Susan, the more remote the prospect of the orgasm. I thought one could make as good an argument against this line of speculation as for it, but I didn’t try. I was neither theoretician nor diagnostician, nor for that matter much of a “father figure” in my own estimation. It would have seemed to me that you hadn’t to penetrate very far beneath the surface of our affair to see that I was just another patient looking for the cure himself.
In fact, it required my doctor to get me to continue to take my medicine named Susan, when, along the way, I repeatedly complained that I’d had enough, that the medicine was exacerbating the ailment more than it might be curing it. Dr. Spielvogel did not take my brother Moe’s view of Susan-no, with Spielvogel I did. “She’s hopeless,” I would tell him, “a frightened little sparrow.” “You would prefer another vulture?” “Surely there must be something in between,” thinking, as I spoke, of Nancy Miles, that soaring creature, and the letter I’d never answered. “But you don’t have something in between. You have this.” “But all that timidity, all that fear…The woman is a slave, Doctor, and not just to me-to everyone.” “You prefer contentiousness? You miss the scenes of high drama, do you? With Maureen, so you told me, it was the Gotterdammerung at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. What’s wrong with a little peace and quiet with your meals?” “But there are times when she is a mouse.” “Good enough,” said Spielvogel, “who ever heard of a little mouse doing a grown man any serious harm?” “But what happens when the mouse wants to be married-and to me?” “How can she marry you? You are married already.” “But when I’m no longer married.” “There will be time to worry about that then, don’t you think?” “No. I don’t think that at all. What if when I should want to leave her, she tries to do herself in? She is not stable, Doctor, she is not strong-you must understand that.” ‘Which are you talking about now, Maureen or Susan?” “I can tell them apart, I assure you. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t beyond Susan, just because it happens also to be a specialty of Maureen’s.” “Has she threatened you with suicide if you should ever leave her?” “She wouldn’t threaten me with anything. That isn’t her way.” “But you are certain that she would do it, if at some future date, when the issue arose, you chose not to marry her. That is the reason you want to give her up now.” “I don’t particularly ‘want’ to. I’m telling you I ought to.” “But you are enjoying yourself somewhat, am I right?” “Somewhat, yes. More than somewhat. But I don’t want to lead her on. She is not up to it. Neither am I.” “But is it leading her on, to have an affair, two young people?” “Not in your eyes, perhaps.” “In whose then? Your own?” “In Susan’s, Doctor, in Susan’s! Look, what if after the affair is no more, she cannot accept the fact and commits suicide? Answer that, will you?” “Over the loss of you she commits suicide?” “Yes!” “You think every woman in the world is going to kill herself over you?” “Oh, please, don’t distort the point I’m making. Not ‘every woman’- just the two I’ve wound up with.” “Is this why you wind up with them?” “Is it? I’ll think about it. Maybe so. But then that is yet another reason to dissolve this affair right now. Why continue if there is anything like a chance of that coming to pass? Why would you want to encourage me to do a thing like that?” “Was I encouraging ‘that’? I was only encouraging you to find some pleasure and comfort in her compliant nature. I tell you, many a man would envy you. Not everybody would be so distressed as you by a mistress who is beautiful and submissive and rich, and a Cordon Bleu cook into the bargain.” “And, conceivably, a suicide.” “That remains to be seen. Many things are conceivable that have little basis in reality.” “I’m afraid in my position I can’t afford to be so cavalier about it.” “Not cavalier. Only no more convinced than is warranted, in the circumstances. And no more terrified.” “Look, I am not up to any more desperate stunts. I’ve got a right to be terrified. I was married to Maureen. I still am!” “Well then, if you feel so strongly, if you’ve been burned once and don’t want to take the chance-“ “I am saying, to repeat, that it may not be such a ‘chance’-and I don’t feel I have a right to take it. It’s her life that is endangered, not mine.” “‘Endangered’? What a narcissistic melodrama you are writing here, Mr. Tarnopol. If I may offer a literary opinion.” “Yes? Is that what it is?” “Isn’t it?” “I don’t always know, Doctor, exactly what you mean by ‘narcissism.’ What I think I am talking about is responsibility. You are the one who is talking about the pleasure and comforts in staying. You are the one who is talking about what is in it for me. You are the one who is telling me not to worry about Susan’s expectations or vulnerability. It would seem to me that it’s you who are inviting me to take the narcissistic line.” “All right, if that’s what you think, then leave her before it goes any further. You have this sense of responsibility to the woman-then act upon it.” “But just a second ago you were suggesting that my sense of responsibility was misplaced. That my fears were delusional. Or weren’t you?” “I think they are excessive, yes.”
Right now I get no advice about Susan from anyone. I am here to be free of advisers-and temptation. Susan a temptation? Susan a temptress? What a word to describe her! Yet I have never ached for anyone like this before. As the saying goes, we’d been through a lot together, and not in the way that Maureen and I had been “through it.” With Maureen it was the relentless sameness of the struggle that nearly drove me mad; no matter how much reason or intelligence or even brute force I tried to bring to bear upon our predicament, I could not change a thing-everything I did was futile, including of course doing nothing. With Susan there was struggle all right, but then there were rewards. Things changed. We changed. There was progress, development, marvelous and touching transformations all around. Surely the last thing you could say was that ours was a comfortable, settled arrangement that came to an end because our pleasures had become tiresome and stale. No, the progress was the pleasure, the transformations what gave me most delight-which is what has made her attempt at suicide so crushing…what makes my yearning for her all the more bewildering. Because now it looks as though nothing has changed, and we are back where we began. I have to wonder if the letters I begin to write to her and leave unfinished, if the phone calls I break off dialing before the last digit, if that isn’t me beginning to give way to the siren song of The Woman Who Cannot Live Without You, She Who Would Rather Be Dead Than Unwed-if this isn’t me on the brink again of making My Mistake, contriving to continue, after a brief intermission, what Spielvogel would call my narcissistic melodrama…But then it is no less distressing for me to think that out of fear of My Mistake, I am making another even worse: relinquishing for no good reason the generous, gentle, good-hearted, ww-Maureenish woman with whom I have actually come to be in love. I think to myself, “Take this yearning seriously. You want her,” and I rush to the phone to call down to Princeton-and then at the phone I ask myself if “love” has very much to do with it, if it isn’t the vulnerability and brokenness, the neediness, to which I am being drawn. Suppose it is really nothing more than a helpless beauty in a bikini bathing suit taking hold of my cock as though it were a lifeline, suppose it is only that that inspires this longing. Such things have been known to happen. “Sexual vanity,” as Mrs. Seabury says. “Rescue fantasies,” says Dr. Spielvogel, “boyish dreams of Oedipal glory.” “Fucked-up shiksas,” my brother says, “you can’t resist them, Pep.”
Meanwhile Susan remains under the care of her mother in Princeton, and I remain up here, under my own.
Rapunzel, Rapunzel,
Let down your hair.
– from the Grimms’ fairy tale
For those young men who reached their maturity in the fifties, and who aspired to be grown-up during that decade, when as one participant has written, everyone wanted to be thirty, there was considerable moral prestige in taking a wife, and hardly because a wife was going to be one’s maidservant or “sexual object.” Decency and Maturity, a young man’s “seriousness,” were at issue precisely because it was thought to be the other way around: in that the great world was so obviously a man’s, it was only within marriage that an ordinary woman could hope to find equality and dignity. Indeed, we were led to believe by the defenders of womankind of our era that we were exploiting and degrading the women we didn’t marry, rather than the ones we did. Unattached and on her own, a woman was supposedly not even able to go to the movies or out to a restaurant by herself, let alone perform an appendectomy or drive a truck. It was up to us then to give them the value and the purpose that society at large withheld-by marrying them. If we didn’t marry women, who would? Ours, alas, was the only sex available for the job: the draft was on.
No wonder then that a young college-educated bourgeois male of my generation who scoffed at the idea of marriage for himself, who would just as soon eat out of cans or in cafeterias, sweep his own floor, make his own bed, and come and go with no binding legal attachments, finding female friendship and sexual adventure where and when he could and for no longer than he liked, laid himself open to the charge of “immaturity,” if not “latent” or blatant “homosexuality.” Or he was just plain “selfish.” Or he was “frightened of responsibility.” Or he could not
