My Life As A Man

“I expected as much.”

“Yes? Then why didn’t you say something?”

“You indicated to me it was worth the risk. You assured me you wouldn’t collapse, however things went.”

“Well, I didn’t…did I?”

“Did you?”

“I don’t know. Before she left-after the beating-she called her lawyer. I dialed the number for her.”

“You did?”

“And I cried, I’m afraid. Not torrentially, but some. I tell you, though, it wasn’t for me, Doctor-believe it or not, it was for her. You should have seen that performance.”

“And now what?”

“Now?”

“Now you ought to call your lawyer, yes?”

“Of course!”

“You sound a little unstrung,” said Spielvogel.

“I’m really all right. I feel fine, surprisingly enough.”

“Then telephone the lawyer. If you want, call me back and tell me what he said. I’ll be up.”

What my lawyer said was that I was to leave town immediately and stay away until he told me to come back. He informed me that for what I had done I could be placed under arrest. In my euphoria, I had neglected to think of it that way.

I called Spielvogel back to give him the news and cancel my sessions for the coming week; I said that I assumed (please no haggling, I prayed) that I wouldn’t have to pay for the hours that I missed-“likewise if I get ninety days for this.” “If you are incarcerated,” he assured me, “I will try my best to get someone to take over your hours.” Then I telephoned Susan, who had been waiting by her phone all night to learn the outcome of my meeting with Maureen-was I getting divorced? No, we were getting out of town. Pack a bag. “At this hour? How? Where?” I picked her up in a taxi and for sixty dollars (it would have gone for three sessions with Spielvogel anyway, said I to comfort myself) the driver agreed to take us down the Garden State Parkway to Atlantic City, where I had once spent two idyllic weeks as a twelve-year-old in a seaside cottage with my cousins from Camden, my father’s family. There, within the first twelve hours, I had fallen in love with Sugar Wasserstrom, a sprightly curly-haired girl from New Jersey, a schoolmate of my cousin’s, prematurely fitted out with breasts just that spring (April, my cousin told me from his bed that night). That I came from New York made me something like a Frenchman in Sugar’s eyes; sensing this, I told lengthy stories about riding the subway, till shortly she began to fall in love with me too. Then I let her have my Gene Kelly version of “Long Ago and Far Away,” crooned it right into her ear as we snuggled down the boardwalk arm in arm, and with that, I believe, I finished her off. The girl was gone. I kissed her easily a thousand times in two weeks. Atlantic City, August 1945: my kingdom by the sea. World War Two ended with Sugar in my arms-I had an erection, which she tactfully ignored, and which I did my best not to bring to her attention. Doubled-up with the pain of my unfired round, I nonetheless kept on kissing. How could I let suffering stop me at a time like this? Thus the postwar era dawned, and, at twelve, my adventures with girls had begun.

I was to stay away as long as Dan Egan remained in Chicago on business. My lawyer was waiting for Egan to get back to be absolutely certain he wasn’t going to press charges for assault with intent to kill-or to attempt to persuade him not to. In the meantime, I tried to show Susan a good time. We had breakfast in bed in our boardwalk hotel. I paid ten dollars to have her profile drawn in pastels. We ate big fried scallops and visited the Steel Pier. I recalled for her the night of V-J Day, when Sugar and I and my cousins and their friends had conga-ed up and down the boardwalk (with my aunt’s permission) to celebrate Japan’s defeat. Was I effusive! And free with the cash! But it’s my money, isn’t it? Not hers-mine! I still couldn’t grow appropriately serious about the grave legal consequences of my brutality, or remorseful, quite yet, about having done so cold-heartedly what, as a little Jewish boy, I had been taught to despise. A man beating a woman? What was more loathsome, except a man beating a child?

The first evening I checked in on the phone with Dr. Spielvogel at the hour I ordinarily would have been arriving at his office for my appointment. “I feel like the gangster hiding out with his moll,” I told him. “It sounds like it suits you,” he said. “All in all it was a rewarding experience. You should have told me about barbarism a long time ago.” “You seem to have taken to it very nicely on your own.”

In the late afternoon of our second full day, my lawyer phoned-no, Egan wasn’t back from Chicago, but his wife had called to say that Maureen had been found unconscious in her apartment and taken by ambulance to Roosevelt Hospital. She had been out for two days and there was a chance she would die.

And covered with bruises, I thought. From my hands.

“After she left me, she went home and tried to kill herself.”

“That’s what it sounds like.”

“I better get up there then.”

“Why?” asked the lawyer.

“Better that I’m there than that I’m not.” Even I wasn’t quite sure what I meant.

“The police might come around,” he told me.

Valducci might come around, I thought.

“You sure you want to do this?” he asked.

“I’d better.”

“Okay. But if the cops are there, call me. I’ll be home all night. Don’t say anything to anyone. Just call me and I’ll come over.”

I told Susan what had happened and that we were going back to New York. She too asked why. “She’s not your business any more, Peter. She is not your concern. She’s trying to drive you crazy, and you’re letting her.”

“Look, if she dies I’d better be there.”

“Why?”

“I ought to be, that’s all.”

“But why? Because you’re her ‘husband’? Peter, what if the police are there? What if they arrest you-and put you in jail! Do you see what you’ve done-you could go to jail now. Oh, Lambchop, you wouldn’t last an hour in jail.”

“They’re not going to put me in jail,” I said, my heart quaking.

“You beat her, which was stupid enough-but this is even more stupid. You keep trying to do the ‘manly’ thing, and all you ever do is act like a child.”

“Oh, do I?”

“There is no ‘manly’ thing with her. Don’t you see that yet? There are only crazy things. Crazier and crazier! But you’re like a little boy in a Superman suit, with some little boy’s ideas about being big and strong. Every time she throws down the glove, you pick it up! If she phones, you answer! If she writes letters, you go crazy. If she does nothing, you go home and work on your novel about her! You’re like-like her puppet! She yanks -you jump! It’s-it’s pathetic.”

“Oh, is it?”

“Oh,” said Susan, brokenhearted, “why did you have to hit her? Why did you do that?”

“Actually, I thought it pleased you.”

“Did you really? Pleased me? I hated it. I just haven’t told you in so many words because you were so pleased with yourself. But why on earth did you do it? The woman is a psychopath, you tell me that yourself. What is gained by beating up someone who isn’t even responsible for what she says? What is the good of it?”

“I couldn’t take any more, that’s the good of it! She may be a psychopath, but I am the psychopath’s husband and 1 can’t take any more.”

“But what about your will? You’re the one who is always telling me about using my will. You’re the one who got me back to college, hitting me over the head with my will-and then you, you who hate violence, who are sweet and civilized, turn around and do something totally out of control like that. Why did you let her come to your apartment to begin with?”

“To get a divorce!”

“But that’s what your lawyer is for!”

“But she won’t cooperate with my lawyer.”