My Life as a Man by Philip Roth

Author:Philip Roth [Roth, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-01-31T08:00:00+00:00

Right now I get no advice about Susan from anyone. I am here to be free of advisers—and temptation. Susan a temptation? Susan a temptress? What a word to describe her! Yet I have never ached for anyone like this before. As the saying goes, we’d been through a lot together, and not in the way that Maureen and I had been “through it.” With Maureen it was the relentless sameness of the struggle that nearly drove me mad; no matter how much reason or intelligence or even brute force I tried to bring to bear upon our predicament, I could not change a thing—everything I did was futile, including of course doing nothing. With Susan there was struggle all right, but then there were rewards. Things changed. We changed. There was progress, development, marvelous and touching transformations all around. Surely the last thing you could say was that ours was a comfortable, settled arrangement that came to an end because our pleasures had become tiresome and stale. No, the progress was the pleasure, the transformations what gave me most delight—which is what has made her attempt at suicide so crushing…what makes my yearning for her all the more bewildering. Because now it looks as though nothing has changed, and we are back where we began. I have to wonder if the letters I begin to write to her and leave unfinished, if the phone calls I break off dialing before the last digit, if that isn’t me beginning to give way to the siren song of The Woman Who Cannot Live Without You, She Who Would Rather Be Dead Than Unwed—if this isn’t me on the brink again of making My Mistake, contriving to continue, after a brief intermission, what Spielvogel would call my narcissistic melodrama…But then it is no less distressing for me to think that out of fear of My Mistake, I am making another even worse: relinquishing for no good reason the generous, gentle, good-hearted, ww-Maureenish woman with whom I have actually come to be in love. I think to myself, “Take this yearning seriously. You want her,” and I rush to the phone to call down to Princeton—and then at the phone I ask myself if “love” has very much to do with it, if it isn’t the vulnerability and brokenness, the neediness, to which I am being drawn. Suppose it is really nothing more than a helpless beauty in a bikini bathing suit taking hold of my cock as though it were a lifeline, suppose it is only that that inspires this longing. Such things have been known to happen. “Sexual vanity,” as Mrs. Seabury says. “Rescue fantasies,” says Dr. Spielvogel, “boyish dreams of Oedipal glory.” “Fucked-up shiksas,” my brother says, “you can’t resist them, Pep.”

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