My Life as a Man (48 page)

“To get a divorce!”

“But that’s what your
lawyer
is for!”

“But she won’t cooperate with my lawyer.”

“And who will she cooperate with instead? You?”

“Look, I am trying to get out of a
trap.
I stepped into it back
when I was twenty-five, and now I’m thirty-three and I’m
still
in it-”

“But the trap is
you.
You’re the trap. When she phoned you, why didn’t you just hang up? When she said no to the Algonquin, why didn’t you realize
—“

“Because I thought I saw a way out! Because this alimony is bleeding me dry! Because going back and forth into court to have my income scrutinized and my check stubs checked is driving me mad! Because I am four thousand dollars in debt to my brother! Because I have nothing left of a twenty-thousand-dollar advance on a book that I cannot write! Because when little Judge Rosenzweig hears I teach only two classes a week, he’s ready to send me to Sing Sing! He has to sit on his ass all day to earn his keep, while coed seducers like me are out there abandoning their wives left and right—and teaching only two classes! They want me to get a paper route, Susan! They wouldn’t care if I sold Good Humors! Abandoned her? She’s with me day and night! The woman is unabandonable!” By
you.

“Not by me—by
them!”

“Peter, you’re going wild.”

“I
am
wild! I’ve
gone!”

“But Lambchop,” she pleaded,
“1
have money. You could use
my
money.”

“I could
not.”

“But it’s not even mine. It’s no one’s, really. It’s Jamey’s. It’s my grandfather’s. And they’re all dead, and
there
’s tons of it,
and why not?
You can pay back your brother, you can pay back the publisher and forget that novel, and go on to something new. And you can pay her whatever the court says, and then just
forget her—oh,
do forget her, once and for all, before you ruin everything. If you haven’t already!”

Oh, I thought, would that be something. Pay them all off, and start in clean.
Clean!
Go back to Rome and start again
…
live with Susan and our pots
of geraniums and our bottles of
Frascati and our walls of books in a white-washed apartment on the Janiculum
…
get a new VW and go off on all those trips again, up through the mountains in a car with nobody grabbing at the wheel
…
gelati
in peace in the Piazza Navona
…
marketing in peace in the Campo dei Fiori
…
dinner with friends in Trastevere,
in peace:
no ranting, no raving, no tears
…
and writing about something other than Maureen
…
oh, just think of all there is to write about in this world that is not Maureen
…
Oh, what luxe!

“We could arrange with the bank,” Susan was saying, “to send her a check every month. You wouldn’t even have to think about it. And, Lambchop, that would be that. You could just wipe the whole thing out, like that.”

“That wouldn’t be that, and I couldn’t wipe anything out like that, and
that
is that. Besides, she’s going to
the
anyway.”

“Not her,” said Susan, bitterly.

“Pack your stuff. Let’s go.”

“But why will you let her crucify you with money when there’s no need for it!”

“Susan, it is difficult enough borrowing from my big brother.”

“But I’m not your brother. I’m your—
m
e
.”

“
Let
’
s go.
”

“No!” And angrier than I could ever have imagined her, she marched off into the bathroom adjoining our room.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, I closed my eyes and tried to think
clearly.
My limbs weakened as I did so.
She’s black and Hue. Couldn’t they say 1 killed her? Couldn’t they make the case that 1 stuffed the pills down her throat and left her there to croak? Can they find fingerprints on flesh? If so, they’ll find mine!

Here I experienced a cold shock on the top of the head.

Susan was standing over me, having just poured a glass of water, drawn from the tap, on my head. Violence breeds violence, as they say—for Susan, it was the most violent act she had ever dared to commit in her life.

“I hate you,” she said, stamping her foot.

And on that note we packed our bags and the box of salt water taffy I had bought for Dr. Spielvogel, and in a rented car we departed the seaside resort where many and many a year ago I had first encountered romantic love: Tarnopol Returns To Face The Music In New York.

At
the
hospital, blessedly, no Valducci and no police—no handcuffs, no squad car, no flashbulbs, no TV cameras grinding away at
the
mug of the prize-winning murderer
…
Paranoid fantasy, all that—grandiose delusions for
the
drive up the parkway,
N
arcissismo, with a capital N! Guilt and ambivalence over his specialness? Oh, Spielvogel, maybe you are right in ways you do not even know—maybe this Maureen of mine is just the Miss America of a narcissist’s dreams. I wonder: have I chosen this She-Wolf of a woman because I am, as you say, such a Gargantua of Self-Love? Because secre
tly
I
sympathize
with the poor girl’s plight, know it is only
right
that she should lie, steal, deceive, risk her very life to have the likes of me? Because she says with every wild shriek and desperate scheme, “Peter Tarnopol, you are the cat’s meow.” Is that why I can’t call it quits with her, because I’m flattered so?

No, no, no, no more fancy self-lacerating reasons for how I am being destroyed. I can walk away all right—only let me!

I took the elevator to the intensive-care unit and gave my name to the young nurse at the desk there. “How,” I asked softly, “is my wife?” She told me to take a seat and wait to talk to the doctor who was presently in with Mrs. Tarnopol. “She’s alive,” I said. “Oh, yes,” the nurse answered, reaching out kindly to touch my elbow. “Good. Great,” I replied; “and there’s no chance of her
—“
The nurse said, “You’ll have to ask
the
doctor, Mr. Tarnopol.”

Good. Great. She may
the
yet. And I will finally be free!

And in jail!

But I didn’t do it!

Someone was tapping me on the shoulder.

“Aren’t you Peter?”

A
short, chubby woman, with graying hair and a pert, lined face, and neatly attired in a simple dark-blue dress and “sensible” shoes, was looking at me rather shyly; as I would eventually learn, she was only a few years older than I and a fifth-grade teacher in a Manhattan parochial school (and, astonishingly, in therapy because of a recurrent drinking problem); she looked no more threatening than the helpful librarian out of my childhood, but there in that hospital waiting room all I saw looking up at me was an enemy, Maureen’s avenger. I backed off a step.

“Aren’t you Peter Tarnopol the writer?”

The kindly nurse had lied. Maureen was dead. I was being placed under arrest for first-degree murder. By this policewoman. “Yes,” I said, “yes, I write.”

“I’m Flossie.”

“Who?”

“Flossie Koerner. From Maureen’s Group. I’ve heard so much about you.”

I allowed with a weak smile that
that
might be so.

“I’m so glad you got here,” she said. “She’ll want to see you as soon as she comes around
…
She has to come around, Peter —she has to!”

“Yes, yes, don’t you worry now…”

“She loves life so,” said Flossie Koerner, clutching at one of my hands. I saw now that the eyes behind the spectacles were red from weeping. With a sigh, and a sweet, an endearing smile really, she said, “She loves you so.”

“Yes, well
…
we’ll just have to see now…”

We sat down beside one another to wait for the doctor.

“I
feel I practically know you,” said Flossie Koerner.

“Oh, yes?”

“When I hear Maureen talk about all those places you visited in Italy, it’s all so vivid, she practically makes me feel I was there, with the two of you, having lunch that day in Siena—and remember that little pensione you stayed at in Florence?”

“In Florence?”

“Across from the Boboli Gardens. That that sweet little old lady owned, the one who looked like Isak Dinesen?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And the little kitty with the spaghetti sauce on its face.”

“I don’t remember that…”

“By the Trevi Fountain. In Rome.”

“Don’t remember…”

“Oh, she’s so proud of you, Peter. She boasts about you like a little girl. You should hear when someone dares to criticize the tiniest thing in your book. Oh, she’s like a lioness protecting one of her cubs.”

“She is, eh?”

“Oh, that’s finally Maureen’s trademark, isn’t it? If I had to sum her up in one word, that would be it: loyalty.”

“Fierce loyalty,” I said.

“Yes, so fierce, so determined—so full of belief and passion. Everything means so
much
to her. Oh, Peter, you should have seen her up in Elmira, at her father’s funeral. It was you of course that she wanted to come with her—but she was afraid you’d misunderstand, and then she’s always been so ashamed of them with you, and so she never dared to call you. I went with her instead. She said, ‘Flossie, I can’t go up there alone—but I have to be there, I have to…’ She had to be there, Peter, to forgive him
…
for what he did.”

“I don’t know about any of this. Her father died?”

“Two months ago. He had a heart attack and died right on a bus.”

“And what had he done that she had to forgive?”

“I shouldn’t say.”

“He was a night watchman somewhere
…
wasn’t he? Some plant in Elmira…”

She had taken my hand again
—“
When Maureen was eleven years old…”

“What happened?”

“I shouldn’t be the one to tell it, to tell you.”

“What happened?”

“Her father
…
forced her
…
but at the graveside, Peter, she forgave him. I heard her whisper the words myself. You can’t imagine what it was like—it went right through me. ‘I forgive you, Daddy,’ she said.”

“Don’t you think it’s strange she never told me this herself?”

Don’t you think it might even be something she happened to read about in
Tender Is the Night?
Or Krafft-Ebing? Or in the “Hundred Neediest Cases” in the Christmas issue of the Sunday
Times?
Don’t you think that maybe she’s just trying to outdo the rest of you girls in the Group? Sounds to me, Flossie, like a Freudian horror story for those nights you all spend roasting marshmallows around the therapist’s campfire.

“Tell
you?”
said Flossie. “She was too humiliated to tell
anyone,
her whole life long, until she found the Group. All her life she was terrified people would find out, she felt so—so polluted by it. Not even her mother knew.”

“You met her mother?”

“We stayed overnight at their house. Maureen’s been back twice to see her. They spend whole days talking about the past. Oh, she’s trying so hard to forgive her too. To forgive, to forget.”

“Forget what? Forgive what?”

“Mrs. Johnson wasn’t much of a mother, Peter…”

Flossie volunteered no lurid details, nor did I ask.

“Maureen didn’t want you, above all, ever to know any of this. We would try so hard to tell her that they weren’t her fault. I mean intellectually of course she understood that
…
but emotionally it was just embedded in her from her earliest childhood, that shame. It was really a classic case history.”