The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (17 page)

Far from causing us to feel at the periphery of American society, the origins that had so strongly marked our style of self-expression seemed to have placed us at the heart of the city’s abrasive, hypercritical, potentially explosive cultural atmosphere as it was evolving out of the angry response to the Vietnam War. Lyndon Johnson, betraying every foreign-policy position by which he’d been sharply distinguished from Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election campaign, had, in only two years, made himself the natural target for a brand of contempt that had never, in my lifetime, been vented with such vehement imagination and on such a scale against a figure of such great authority. His own outsized personality seemed, paradoxically, to be the fountainhead for that steamrolling defiance that his politics would come to generate in many of those repelled by the war. There was something boisterous and unconstrainable in him, the potential in his very physique for a kind of mastodon rage, that made him the inspirational impresario as much for the ugly extremes of theatrical combat dividing the society as for the Southeast Asia conflict. To me it always seemed that his was the hateful, looming, uncontrollable presence that, at least initially, had activated the fantastical style of obscene satire that began to challenge virtually every hallowed rule of social propriety in the middle and late sixties.

What I found, then, in New York, after leaving my wife and moving up from Princeton—where, for as long as I remained on the university faculty, Josie continued to make her home—were the ingredients that inspired
Portnoy’s Complaint,
whose publication in 1969 determined every important choice I made during the next decade. There was this audience of sympathetic Jewish friends who responded with euphoric recognition to my dinner-table narratives; there was my intense psychoanalysis, which, undertaken to stitch back together the confidence shredded to bits in my marriage, itself became a model for reckless narrative disclosure of a kind I hadn’t learned from Henry James; there was May, a trustworthy, exceedingly tender woman in dire need herself of affectionate attention, with whom a mutual convalescence, grounded in demidomesticity, proceeded at a steady, invigorating pace; and there was May’s unequivocal gentileness, bestowed by her upbringing and revealed by genetic markings that made her as unimpeachably Aryan as I was Jewish, and that it wouldn’t have entered her mind to attempt, like Josie, to disguise or renounce. There was, in other words, a pervasive anthropological dimension to our love affair that delineated just the sort of tribal difference that would empower Portnoy’s manic self-presentation.

Lastly, there was the ferocity of the rebellious rhetoric unleashed against the president and his war, the assault that Johnson’s own seething cornball bravado inspired and from which even he, with his rich and randy vein of linguistic contempt, had eventually to flee in defeat, as though before a deluge of verbal napalm. It bedazzled me, this enraged invective so potent as to wound to the quick a colossus like Lyndon Johnson, especially after my long, unnatural interlude of personal and literary self-subjugation.

*   *   *

I
WAS THIRTY-FOUR
in the autumn following that second, splendidly healing Vineyard summer with May and so never quite grasped how close to death I had come, not even when, having begun to feel some strength returning, I asked the surgeon how much more of the fall I was going to miss, cooped up in the hospital. He answered, with a bemused smile, “Don’t you get it
yet?
You almost missed everything.” I heard his words, I never forgot his words, and yet the experience registered not as my having nearly died but instead as my having met with death and overcome it. I felt as though now I needn’t worry about dying for another thousand years.

Amazingly, I didn’t see my burst appendix as Josie’s handiwork, probably because the poisons of peritonitis spread through my system without her accompanying barrage of moral indictment. It was a separate ordeal entirely, the denouement of a decade that had posed somewhat preposterous tests of strength, but arising clearly out of a family predisposition toward which it was a relief not to feel a personal antagonism. What had killed two of my uncles, and very nearly, in 1944, killed my father, had tried and failed to kill me. This was the sort of ordeal whose lucky outcome heightens tremendously your respect for the place of chance in an individual destiny; once the cozy part of the convalescence begins, you float buoyantly off on feelings of sentimental kinship with virtually everyone else fortunate enough to have been left living. My life with Josie, by contrast, had isolated me as a case, bizarrely cut off in a bad marriage that wasn’t merely bad in its own way but included among its hazards the oft-repeated threat of murder. I felt strong and lucky, like a human being among human beings, for having survived peritonitis; I would never know what to make of myself for having endured and survived my wife, though not for lack of thinking about it. For years afterward I was to think and brood and fictionalize obsessively about how I had made Josie happen to me. And it’s become apparent, while writing this, that I’m all too capable of thinking about it still.

Every evening at dinnertime May came to the hospital to see me; during the day she had her Hunter classes and also worked part-time as a draft counselor with a Quaker group in Murray Hill, advising draft-age young men about the alternatives to military service. The job was hardly congenial to her temperament, but the war had mobilized her indignation in an unforeseen way. She was not the only American discovering in herself the power to oppose; however, as someone for whom taking the public steps that counted one among the opposition did not come easily, she wasn’t overjoyed by what conviction sometimes demanded of her, such as having to phone the Cleveland banker who oversaw her trust fund and requesting of that ultraconservative gentleman and family friend that her portfolio be divested of “war stocks” like Dow Chemical. It was irresistible, of course, for her old Manhattan friends to see in this transformation of a polite, retiring society heiress nothing more “political” than the overbearing influence of me and
my
friends. And it’s true that on her own, in her old world, May Aldridge might not have turned spontaneously into a dedicated antiwar worker; nonetheless, it wasn’t really any position of mine that influenced her so much as the confidence inspired by the affair itself, generating in her a belief that she (who had been stuck so long in what had felt like an unalterable existence gathering swatches for other people’s upholstery) could hope to help change, right along with her own fate, the American war policy. Because she was being stirred into action on virtually every front, the last traces of self-protective meekness largely disappeared, and something touchingly animated and akin to the furtiveness that I found so stirring in her nudity turned her characteristic placidity into genuine composure, with a power and effectiveness of its own.

A month after my emergency appendectomy I was released from the hospital and then, two weeks later, unexpectedly readmitted, this time for the removal of the stump of the blown appendix, which had failed to atrophy and had become infected. It was to be another thirty days before I came out for good, as thin as I’d been as a junior in high school but healthy at last. With May I went down to a tiny island off the west coast of Florida to recuperate for a couple of weeks. We stopped off to have lunch in Miami Beach, where my parents were wintering in an apartment they’d taken in the same complex as some of their old Newark friends, and then in a rented car we drove across to Fort Myers and out over the causeway to Captiva. There wasn’t much to do there: we strolled the beaches with the elderly people who were out collecting shells, there were pelicans to watch, dolphins swam by, and a couple of mornings we went to the bird sanctuary with our lunch and followed the cormorants with field glasses. I was bored and edgy a lot of the time, impatient now with the enforced idleness of an extended bout of ill health and eager to get back to writing. A new book was well under way, and I was afraid of losing the galloping pace that had got me going. A section entitled “Whacking Off” had appeared in
Partisan Review;
Ted Solotaroff, who’d just begun
New American Review,
had featured another section in his first issue and wanted to publish more; and my Random House editors, Joe Fox and Jason Epstein, had read a rough first draft and told me I was on to something. I wanted to get back to work, Ted wanted me to get back to work, Jason and Joe wanted me to get back to work, but probably nobody wanted me to get back and finish what I’d begun quite as much as Josie: the rumor in New York publishing circles—and Josie was working finally at a publishing job—was that my new novel, if it was anything like what Solotaroff, Epstein, and Fox were saying, would command a large advance.

*   *   *

B
Y THE TIME
I’d fallen ill in the autumn of 1967, the worst of my separation seemed to be over. It was five years since I’d left Josie, and though she still refused to divorce me and planned to take me back to court in the new year to try for a second time to get the alimony of $125 a week increased, I had not seen her outside a courtroom, and it was a long while since she’d telephoned during the day to tell me how wicked I was or in the middle of the night, generally after too much drink, to announce, “You’re in bed with some Negress!” When I moved from Princeton to Manhattan, after finally leaving her in the last weeks of 1962, she followed suit some eight months later; she hoped to resume the plan interrupted by our marriage—to work in publishing—while simultaneously she wanted me to support her, a goal best pursued in the state where I was domiciled and where antiquated divorce laws made it likely that, if she continued to prefer it that way, I would legally remain her husband forever.

She could also better keep track of my whereabouts in New York than she could back in Chicago, close to where her two children were now in boarding schools, supported by the aunt and uncle of her first husband. For instance, one night when Helen, her twelve-year-old daughter, came East during a vacation to visit her mother, I arranged to take the girl to dinner and to the theater. While we waited in our seats for the play to begin, I was served from the aisle with a subpoena. I immediately recognized the polite gentleman who was serving me; previously he had served me politely while I was at the dentist’s. Pretending to Helen that the envelope I’d been handed was something that I was expecting to be delivered at the theater, I thanked him and slipped it into my jacket pocket. During the intermission, while Helen was in the lobby having an orange drink, I went to the men’s room, where, in a stall, I opened the envelope and read the subpoena. I could barely contain my fury. The subpoena, summoning me to court to face another alimony challenge, could have been served on me in my apartment any day of the week: I had a university teaching job and, after months in a New York sublet, I clearly wasn’t about to skip town. Nonetheless, Josie had arranged to have me served while I was out entertaining Helen, as though her daughter hadn’t been sufficiently scarred by all the sexual battling she’d seen and as though my own capacity to show the child a good time might not be strained by an unanticipated announcement of yet another resumption of our conflict.

During the year that Helen had lived with us in Iowa City, where I was teaching in the Writers’ Workshop of the state university, I’d served as a surrogate father. Helen was alarmingly needy but also very engaging, and taking serious parental responsibility for her wasn’t simply a burden. Her pathetic difficulties with her studies required lots of attention, but she was a little girl quick to smile and genial with our best friends, and it could be fun to take her to the Iowa football games or to ice skate with her on the river or, with her help, to rake the leaves from the lawn in the fall. Josie was pleased when Helen and I began to grow close, but as the months went by and family life became routinized, there were also astonishing outbursts to throw a lurid shadow over this too. A sudden tirade about the probity of men would end with a warning that if ever I laid a finger on her ten-year-old daughter she would drive a knife into my heart. One evening, following a bedroom argument culminating in just such a threat, I waited until everyone had fallen asleep and then rounded up all the kitchen knives and locked them in the trunk of the car. Early the next morning, when Helen was alone in the kitchen making herself some breakfast, I came down in my robe to find her looking mightily perturbed. “What’s the matter?” I asked her. “It’s getting to be late for school! I have to cut my grapefruit and I can’t find a knife!” I went out to the garage and got her one.

By 1967, then, I was still saddled with alimony amounting to about half my income; my lawyer led me to understand that the alimony could be expected to increase proportionally with any substantial increase in my income and that I would be paying it for the rest of my life, unless Josie one day remarried. To me the alimony was court-ordered robbery and never more galling to pay than when I remembered, while making out the check, how the brief marriage had come to be in the first place. That was a story I couldn’t forget. I couldn’t forget it because I was the fall guy but also because the urine story was one of the best stories I’d ever heard. Had I been a dermatologist or an engineer or a shoemaker, after five years there might have been little more than the alimony left to dwell on; but what obsessed me no less than what was being taken from me was the story that she’d bestowed on me—for a man in my business it was too good to give up.

Actually,
When She Was Good
was intended to have provided me with a setting for that urine story, but after several fragmentary, unsatisfactory drafts, it veered away from this purpose and ended up as an imaginary elaboration, at once freely invented and yet close to the spirit—and even to the pattern of events—of the legend of her upbringing, her adolescence, and her first marriage as it had been narrated to me over the kitchen table throughout our early months as lovers in Chicago.