My Life as a Man (35 page)

His appearance, like mine, had changed for the worse in three years. While I had been battling with Maureen, Spielvogel had been up against cancer.
He
had survived, though tire disease appeared to have shrunk him down some. I remembered him of course in the yachting cap and with a summer tan; in his office, he wore a drab suit bought to fit a man a size larger, and an unexpectedly bold striped shirt whose collar now swam around his neck. His skin was pasty, and the heavy black frames of
the
glasses he wore tended further to dramatize this shrinkage he had undergone—beneath them, behind them, his head looked like a skull. He also walked now with a slight dip, or list, to the left, the cancer having apparently damaged his hip or leg. In all, the doctor he reminded me of most was Dr. Roger Chillingworth in Hawthorne’s
Scarlet Letter.
Appropriate enough, because I sat facing him as full of shameful secrets as the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale.

Maureen and I had lived a year in western Connecticut, a year at the American Academy in Rome, and a year at the university in Madison, and as a result of all that moving around I had never been able to find anyone in whom I was willing to confide. By the end of three years I had convinced myself that it would be “disloyal,” a “betrayal,” to tell even the closest friends I had made in our wanderings what went on between Maureen and me in private, though I imagined they could guess plenty from what often took place right out on the street or in other
people’s houses. Mostly I didn’t open up to anyone because I was so ashamed of my defenselessness before her wrath and frightened of what she might do either to herself or to me, or to the person in whom I’d confided, if she ever found out what I had said. Sitting in a chair
immediately
across from Spielvogel, looking in embarrassment from his shrunken skull to the framed photograph of the Acropolis that was the only picture on his cluttered desk, I realized that I still couldn’t do it: indeed, to tell
this
stranger the whole sordid story of my marriage seemed to me as reprehensible as committing a serious crime.

“You remember Maureen?” I asked. “My wife?”

“I do. Quite well.” His voice, in contrast to his appearance, was strong and vigorous, causing me to feel even more puny and self-conscious
…
the little stool pigeon about to sing. My impulse was to get up and leave, my shame and humiliation (and my disaster) still my own—and simultaneously to crawl into his lap. “A small, pretty, dark-haired young woman,” he said. “Very determined looking.”

“Very.”

“A lot of spunk there, I would think.”

“She’s a lunatic, Doctor!” I began to cry. For fully five minutes I sobbed into my hands—until Spielvogel asked, “Are you finished?”

There are lines from my five years of psychoanalysis as memorable to me as the opening sentence of
Anna Karenina—
“
Are
you finished?” is one of them. The perfect tone, the perfect tactic. I turned myself over to him, then and there, for good or bad.

Yes, yes, I was finished. “All I do these days is collapse in tears
…
” I wiped my face with a Kleenex from a box that he offered me and proceeded to “spill”—though not about Maureen (I couldn’t, right off) but about Karen Oakes, the Wisconsin coed with whom I had been maniacally in love during the winter and early spring of that year. I had been watching her bicycle around the campus for months before she showed up in my undergraduate writing section i
n the second semester to become
the smartest girl in the class. Good-natured, gentle, a beguiling mix of assertive innocence and shy adventurousness, Karen had a small lyrical gift as a poet and wrote clever, somewhat magisterial literary analyses of the fiction that we read in class; her candor and lucidity, I told Spielvogel, were as much a balm to me as her mild temperament, her slender limbs, her pretty and composed American girl’s face
. Oh, I went on and on about Ka-
reen (the pet name for the pillow talk), growing increasingly intoxicated, as I spoke, with
memories of our ardent “passion”
and
brimming “love”—I did not mention that in all we probably had not been alone with one another more than forty-eight hours over the course of the three months, and rarely for more than forty-five minutes at a clip; we were together ei
the
r in the classroom with fifteen undergraduates for chaperones, or in her bed. Nonetheless she was, I said, “
the
first good thing” to happen in my private life since I’d been discharged from the army
and
come to New York to write. I told Spielvogel how she had called herself “Miss Demi-Womanhood of 1962”; he did not appear to be one-hundredth as charmed by the remark as I had been, but
then
he had not just disrobed for the first time the demi-woman who had said it. I recounted to him the agonies of doubt and longing that I had experienced before I went ahead, three weeks into the semester, and wrote “See me” across the face of one of her A+ papers. She came, as directed, to my office, and accepted my courtly, professorial invitation to be seated. In the first moments, courtliness was rampant, as a matter of fact. “You wanted to see me?” “Yes, I did, Miss Oakes.” A silence ensued, long and opaquely eloquent enough to satisfy Anton Chekhov. “Where do you come from, Miss Oakes?” “Racine.” “And what does your father do?” “He’s a physician.” And then, as though hurling myself off a bridge, I did it: reached forward and laid a hand upon her straw-colored hair. Miss Oakes swallowed and said nothing. “I’m sorry,” I told her, “I couldn’t help it.” She said: “Professor Tarnopol, I’m not a sophisticated person.” Whereupon I proceeded to apologize profusely.
“Oh, please, don’t worry,” she
said, when I wouldn’t stop, “a lot of teachers do it.” “Do they?” the award-winning novelist asked. “Every semester so far,” said she, nodding a little wearily; “and usually it’s English.” “What happens then, usually?” “I tell them I’m not a sophisticated person. Because I’m not.” “And then?” “That’s it, generally.” “They get conscience-stricken and apologize profusely.” “They have second thoughts, I suppose.” “Just like me.” “And me,” she said, without blinking; “the doctrine of
in loco parentis
works both ways.” “Look, look
—“
“Yes?” “Look, I’m
taken
with you. Terribly.” “You don’t even know me, Professor Tarnopol.” “I don’t and I do. I’ve read your papers. I’ve read your stories and poems.” “I’ve read yours.” Oh my God, Dr. Spielvogel, how can you sit there like an Indian? Don’t you appreciate the
charm
of all this? Can’t you see what a conversation like that meant to me in my despair? “Look, Miss Oakes, I want to see you—I
have
to see you!” “Okay.”
“Where?”
“I have a room
—“
“I can’t go into a dormitory, you know that.” “I’m a senior. I don’t live in the dorm any more. I moved out.” “You did?” “I have my own room in town.” “Can I come to talk to you there?” “Sure.”

Sure!
Oh, what a wonderful, charming, disarming, engaging
little
word that one is! I went around sibilating it to myself all through the rest of the day. “What are you so bouncy about?” asked Maureen.
Shoor. Shewer. Shur.
Now just how did that beautiful and clever and willing and healthy young girl say it anyway?
Sure!
Yes, like that—crisp and to the point.
Sure!
Oh yes, sure as sure is sure, Miss Oakes is going to have an adventure, and Professor Tarnopol is going to have a breakdown
…
How many hours before I decided that when the semester was over we would run off together? Not that many. The second time we were in bed I proposed the idea to Ka-reen. We would go to Italy in June—catch the Pan Am flight from Chicago (I’d checked on it by phone) the evening of the day she’d taken her last exam; I could send my final grades in from Rome. Wouldn’t that be terrific? Oh, I would say to her, burying my face in her hair, I want to take you somewh
ere, Ka-reen, I want to go away
with you! And she would murmur softly, “Mmmmmm, mmmmmm,” which I interpreted as delicious acquiescence. I told her about all the lovely Italian piazzas in which Maureen and I had screamed bloody murder at one another: the Piazza San Marco in Venice,
the
Piazza della Signoria in Florence, the Piazza del Campo in Siena
…
Karen went home for spring vacation and never came back. That’s how overbearing and frightening a character I had become. That murmuring was just the sound her good mind gave off as it gauged the dreadful consequences of having chosen this particular member of the conscience-stricken English faculty to begin sophisticated life with outside of a college dorm. It was one thing reading Tolstoy in class, another playing Anna and Vronsky with the professor. After she failed to return from spring recess, I made desperate phone calls to Racine practically daily. When I call at lunchtime I am told she is “out.” I refuse to believe it—where does she eat then? “Who is this, please?” I am asked. I mumble, “A friend from school
…
are you
sure
she isn’t
…
?” “Would you care to leave your name?” “No.” After dinner each night I last about ten minutes in the living room with Maureen before I begin to feel myself on the brink of cracking up; rising from my reading chair, I throw down my pencil and my book—as though I am Rudolph Hess, twenty years in Spandau Prison, I cry, “I have to take a walk! I have to see some faces! I’m suffocating in here!” Once out the door, I break into a sprint, and crossing back lawns and leaping low garden fences, I head for the dormitory nearest our apartment, where there is a telephone booth on the first floor. I will catch Karen at the dinner hour and beg her at least to come back to school for the rest of this semester, even if she will not run away in June to live in Trastevere with me. She says, “Hang on a sec—let me take it on another phone.” A few moments later I hear her call, “Will you hang up the downstairs phone, please, Mom?” “Karen! Karen!” “Yes, I’m back.” “Ka-reen, I can’t bear it—I’ll meet you somewhere in Racine! I’ll hitch! I can be there by nine-thirty!” But she
was
the smartest girl in my
class and had no intention of letting some overwrought creative writing teacher with a bad marriage and a stalled career ruin her life. She could not save me from my wife, she said, I would have to do that myself. She had told her family she had had an unhappy love affair, but, she assured me, she had not and would not tell them with whom. “But what about your degree?” I demanded, as though I were the dean of students. “That’s not important right now,” said Karen, speaking as calmly from her bedroom in Racine as she did in class. “But I love you! I want you!” I shouted at the slender girl who only the week before had bicycled in sneakers and a poplin skirt to English 312, her straw-colored hair in braids and her innards still awash with semen from our lunchtime assignation in her rented room. “You just can’t leave, Karen! Not now! Not after how marvelous it’s been!” “But I can’t save you, Peter. I’m only twenty years old.” In tears I cried, “I’m only twenty-nine!” “Peter, I should never have started up. I had no idea what was at stake. That’s my fault. Forgive me. I’m as sorry as I can be.” “Christ, don’t be ‘sorry’—
just come back!”
One night Maureen followed me out of the house and across the backyards to the dormitory, and after standing out of sight for a minute with her ear to the telephone booth, threw back the door while I was pleading with Karen yet again to change her mind and come with me to Europe on the Pan Am night flight from O’Hare. “Liar!” screamed Maureen, “whore-mongering liar!” and ran back to the apartment to swallow a small handful of sleeping pills. Then, on hands and knees, she crawled into the living room in her underwear and knelt there on the floor with my Gillette razor in her hand, waiting patiently for me to finish talking with my undergraduate harlot and come on home so that she could get on with the job of almost killing herself.

I told Spielvogel what Maureen had confessed to me from the living-room floor. Because this had happened only two months earlier, I found with Spielvogel, as I had that morning with Moe in the taxi back from th
e airport, that I could not re
count the story of
the
false urine specimen without becoming woozy and weak, as
though
once the story surfaced in my mind, it was only a matter of seconds before the fires of rage had raced through me, devouring all vitality and strength. It is not that easy for me to tell it today without at least a touch of vertigo. And I have never been able to introduce the story into a work of fiction, not that I haven’t repeatedly tried and failed in the five years since I received Maureen’s confession. I cannot seem to make it credible—probably because I still don’t entirely believe it myself. How could she? To me! No matter how I may contrive to transform low actuality into high art, that is invariably what is emblazoned across the face of
the
narrative, in blood: HOW COULD SHE? TO ME!

“And then,” I told Spielvogel, “do you know what she said next? She was on the floor with the blade of the razor right on her wrist. In her panties and bra. And I was just standing over her. Dumbstruck.
Dumbstruck.
I could have kicked her head in. I should have!”