My Life As A Man

simply a big, sweet, good-natured, commonsensical eighteen-year-old girl who did not care very much that I was a dark Jew and she a blonde Aryan. This suspiciousness, and my self-conscious struggle with it, turned up in the affair between the two young lovers depicted in A Jewish Father.

What I liked, you see, was something taxing in my love affairs, something problematical and puzzling to keep the imagination going even while I was away from my books; I liked most being with young women who gave me something to think about, and not necessarily because we talked together about “ideas.”

So, Maureen was a rough customer-I thought about that. I wondered if I was “up”-nice word-to someone with her history and determination. It would seem by the way I hung in there that I decided that I at least ought to be. I had been up to Grete and the problems she raised for me, had I not? Why back away from difficulties, or disorder, or even turbulence-what was there to be afraid of? I honestly didn’t know.

Besides, for a very long time, the overwhelming difficulty-Maureen’s helplessness-was largely obscured by the fight in her and by the way in which she cast herself as the victim always of charlatans and ingrates, rather than as a person who hadn’t the faintest idea of the relationship of beginning, middle, and end. When she fought me, I was at first so busy fighting back I didn’t have time to see her defiance as the measure of her ineptitude and desperation. Till Maureen I had never even fought a man in anger-with my hands, that is; but I was much more combative at twenty-five than I am now and learned quickly enough how to disarm her of her favorite weapon, the spike of a high-heeled shoe. Eventually I came to realize that not even a good shaking such as parents administer to recalcitrant children was sufficient to stop her once she was on the warpath-it required a slap in the face to do that. “Just like Mezik!” screamed Maureen, dropping dramatically to the floor to cower before my violence (and pretending as best she could that it did not give her pleasure to have uncovered the brute in the high-minded young artist).

Of course by the time I got around to hitting her I was already in over my head and looking around for a way out of an affair that grew more distressing and bewildering-and frightening-practically by the hour. It was not only the depths of acrimony between us that had me reeling, but the shocking realization of this helplessness of hers, that which drove her to the episodes of wild and reckless rage. As the months passed I had gradually come to see that nothing she did ever worked-or, rather, I had finally come to penetrate the obfuscating rhetoric of betrayal and victimization in order to see it that way: the Christopher Street producer went back on his “promise” to lift her from the ticket office into the cast; the acting teacher in the West Forties who needed an assistant turned out to be “a psychotic”; her boss at one job was “a slave driver,” at the next, “a fool,” at the next, “a lecher,” and invariably, whenever she quit in disgust or was fired and came home in angry tears-whenever yet another of those “promises” that people were forever making to her had been broken-she would return to my basement apartment in the middle of the day to find me over the typewriter, pouring sweat-as happens when I’m feeling fluent -and reeking through my button-down oxford shirt like a man who’d been out all day with the chain gang. At the sight of me working away feverishly at what I wanted most to do, her rage at the world of oppressors was further stoked by jealousy of me -even though, as it happened, she greatly admired my few published stories, defended them vehemently against all criticism, and enjoyed vicariously the small reputation that I was coming to have. But then vicariousness was her nemesis: what she got through men was all she got. No wonder she could neither forgive nor forget him who had wronged her by “forcing” her at sixteen into bed with his buddy, or him who preferred the flesh of Harvard freshmen to her own; and if she could not relinquish the bartender Mezik or the bit player Walker, imagine the meaning she must have found in one whose youthful earnestness and single-minded devotion to a high artistic calling might magically become her own if only she could partake forever of his flesh and blood.

Our affair was over (except that Maureen wouldn’t move out, and I hadn’t the sense, or the foresight, to bequeath to her my two rooms of secondhand furniture and take flight; having never before been defeated in my life in anything that mattered, I simply could not recognize defeat as a possibility for me, certainly not at the hands of someone seemingly so inept)-our affair was over, but for the shouting, when Maureen told me…Well, you can guess what she told me. Anybody could have seen it coming a mile away. Only I didn’t. Why would a woman want to fool Peter Tarnopol? Why would a woman want to tell me a lie in order to get me to marry her? What chance for happiness in such a union? No, no, it just could not be. No one would be so silly and stupid as to do a thing like that and certainly not to me. I Had Just Turned Twenty-Six. I Was Writing A Serious Novel. I Had My Whole Life Ahead Of Me. No-the way I pictured it, I would tell Maureen that this affair of ours had obviously been a mistake from the beginning and by now had become nothing but a nightmare for both of us. “As much my fault as yours, Maureen”-I didn’t believe it, but I would say it, for the sake of getting out without further altercation; the only sensible solution, I would say, was for each now to go his own separate way. How could we be anything but better off without all this useless conflict and demeaning violence in our lives? “We just”-I would tell her, in straight, unsentimental talk such as she liked to use herself-“we just don’t have any business together any more.” Yes, that’s what I would say, and she would listen and nod in acquiescence (she would have to-I would be so decent about it, and so sensible) and she would go, with me wishing her good luck.

It didn’t work out that way. Actually it was in the midst of one of the ten or fifteen quarrels that we had per day, now that she had decided to stay at home and take up writing herself, that I told her to leave. The argument, which began with her accusing me of trying to prevent her from writing fiction because I was “frightened” of competition from a woman, ended with her sinking her teeth into my wrist-whereupon, with my free hand, I bloodied her nose. “You and Mezik! No difference at all!” The barkeeper, she claimed, used to draw blood from her every single day during the last year of their married life-he had turned her nose “into a faucet.” For me it was a first, however-and a shock. Likewise her teeth in my flesh was like nothing I had ever known before in my stable and unbloody past. I had been raised to be fearful and contemptuous of violence as a means of settling disputes or venting anger-my idea of manliness had little to do with dishing out physical punishment or being able to absorb it. Nor was I ashamed that I could do neither. To find Maureen’s blood on my hand was in fact unmanning, as disgraceful as her teeth marks on my wrist. “Go!” I screamed, “Get out of here!” And because she had never seen me in such a state before-I was so unhinged by rage that while she packed her suitcase I stood over her tearing the shirt off my own body-she left, borrowing my spare typewriter, however, so she could write a story about “a heartless infantile son-of-a-bitch so-called artist just like you!”

“Leave that typewriter where it is!” “But what will I write on then?” “Are you kidding? Are you crazy? You’re going to ‘expose’ me, and you want me to give you the weapon to do it with?” “But you have two of them! Oh, I’m going to tell the world, Peter, I’ll tell them just what a selfish, self-important, ego-maniacal baby you are!” “Just go, Maureen-and I’ll tell them! But I won’t have any more fucking screaming and arguing and biting around here when I am trying to do my work!” “Oh fuck your high and mighty work! What about my life!” “Fuck your life, it’s not my affair any longer! Get out of here! Oh, take it -take it and just go!” Maybe she thought (now that my shirt was hanging off me in strips) that I might start in next tearing her to shreds-for all at once she backed off and was out of the apartment, taking with her, to be sure, the old gray Remington Royal portable that had been my parents’ bar mitzvah present to the hotshot assistant sports editor of the Yonkers High Broadcaster.

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 she first came to New York and went into wood sculpture. Months back she had declared that she had been badly misled by these 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 naivete) 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