My Life as a Man (26 page)

She said,
“
It is not possible for you to leave because she is lying on her back with her legs spread apart and
—“

“
And,
”
I replied, my face ablaze,
“
suppose that were the reason?
”

“
Is that all you people can think about?
”

“
Which
‘
people
’
are you referring to?
”

“
People like yourself and my daughter, experimenting with one another
’
s genitals, up there in New York. When do you stop being adolescent transgressors and grow up? You know you never had the slightest intention of making Susan your wife. You are too much of a
‘
swinger
’
for that. Such people used to be called
‘
bohemians.
’
They don
’
t believe in marriage, with its risks and its trials and its difficulties—only in sex, till it bores them. Well, that is your business—and your prerogative, I am sure, as an artist. But you should not be so reckless as to foist your elitist values upon someone like Susan, who happens to come from a different background and was raised according to more traditional standards of conduct. Look at her out there, trying so hard to be a sexpot for your benefit. How could you have wanted to put such a ridiculous idea in that girl
’
s head? Of all the things to encourage a person like Susan to become! Why on earth couldn
’
t you have left such an unlikely candidate alone? Must she be driven crazy with sex too? Must every last woman in the world be
‘
turned on
’
by you modern Don Juans? To what end, Mr. Tarnopol, o
the
r than to quenc
h your unquenchable sexual van
ity? Wasn
’
t she confused and broken enough—without
this?
”

“
I don
’
t know where to begin to tell you that you
’
re wrong.
”

I walked out into the garden and looked down at a body as familiar to me as my own.

“
I
’
m going now,
”
I said.

She opened her eyes against the sun, and she laughed, a small, rather surprisingly cynical laugh; then after a moment
’
s contemplation, she raised the hand nearest to me from where it dangled to the ground and placed it between the legs of my trousers, directly on my penis. And she held me like that, her face now stolid and expressionless in the strong light. I did nothing but stand there, being held. From where she had stepped out onto the patio, Mrs. Seabury looked on.

This all couldn
’
t have lasted as long as a minute.

She lowered her hand to her own bare stomach.
“
Go ahead,
”
Susan whispered.
“
Go.
”
But just before I moved away she raised her body and pressed her cheek to my trousers.

“
And I was
‘
wrong,
’”
said Mrs. Seabury, her voice harsh at last, as I passed through
the
living room to the street.

At the time we met, Susan was just thirty and had been living for eleven years in the co-op apartment at Park and Seventy-ninth that had become hers (along with the eighteenth-century English marquetry furniture, the heavy velvet draperies, the Aubusson carpets, and two million dollars
’
worth of securities in McCall and McGee Industries) when the company plane bearing her young husband to a board meeting crashed into a mountainside in upstate New York eleven months into the marriage. In that marrying the young heir had been considered by everyone (excepting her father, who, characteristically, had remained silent) a fantastic stroke of luck for a girl who hadn
’
t enough on the ball to survive two semesters at college, Susan (who eventually confided to me that she really hadn
’
t liked McCall that much) took his death very hard. Believing that her
chances were all used up at twenty, she retired to her bed and lay there, mute and motionless, every single day during the month of mourning. As a result she wound up doing woodwork for six months at a fashionable
“
health farm
”
down in Bucks County known as the Institute for Better Living. Her father would have preferred that she return to the house on Mercer Street after she had completed her convalescence, but Susan
’
s
“
counselor
”
at the Institute had long talks with her about maturity and by the end of her stay had convinced her to return to the apartment at Park and Seventy-ninth and
“
give it a try on her own.
”
To be sure, she too would have preferred to return to Princeton and
the
father she adored—doing
“
research
”
for him in the library, lunching with him at Lahiere
’
s, hiking with him on weekends along
the
canal—if only living with her father didn
’
t entail living under the gaze of her mother, that gaze that frightened her largely because it said,
“
You must grow up and you must go away.
”

In Manhattan, the rich and busy ladies in her building who
“
adopted
”
her made it their business to keep Susan occupied-running their errands for them during the week, and on Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays accompanying schoolchildren around town to be sure they didn
’
t lose their mufflers and were home in time for supper (to which Susan, having sung her servile little lungs out for it, would sometimes be invited). That was what she did
for eleven years—
and, of course, she
“
fixed up
”
the apartment that she and this ghost named
“
Jamey
”
had never really
“
finished.
”
Every few years she enrolled in a course at the night division at Columbia. Always she would take copious notes and diligently do all the reading, until such time as she began to fear that the professor was going to call upon her to speak. She would disappear then from the class, for a time, however, keeping up with the reading at home—even giving herself tests of her own devising. Men made some use of her over
the
se eleven years, mostly after charity dinners and dances, which she attended on the arm of
a bachelor nephew or some young
cousin of the chairwoman, a rising something or other in the world. That was easy enough, and after a while did not even require eight hundred milligrams of Miltown for her to be able to
“
cope
”
: she just opened her legs a little way, and he who was rising in the world did what little remained to be done. Sometimes the cousins and nephews (or maybe it was just the thoughtful chairwomen) sent her flowers the next day: she saved the cards in a folder in the file cabinet that contained her lecture notes and self-administered, ungraded examinations.
“
Will call. Great night. Love, A.
”
or B. or C.

Early each summer there would generally be a knock on her apartment door: a man to ask if she would have dinner with him while his wife was away in the country. These were the husbands of the women in the building for whom she went around town all day picking up swatches of fabrics and straightening out errors in charge accounts. Their wives had told them what a lovely young person Susan was, and then they would themselves have caught sight of the five foot nine inch redhead when she was getting in and out of taxis in front of the building, her arms loaded with other people
’
s Bergdorf boxes and her dress shimmying up her slender legs. One of these men, a handsome and charming investment banker (
“
like a father to me,
”
the thirty-year-old widow told me, without blinking an eye), gave her a new electric range for a present when fall came and he wanted to be sure she kept her mouth shut; she didn
’
t need a new range (not even to keep her mouth shut), but because she did not want to hurt his feelings, she had the one she and Jamey and the decorator had bought ripped out and the new one installed. And not one of these hot-weather paramours of hers, afflicted as he might be with middle-age wife-weariness, ever wanted to run off with the rich and beautiful young woman and start a new life—and that to Susan was as damning a fact as any in the prosecution
’
s case against her self-esteem.

I didn
’
t want to run off with her either. Yet I came back, night after night, returned to her apart
ment to eat and read and sleep,
which was not what young A., B., C, D., or E. had ever done. And for good reason: they obviously had too much going for them, too much confidence and vitality and hope for the future, to settle for more
than
a night with the likes of Susan the Submissive. I, on the other hand, at the age of thirty, with my prizes and my publication behind me, had had it. I sat at dinner in Jamey
’
s baronial chair, Susan serving me like a geisha. I shaved in Jamey
’
s lacquered brothel of a bathroom, my towels
war
m
ing
on the electrical heating stand while I discovered the luxury of his Rolls razor. I read in his gargantuan club chair, my feet up on the ottoman covered in Jamey
’
s mother
’
s favorite flame stitch, a gift for his twenty-second (and last) birthday. I drank those rare vintages of Jamey
’
s wine that Susan had kept at the proper temperature in an air-conditioned pantry all these years, as though she expected that he might rise from the grave one day and ask to taste his Richebourg. When my shoes got wet in
a
rainstorm, I stuffed them with his wooden shoe trees
and
padded around in his velvet slippers from Tripler
’
s. I borrowed stays from his shirts. I weighed myself on his scale. And was generally bored by his wife.
But she did not make a single demand.

All Susan said to me about our arrangement was this, and being Susan, she didn
’
t even say it aloud:
“
I
’
m yours. I
’
ll do anything. Come and go as you like. Let me feed you. Let me sit with you at night and watch you read. You can do anything you want to my body. I
’
ll do anything you say. Just have dinner with me sometimes and use some of these things. And I
’
ll never utter a peep. I
’
ll be good as gold. I won
’
t ask what you do when you go away. You don
’
t have to take me anywhere. Just stay here sometimes and make use of whatever you want, including me.
You
see, I have all these thick bath-sized towels and Belgian lace tablecloths, all this lovely crockery, three bathrooms, two televisions, and two million dollars of Jamey
’
s money with more of my own to come, I have these breasts and this vagina, these limbs, this skin—and no life. Giv
e me just a little bit of that,
and in return whenever you want to you can come here and recover from your wife. Any hour of the day or night. You don
’
t even have to call beforehand.
”

It
’
s a deal, I said. The broken shall succor the broken.

Of course, Susan was not the first young woman that I had met in New York since I
’
d come East seeking asylum in June of
‘
62. She was just the first one I
’
d set
tl
ed in with. According to the custom of that era—it is depressing to think that it may be the custom still—I had been to parties, befriended girls (which is to say, stood exchanging ironic quips with them in the corner of someone
’
s crowded West Side apartment), and then had gone to bed with them, either before or after taking them out to dinner a couple of times. Some were undoubtedly nice people, but I didn
’
t have the staying power or the confidence really to find out. Oftentimes during my first year in New York I discovered that I did not really want to take off my clothes or those of my new-found acquaintance, once we had gotten back to one or another of our apartments, and so I would fall into silent fits of melancholy that must have made me seem rather freakish—or at least affected. One young knockout, I remember, took it very personally and became incensed that I should suddenly have turned lugubrious on her after having been
“
so ferociously charming
”
with my back against the wall of one of those crowded living rooms; she asked if it was true that I was trying to kick being queer, and I, dim-witted as can be, began to struggle to remove her pantyhose, an act which turned out to consume such passion as I had. She took her leave shortly thereafter, and the following morning, going down for the paper and my seeded roll, I found wedged into the frame of the door an index card that had penciled on it,
“
Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here.
”
Those parties I went to, with their ongoing intersexual competition in self-defense, bred a lot of this sort of scuffling, or maybe a little bit went a long way with me then; eventually invitations from
editors and writers to parties
where there would be
“
a lot of girls
”
I mostly turned down; when I didn
’
t, I generally regretted it afterward.