“Is that all she said?” asked Spielvogel. “Just called you ‘sweetheart’?”
“No. She said, ‘Take that off. I’ll never tell anybody. Just take that off right now.’”
“That was two months ago,” said Dr. Spielvogel, when it appeared that I had nothing more to say.
“Yes.”
“And?”
“It’s not been good, Doctor.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve done some other strange things.”
“Such as?”
“Such as staying with Maureen-that’s the strangest thing of all! Three years of it, and now I know what I know, and I’m still living with her! And if I don’t fly back tomorrow, she says she’s going to tell the world ‘everything.’ That’s what she told my brother to tell me on the phone. And she will. She will do it.”
“Any other ‘strange things’?”
“…with my sperm.”
“I didn’t hear you. Your sperm? What about your sperm?”
“My semen-I leave it places.”
“Yes?”
“I smear it places. I go to people’s houses and I leave it-places.”
“You break into people’s houses?”
“No, no,” I said sharply-what did he think I was, a madman? “I’m invited. I go to the bathroom. I leave it somewhere…on the tap. In the soap dish. Just a few drops…”
“You masturbate in their bathrooms.”
“Sometimes, yes. And leave…”
“Your signature.”
“Tarnopol’s silver bullet.”
He smiled at my joke; I did not. I had still more to tell. “I’ve done it in the university library. Smeared it on the bindings of books.”
“Of books? Which books?”
“Books! Any books! Whatever books are handy!”
“Anywhere else?”
I sighed.
“Speak up, please,” said the doctor.
“I sealed an envelope with it,” I said in a loud voice. “My bill to the telephone company.”
Again Spielvogel smiled. “Now that is an original touch, Mr. Tarnopol.”
And again I broke into sobs. “What does it mean!”
“Come now,” said Dr. Spielvogel, “what do you think it ‘means’? You don’t require a soothsayer, as far as I can see.”
“That I’m completely out of control!” I said, sobbing. “That I don’t know what I’m doing any more!”
“That you’re angry,” he said, slapping the arm of his chair. “That you are furious. You are not out of control-you are under control. Maureen’s control. You spurt the anger everywhere, except where it belongs. There you spurt tears.”
“But she’ll ruin Karen! She will! She knows who she is-she used to check out my students like a hawk! She’ll destroy that lovely innocent girl!”
“Karen sounds as if she can take care of herself.”
“But you don’t know Maureen once she gets going. She could murder somebody. She used to grab the wheel of our VW in Italy and try to run us off the side of a mountain-because I hadn’t opened a door for her leaving the hotel in Sorrento! She could carry a grudge like that for days-then she would erupt with it, in the car, weeks later! You can’t imagine what it’s like when she goes wild!”
“Well, then, Karen should be properly warned, if that is the case.
“It is the case! It’s hair-raising! Grabbing the wheel from my hands and spinning it the other way when we’re winding down a mountain road! You must believe what I’ve been through-I am not exaggerating! To the contrary, I’m leaving things out!”
Now, with my avenger dead and her ashes scattered from a plane into the Atlantic Ocean, now with all that rage stilled, it seems to me that I simply could not have been so extensively unmanned by Maureen Johnson Mezik Walker Tarnopol, dropout from Elmira High, as I indicated (and demonstrated) to Spielvogel during our first hour together. I was, after all, bigger than she was, more intelligent than she was, better educated than she was, and far more accomplished. What then (I asked the doctor) had made me such a willing, or will-less, victim? Why couldn’t I find the strength, or just the simple survival mechanism, to leave her once it became obvious that it was no longer she who needed rescuing from her disasters, but I from mine? Even after she had confessed to committing the urine fraud, even then I couldn’t get up and go! Now why? Why should someone who had battled so determinedly all his life to be independent- his own child, his own adolescent, his own man-why should someone with my devotion to “seriousness” and “maturity” knuckle under like a defenseless little boy to this cornball Clytemnestra?
Dr. Spielvogel invited me to look to the nursery for the answer. The question with which he began our second session was, “Does your wife remind you of your mother?”
My heart sank. Psychoanalytic reductivism was not going to save me from the IRT tracks, or worse, from returning to Wisconsin at the end of the week to resume hostilities with Maureen. In reply to the question I said, no, she did not. My wife reminded me of no one I had ever known before, anywhere. Nobody in my entire lifetime had ever dared to deceive, insult, threaten, or blackmail me the way she did-certainly no woman I had ever known. Nor had anyone ever hollered at me like that, except perhaps the basic training cadre at Fort Dix. I suggested to Spielvogel that it wasn’t because she was like my mother that I couldn’t deal with her, but, if anything, because she was so unlike her. My mother was not aggrieved, contentious, resentful, violent, helpless, or suicidal, and she did not ever want to see me humbled-far from it. Certainly, for our purposes, the most telling difference between the two was that my mother adored me, worshipped me across the board, and I had basked in that adoration. Indeed, it was her enormous belief in my perfection that had very likely helped to spawn and nourish whatever gifts I had. I supposed that it could be said that I had knuckled under to my mother when I was still a little boy-but in a little boy that is not knuckling under, is it? That is just common sense and a feel for family life: childhood realpolitik. One does not expect to be treated like a thirty-year-old at five. But at fifteen I certainly did expect deferential treatment of a kind, and from my mother I got it. As I remember it, I could sweet-talk that lady into just about anything during my high-school years, without too much effort get her to agree to the fundamental soundness of my position on just about every issue arising out of my blooming sense of prerogatives; in fact, it was with demonstrable delight (as I recalled it) that she acquiesced to the young prince whom she had been leading all these years toward the throne.