answer my next question), if I refused after the divorce to make the alimony payments, I could be (and with Maureen as my antagonist, no doubt would be) hauled into court under state reciprocity agreements and held in contempt by the Florida or Delaware or Wyoming judge for failing to support my former spouse in New York. A divorce, my lawyer said, I might be able to pull off-but escape the alimony? never. Nonetheless, I went ahead and accepted a job teaching American literature and creative writing the following September in Laramie, Wyoming. I went immediately to the library and took out books on the West. I went up to the Museum of Natural History and walked among the Indian artifacts and the tableau of the American bison. I decided I would try to learn to ride a horse, at least a little, before I got out there. And I thought of the money I would not be paying to Dr. Spielvogel.
Some ten weeks later I wrote to tell the chairman of the English department in Laramie that because of unforeseen circumstances I would be unable to take the job. The unforeseen circumstance was the hopelessness I had begun to feel at the prospect of a two-year exile in Wyoming. After which I might be able to ride a horse, but I would
I spent the following few months deciding whether to return to Italy, where I still had a few friends, or to try Norway, where chances were slim that anybody would ever find me (unless of course they went looking). How about Finland? I read all about Finland in the
But, oh, if I was outraged in New York over all I had lost in that marriage, imagine how I would feel when I woke up bearded in my cottage on the moors in Scalloway to discover I had lost my country as well. What “freedom” would I have won then, speaking American to the ponies? What “justice” would I have made, an ironical Jewish novelist with a crook and a pack of sheep? And what’s worse, suppose she found me out and followed me there, for all that my name is now Long Tom Dumphy? Not at all unlikely, given that I couldn’t shake her in this, a country of two hundred million. Oh, imagine what that would be like, me with me stick and Maureen with her rage in the middle of the roarin’ North Sea, and only 19,343 others to hold us apart?
So, unhappily (and not at all, really) I accepted my fate as a male resident of the state of New York of the republic of America who no longer cared to live with a wife whose preference it was to continue to live with (and off) him. I began, as they say, to try to make the best of it. Indeed, by the time I met Susan I was actually beginning to pass out of the first stages of shell shock (or was it fallout sickness?) and had even found myself rather taken with (as opposed to “taken by,” very much a preoccupation at the time) a bright and engaging girl named Nancy Miles, fresh out of college and working as a “checker” for the New
Mr. Peter Tarnopol
Institute for Unpredictable Behavior
62 West 12th Street
New York, N.Y.
Dear Mr. Tarnopol:
With reference to our meeting of 5/6/63:
1. What happened?
2. Where are we?
While I fully recognize that numerous demands of this nature must strain the limits of your patience, I nonetheless make bold to request that you fill out the above questionnaire and return it to the address below as soon as it is convenient.
I remain,
yours,
Perplexed
Perplexed perhaps, but not broken. That was the last I heard from Nancy. I chose Susan.
It goes without saying that those seeking sanctuary have ordinarily to settle for something less than a seven- room apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in which to take refuge from the wolves or the cops or the cold. I for one had never lived in anything approaching Susan’s place for size or grandeur. Nor had I ever eaten so well in my life. Maureen’s cooking wasn’t that bad, but generally dinnertime was the hour reserved at our house for settling scores with me and my sex-unsettled scores that some evenings seemed to me to have been piling up ever since the first nucleic acid molecule went ahead and reproduced itself several billion years ago; consequently, even when the food was hot and tasty, the ambience was wrong. And in the years before I took to dining in each night on Maureen’s gall, there had been army chow or university cafeteria stew. But Susan was a pro, trained by masters at what she had not learned at Calpurnia’s knee: during the year she had been waiting for her fiance to be graduated from Princeton and their life of beauty and abundance to begin, she had commuted up to New York to learn how to cook French, Italian, and Chinese specialties. The course in each cuisine lasted six weeks, and Susan stayed on (as she hadn’t at Wellesley) triumphantly to complete all three. To her great glee she discovered she could now at least
During her widowhood Susan had only rarely had the opportunity to feed anyone other than herself, and so it was that I became the first dinner guest ever to appreciate in full a culinary expertise that spanned the continents. I had never tasted food so delicious. And not even my own dutiful mother had waited on me the way this upper-crust waitress did. I was under standing instructions to proceed to eat without her, so that she could scamper freely back and forth into the kitchen getting the next dish going in her wok. Good enough. We had little outside of the food to talk about anyway. I asked about her family, I asked about her analysis, I asked about Jamey and the McCalls. I asked why she had left Wellesley in her first year. She shrugged and she flushed and she averted her eyes. She replied, oh they’re very nice, and he’s very nice, and she’s such a sweet and thoughtful person, and “Why did I leave Wellesley? Oh, I just left.” For weeks I got no more information or animation than I had the night we met, when I was seated next to her at the dinner party I was invited to annually at my publisher’s town house: unswerving agreeableness, boundless timidity-a frail and terrified beauty. And in the beginning that was just fine with me. Bring on the blanquette de veau.
Each morning I headed back to the desk in my West Twelfth Street sublet, off to school to practice the three Rs-reading, writing, and angrily toting up yet again the alimony and legal bills. In the elevator, as I descended from 9D, I met up with the schoolchildren a third my age whom Susan took on weekends to the Planetarium and the puppet shows, and the successful business executives whose August recreation she had sometimes been. And what am