My Life as a Man (38 page)

“I am not a fortune-teller,” he said, “and neither are you. There was as much reason, if not more, to believe she would not do it as that she would. You know yourself—she knew
herself—that this
affair of yours was the most satisfying thing to happen to her in years. She had, literally, the
time of her life. She began at
last to become a full-grown woman. She
bloomed,
from all reports—correct? If when you left her, she did not have enough support from her doctor, from her family, from wherever, well, that is unfortunate. But what can
you
do? She did at least have what she had with you. And she could not have had it
without
you. To regret now having stayed with her all those years, because of this—well, that is not to look very carefully at the credit side of the ledger. Especially, Mr. Tarnopol, as she did not commit suicide. You act here, you know, as though that is what has happened, as though there has been a funeral, and so on. But she only
attempted
suicide, after all. And, I would think, with little intention of succeeding. The fact is that her cleaning woman was to arrive early
the
very next morning, and that the woman had a key with which to let herself into Susan’s apartment. She knew then that she would be found in only a few hours. Correct? Of course, Susan took something of a risk to get what she wanted, but as we see, she pulled it off quite well. She did not die. You did come running. And you are running yet. Maybe only in circles, but that for her is still better than out of her life completely. It is you, you see, who is blowing this up out of all proportion. Your narcissism again, if I may say so. Much too much overestimation of—well, of practically everything. And to use this incident, which has not ended so tragically, you know—to use this incident to break off therapy and go off into isolation again, once more the defeated man, well, I think you are making a serious mistake.”

If so, I went ahead and made it. I could not continue to confide in him or to take myself seriously as his patient, and I left. The last of my attachments had been severed: no more Susan, no more Spielvogel, no more Maureen. No longer in the path of love, hate, or measured professional concern—by accident or design, for good or bad, I am not there.

Note: A letter from Spielvogel arrived here at the Colony just this week, expressing thanks for the copies of “Salad Days” and

“Courting Disaster” that I mailed to him earlier in
the
month. I had written:

For some time now I’ve been debating whether to send on to you these two (postanalytic) stories I wrote during my first months here in Vermont. I do now, not because I wish to open my case up to a renewed investigation in your office (though I see how you might interpret these manuscripts in that way), but because of your interest in the processes of art (and because lately you have been on my mind). I know that your familiarity with the biographical and psychological data that furnished the raw material for such flights of fancy might give rise to theoretical speculation, and the theoretical speculation give rise in turn to the itch to communicate your findings to your fellows. Your eminent colleague Ernst Kris has noted that “the psychology of artistic style is unwritten,” and my suspicion (aroused by past experience) is that you might be interested in
taking
a crack at it. Feel free to speculate all you want, of course, but please, nothing in print without my permission. Yes, that is still a sore subject, but not so sore (I’ve concluded) as to outweigh this considered impulse to pass on for your professional scrutiny these waking dreams whose “unconscious” origins (I must warn you) may not be so unconscious as a professional might like to conclude at first glance. Yours, Peter Tarnopol.

Spielvogel’s reply:

It was thoughtful of you to send on to me your two new stories. I read them with great interest and enjoyment, and as ever, admiration for your skills and understanding. The two stories are so different and yet so expertly done, and to my mind balance each other
perfectly
. The scenes with Sharon in the first I found especially funny, and in the second the fastidious attention that the narrating voice pays to itself struck me as absolutely right, given his concerns (or “human concerns” as the Zuckerman of “Salad Days” would have said in his undergraduate seminar). What a sad and painful story it is. Moral, too, in the best, most serious way. You appear to be doing very well. I wish you continued success with your work. Sincerely, Otto Spielvogel.

This is the doctor whose ministrations I have renounced? Even if the letter is just a contrivance to woo me back onto his couch, what a lovely and clever contrivance! I wonder whom he has been seeing about his prose style. Now why couldn’t he write about
me
like that? (Or wasn’t that piece he wrote about me really as bad as I thought? Or was it even worse? And did it matter either way? Surely I know what it’s like having trouble writing up my case in English sentences.
I’ve
been trying to do it now for years. Then, was ridding myself of him wrong too? Or am I just succumbing—like a narcissist! Oh, he knows his patient, this conjurer
…
Or
am
I being too suspicious?)

So: shall I go ahead now and confuse myself further by sending copies of the stories to Susan? to my mother and father? to Dina Dornbusch? to Maureen’s Group? How about to Maureen herself?

Dear Departed: It may cheer you up some to read the enclosed.
Little
did you know how persuasive you were. Actually had you played your cards right and been just a little less nuts we’d be miserably married yet. Even as it is, your widower thinks practically only of you. Do you think of him in Heaven, or (as I fear) have you set your sights on some big strapping neurotic angel ambivalent about his sexual role? These two stories owe much to your sense of things—you might have conceived of the self-intoxicated princeling of “Salad Days” yourself and called him me; and, allowing for artistic license of course, isn’t Lydia pretty much how you saw yourself (if, that is, you could have seen yourself as you would have had others see you)? How is Eternity, by the way? In the hope that these two stories help to pass the time a little more quickly, I am, your bereaved, Peter.

Out of the whirlwind, a reply:

Dear Peter: I’ve read the stories and found them most amusing, particularly the one that isn’t suppo
sed to be. Your spiritual exer
tions (m your own behalf) are very touching. I took the liberty (I didn’t imagine you would mind) of passing them on to the Lord. You will be pleased to know that “Courting Disaster” brought a smile to His lips as well. No wrath whatsoever, I’m happy to report, though He did remark (not without a touch of astonishment), “It
is
all vanity, isn’t it?” The stories are currently making the rounds of the saints, who I’m sure will find your aspiration to their condition rather flattering. The rumor here among the holy martyrs is that you’ve got a new work under way that you say is really going “to tell it like it is.” If so, I expect that means Maureen again. How do you intend to portray me this time? Holding your head on a plate? I think a phallus would increase your sales. But of course you know best how to exploit my memory for high artistic purposes. Good luck with
My Martyrdom as a Man,
That
is
to be the title, is it not? All of us here in Heaven look forward to the amusement it is sure to afford those who know you from on high. Your beloved wife, Maureen. P.S. Eternity is fine. Just about long enough to forgive a son of a bitch like you.

And now, class, will you please hand in your papers, and before turning to Dr. Spielvogel’s useful fiction, let us see what
you
have made of the legends here contrived:

English
312

M&F 1:00-2:30

(assignations by appointment)

Professor Tarnopol

THE USES OF
THE
USEFUL FICTIONS:

Or, Professor Tarnopol Withdraws

Somewhat from His Feelings

by Karen Oakes

Certainly I do not deny when I am reading that the author may be impassioned, nor even that he might have conceived the first plan of
his work under the sway of passion. But his decision to write supposes that he withdraws somewhat from his feelings
…

—Sartre,
What Is Literature?

On ne feut jamais se connaitre, mais settlement se raconter.

—Simone de Beauvoir

“Salad Days,” the shorter of the two Zuckerman stories assigned for today, attempts by means of comic irony to contrast the glories and triumphs of Nathan Zuckerman’s golden youth with the “misfortune” of his twenties, to which the author suddenly alludes in the closing lines. The author (Professor Tarnopol) does not elucidate in the story the details of that misfortune; indeed, the point he makes is that, by him at least, it cannot be done. “Unfortunately, the author of this story, having himself experienced a similar misfortune at about the same age, does not have it in him, even yet, midway through his thirties, to tell it briefly or to find it funny. ‘Unfortunate,’” concludes the fabricated Zuckerman, speaking in behalf of the dissembling Tarnopol, “because he wonders if
that
isn’t more the measure of the man than of the misfortune.”

In order to dilute the self-pity that (as I understand it) had poisoned his imagination in numerous previous attempts to fictionalize his unhappy marriage, Professor Tarnopol establishes at
the
outset here a tone of covert (and, to some small degree, self-congratulatory) self-mockery; this calculated attitude of comic detachment he maintains right on down to the last paragraph, where abruptly
the
shield of lightheartedness is all at once pierced by the author’s pronouncement that in his estimation the true story really isn’t funny at all. All of which would appear to suggest that if Professor Tarnopol has managed in “Salad Days” to make an artful narrative of his misery, he has done so largely by refusing direc
tly
to confront it.

In contrast to “Salad Days,
” “Courting Disaster” is marked
throughout by a tone of sobriety and an air of deep concern; here is all the heartfeltness that has been suppressed in “Salad Days.” A heroic quality adheres to the suffering of the major characters, and their lives are depicted as far too grave for comedy or satire. The author reports that he began this story intending that his hero should be tricked into marrying exac
tly
as he himself had been. Why that bedeviling incident from Professor Tarnopol’s personal history could not be absorbed into this fictional artifice is not difficult to understand: the Nathan Zuckerman imagined in “Courting Disaster” requires no shotgun held to his head for him to find in the needs and sorrows of Lydia Ketterer the altar upon which to offer up the sacrifice of his manhood. It is not compromising circumstances, but (in both senses) the
gravity
of his character, that determines his moral career; all the culpability is his.

In
“Courting Disaster,” then, Professor Tarnopol conceives of himself and Mrs. Tarnopol as characters in a struggle that, in its moral pathos, veers toward tragedy, rather than Gothic melodrama, or soap opera, or farce, which are the modes that generally obtain when Professor Tarnopol narrates the story of his marriage to me in bed. Likewise, Professor Tarnopol invents cruel misfortunes (i.e., Lydia’s incestuous father, her sadistic husband, her mean little aunts, the illiterate Moonie) to validate and deepen Lydia’s despair and to exacerbate Nathan’s morbid sense of responsibility—this plenitude of heartache, supplying, as it were, “the objective correlative” for the emotions of shame, grief, and guilt that inform the narration.

And that informed Professor Tarnopol’s marriage.

To put the matter altogether direc
tl
y: if Mrs. Tarnopol had been such a Lydia, if Professor Tarnopol had been such a Nathan, and if I, Karen Oakes, had been a Moonie of a stepdaughter instead of just the star pupil of my sex in English 312 that semester, then,
then
his subsequent undoing would have made a certain poetic sense.

But as it is, he is who he is, she is who she is, and I am simply
myself,
the
girl who would not go with him to Italy. And there is no more poetry, or tragedy, or for that matter, comedy to it than that.

Miss Oakes: As usual, A+. Prose overly magisterial in spots, but you understand the stories (and the author) remarkably well for one of your age and background. It is always something to come upon a beautiful young girl from a nice family with a theoretical turn of mind and a weakness for the grand style and the weighty epigraph. I remember you as an entirely beguiling person. On my deathbed I shall hear you calling from your room, “Will you hang up the downstairs phone, please, Mom?” That plain-spoken line spoke volumes to me too. Ka-reen, you were right not to run off to Italy with me. It wouldn’t have been Moonie and Zuckerman, but it probably wouldn’t have been any good. Still, you should know that whatever the “neurotic” reason, I was gone on you— let no man, lay or professional, say I wasn’t, or ascribe my “hangup” over you simply to my having transgressed the unwritten law against copulating with those sort-of forbidden daughters known as one’s students (though I admit: asking Miss Oakes, from behind my desk, to clarify further for the other students some clever answer she’d just given in class, only twenty minutes after having fallen to my knees in your room to play the supplicant beneath your belly,
was
a delicious sensation; cunnilingus aside, I don’t think
teaching
has ever been so exciting, before or since, or that I’ve ever felt so tender or devoted to any class as I did to our English 312. Perhaps the authorities should reconsider, from a strictly pedagogical point of view, the existing taboo, being mindful of the benefits that may accrue to the class whose teacher has taken one of its members as his secret love; I’ll write the AAUP about this, in good scholarly fashion of course outlining for them the tradition, from Socrates to Abelard to me—nor will I fail to mention the thanks we three received from the authorities for having thrown ourselves so conscientiously into our work. To think, I recounted to you on our very first “date” what they did to Abelard—yet, here I am still stunned at how I got mutilated by the state of New York). Ah, Miss Oakes, if only I hadn’t been so overbearing! Memories of my
behavior make me cringe. I told
you about Isaac Babel and about my wife with the same veins popping. My insistence, my doggedness, and my tears. How it must have alarmed you to hear me sobbing over the phone—your esteemed professor! If only I had taken it a little easier and suggested a couple of weeks together in northern Wisconsin, some lake somewhere, rather than forever in tragic Europe, who knows, you might have been willing to start off that way. You were brave enough—it’s just that I didn’t have the wherewithal for a little at a time. At any rate, I have had enough Vivid Experience to last awhile, and am off in the bucolic woods writing my memoirs. Whether this will put the Vivid Experience to rest I don’t know. Perhaps what I’ll think when I’m done is that these pages add up to Maureen’s final victory over Tarnopol the novelist, the culmination of my life as her man and no more. To be writing “in all candor” doesn’t suggest that I’ve withdrawn that much from my feelings. But then why the hell should I? So maybe my animus is not wholly transformed—so maybe I am turning art into a chamberpot for hatred, as Flaubert says I shouldn’t, into so much camouflage for self-vindication—so, if the other thing is what literature is, then this ain’t. Ka-reen, I know I taught the class otherwise, but so what? I’ll try a character like Henry Miller, or someone out-and-out bilious like Celine for my hero instead of Gustave Flaubert— and won’t be such an Olympian writer as it was my ambition to be back in the days when nothing called personal experience stood between me and aesthetic detachment. Maybe it’s time to revise my ideas about being an “artist,” or “artiste” as my adversary’s lawyer preferred to pronounce it. Maybe it was always time. Only one drawback: in that I am not a renegade bohemian or cutup of any kind (only a municipal judge could have taken me for that), I may not be well suited for the notoriety that attends the publication of an unabashed and unexpurgated history of one’s erotic endeavors. As the history itself will testify, I happen to be no more immune to shame or built for public exposure than the next burgher with shades on his bedroom windows and a latch on the bathroom door—indeed, maybe what the whole history signifies is that I am sensitive to nothing in all the world as I am to my moral reputation. Not that I like being fleeced of my hard-earned dough either. Maybe I ought just to
call this confession “The Case
Against Leeches, by One Who Was Bled,” and publish it as a political tract—go on Johnny Carson and angrily shake an empty billfold at America, the least I can do for all those husbands who’ve been robbed deaf, dumb, and blind by chorines and maureens in the courts of law. Inveigh with an upraised fist against “the system,” instead of against my own stupidity for falling into the first (the first!) trap life laid for me. Or ought I to deposit these pages too into my abounding liquor carton, and if I must embroil myself in the
battle
yet again, go at it like an artist worthy of the name, without myself as the “I,” without the bawling and the spleen, and whatever else unattractive that shows? What do you think, shall I give this up and go back to Zuckermanizing myself and Lydiafying Maureen and Moonieing over you? If I do take the low road of candor (and anger and so forth) and publish what I’ve got, will you (or your family) sue for invasion of privacy and defamation of character? And if not you, won’t Susan or her family? Or will she go one better and, thoroughly humiliated, do herself in? And how will I take it when my photograph appears on the
Time
magazine book page, captioned “Tarnopol: stripped to his panties and bra.” I can hear myself screaming already. And what about the letter in the Sunday
Times
book review section, signed by members of Maureen’s Group, challenging my malicious characterization of Maureen as a pathological liar, calling
me
the liar and my
hook,
the fraud. How will I like it when the counterattack is launched by the opposition—will it strike me then that I have exorcised the past, or rather that now I have wed myself to it as irrevocably as ever I was wed to Maureen? How will I like reading reviews of my private life in the Toledo
Blade
and the Sacramento
Bee?
And what will
Commentary
make of this confession? I can’t imagine it’s good for the Jews. What about when the professional marital experts and authorities on love settle in for a marathon discussion of my personality problems on the “David Susskind Show”? Or is that just what I need to straighten me out? Maybe the best treatment possible for my excessive vulnerability and preoccupation generally with My Good Name (which is largely how I got myself into this fix to begin with) is to go forth brazenly crying, “Virtue! a fig! ‘tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus.” Sure, quote Iago to them—tell them, “Oh, find me self-addicted and self-deluded, find me self and nothing more!