My Life as a Man (32 page)

Three days later she was back at the door, in blue duffel coat and knee socks, wan and scrappy looking as a street urchin. Because she could not face her top-floor room on Carmine Street alone, she had spent the three days with friends of hers, a Village couple in their early fifties whom I couldn’t stand, who in turn considered me and my narratives “square.” The husband (advertised by Maureen as “an old friend of Kenneth Patchen’s”) had been Maureen’s teacher when s
he first came to New York
and went into wood sculpture. Months back she had declared that she had been badly misled by
the
se two “schizorenos,” but never explained how.

As was her way the morning after even
the
most horrendous scenes, she laughed off the violent encounter of three days earlier, asking me (in wonderment at my
naïveté
) how I could take seriously anything she may have said or done in anger. One aspect of my squareness (according to those who worked in wood) was that I had no more tolerance for the irregular or the eccentric than George F. Babbitt of Zenith, Middle America. I was not open to experience in my basement apartment on East Ninth the way those middle-aged beatniks were in their Bleecker Street loft. I was a nice Jewish boy from Westchester who cared only about Success. I was their Dina Dornbusch.

“Lucky I am,” I told her, “otherwise you’d be at the bottom of the East River.” She was sitting in a chair, still in her duffel coat; I had given no sign that I had any intention of allowing her to move back in. When she had gone to peck me on the cheek in the doorway, I had—again, to her amusement—pulled my head away. “Where’s the typewriter?” I asked, my way of saying that as far as I was concerned the only excuse Maureen could have
to
be visiting me was to return what she had borrowed.
“You
middle-class monster!” she cried. “You throw me
out
into the street. I have to go sleep on somebody’s floor with sixteen cats lapping my face all night long—and all you can think about is your portable typewriter! Your
things.
It’s a thing, Peter,
a thing
—and I’m a human being!” “You could have slept at your own place, Maureen.” “I was
lonely.
You don’t understand that because you have ice in your heart instead of feelings. And my own place isn’t a ‘place,’ as you so blithely put it—it’s a shithole of an attic and you know it!
You
wouldn’t sleep there for half an hour.” “Where’s the typewriter?” “The typewriter is a
thing,
damn it, an inanimate object! What about
me?”
and leaping from the chair, she charged, swinging her pocketbook like a shillelagh. “
CLIP ME WITH THAT, MAUREEN, AND
I’LL KILL YOU!” “Do it!” was her reply. “Kill me! Some man’s going to—why not a ‘civilized’ one like you! Why not a follower of Flaubert!” Here she collapsed against me, and with her arms around my neck, began to sob. “Oh, Peter, I don’t have anything. Nothing at all. I’m really lost, baby. I didn’t want to go to them—I
had
to. Please, don’t make me go away again right now. I haven’t even had a shower in three days. Let me just take a shower. Let me just calm down—and this time I’ll go forever, I promise.” She then explained that the loft on Bleecker Street had been burglarized one night when all except the cats were out eating spaghetti on Fourteenth Street; my typewriter had been stolen, along with all of her friends’ wood-carving tools, their recorders, and their Blatstein, which sounded to me like an automatic rifle but was a painting.

I didn’t believe a word of it. She went off to the bathroom, and when I heard
the
shower running, I put my hand into the pocket of her duffel coat and after just a little fishing around in the crumpled Kleenex and the small change came up with a pawn ticket. If I hadn’t been living half a block from the Bowery, I don’t imagine it would have occurred to me that Maureen had taken the typewriter up the street for the cash. But I was learning—though not quite fast enough.

Now an even worldlier fellow than myself—George F. Babbitt, say, of Zenith—would have remembered the old business adage, “Cut your losses,” and after finding the pawn ticket, would have dropped it back into her pocket and said nothing. Shower her, humor her, and get her the hell out, George F. Babbitt would have said to himself, and peace and quiet will reign once again. Instead I rushed into
the
bathroom—no Babbitt I—where we screamed at each other with such ferocity that the young married couple upstairs, whose life we made a misery during these months (the husband, an editor at a publishing house, cuts me to this day), began to pound on the floor above with a broom handle. “You petty little thief! You
crook!”
“But I did it for you!” “For me? You pawned my typewriter for
me?”
“Yes!”
“What are you
talking
about?” Here, with the water still beating down on her, she slumped to the bottom of the bathtub, and sitting on her haunches, began actually to keen in her woe. Unclothed, she would sometimes make me think of an alley cat-quick, wary, at once scrawny and strong; now, as she rocked and moaned with grief under the full blast of the shower, something about the weight and pointiness of her large conical breasts, and her dark hair plastered to her head, made her look to me like some woman out of the bush, a primitive whose picture you might come upon in
National Geographic,
praying to the sun-god to roll back the waters. “Because
—“
she howled, “because I’m pregnant. Because—because I wasn’t going to tell you. Because I was going to get the money however I could and get an abortion and never bother you again. Peter, I’ve been shoplifting too.” “Stealing? Where?” “Altman’s-a little from Klein’s. I
had,
to!” “But you
can’t
be pregnant, Maureen—we
haven’t slept together for weeks!”
“BUT I AM! TWO MONTHS PREGNANT!” “Two months?” “Yes! And I never said a word, because I didn’t want to interfere with your ART!” “Well, you should have, goddam it, because I would have given you the money to go out and get an abortion!” “Oh, you are so generous—! But it’s too late—I’ve taken enough from men like you in my life! You’re going to marry me or I’m going to kill myself! And I will do it!” she cried, hammering defiantly on the rim of the tub with her two little fists. “This is no empty threat, Peter —I cannot take you people any more! You selfish, spoiled, immature, irresponsible Ivy League bastards, born with those spoons in your mouths!” The silver spoon was somewhat hyperbolic, and even she knew that much, but she was hysterical, and in hysteria, as she eventually made clear to me, anything goes. “With your big fat advance and your high Art—oh, you make me sick the way you hide from life behind that
Art
of yours! I hate you and I hate that fucking Flaubert, and you are going to marry me, Peter, because I have had enough! I’m not going to
be another man’s helpless victim! You are not going to dump me the way you dumped that girl!”

“That girl” was how she referred to Dina, toward whom she had never until that moment been anything but dismissive; now, all at once, she invoked in her own behalf not just Dina, but Grete
and
the Pembroke undergraduate who had been my girl friend during my senior year at Brown. All of them shared with Maureen the experience of being “discarded” when I had finished having my “way” with them. “But we are not leftovers, Peter; we’re not trash or scum and we will not be treated that way! We are human beings, and we will not be thrown into a garbage pail by
you!”
“You’re not pregnant, Maureen, and you know damn well you’re not. That’s what all this ‘we’ business is about,” I said, suddenly, with perfect confidence. And with that, she all but collapsed
—“
We’re not
talking
about me right now,” she said, “we’re talking about
you.
Don’t you know
yet
why you got rid of your Pembroke pal? Or your German girl friend? Or that girl who had everything? Or why you’re getting rid of me?” I said, “You’re not pregnant, Maureen. That is a lie.” “It is not—and listen to me! Do you have no idea at all why it is you are so afraid of marriage and children and a family and treat women the way that you do? Do you know what you really are, Peter, aside from being a
heartless
, selfish writing machine?” I said, “A fag.” “That’s right! And making light of it doesn’t make it any less true!” “I would think it makes it more true.” “It does! You are the most transparent latent homosexual I have ever run across in my life! Just like big brave Mezik who forced me to blow his buddy—
so that he could watch.
Because it’s really what he wanted to do himself—but he didn’t even have the guts for that!”
“Forced
you? Oh, come on, pal, you’ve got pointy teeth in that mouth of yours—I’ve felt your fangs. Why didn’t you bite it off and teach them both a lesson, if you were being
forced
to?” “I should have! Don’t you think I didn’t think of it! Don’t you think a woman doesn’t think of it every time! And don’t you worry, mister, if th
ey weren’t twelve inches taller
than me, I would have bitten the thing off at the root! And spit on the bleeding stump—just like I spit on you, you high and mighty Artist, for throwing me two months pregnant out into the street!” But she was weeping so, that the spittle meant for me just rolled down her lips onto her chin.

She slept in the bed that night (first bed in three days, I was reminded) and I sat at my desk in the living room, thinking about running away—not because she continued to insist she had missed two periods in a row, but because she was so tenaciously hanging on to what I was certain was a lie. I could leave right then for any number of places. I had friends up in Providence, a young faculty couple who’d gladly put me up for a while. I had an army buddy in Boston, graduate-school colleagues still out in Chicago, there was my sister Joan in California. And of course brother Morris uptown, if I should require spiritual comfort and physical refuge near at hand. He would take me in for as long as was necessary, no questions asked. Since I’d settled in New York, I had been getting phone calls from Moe every couple of weeks checking to see if there was anything I needed and reminding me to come to dinner whenever I was in the mood. At his invitation I had even taken Maureen up to their apartment one Sunday morning for bagels and the smoked fish spread. To my surprise, she had appeared rather cowed by my brother’s bearish manner (Moe is a great one to cross-examine strangers), and the general intensity of the family life seemed to make her morose; she did not have much to say after we left, except that Moe and I were very different people. I agreed; Moe was very much the public man (the university, the UN commissions, political meetings and organizations ever since high school) and very much the paterfamilias
…
She said, “I meant he’s a brute.” “A what?” “The way he treats that wife of his. It’s unspeakable.” “He’s nuts about her, for Christ’s sake.” “Oh? Is that why he walks all over her? What a little sparrow
she
is! Has she ever had an idea o
f her own in her life? She just
sits there, eating his crumbs. And that’s her life.” “Oh, that’s not her life, Maureen.” “Sorry, I don’t like him—or her.”

Moe didn’t like Maureen either, but at the outset said nothing, assuming it was my affair not his, and
that
she was just the girl of the moment. As I had assumed myself. But when combat between Maureen and me stepped up dramatically, and I apparen
tly
began to look and sound as confused and em
battle
d as I’d become, Moe tried on a couple of occasions to give me some brotherly advice; each time I shook him off. As I still couldn’t imagine any long-range calamity befalling me, I objected strenuously to being “babied,” as I thought of it—particularly by someone whose life,
though
admirable, was
grounded
in ways I was just too young to be concerned about. As I saw it, it was essential for me to be able to confront whatever troubles I’d made for myself without his, or anyone else’s, assistance. In brief, I was as arrogant (and blind) as youth and luck and an aristocratic literary bent could make me, and so, when he invited me up to Columbia for lunch I told him, “I’ll work it all out, don’t worry.” “But why should it be ‘work’? Your
work,
is your work, not this little Indian.” “I take it that’s some kind of euphemism. For the record, the mother’s family was Irish, the father’s German.” “Yeah? She looks a little Apache to me, with those eyes and that hair. There’s something savage there, Peppy. No? All right, don’t answer. Sneer now, pay later. You weren’t brought up for savagery, kid.” “I know. Nice boy. Jewish.” “What’s so bad about that? You are a nice civilized Jewish boy, with some talent and some brains. How much remains to be seen. Why don’t you attend to t
hat and leave the lions to Hem
ingway.” “What is that supposed to mean, Moey?” “You. You look like you’ve been sleeping in the jungle.” “Nope. Just down on Ninth Street.” “I thought girls were for fun, Pep. Not to scare the shit out of you.” I was offended
both
by his low-mindedness and his meddling and refused to talk further about it. Afterward I looked in the mirror for the signs of fear—or doom. I saw nothing: still looked like Tarnopol the Triumphant to me.