My Life as a Man by Philip Roth Page B

(As the story had it: “ It did a growing body good to sit once a week in a nice starched dress, and without squirming. ” )
    I was drawn to Lydia, not out of a passion for Monica—not yet—but because she had suffered so and because she was so brave. Not only that she had survived, but what she had survived, gave her enormous moral stature, or glamor, in my eyes: on the one hand, the puritan austerity, the prudery, the bland-ness, the xenophobia of the women of her clan; on the other, the criminality of the men. Of course, I did not equate being raped by one ’ s father with being raised on the wisdom of the Chicago Tribune; what made her seem to me so valiant was that she had been subjected to every brand of barbarity, from the banal to the wicked, had been exploited, beaten, and betrayed by every last one of her keepers, had finally been driven crazy— and in the end had proved indestructible: she lived now in a neat little apartment within earshot of the bell in the clock tower of the university whose a the ists, Communists, and Jews her people had loathed, and at the kitchen table of that apartment wrote ten pages for me every week in which she managed, heroically I thought , to recall the details of that brutal life in the style of one a very long way from rage and madness. When I told the class that what I admired most in Mrs. Ketterer ’ s fiction was her “ control, ” I meant something more than those strangers could know.
    Given all there was to move me about her character, it seemed to me curious that I should be so repelled by her flesh as I was that first night. I was able myself to achieve an orgasm, but afterward felt terrible for the “ achievement ” it had had to be. Earlier, caressing her body, I had been made uneasy by the unexpected texture of her genitals. To the touch, the fold of skin between her legs felt abnormally thick, and when I looked, as though to take pleasure in the sight of her nakedness, the vaginal lips appeared withered and discolored in a way that was alarming to me. I could even imagine myself to be staring down at the sexual parts of one of Lydia ’ s maiden aunts, rather than at a physically healthy young woman not yet into her thirties. I was tempted to imagine some connection here to the childhood victimization by her father, but of course that was too literary, too poetic an idea to swallow—this was no stigma, however apprehensive it might make me.
    The reader may by now be able to imagine for himself how the twenty-four-year-old I was responded to his alarm: in the morning, without very much ado, I performed cunnilingus upon her.
    “ Don ’ t, ” said Lydia. “ Don ’ t do that. ”
    “ Why not? ” I expected the answer: Because I ’ m so ugly there.
    “ I told you. I won ’ t reach a climax. It doesn ’ t matter what you do. ”
    Like a sage who ’ d seen everything and been everywhere, I said, “ You make too much of that. ”
    Her thighs were not as long as my forearm (about the length, I thought, of one of Mrs. Slater ’ s Pappagallos) and her legs were open only so far as I had been able to spread them with my two hands. But where she was dry, brownish, weatherworn, I pressed my open mouth. I took no pleasure in the act, she gave no sign that she did; but at least I had done what I had been frightened of doing, put my tongue to where she had been brutalized, as though—it was tempting to put it this way—that would redeem us both.
    As though that would redeem us b oth. A notion as inflated as it was shallow, growing, I am certain, out of “ serious literary studies. ” Where Emma Bovary had read too many romances of her period, it would seem that I had read too much of the criticism of mine. That I was, by “ eating ” her, taking some sort of sacrament was a most attractive idea—though one that I rejected after the initial momentary infatuation. Yes, I continued to resist as best I could all these high-flown, prestigious interpretations,