My Life as a Man by Philip Roth Page A

acrobat, perhaps a member of a women ’ s track and field association; I was reminded of those photographs in the popular magazines of the strong blue-eyed women athletes who win medals at the Olympic games for the Soviet Union. Yet her shoulders were as touchingly narrow as a child ’ s, and her skin pale and almost luminously soft. Only from the waist to the floor did she seem to be moving on the body of my sex rather than her own.
    Within the month I had seduced her, as much against her inclination and principles as my own. It was standard enough procedure, pretty much what Mrs. Slater must have had in mind: a conference alone together in my office, a train ride side by side on the IC back to Hyde Park, an invitation to a beer at my local tavern, the flirtatious walk to her apartment, the request by me for coffee, if she would make me some. She begged me to think twice about what I was doing, e ven after she had returned from the bathroom where she had inserted her diaphragm and I had removed her underpants for the second time and was hunched, unclothed, over her small, ill-proportioned body, preparatory to entering her. She was distressed, she was amused, she was frightened, she was mystified.
    “ There are so many beautiful young girls around, why pick on me? Why choose me, when you could have the cream of the crop?
    I didn ’ t bother to answer. As though she were the one being coy or foolish, I smiled.
    She said: “ Look, look at me. ”
    “ I ’ m doing that. ”
    “ Are you? I ’ m five years older than you. My breasts sag, not that they ever amounted to much to begin with. Look, I have stretch marks. My behind ’ s too big, I ’ m hamstrung— ’ Professor, ’ listen to me, I don ’ t have orgasms. I want you to know that beforehand. I never have. ”
    When we later sat down for the coffee, Lydia, wrapped in a robe, said this: “ I ’ ll never know why you wanted to do that. Why not Mrs. Slater, who ’ s b egging you for it? Why should anyone like you want me? ”
    Of course I didn ’ t “ want ” her, not then or ever. We lived together for almost six years, the first eighteen months as lovers, and the four years following, until her suicide, as husband and wife, and in all that time her flesh was never any less distasteful to me than she had insisten tly advertised it to be. Utterly without lust, I seduced her on that first night, the next morning, and hundreds of times thereafter. As for Mrs. Slater, I seduced her probably no more than ten times in all, and never anywhere but in my imagination.
    It was another month before I met Monica, Lydia ’ s ten-year-old daughter, so it will not do to say that, like Nabokov ’ s designing rogue, I endured the uninviting mother in order to have access to the seductive and seducible young daughter. That came later. In the beginning Monica w as without any attraction what soever, repellent to me in character as well as appearance: lanky, stringy-haired, undernourished, doltish, without a trace of curiosity or charm, and so illiterate that at ten she was still unable to tell the time. In her dungarees and faded polo shirts she had the look of some mountain child, the offspring of poverty and deprivation. Worse, when she was dressed to kill in her white dress and round white hat, wearing her little Mary Jane shoes and carrying a white handbag and a Bible (white too), she seemed to me a replica of those over-dressed little Gentile children who used to pass our house every Sunday on their way to church, and toward whom I used to feel an emotion almost as strong as my own grandparents ’ aversion. Secre tl y, and despite myself, I came close to despising the stupid and stubborn child when she would appear in that little white churchgoing outfit— and so too did Lydia, who was reminded by Monica ’ s costume of the clothes in which she had had to array herself each Sunday in Skokie, before being led off to Lutheran services with her aunts Helda and Jessie.