My Life As A Man

an answer, please, so we can get on here!” “Look, I have nothing to hide-I have nothing to feel guilty about-“ “Your Honor,” interrupted my lawyer, even as I told the judge, “I had a love affair.” “Yes?” said Rosenzweig, smiling, his ear-flicking finger poised now at the side of his head-“How nice. With whom?” “A girl in my class-whom I loved, Your Honor-a young woman.” And that of course helped the cause enormously, that qualification.

But now we would all find out just who the guilty party was, just who had committed a crime against whom! “Judge Rosenzweig, you may remember that the last time I appeared before you, I brought no charges against Mrs. Tarnopol. I was cautioned by my attorney, and rightly so, to say nothing whatsoever about a fraud that had been perpetrated on me by my wife, because at that time, Your Honor, we had nothing in the way of evidence to support so damning an accusation. And we realized that, understandably, His Honor would not take kindly to unsubstantiated charges being brought against an ‘abandoned’ woman, who was here only to seek the protection that the law rightfully provides her. But now, Your Honor, we have the proof, a confession written in the ‘abandoned’ woman’s own hand, that on March 1,1959, she purchased, for two dollars and twenty-five cents in cash, several ounces of urine from a pregnant Negro woman with whom she made contact in Tompkins Square Park, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. We have proof that she did then take said urine to a drugstore at the corner of Second Avenue and Ninth Street, and that she submitted it, in the name of ‘Mrs. Peter Tarnopol,’ to the pharmacist for a pregnancy test. We further have proof…” No matter that my lawyer had already told me that it was much too late for evidence of a fraud to do me any good, if ever it would have. I had to get the goods on her! Find something to restrain her, something that would make her quit and go away! Because I could not take any longer playing the role of the Archenemy, Divorcing Husband as Hooligan, Moth in the Fabric of Society and Housewrecker in the Householder’s State!

And luck (I thought) was with me! The door broken in by the police late that afternoon had not yet been repaired-the door (just as I’d been hoping and praying) was ajar, freedom a footstep away! Bless the mismanagement of this megalopolis!

A light was burning in the apartment. I knocked very gently. I did not want to rouse the neighbors in the other two apartments on the landing. But no one appeared to check out the door of their hospitalized neighbor-bless too this city’s vast indifference! The only one I aroused was a fluffy black Persian cat who slithered up to greet me as I slipped into the empty apartment. The recent acquisition named Delilah. Nothing subtle there, Maureen. I never said I was, she answers as I push the door shut behind me. You want subtlety, read The Golden Bowl. This is life, bozo, not high art.

More luck! There, right out on the dining table, the three-ring school notebook in which Maureen used to scribble her “droughts”-generally in the hours immediately following a quarrel. Keeping “a record,” she once warned me, of who it was that “started” all our arguments, the proof of what “a madman” I was. When we were living together at the Academy in Rome and later in Wisconsin, she used to keep the diary carefully hidden away- it was “private property,” she told me, and if I should ever try to “steal” it, she would not hesitate to call in the local constabulary, be it Italian or middle western. This, though she herself had no compunction about opening mail that came for me when I wasn’t home: “I’m your wife, aren’t I? Why shouldn’t D Do you have something to hide from your own wife?” I expected then that, when I did get my hands on it, the diary would contain much that she wanted to hide from her husband. I rushed to the dining table, anticipating a gold mine.

I turned to an entry dated “8/15/58,” written in the early weeks of our “courtship.” “It’s hard to sketch my own personality really, since personality implies the effect one has on others, and it’s difficult to know truly what that effect is. However, I think I can guess some of this effect correctly. I have a moderately compelling personality.” And on in that vein, describing her moderately compelling personality as though she were a freshman back in high school in Elmira. “At best I can be quite witty and bright and I think at best I can be a winning per-son…

The next entry was dated “Thursday, October 9, 1959.” We were by then already married, living in the little rented house in the country outside New Milford. “It’s almost a year-“ actually it was over a year, unless she had removed a page, the one I was looking for, describing the purchase of the urine!-since I’ve written here and my life is different in every way. It’s a miracle how change of circumstances can truly change your essential self. I still have awful depressions, but I truly have a more optimistic outlook and only at the blackest moments do I feel hopeless. Strangely tho’, I do think more often about suicide, it seems to grow as a possibility altho’ I really wouldn’t do it now, I’m certain. I feel P. needs me more than ever now, tho’ that of course is something he would never admit to. If it weren’t for me he’d still be hiding behind his Flaubert and wouldn’t know what real life was like if he fell over it. What did he ever think he was going to write about, knowing and believing nothing but what he read in books? Oh, he can be such a self-important snob and fool! Why does he fight me like this? I could be his Muse, if only he’d let me. Instead he treats me like the enemy. When all I’ve ever really wanted is for him to be the best writer in the world. It’s all too brutally ironic.

That missing page, where was it? Why was there no mention made of what she had done to get P. to need her so!

“Madison, May 24, 1962.” A month after she had discovered me in the phone booth telephoning Karen; a month after she had taken the pills and the whiskey, put a razor to her wrist, and then confessed about the urine. An entry that caused a wave of nausea to come over me as I read it. I had been leaning over the table all this time, reading on my feet; now I sat down and read three times over her revelations of May 24, 1962: “Somehow”-somehow!-

P. has a deep hostile feeling for me and when face to face the emotion I sense now is hatred. Somehow I’ve finally become despairing and hopeless about it all and feel utterly cheerless most of the time. I love P. and our life together-or what our life could be if only he weren’t so neurotic, but it seems impossible. It’s so joyless. His emotional coldness grows in leaps and bounds. His inability to love is positively frightening. He simply does not touch, kiss, smile, etc., let alone make love, a most unsatisfying state for me. I felt fed up with everything this morning and ready to throw it all over. Yet I know I must not lose heart. Life is not easy -P.’s naive expectations to the contrary. However, I sometimes think that to think about and try to ferret out P.’s neurosis is fruitless, for accurate as I may be, even if he were analyzed it would take years and years with a case like his, and no doubt I’d be discarded in the process anyway, though he might at last see what a madman he is. The only satisfaction is that I know perfectly well that if he does give me up, he will inevitably marry next someone who has her own talent and ego to match, who will care for that instead of him. Would he be surprised then! I almost wish it for him except I don’t wish it for myself. But he is killing my feeling so that if all this coldness from him should continue, finally my star will ascend and my heart will be stony instead of his. What a pity that would be, tho’.

“West 78th St., 3/22/66.” The next-to-last entry, written just three weeks earlier. After our day in court with Judge Rosenzweig. After the two go-rounds with the court-appointed referee. After Valducci. After Egan. After alimony. Four years after I’d left her, seven years after the urine. The entry, in its entirety:

Where have I been? Why haven’t I realized this? Peter doesn’t care for me. He never did! He married me only because he thought he had to. My God! It seems so plain now, how could I have been mistaken before? Is this insight a product of Group? I wish I could go away. It’s so degrading. I wonder if I’ll ever have the luck to be in love with someone who loves me, the real me, and not some cockeyed idea of me, a la the Meziks, Walkers, and Tarnopols of this world. That seems to me now nearly all I could want, though I now know how practical I really am-or how practical it’s necessary to be to survive.

And the last entry. She had written a suicide note, but it would seem that no one had thought to look for it in her three-ring school notebook. The handwriting, and the prose, indicated that she was already under the influence of the pills, and/or the whiskey, when she began to write her final message to herself:

Marilyn Monroe Marilyn Monroe Marilyn Monroe Marilyn Monroe why do they do these Marilyn Monroe why to use Marilyn why to use us Marilyn

That was it. Somehow she had then made it from the table back to the bed, nearly to die there like the famous movie star herself. Nearly!

A policeman had been watching me from the door for I didn’t know how long. He had his pistol drawn.

“Don’t shoot!” I cried.

“Why not?” he asked. “Get up, you.”

“It’s okay, Officer,” I said. I rose on boneless legs. I rose on air. Without even being asked I put my hands over my head. The last time I’d done that I’d been eight, a holster around my sixteen-inch waist and a Lone Ranger gun, made in Japan and hollow as a chocolate bunny, poking me in the ribs-a weapon belonging to my little pal from next door, Barry Edelstein, wearing his chaps and his sombrero, and telling me, in the accent of the Cisco Kid, “Steeck