My Life As A Man

brief tenure on the Lower East Side following my discharge from the service certainly evoked no nostalgia; when, shortly after my day in court with Maureen, I hiked crosstown one morning from West Twelfth Street to Tompkins Square Park, it was not to reawaken fond memories of the old neighborhood, but to search through the scruffy little park and the rundown streets nearby for the woman from whom Maureen had bought a specimen of urine some three and a half years earlier. In a morning of hunting around, I of course saw numerous Negro women of childbearing age out in the park and in the aisles of the local supermarket and climbing on and off buses on Avenues A and B, but I did not approach a single one of them to ask if perchance back in March of 1959 she had entered into negotiations with a short, dark-haired young woman from “a scientific organization,” and if so, to ask if she would now (for a consideration) come along to my lawyer’s office to sign an affidavit testifying that the urine submitted to the pharmacist as Mrs. Tarnopol’s had in actuality been her own. Enraged and frustrated as I was by the outcome of the separation hearing, crazed enough to spend an entire morning on this hopeless and useless undercover operation, I was never completely possessed.

Or is that what I am now, living here and writing this?

My point is that by and large to me Manhattan was: one, the place to which I had come in 1958 as a confident young man starting out on a promising literary career, only to wind up deceived there into marriage with a woman for whom I had lost all affection and respect; and two, the place to which I had returned in 1962, in flight and seeking refuge, only to be prevented by the local judiciary from severing the marital bond that had all but destroyed my confidence and career. To others perhaps Fun City and Gotham and the Big Apple, the Great White Way of commerce and finance and art-to me the place where I paid through the nose. The number of people with whom I shared my life in this most populous of cities could be seated comfortably around a kitchen table, and the Manhattan square footage toward which I felt an intimate attachment and considered essential to my well-being and survival would have fit, with room to spare, into the Yonkers apartment in which I’d been raised. There was my own small apartment on West Twelfth Street-rather, the few square feet holding my desk and my wastebasket; on Seventy-ninth and Park, at Susan’s, there was the dining table where we ate together, the two easy chairs across from one another where we read in her living room at night, and the double bed we shared; ten blocks north of Susan’s there was a psychoanalyst’s couch, rich with personal associations; and up on West 107th Street, Morris’s cluttered little study, where I went once a month or so, as often willingly as not, to be big-brothered-that being the northernmost pin on this runaway husband’s underground railway map of New York. The remaining acreage of this city of cities was just there-as were those multitudes of workers and traders and executives and clerks with whom I had no connection whatsoever- and no matter which “interesting” and lively route I took to Spielvogel’s office at the end of each day, whether I wandered up through the garment district, or Times Square, or the diamond center, or by way of the old bookstores on Fourth Avenue, or through the zoo in Central Park, I could never make a dent in my feeling of foreignness or alter my sense of myself as someone who had been detained here by the authorities, stopped in transit like that great paranoid victim and avenger of injustice in the Kleist novella that I taught with such passion out at Hofstra.

One anecdote to illustrate the dimensions of my cell and the thickness of the walls. Late one afternoon in the fall of ‘64, on my way up to Spielvogel’s, I had stopped off at Schulte’s secondhand bookstore on Fourth Avenue and descended to the vast basement where thousands of “used” novels are alphabetically arranged for sale in rows of bookshelves twelve feet high. Moving slowly through that fiction warehouse, I made my way eventually to the Ts. And there it was: my book. To one side Sterne, Styron, and Swift, to the other Thackeray, Thurber, and Trol-lope. In the middle (as I saw it) a secondhand copy of A Jewish Father, in its original blue and white jacket. I took it down and opened to the flyleaf. It had been given to “Paula” by “Jay” in April i960. Wasn’t that the very month that Maureen and I had it out amid the blooming azaleas on the Spanish Steps? I looked to see if there were markings on any of the pages, and then I placed the book back where I had found it, between A Tale of a Tub and Henry Esmond. To see out in the world, and in such company, this memento of my triumphant apprenticeship had set my emotions churning, the pride and hopelessness all at once. “That bitch!” said I, just as a teenage boy, cradling half a dozen books in his arms, and wearing a washed-out gray cotton jacket, noiselessly approached me on his sneakers. An employee, I surmised, of Schulte’s lower depths. “Yes?” “Excuse me,” he said, “is your name Peter Tarnopol by any chance, sir?” I colored a little. “It is.” “The novelist?” I nodded my head, and then he turned a very rich red himself. Uncertain clearly as to what to say next, he suddenly blurted, “I mean-what ever happened to you?” I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I told him, “I’m waiting to find out myself.” The next instant I was out into the ferment and pressing north: skirting the office workers springing from the revolving doors and past me down into the subway stations, I plunged through the scrimmage set off by the traffic light at each intersection-down the field I charged, cutting left and right through the faceless counterforce, until at last I reached Eighty-ninth Street, and dropping onto the couch, delivered over to my confidant and coach what I had carried intact all the way from Schulte’s crypt-the bookboy’s heartfelt question that had been blurted out at me so sweetly, and my own bemused reply. That was all I had heard through the world-famous midtown din which travelers journey halfway round the globe to behold.

So then: after paying my call on the doctor, I would head on down to Susan’s for dinner and to spend the evening, the two of us most nights reading in those easy chairs on either side of the fireplace, until at midnight we went to bed, and before sleep, regularly devoted ourselves for some fifteen or twenty minutes to our mutual effort at erotic rehabilitation. In the morning Susan was up and out by seven thirty-Dr. Golding’s first patient of the day- and about an hour later I departed myself, book in hand, only occasionally now getting a look from one of the residents who thought that if the young widow McCall had fallen to a gentleman caller of the Israelite persuasion in baggy corduroy trousers and scuffed suede shoes, she might at least instruct him to enter and exit by way of the service elevator. Still, if not suitably haut bourgeois for Susan’s stately co-op, I was in most ways leading the “regular and orderly” life that Flaubert had recommended for him who would be “violent and original” in his work.

And the work, I thought, was beginning to show it. At least there was beginning to be work that I did not feel I had to consign, because it was so bad, to the liquor carton at the bottom of my closet. In the previous year I had completed three short stories: one had been published in the New Yorker, one in the Kenyon Review, and the third was to appear in Harper’s. They constituted the first fiction of mine in print since the publication of A Jewish Father in 1959. The three stories, simple though they were, demonstrated a certain clarity and calm that had not been the hallmark of my writing over the previous years; inspired largely by incidents from boyhood and adolescence that I had recollected in analysis, they had nothing to do with Maureen and the urine and the marriage. That book, based upon my misadventures in manhood, I still, of course, spent maddening hours on every day, and I had some two thousand pages of manuscript in the liquor carton to prove it. By now the various abandoned drafts had gotten so shuffled together and interwoven, the pages so defaced with Xs and arrows of a hundred different intensities of pen and pencil, the margins so tattooed with comments, reminders, with schemes for pagination (Roman numerals, Arabic numerals, letter of the alphabet in complex combinations that even I, the cryptographer, could no longer decode) that what impressed one upon attempting to penetrate that prose was not the imaginary world it depicted, but the condition of the person who’d been doing the imagining: the manuscript was the message, and the message was Turmoil. I had, in fact, found a quotation from Flaubert appropriate to my failure, and had copied it out of my worn volume of his correspondence (a book purchased during my army stint to help tide me over to civilian life); I had Scotch-taped the quotation to the carton bearing those five hundred thousand words, not a one of them juste. It seemed to me it might be a fitting epitaph to that effort, when and if I was finally going to have to call it quits. Flaubert, to his mistress Louise Colet, who had published a poem maligning their contemporary, Alfred de Musset: “You wrote with a personal emotion that distorted your outlook and made it impossible to keep before your eyes the fundamental principles that must underlie any imaginative composition. It has no aesthetic. You have turned art into an outlet for passion, a kind of chamberpot to catch an overflow. It smells bad; it smells of hate!”

But if I could not leave off picking at the corpse and remove it from the autopsy room to the grave, it was because this genius, who had done so much to form my literary conscience as a student and an aspiring novelist, had also written-

Art, like the Jewish God, wallows in sacrifice.