I thought, upon coming to the end of that entry, “What a thing- everybody in the world can write fiction about that marriage, except me! Oh, Maureen, you should never have spared my ego your writing career-better you should have written down everything in that head of yours and spared me all this reality! On the printed page, instead of on my hide! Oh, my one and only and eternal wife, is this what you really think? Believe? Do these words describe to you who and what you are? It’s almost enough to make a person feel sorry for you. Some person, somewhere.” During the night I paused at times in reading Maureen to read Faulkner. “I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” I read that Nobel Prize speech from beginning to end, and I thought, “And what the hell are you talking about? How could you write The Sound and the Fury, how could you write The Hamlet, how could you write about Temple Drake and Popeye, and write that?”
Intermittently I examined the No. 5 Junior can opener, Maureen’s corncob. At one point I examined my own corncob. Endure? Prevail? We are lucky, sir, that we can get our shoes on in the morning. That’s what I would have said to those Swedes! (If they’d asked.)
Oh, there was bitterness in me that night! And much hatred. But what was I to do with it? Or with the can opener? Or with the diary confessing to a “confession”? What was I supposed to do to prevail? Not “man,” but Tarnopol!
The answer was nothing. “Tolerate it,” said Spielvogel. “Lambchop,” said Susan, “forget it.” “Face facts,” my lawyer said, “you’re the man and she’s the woman.” “Are you still sure of that?” I said. “Piss standing up and you’re the man.” “I’ll sit down.” “It’s too late,” he told me.
Six months later, on a Sunday morning, only minutes after I had returned from breakfast and the Times at Susan’s and was settling down at my desk to work-the liquor carton had just been dragged from the closet, and I was stirring around in that dispiriting accumulation of disconnected beginnings, middles, and endings-Flossie Koerner telephoned my apartment to tell me that Maureen was dead.
I didn’t believe her. I thought it was a ruse cooked up by Maureen to get me to say something into the telephone that could be tape-recorded and used to incriminate me in court. I thought, “She’s going back in again for more alimony-this is another trick.” All I had to say was, “Maureen dead? Great!” or anything even remotely resembling that for Judge Rosenzweig or one of his lieutenants to reason that I was an incorrigible enemy of the social order still, my unbridled and barbaric male libido in need of yet stronger disciplinary action.
“Dead?”
“Yes. She was killed in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At five in the morning.”
“Who killed her?”
“The car hit a tree. Bill Walker was driving. Oh, Peter,” said Flossie, with a rasping sob, “she loved life so.”
“And she’s dead…?” I had begun to tremble.
“Instantly. At least she didn’t suffer…Oh, why didn’t she have the seat belt on?”
‘What happened to Walker?”
“Nothing bad. A cut. But his whole Porsche was destroyed. Her head…her head…”
“Yes, what?”
“Hit the windshield. Oh, I knew she shouldn’t go up there. The Group tried to stop her, but she was just so terribly hurt.”
“By what? Over what?”
“What he did with the shirt.”
‘What shirt?”
“Oh…I hate to say it…given who he is…and I’m not accusing him…”
“What is it, Hossie?”
“Peter, Bill Walker is a bisexual person. Maureen herself didn’t even know. She-“ She broke down sobbing here. I meanwhile had to clamp my mouth shut to stop my teeth from chattering. “She-“ said Hossie, starting in again, “she gave him this beautiful, expensive lisle shirt, you know for a present? And it didn’t fit-or so he said afterward-and instead of returning it for a bigger size, he gave it to a man he knows. And she went up to tell him what she thought of that kind of behavior, to have a frank confrontation…And they must have been drinking late, or something. They had been to a party…”
“Yes?”
“I’m not blaming anyone,” said Flossie. “I’m sure it was nobody’s deliberate fault.”
Was it true then? Dead? Really dead? Dead in the sense of nonexistent? Dead as the dead are dead? Dead as in death? Dead as in dead men tell no tales? Maureen is dead? Dead dead? Deceased? Extinct? Called to her eternal rest, the miserable bitch? Crossed the bar?
“Where’s the body?” I asked.
“In Boston. In a morgue. I guess…I think…you’ll have to go get her, Peter. And take her home to Elmira. Someone will have to call her mother…Oh, Peter, you’ll have to deal with Mrs. Johnson-I couldn’t.”
Peter get her? Peter take her to Elmira? Peter deal with her mother? Why, if it’s true, Flossie, if this isn’t the most brilliant bit of dissimulation yet staged and directed by Maureen Tarnopol, if you are not the best supporting soap-opera actress of the Psychopathic Broadcasting Network, then Peter leave her. Why Peter even bother with her? Peter let her lie there and rot!
As I still didn’t know for sure whether our conversation was being recorded for Judge Rosenzweig’s edification, I said, “Of course I’ll get her, Flossie. Do you want to come with me?”
“I’ll do anything at all. I loved her so. And she loved you, more than you could ever know-“ But here a noise came out of Flossie that struck me as indistinguishable from the wail of an animal over the carcass of its mate.
I knew then that I wasn’t being had. Or probably wasn’t.
I was on the phone with Flossie for five minutes more; as soon as I could get her to hang up-with the promise that I would be over at her apartment to make further plans within the hour-I telephoned my lawyer at his weekend place in the country.
“I take it that I am no longer married. Is that correct? Now tell me, is that right?”
“You are a widower, friend.”
“And there’s no two ways about it, is there? This is it.”
“This is it. Dead is dead.”
“In New York State?”
“In New York State.”
Next I telephoned Susan, whom I had left only half an hour earlier.
“Do you want me to come down?” she asked, when she could ask anything.
“No. No. Stay where you are. I have to make some more phone calls, then I’ll call you back. I have to go to Flossie Koerner’s. I’ll have to go up to Boston with her.”
“Why?”
“To get Maureen.”
“Why?”
“Look, I’ll call you later.”
“You sure you don’t want me to come?”
“No, no, please. I’m fine. I’m shaking a little but aside from that everything’s under control. I’m all right.” But my teeth were chattering still, and there seemed nothing I could do to stop them.
Next, Spielvogel. Susan arrived in the middle of the calclass="underline" had she flown from Seventy-ninth Street? Or had I just gone blank there at my desk for ten minutes? “I had to come,” she whispered, touching my cheek with her hand. “I’ll just sit here.”
“-Dr. Spielvogel, I’m sorry to bother you at home. But something has happened. At least I am assuming that it happened because somebody told me that it happened. This is not the product of imagination, at least not mine. Flossie Koerner called, Maureen’s friend from group therapy. Maureen is dead. She was killed in Boston at five in the morning. In a car crash. She’s dead.”