“I assure you, unlike Maureen, I said ‘threatened’ because I meant ‘threatened.’”
“But maybe writing isn’t your strong point. Maybe that is an objective statement of fact and has nothing to do with whether I am a writer or a tightrope walker.”
“But why should it matter so much to you?”
‘Why? Why?” That he could seriously ask this question just took the heart out of me; I felt the tears welling up. “Because, among other things, I am the subject of that writing! I am the one your imprecise language has misrepresented! Because I come here each day and turn over the day’s receipts, every last item out of my most personal life, and in return I expect an accurate accounting!” I had begun to cry. “You were my friend, and I told you the truth. I told you everything.”
“Look, let me disabuse you of the idea that the whole world is waiting with bated breath for the newest issue of our little journal in which you claim you are misrepresented. I assure you that is not the case. It is not the New Yorker magazine, or even the Kenyon Review. If it is any comfort to you, most of my colleagues don’t even bother to read it. But this is your narcissism again. Your sense that the whole world has nothing to look forward to but the latest information about the secret life of Peter Tarnopol.”
The tears had stopped. “And that is your reductivism again, if I may say so, and your obfuscation. Spare me that word ‘narcissism,’ will you? You use it on me like a club.”
“The word is purely descriptive and carries no valuation,” said the doctor.
“Oh, is that so? Well, you be on the receiving end and see how little ‘valuation’ it carries! Look, can’t we grant that there is a difference between self-esteem and vanity, between pride and megalomania? Can we grant that there actually is an ethical matter at stake here, and that my sensitivity to it, and your apparent indifference to it, cannot be explained away as a psychological aberration of mine? You’ve got a psychology too, you know. You do this with me all the time, Dr. Spielvogel. First you shrink the area of moral concern, you say that what I, for instance, call my responsibility toward Susan is so much camouflaged narcissism-and then if I consent to see it that way, and I leave off with the moral implications of my conduct, you tell me I’m a narcissist who thinks only about his own welfare. Maureen, you know, used to do something similar-only she worked the hog- tying game from the other way round. She made the kitchen sink into a moral issue! Everything in the whole wide world was a test of my decency and honor-and the moral ignoramus you’re looking at believed her! If driving out of Rome for Frascati, I took a wrong turn, she had me pegged within half a mile as a felon, as a fiend up from Hell by way of Westchester and the Ivy League. And I believed her!…Look, look-let’s talk about Maureen a minute, let’s talk about the possible consequences of all this for me, ‘narcissistic’ as that must seem to you. Suppose Maureen were to get hold of this issue and read what you’ve written here. It’s not unlike her, after all, to be on her toes where I’m concerned-where alimony is concerned. I mean it won’t do, to go back a moment to what you just said-it won’t do to say that nobody reads the magazine anyway. Because if you really believed that, then you wouldn’t publish your paper there to begin with. What good are your findings published in a magazine that has no readers? The magazine is around, and it’s read by somebody, surely here in New York it is-and if it somehow came to Maureen’s attention…well, just imagine how happy she would be to read those pages about me to the judge in the courtroom. Just imagine a New York municipal judge taking that stuff in. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“Oh, I see very well what you’re saying.”
“Where you write, for instance, that I was ‘acting out’ sexually with other women ‘almost from the beginning of the marriage.’ First off, that is not accurate either. Stated like that, you make it seem as though I’m just another Italian-American who sneaks off after work each day for a quick bang on the way home from the poetry office. Do you follow me? You make me sound like somebody who is simply fucking around with women all the time. And that is not so. God knows what you write here is not a proper description of my affair with Karen. That was nothing if it wasn’t earnest-and earnest in part because I was so new at it!”
“And the prostitutes?”
“Two prostitutes-in three years. That breaks down to about half a prostitute a year, which is probably, among miserably married men, a national record for not acting out. Have you forgotten? I was miserable! See the thing in context, will you? You seem to forget that the wife I was married to was Maureen. You seem to forget the circumstances under which we married. You seem to forget that we had an argument in every piazza, cathedral, museum, trattoria, pensione, and hotel on the Italian peninsula. Another man would have beaten her head in! My predecessor Mezik, the Yugoslav barkeep, would have ‘acted out’ with a right to the jaw. I am a literary person. I went forth and did the civilized thing-I laid a three-thousand-lire whore! Ah, and that’s how you came up with ‘Italian-American’ for me, isn t it?
He waved a hand to show what he thought of my apercu- then said, “Another man might have confronted his wife more directly, that is true, rather than libidinizing his anger.”
“But the only direct way to confront that woman was to kill her! And you yourself have told me that killing people is against the law, crazy wives included. I was not ‘sexually acting out,’ whatever that means-I was trying to stay alive in all that madness. Stay me! ‘Let me shun that,’ and so on!”
“And,” he was saying, “you conveniently forget once again the wife of your young English department colleague in Wisconsin.”
“Good Christ, who are you, Cotton Mather? Look, I may be childish and a weakling, I may even be the narcissist of your fondest professional dreams-but 1 am not a slob! I am not a bum or a lecher or a gigolo or some kind of walking penis. Why do you want to portray me that way? Why do you want to characterize me in your writing as some sort of heartless rapist manque? Surely, surely there is another way to describe my affair with Karen-“
“But I said nothing about Karen. I only reminded you of the wife of your colleague, whom you ran into that afternoon at the shopping center in Madison.”
“You’ve got such a good memory, why don’t you also remember that I didn’t even fuck her! She blew me, in the car. So what? So what? I tell you, it was a surprise to the two of us. And what’s it to you, anyway? I mean that! We were friends. She wasn’t so happily married either. That, for Christ’s sake, wasn’t ‘sexually acting out.’ It was friendship! It was heartbrokenness! It was generosity! It was tenderness! It was despair! It was being adolescents together for ten secret minutes in the rear of a car before we both went nobly back into Adulthood! It was a sweet and harmless game of Let’s Pretend! Smile, if you like, smile from your pulpit, but that’s still closer to a proper description of what was going on there than what you call it. And we did not let it go any further, which was a possibility, you know; we let it remain a kind of happy, inconsequential accident and returned like good soldiers to the fucking front lines. Really, Your Holiness, really, Your Excellency, does that in your mind add up to ‘acting out sexually with other women from the beginning of the marriage’?”
“Doesn’t it?”
“Two street whores in Italy, a friend in a car in Madison…and Karen? No! I call it practically monkish, given the fact of my marriage. I call it pathetic, that’s what! From the beginning of his marriage, the Italian-American poet had some crazy idea that now that he was a husband his mission in life was to “be faithful-to whom never seemed to cross his mind. It was like keeping his word and doing his duty-what had gotten him married to this shrew in the first place! Once again the Italian-American poet did what he thought to be ‘manly’ and ‘upright’ and ‘principled’-which, needless to say, was only what was cowardly and submissive. Pussy-whipped, as my brother so succinctly puts it! As a matter of fact, Dr. Spielvogel, those two Italian whores and my colleague’s wife back of the shopping center, and Karen, constituted the only praiseworthy, the only manly, the only moral…oh, the hell with it.”
“I think at this point we are only saying the same thing in our different vocabularies. Isn’t that what you just realized?”
“No, no, no, no, no. I just realized that you are never going to admit to me that you could be mistaken in any single particular of diction, or syntax, let alone in the overriding idea of that paper. Talk about narcissism as a defense!”
He did not bristle at my tone, contemptuous as it had become. His voice throughout had been strong and
