My Life As A Man

New York analyst summering in rural Connecticut, but otherwise he seemed at once dignified and without airs-a tall, quiet, decorous man, growing stout in his middle forties, with a mild German accent and that anomalous yachting cap. I never even noticed which woman was his wife; I discovered later that he had noticed which was mine.

When, in June of ‘62, it became necessary, according to my brother, for me to remain in New York and turn myself over to a psychiatrist, I came up with Spielvogel’s name; friends in Connecticut that summer had spoken well of him, and, if I remembered right, treating “creative” people was supposed to be his specialty. Not that that made much difference to me in the shape I was in. Though I continued to write every day, I had really stopped thinking of myself as capable of creating anything other than misery for myself. I was not a writer any longer, no matter how I filled the daylight hours-I was Maureen’s husband, and I could not imagine how I could get to be anything else ever again.

His appearance, like mine, had changed for the worse in three years. While I had been battling with Maureen, Spielvogel had been up against cancer. He had survived, though tire disease appeared to have shrunk him down some. I remembered him of course in the yachting cap and with a summer tan; in his office, he wore a drab suit bought to fit a man a size larger, and an unexpectedly bold striped shirt whose collar now swam around his neck. His skin was pasty, and the heavy black frames of the glasses he wore tended further to dramatize this shrinkage he had undergone-beneath them, behind them, his head looked like a skull. He also walked now with a slight dip, or list, to the left, the cancer having apparently damaged his hip or leg. In all, the doctor he reminded me of most was Dr. Roger Chillingworth in Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. Appropriate enough, because I sat facing him as full of shameful secrets as the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale.

Maureen and I had lived a year in western Connecticut, a year at the American Academy in Rome, and a year at the university in Madison, and as a result of all that moving around I had never been able to find anyone in whom I was willing to confide. By the end of three years I had convinced myself that it would be “disloyal,” a “betrayal,” to tell even the closest friends I had made in our wanderings what went on between Maureen and me in private, though I imagined they could guess plenty from what often took place right out on the street or in other people’s houses. Mostly I didn’t open up to anyone because I was so ashamed of my defenselessness before her wrath and frightened of what she might do either to herself or to me, or to the person in whom I’d confided, if she ever found out what I had said. Sitting in a chair immediately across from Spielvogel, looking in embarrassment from his shrunken skull to the framed photograph of the Acropolis that was the only picture on his cluttered desk, I realized that I still couldn’t do it: indeed, to tell this stranger the whole sordid story of my marriage seemed to me as reprehensible as committing a serious crime.

“You remember Maureen?” I asked. “My wife?”

“I do. Quite well.” His voice, in contrast to his appearance, was strong and vigorous, causing me to feel even more puny and self-conscious…the little stool pigeon about to sing. My impulse was to get up and leave, my shame and humiliation (and my disaster) still my own-and simultaneously to crawl into his lap. “A small, pretty, dark- haired young woman,” he said. “Very determined looking.”

“Very.”

“A lot of spunk there, I would think.”

“She’s a lunatic, Doctor!” I began to cry. For fully five minutes I sobbed into my hands-until Spielvogel asked, “Are you finished?”

There are lines from my five years of psychoanalysis as memorable to me as the opening sentence of Anna Karenina-“Are you finished?” is one of them. The perfect tone, the perfect tactic. I turned myself over to him, then and there, for good or bad.

Yes, yes, I was finished. “All I do these days is collapse in tears…” I wiped my face with a Kleenex from a box that he offered me and proceeded to “spill”-though not about Maureen (I couldn’t, right off) but about Karen Oakes, the Wisconsin coed with whom I had been maniacally in love during the winter and early spring of that year. I had been watching her bicycle around the campus for months before she showed up in my undergraduate writing section in the second semester to become the smartest girl in the class. Good-natured, gentle, a beguiling mix of assertive innocence and shy adventurousness, Karen had a small lyrical gift as a poet and wrote clever, somewhat magisterial literary analyses of the fiction that we read in class; her candor and lucidity, I told Spielvogel, were as much a balm to me as her mild temperament, her slender limbs, her pretty and composed American girl’s face. Oh, I went on and on about Ka-reen (the pet name for the pillow talk), growing increasingly intoxicated, as I spoke, with memories of our ardent “passion” and brimming “love”-I did not mention that in all we probably had not been alone with one another more than forty-eight hours over the course of the three months, and rarely for more than forty-five minutes at a clip; we were together either in the classroom with fifteen undergraduates for chaperones, or in her bed. Nonetheless she was, I said, “the first good thing” to happen in my private life since I’d been discharged from the army and come to New York to write. I told Spielvogel how she had called herself “Miss Demi-Womanhood of 1962”; he did not appear to be one-hundredth as charmed by the remark as I had been, but then he had not just disrobed for the first time the demi-woman who had said it. I recounted to him the agonies of doubt and longing that I had experienced before I went ahead, three weeks into the semester, and wrote “See me” across the face of one of her A+ papers. She came, as directed, to my office, and accepted my courtly, professorial invitation to be seated. In the first moments, courtliness was rampant, as a matter of fact. “You wanted to see me?” “Yes, I did, Miss Oakes.” A silence ensued, long and opaquely eloquent enough to satisfy Anton Chekhov. “Where do you come from, Miss Oakes?” “Racine.” “And what does your father do?” “He’s a physician.” And then, as though hurling myself off a bridge, I did it: reached forward and laid a hand upon her straw-colored hair. Miss Oakes swallowed and said nothing. “I’m sorry,” I told her, “I couldn’t help it.” She said: “Professor Tarnopol, I’m not a sophisticated person.” Whereupon I proceeded to apologize profusely. “Oh, please, don’t worry,” she said, when I wouldn’t stop, “a lot of teachers do it.” “Do they?” the award-winning novelist asked. “Every semester so far,” said she, nodding a little wearily; “and usually it’s English.” “What happens then, usually?” “I tell them I’m not a sophisticated person. Because I’m not.” “And then?” “That’s it, generally.” “They get conscience-stricken and apologize profusely.” “They have second thoughts, I suppose.” “Just like me.” “And me,” she said, without blinking; “the doctrine of in loco parentis works both ways.” “Look, look-“ “Yes?” “Look, I’m taken with you. Terribly.” “You don’t even know me, Professor Tarnopol.” “I don’t and I do. I’ve read your papers. I’ve read your stories and poems.” “I’ve read yours.” Oh my God, Dr. Spielvogel, how can you sit there like an Indian? Don’t you appreciate the charm of all this? Can’t you see what a conversation like that meant to me in my despair? “Look, Miss Oakes, I want to see you-I have to see you!” “Okay.” “Where?” “I have a room-“ “I can’t go into a dormitory, you know that.” “I’m a senior. I don’t live in the dorm any more. I moved out.” “You did?” “I have my own room in town.” “Can I come to talk to you there?” “Sure.”

Sure! Oh, what a wonderful, charming, disarming, engaging little word that one is! I went around sibilating it to myself all through the rest of the day. “What are you so bouncy about?” asked Maureen. Shoor. Shewer. Shur. Now just how did that beautiful and clever and willing and healthy young girl say it anyway? Sure! Yes, like that-crisp and to the point. Sure! Oh yes, sure as sure is sure, Miss Oakes is going to have an adventure, and Professor Tarnopol is going to have a breakdown…How many hours before I decided that when the semester was over we would run off together? Not that many. The second time we were in bed I proposed the idea to Ka- reen. We would go to Italy in June-catch the Pan Am flight from Chicago (I’d checked on it by phone) the evening of the day she’d taken her last exam; I could send my final grades in from Rome. Wouldn’t that be terrific? Oh, I would say to her, burying my face in her hair, I want to take you somewhere, Ka-reen, I want to go away with you! And she would murmur softly, “Mmmmmm, mmmmmm,” which I interpreted as delicious acquiescence. I told her about all the lovely Italian piazzas in which Maureen and I had screamed bloody murder at one another: the Piazza San Marco in Venice, the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, the Piazza del Campo in Siena…Karen went home for spring vacation and never came back. That’s how overbearing and frightening a character I had become. That murmuring was just the sound her good mind gave off as it gauged the dreadful consequences of having chosen this particular member of the conscience-stricken English faculty to begin sophisticated life with outside of a college dorm. It was one thing reading Tolstoy in class, another playing Anna and Vronsky with the professor. After she failed to return from spring recess, I made desperate phone calls to Racine practically daily. When I call at lunchtime I am told she