My Life as a Man (51 page)

I turned to an entry dated “8/15/58,” written in the early weeks of our “courtship.” “It’s hard to sketch my own personality really, since personality implies the effect one has on others, and it’s difficult to know truly what that effect is. However, I think I can guess some of this effect
correctly
. I have a moderately compelling personality.” And on in that vein, describing her moderately compelling personality as though she were a freshman back in high school in Elmira. “At best I can be quite witty and bright and I think at best I can be a winning per-son
…

The next entry was dated “Thursday, October 9, 1959.” We were by then already married, living in
the little rented house in
the country outside New Milford. “It’s almost a year
—“
actually it was over a year, unless she had removed a page, the one I was looking for, describing the purchase of the urine!—since I’ve written here and my life is different in every way. It’s a miracle how change of circumstances can truly change your essential self. I still have awful depressions, but I truly have a more optimistic outlook and only at the blackest moments do I feel hopeless. Strangely tho’, I do think more often about suicide, it seems to grow as a possibility altho’ I really wouldn’t do it now, I’m certain. I feel P. needs me more than ever now, tho’ that of course is something he would never admit to. If it weren’t for me he’d still be hiding behind his Flaubert and wouldn’t know what real life was like if he fell over it. What did he ever think he was going to write
about,
knowing and believing nothing but what he read in books? Oh, he can be such a self-important snob and fool! Why does he fight me like this? I could be his Muse, if only he’d let me. Instead he treats me like the enemy. When all I’ve ever really wanted is for him to be the best writer in the world. It’s all too brutally ironic.

That missing page,
where was it?
Why was there no mention made of what she had done to get P. to need her so!

“Madison, May 24, 1962.” A month after she had discovered me in the phone booth telephoning Karen; a month after she had taken the pills and the whiskey, put a razor to her wrist, and then confessed about the urine. An entry
that
caused a wave of nausea to come over me as I read it. I had been leaning over the table all this time, reading on my feet; now I sat down and read three times over her revelations of May 24, 1962: “Somehow”—somehow!—

P. has a deep hostile feeling for me and when face to face the emotion I sense now is hatred. Somehow I’ve finally become despairing and hopeless about it all and feel utterly cheerless most of the time. I love P. and our life together—or what our life
could
be
if only he weren’t so neurotic, but it seems impossible. It’s so joyless. His emotional coldness grows in leaps and bounds. His inability to love is positively frightening. He simply does not touch, kiss, smile, etc., let alone make love, a most unsatisfying state for me. I felt fed up with everything this morning and ready to throw it all over. Yet I know I must not lose heart. Life is not easy —P.’s naive expectations to the contrary. However, I sometimes think that to think about and try to ferret out P.’s neurosis is fruitless, for accurate as I may be, even if he were analyzed it would take years and years with a case like his, and no doubt I’d be discarded in the process anyway, though he might at last see what a madman he is. The only satisfaction is that I know perfectly well that if he does give me up, he will inevitably marry next someone who has her own talent and ego to match, who will care for that instead of him. Would he be surprised then! I almost wish it for him except I don’t wish it for myself. But he is killing my feeling so that if all this coldness from him should continue, finally my star will ascend and my heart will be stony instead of his. What a pity that would be, tho’.

“West 78th St., 3/22/66.” The next-to-last entry, written just three weeks earlier. After ou
r day in court with Judge Rosen
zweig. After the two go-rounds with the court-appointed referee. After Valducci. After Egan. After alimony. Four years after I’d left her, seven years after the urine. The entry, in its entirety:

Where have I been? Why haven’t I realized this? Peter doesn’t
care
for me. He never did! He married me only because he thought he
had
to. My God! It seems so plain now, how could I have been mistaken before? Is this insight a product of Group? I wish I could go away. It’s so degrading. I wonder if I’ll ever have the luck to be in love with someone who loves me, the real me, and not some cockeyed idea of me, a la the Meziks, Walkers, and Tarnopols of this world. That seems to me now nearly all I could want, though I now know how practical I really am—or how practical it’s necessary to be to survive.

And the last entry. She
had
written a suicide note, but it would seem that no one had thought to look for it in her three-ring school notebook. The handwriting, and the prose, indicated that she was already under the influence of the pills, and/or the whiskey, when she began to write her final message to herself:

Marilyn Monroe Marilyn Monroe Marilyn Monroe Marilyn Monroe why do they do these Marilyn Monroe why to use Marilyn why to use us Marilyn

That was it. Somehow she had then made it from the table back to the bed, nearly to
die
there like the famous movie star herself. Nearly!

A policeman had been watching me from the door for I didn’t know how long. He had his pistol drawn.

“Don’t shoot!” I cried.

“Why not?” he asked. “Get up, you.”

“It’s okay, Officer,” I said. I rose on boneless legs. I rose on air. Without even being asked I put my hands over my head. The last time I’d done that I’d been eight, a holster around my sixteen-inch waist and a Lone Ranger gun, made in Japan and hollow as a chocolate bunny, poking me in the ribs—a weapon belonging to my little pal from next door, Barry Edelstein, wearing his chaps and his sombrero, and telling me, in the accent of the Cisco Kid, “Steeck ‘em up, amigo.” That, by and large, was my preparation for this dangerous life I now led.

“I’m Peter Tarnopol,” I hurriedly explained. “I’m Maureen Tarnopol’s husband. She’s the one who lives here. We’re separated. Legally, legally. I just came from the hospital. I came to get my wife’s toothbrush and some
things
. She’s my wife still, you see; she’s in the hospital
—“

“I
know who’s in the hospital.”

“Yes, well, I’m her husband. The door was open. I thought I better stay here until I can get it fixed. Anybody could walk right in. I was sitting here. Reading. I was going to call a locksmith.”

The cop just stood there, pointing his pistol. I should never have told him we were separated.
I should never have told Rosen
zweig I’d had “a love affair” with a student. I should never have gotten involved with Maureen. Yes, that was my biggest mistake.

I said some more words about a locksmith.

“He’s on his way,” the cop told me.

“Yes? He is? Good. Great. Look, if you still don’t believe me, I have a driver’s license.”

“On you?”

“Yes, yes, in my wallet. May I reach for my wallet?”

“All right, never mind, it’s okay
…
just got to be careful,” he mumbled, and lowering his pistol, took a step into the room. “I just went down for a Coke. I seen she had her own, but I didn’t want to take it. That ain’t right.”

“Oh,” said I, as he dropped the pistol into his holster, “you should have.”

“Fuckin’ locksmith.” He looked at his watch.

When he stepped all the way into the apartment I saw how very young he was: a pug-nosed kid off the subway, with a gun and a badge and dressed up in a blue uniform. Not so unlike Barry Edelstein as I’d thought while the pistol was pointed at my head. Now he wouldn’t engage my eyes
directly
, embarrassed it seemed for having drawn the gun, movie style, or for having spoken obscenely to an innocent man, or, most likely, for having been discovered by me away from his post. Yet another member of the sex, abashed to be revealed as unequal to his task.

“Well,” I said, closing the three-ring notebook and tucking it under my arm, “I’ll just get those things now, and be off
—
”

“Hey,” he said, motioning to the bedroom, “don’t worry about the mattress in there. I just couldn’t take the stink no more, so I washed it out. That’s how come it’s wet like that. Ajax and a
little
Mr. Clean, and that did it. Don’t worry—it won’t leave no mark when it dries.”

“Well,
th
ank you. That was very nice of you.”

He shrugged. “I put all the stuff back in the kitchen, under the sink there.” hne.

“That Mr. Clean is some stuff.”

“I know. I’ve heard them say that. I’ll just get a few things and go.”

We were friends now. He asked, “What is the missus anyway? An actress?”

‘Well
…
yes.”

“On TV?”

“No, no, just around.”

“What? Broadway?”

“No,
no, not
yet anyway.”

“Well, that takes time, don’t it? She shouldn’t be discouraged.”

I went into Maureen’s bedroom, a tiny cell just big enough for a bed and a night table with a lamp on it. Because the closet door could only be opened halfway before it banged against the foot of the bed, I had to reach blindly around inside until I came up with a nightdress that was hanging on a hook. “Ah,” I said, nice and loud,
“here
it is—right
…
where
…
she said!” To complete the charade, I decided to open and then shut loudly the drawer to the little night table.

A can opener. In the drawer there was a can opener. I did not
immediately
deduce its function. That is, I thought it must be there to open cans.

Let me describe the instrument. The can-opening device itself is screwed to a smooth, grainy-looking wooden handle, about two and a half inches around and some five inches long, tapering sligh
tly
to its blunt end. The opening device consists of a square aluminum case, approximately the size of a cigarette lighter, housing on its underside a small metal tooth and a little ridged gear; projecting upward from the top side of the case is an inch-long shaft to which is attached a smaller wooden handle, about three inches long. Placing the can opener horizontally over the edge of
the
can, you press
the
pointed metal tooth down
into the rim, and proceed to open the can by holding the longer handle in one hand, and rotating the smaller handle with the other; this causes the tooth to travel around the rim until it has severed the top of the can from the cylinder. It is a type of can opener that you can buy in practically any hardware store for between a dollar and a dollar and a quarter. I have priced them since. They are manufactured by the Eglund Co., Inc., of Burlington, Vermont—their “No. 5 Junior” model. I have Maureen’s here on my desk as I write.

“How ya’ doin’?” the cop called.

“Oh, fine.”

I slammed the drawer shut, having first deposited the No. 5 Junior in my pocket.

“So that’s it,” I said, coming back around into the living room, Delilah glued to my trouser cuff.

“Mattress look okay to you?”

“Great. Perfect. Thanks again. I’ll be off, you know—I’ll leave the locksmith to you then, right?”

I was one flight down and flying, when the young cop appeared at the landing over my head. “Hey!”

“What!”

“Toothbrush!”

“Oh!”

“Here!”

I caught it and kept going.

The taxi I flagged down to take me crosstown to Susan’s was one of those fitted out like the prison cell of an enterprising convict or the den of an adolescent boy: framed family photographs lined up on the windshield, a large round alarm clock strapped atop the meter, and som
e ten or fifteen sharpened Eber
hard pencils jammed upright in a white plastic cup fastened by a system of thick elastic bands to the grill separating the passenger in the back seat from the driver up front. The grill was itself festooned with blue-and-white tassels, and an arrangement of gold-headed upholstery tacks stuck into the
roof above the
driver’s head spelled out “Gary, Tina & Roz”—most likely the names of the snappily dressed children smiling out from the family photographs of weddings and bar mitzvahs. The driver, an elderly man, must have been their grandfather.

Ordinarily I suppose I would have commented, like every other passenger, on
the
elaborate decor. But all I could look at and think about then was the Eglund Company’s No. 5 Junior can opener. Holding the aluminum end in my left hand, I passed the larger handle through a circle formed out of the thumb and index finger of my right hand; then, wrapping the other three fingers loosely around it, I moved the handle slowly down the channel.