down and take back to his home his twenty-six-year-old baby boy.

4.
Dr. Spielvogel

We may incite [the patient] to jealousy or inflict upon him the pain of disappointed love, but no special technical design is necessary for that purpose. These things happen spontaneously in most analyses.

—Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable”

I first met Dr. Spielvogel the year Maureen and I were married. We had moved out of my Lower East Side basement apartment to a small house in the country near New Milford, Connecticut, not far from where Spielvogel and his family were summering at Candlewood Lake. Maureen was going to grow vegetables and I was going to write the final chapters of
A Jewish Father.
As it turned out, the seeds never got in the ground (or the bread in the oven, or the preserves in the jar), but because there was a twelve-by-twelve shack at the edge of the woods back of the house
with a holt on the door,
somehow the hook got finished. I saw Spielvogel maybe three times that summer at parties given by a New York magazine editor who was living nearby. I don’t remember that the doctor and I had much to say to each other. He wore a yachting cap, this New York analyst summering in rural Connecticut, but otherwise he seemed at once dignified and without airs—a tall, quiet, decorous man, growing stout in his middle forties, with a mild German accent and that anomalous yachting cap. I never even noticed which woman was his wife; I discovered later that he had noticed which was mine.

When, in June of ‘62, it became necessary, according to my brother, for me to remain in New
York and turn myself over to a
psychiatrist, I came up with Spielvogel’s name; friends in Connecticut that summer had spoken well of him, and, if I remembered right, treating “creative” people was supposed to be his specialty. Not that
that
made much difference to me in the shape I was in. Though I continued to write every day, I had really stopped thinking of myself as capable of creating anything other than misery for myself. I was not a writer any longer, no matter how I filled the daylight hours—I was Maureen’s husband, and I could not imagine how I could get to be anything else ever again.