There is a growing body of opinion which maintains that by and large marriages, affairs, and sexual arrangements generally are made by masters in search of slaves: there are the dominant and the submissive, the brutish and the compliant, the exploiters and the exploited. What this formula fails to explain, among a million other things, is why so many of the “masters” appear themselves to be in bondage, oftentimes to their “slaves.” I do not contend-to make the point yet again-that my story furnishes anything like an explanation or a paradigm; it is only an instance, a post-chivalric instance to be sure, of what might be described as the Prince Charming phenomenon. In this version of the fairy tale the part of the maiden locked in the tower is played consecutively by Maureen Johnson Tarnopol and Susan Seabury McCall. I of course play the prince. My performance, as described here, may give rise to the sardonic suggestion that I should have played his horse. But, you see, it was not as an animal that I wished to be a star-it was decidedly not horsiness, goatishness, foxiness, lionliness, or beastliness in any form that I aspired to. I wanted to be humanish: manly, a man.
At the time when all this began, I would never even have thought it necessary to announce that as an aspiration-I was too confident at twenty-five that success was all but at hand-nor did I foresee a career in which being married and then trying to get unmarried would become my predominant activity and obsession. I would have laughed had anyone suggested that struggling with a woman over a marriage would come to occupy me in the way that exploring the South Pole had occupied Admiral Byrd-or writing Madame Bovary had occupied Flaubert. Clearly the last thing I could have imagined was myself, a dissident and skeptical member of my generation, succumbing to all that moralizing rhetoric about “permanent relationships.” And, in truth, it did take something more than the rhetoric to do me in. It took a Maureen, wielding it. Yet the humbling fact remains: when the dissident and skeptical member of his generation was done in, it was on the same grounds as just about everyone else.
I was fooled by appearances, largely my own.
As a young writer already publishing stories in literary quarterlies, as one who resided in a Lower East Side basement apartment between Second Avenue and the Bowery, living on army savings and a twelve-hundred-dollar publisher’s advance that I doled out to myself at thirty dollars a week, I did not think of myself as an ordinary or conventional university graduate of those times. My college acquaintances were all off becoming lawyers and doctors; a few who had been friends on the Brown literary magazine were working on advanced degrees in literature-prior to my induction into the army, I had myself served a year and a half in the Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago, before falling by the wayside, a casualty of “Bibliography” and “Anglo-Saxon”; the rest-the fraternity boys, the athletes, the business majors, those with whom I’d had little association at school-were by now already married and holding down nine-to-five jobs. Of course I dressed in blue button-down oxford shirts and wore my hair clipped short, but what else was I to wear, a serape? long curls? This was 1958. Besides, there were other ways in which it seemed to me I was distinguishable from the mass of my contemporaries: I read books and I wanted to write them. My master was not Mammon or Fun or Propriety, but Art, and Art of the earnest moral variety. I was by then already well into writing a novel about a retired Jewish haberdasher from the Bronx who on a trip to Europe with his wife nearly strangles to death a rude German housewife in his rage over “the six million.” The haberdasher was modeled upon my own kindly, excitable, hard-working Jewish father who had had a similar urge on a trip he and my mother had taken to visit me in the army; the haberdasher’s GI son was modeled upon myself, and his experiences closely paralleled mine in Germany during my fourteen months as a corporal in Frankfurt. I had had a German girl friend, a student nurse, large and blonde as a Valkyrie, but sweet to the core, and all the confusion that she had aroused in my parents, and in me, was to be at the heart of the novel that eventually became A Jewish Father.
Over my desk I did not have a photograph of a sailboat or a dream house or a diapered child or a travel poster from a distant land, but words from Flaubert, advice to a young writer that I had copied out of one of his letters: “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” I appreciated the wisdom in this, and coming from Flaubert, the wit, but at twenty-five, for all my dedication to the art of fiction, for all the discipline and seriousness (and awe) with which I approached the Flaubertian vocation, I still wanted my life to be somewhat original, and if not violent, at least interesting, when the day’s work was done. After all, hadn’t Flaubert himself, before he settled down at his round table to become the tormented anchorite of modern literature, gone off as a gentleman-vagabond to the Nile, to climb the pyramids and sow his oats with dusky dancing girls?
So: Maureen Johnson, though not exactly Egyptian, struck me as someone who might add a little outside interest to my dedicated writer’s life. Did she! Eventually she displaced the writing, she was so interesting. To begin with, she was twenty-nine years of age, that temptingly unknown creature of a young man’s eroto-heroic imaginings, an older woman. Moreover, she had the hash marks to prove it. Not one but two divorces: first from the husband in Rochester, a Yugoslav saloonkeeper named Mezik, whose sixteen-year-old barmaid she had been; she claimed that Mezik, a heavy drinker with a strong right hook, had once “forced” her to go down on a friend of his, the manager of an upholstery factory-later she changed the story somewhat and said that the three of them had been drunk at the time, and that the men had drawn straws to see which of them young Maureen would go off with to the bedroom; she had decided to blow Mezik’s buddy, rather than have intercourse with him, because it had seemed to her, in the circumstances and in her innocence, less demeaning. “It wasn’t,” she added. Then the marriage and divorce from Walker, a handsome young actor with a resonant voice and a marvelous profile who turned out to be a homosexual-that is to say, he’d “promised” Maureen he’d get over it after the wedding, but only got worse. Twice then she had been “betrayed” by men-nonetheless there was plenty of the scrapper in her when we met. And plenty of tough wit. “I am Duchess of Malfi still,” was a line she pulled on me our first night in bed-not bad, I thought, not bad, even if it was obviously something her actor husband had taught her. She had the kind of crisp good looks that are associated with “dark Irishmen”-only a little marred in her case by a lantern jaw-a lithe, wiry little body (the body of a tomboyish prepubescent, except for the sizable conical breasts) and terrific energy and spirit. With her quick movements and alert eyes, she was like one of nature’s undersized indefatigables, the bee or the hummingbird, who are out working the flowers from sunup to sundown, sipping from a million stamens in order to meet their minimum daily nutritional requirements. She jocularly boasted of having been the fastest runner, male or female, of her era in the Elmira, New York, grade-school system, and that (of all she told me) may well have been the truth. The night we met-at a poet’s party uptown-she had challenged me to a footrace from the Astor Place subway station to my apartment two blocks away on East Ninth: “Winner calls the shots!” she cried, and off we went -I triumphed, but only by the length of a brownstone, and at the apartment, breathless from the race she’d run me, I said, “Okay, the spoils: take off your clothes,” which she gladly (and rapidly) proceeded to do in the hallway where we stood, panting. Hot stuff, this (thought I); very interesting. Oh yes, she was fast, that girl-but I was faster, was I not?…Also, I should mention here, Maureen had these scores to settle with my sex, and rather large delusions about her gifts, which she had come to believe lay somewhere, anywhere, in the arts.