So, unhappily (and not at all, really) I accepted my fate as a male resident of the state of New York of the republic of America who no longer cared to live with a wife whose preference it was to continue to live with (and off) him. I began, as they say, to try to make the best of it. Indeed, by the time I met Susan I was actually beginning to pass out of the first stages of shell shock (or was it fallout sickness?) and had even found myself rather taken with (as opposed to “taken by,” very much a preoccupation at the time) a bright and engaging girl named Nancy Miles, fresh out of college and working as a “checker” for the New Yorker. Nancy Miles was eventually to go off to Paris to marry an American journalist stationed there, and subsequently to publish a book of autobiographical short stories, most of them based upon her childhood as a U.S. Navy commander’s daughter in postwar Japan. However, the year I met her she was free as a bird, and soaring like one, too. I hadn’t been so drawn to anyone since the Wisconsin debacle, when I had thrown myself at the feet of my nineteen-year-old student Karen (for whom I intermittently continued to pine, by the way; I imagined her sometimes with me and the sheep in Scalloway), but after three consecutive evenings together of nonstop dinner conversation, the last culminating in lovemaking as impassioned as anything I’d known since those illicit trysts between classes in Karen’s room, I decided not to call Nancy again. Two weeks passed, and she sent me this letter:
Mr. Peter Tarnopol
Institute for Unpredictable Behavior
62 West 12th Street
New York, N.Y.
Dear Mr. Tarnopoclass="underline"
With reference to our meeting of 5/6/63:
1. What happened?
2. Where are we?
While I fully recognize that numerous demands of this nature must strain the limits of your patience, I nonetheless make bold to request that you fill out the above questionnaire and return it to the address below as soon as it is convenient.
I remain,
yours,
Perplexed
Perplexed perhaps, but not broken. That was the last I heard from Nancy. I chose Susan.
It goes without saying that those seeking sanctuary have ordinarily to settle for something less than a seven-room apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in which to take refuge from the wolves or the cops or the cold. I for one had never lived in anything approaching Susan’s place for size or grandeur. Nor had I ever eaten so well in my life. Maureen’s cooking wasn’t that bad, but generally dinnertime was the hour reserved at our house for settling scores with me and my sex-unsettled scores that some evenings seemed to me to have been piling up ever since the first nucleic acid molecule went ahead and reproduced itself several billion years ago; consequently, even when the food was hot and tasty, the ambience was wrong. And in the years before I took to dining in each night on Maureen’s gall, there had been army chow or university cafeteria stew. But Susan was a pro, trained by masters at what she had not learned at Calpurnia’s knee: during the year she had been waiting for her fiancé to be graduated from Princeton and their life of beauty and abundance to begin, she had commuted up to New York to learn how to cook French, Italian, and Chinese specialties. The course in each cuisine lasted six weeks, and Susan stayed on (as she hadn’t at Wellesley) triumphantly to complete all three. To her great glee she discovered she could now at least outcook her mother. Oh, what a wonderful wife (she hoped and prayed) she was going to make for this fantastic stroke of luck named James McCall the Third!
During her widowhood Susan had only rarely had the opportunity to feed anyone other than herself, and so it was that I became the first dinner guest ever to appreciate in full a culinary expertise that spanned the continents. I had never tasted food so delicious. And not even my own dutiful mother had waited on me the way this upper-crust waitress did. I was under standing instructions to proceed to eat without her, so that she could scamper freely back and forth into the kitchen getting the next dish going in her wok. Good enough. We had little outside of the food to talk about anyway. I asked about her family, I asked about her analysis, I asked about Jamey and the McCalls. I asked why she had left Wellesley in her first year. She shrugged and she flushed and she averted her eyes. She replied, oh they’re very nice, and he’s very nice, and she’s such a sweet and thoughtful person, and “Why did I leave Wellesley? Oh, I just left.” For weeks I got no more information or animation than I had the night we met, when I was seated next to her at the dinner party I was invited to annually at my publisher’s town house: unswerving agreeableness, boundless timidity-a frail and terrified beauty. And in the beginning that was just fine with me. Bring on the blanquette de veau.
Each morning I headed back to the desk in my West Twelfth Street sublet, off to school to practice the three Rs-reading, writing, and angrily toting up yet again the alimony and legal bills. In the elevator, as I descended from 9D, I met up with the schoolchildren a third my age whom Susan took on weekends to the Planetarium and the puppet shows, and the successful business executives whose August recreation she had sometimes been. And what am I doing here, I would ask myself. With her! Just how debilitated can I be! My brother’s recent warning would frequently come back to me as I exited past the doorman, who always courteously raised his cap to Mrs. McCall’s gentleman caller, but had surmised enough about my bankroll not to make a move to hail a cab. Moe had telephoned me about Susan the night after I had come around with her to have dinner at his and Lenore’s invitation. He laid it right on the line. “Another Maureen, Pep?” “She’s hardly a Maureen.” “The gray eyes and the ‘fine’ bones have got you fooled, kiddo. Another fucked-up shiksa. First the lumpenproletariat, now the aristocracy. What are you, the Malinowski of Manhattan? Enough erotic anthropology. Get rid of her, Pep. You’re sticking your plug in the same socket.” “Moe, hold the advice, okay?” “Not this time. I don’t care to come home a year from now, Peppy, to find you shitting into your socks.” “But I’m all right.” “Oh, Christ, here we go again.” “Moey, I happen to know what I’m doing.” “With a woman you know what you’re doing? Look, what the hell is Spielvogel’s attitude toward this budding catastrophe-what is he doing to earn his twenty bucks an hour, anything?” “Moe, she is not Maureen!” “You’re letting the legs fool you, kid, the legs and the ass.” “I tell you I’m not in it for that.” “If not that, what? Her deep intelligence? Her quick wit? You mean on top of being tongue-tied, the ice cube can’t screw right either? Jesus! A pretty face must go an awful long way with you-that, plus a good strong dose of psychoneurosis, and a girl is in business with my little brother. You come over here tonight for dinner, Peppy, you come eat with us every night-I’ve got to talk some sense into you.” But each evening I turned up at Susan’s, not Moe’s, carrying with me my book to be read later by the fire, envisioning, as I stepped through the door, my blanquette, my bath, and my bed.
So the first months passed. Then one night I said, ‘Why don’t you go back to college?” “Oh, I couldn’t do that.” “Why couldn’t you?” “I have too much to do already.” “You have nothing to do.” “Are you kidding?” “Why don’t you go back to college, Susan?” “I’m too busy, really. Did you say you did want kirsch on your fruit?”
Some weeks later. “Look, a suggestion.” “Yes?” “Why don’t you move in bed?” “Haven’t you enough room?” “I mean move. Underneath me.” “Oh, that. I just don’t, that’s all.” “Well, try it. It might liven things up.” “I’m happy as I am, thank you. Don’t you like the spinach salad?” “Listen to me: why don’t you move your body when I fuck you, Susan?” “Oh, please, let’s just finish dinner.” “I want you to move when I fuck you.” “I told you, I’m happy as I am.” “You’re miserable as you are.” “I’m not, and it’s none of your business.” “Do you know how to move?” “Oh, why are you torturing me like this?” “Do you want me to show you what I mean by ‘move’?” “Stop this. I am not going to talk about it! I don’t have to be shown anything, certainly not by you! Your life isn’t such a model of order, you know.” “What about college? Why don’t you go back to college?” “Peter, stop. Please! Why are you doing this to me?” “Because the way you live is awful.” “It is not.” “It’s crazy, really.” “If it’s so crazy then what are you doing here every night? I don’t force you to spend the night. I don’t ask anything of you at all.” “You don’t ask anything of anyone, so that’s neither here nor there.” “That’s none of your business either.” “It is my business.” “Why? Why yours?” “Because I am here-because I do spend the night.” “Oh, please, you must stop right now. Don’t make me argue, please. I hate arguments and I refuse to participate in one. If you want to argue with somebody, go argue with your wife. I thought you come here not to fight.”