“Look, I’m sure there are in New York City such people as you’ve just described. Only I ain’t one of ‘em! Either that’s some model you’ve got in your head, some kind of patient for all seasons, or else it’s some other patient of yours you’re thinking about; I don’t know what the hell to make of it, frankly. Maybe what it comes down to is a problem of self-expression; maybe it’s that the writing isn’t very precise.”
“Oh, the writing is also a problem?”
“I don’t like to say it, but maybe writing isn’t your strong point.”
He smiled. “Could it be, in your estimation? Could I be precise enough to please you? I think perhaps what so disturbs you about the incident in the Anne Frank story is not that by using it I may have disclosed your identity, but that in your opinion I plagiarized and abused your material. You are made so very angry by this piece of writing that I have dared to publish. But if I am such a weak and imprecise writer as you suggest, then you should not feel so threatened by my little foray into English prose.”
“I don’t feel ‘threatened.’ Oh, please, don’t argue like Maureen, will you? That is just more of that language again, which doesn’t at all express what you mean and doesn’t get anyone anywhere.”
“I assure you, unlike Maureen, I said ‘threatened’ because I meant ‘threatened.’”
“But maybe writing isn’t your strong point. Maybe that is an objective statement of fact and has nothing to do with whether I am a writer or a tightrope walker.”
“But why should it matter so much to you?”
‘Why? Why?” That he could seriously ask this question just took the heart out of me; I felt the tears welling up. “Because, among other things, I am the subject of that writing! I am the one your imprecise language has misrepresented! Because I come here each day and turn over the day’s receipts, every last item out of my most personal life, and in return I expect an accurate accounting!” I had begun to cry. “You were my friend, and I told you the truth. I told you everything.”
“Look, let me disabuse you of the idea that the whole world is waiting with bated breath for the newest issue of our little journal in which you claim you are misrepresented. I assure you that is not the case. It is not the New Yorker magazine, or even the Kenyon Review. If it is any comfort to you, most of my colleagues don’t even bother to read it. But this is your narcissism again. Your sense that the whole world has nothing to look forward to but the latest information about the secret life of Peter Tarnopol.”
The tears had stopped. “And that is your reductivism again, if I may say so, and your obfuscation. Spare me that word ‘narcissism,’ will you? You use it on me like a club.”
“The word is purely descriptive and carries no valuation,” said the doctor.
“Oh, is that so? Well, you be on the receiving end and see how little ‘valuation’ it carries! Look, can’t we grant that there is a difference between self-esteem and vanity, between pride and megalomania? Can we grant that there actually is an ethical matter at stake here, and that my sensitivity to it, and your apparent indifference to it, cannot be explained away as a psychological aberration of mine? You’ve got a psychology too, you know. You do this with me all the time, Dr. Spielvogel. First you shrink the area of moral concern, you say that what I, for instance, call my responsibility toward Susan is so much camouflaged narcissism-and then if I consent to see it that way, and I leave off with the moral implications of my conduct, you tell me I’m a narcissist who thinks only about his own welfare. Maureen, you know, used to do something similar-only she worked the hog-tying game from the other way round. She made the kitchen sink into a moral issue! Everything in the whole wide world was a test of my decency and honor-and the moral ignoramus you’re looking at believed her! If driving out of Rome for Frascati, I took a wrong turn, she had me pegged within half a mile as a felon, as a fiend up from Hell by way of Westchester and the Ivy League. And I believed her!…Look, look-let’s talk about Maureen a minute, let’s talk about the possible consequences of all this for me, ‘narcissistic’ as that must seem to you. Suppose Maureen were to get hold of this issue and read what you’ve written here. It’s not unlike her, after all, to be on her toes where I’m concerned-where alimony is concerned. I mean it won’t do, to go back a moment to what you just said-it won’t do to say that nobody reads the magazine anyway. Because if you really believed that, then you wouldn’t publish your paper there to begin with. What good are your findings published in a magazine that has no readers? The magazine is around, and it’s read by somebody, surely here in New York it is-and if it somehow came to Maureen’s attention…well, just imagine how happy she would be to read those pages about me to the judge in the courtroom. Just imagine a New York municipal judge taking that stuff in. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“Oh, I see very well what you’re saying.”
“Where you write, for instance, that I was ‘acting out’ sexually with other women ‘almost from the beginning of the marriage.’ First off, that is not accurate either. Stated like that, you make it seem as though I’m just another Italian-American who sneaks off after work each day for a quick bang on the way home from the poetry office. Do you follow me? You make me sound like somebody who is simply fucking around with women all the time. And that is not so. God knows what you write here is not a proper description of my affair with Karen. That was nothing if it wasn’t earnest-and earnest in part because I was so new at it!”
“And the prostitutes?”
“Two prostitutes-in three years. That breaks down to about half a prostitute a year, which is probably, among miserably married men, a national record for not acting out. Have you forgotten? I was miserable! See the thing in context, will you? You seem to forget that the wife I was married to was Maureen. You seem to forget the circumstances under which we married. You seem to forget that we had an argument in every piazza, cathedral, museum, trattoria, pensione, and hotel on the Italian peninsula. Another man would have beaten her head in! My predecessor Mezik, the Yugoslav barkeep, would have ‘acted out’ with a right to the jaw. I am a literary person. I went forth and did the civilized thing-I laid a three-thousand-lire whore! Ah, and that’s how you came up with ‘Italian-American’ for me, isn t it?
He waved a hand to show what he thought of my aperçu- then said, “Another man might have confronted his wife more directly, that is true, rather than libidinizing his anger.”
“But the only direct way to confront that woman was to kill her! And you yourself have told me that killing people is against the law, crazy wives included. I was not ‘sexually acting out,’ whatever that means-I was trying to stay alive in all that madness. Stay me! ‘Let me shun that,’ and so on!”
“And,” he was saying, “you conveniently forget once again the wife of your young English department colleague in Wisconsin.”
“Good Christ, who are you, Cotton Mather? Look, I may be childish and a weakling, I may even be the narcissist of your fondest professional dreams-but 1 am not a slob! I am not a bum or a lecher or a gigolo or some kind of walking penis. Why do you want to portray me that way? Why do you want to characterize me in your writing as some sort of heartless rapist manqué? Surely, surely there is another way to describe my affair with Karen-“