by Philip Roth
with the young children? Pornography. Drugs. The violence.”
“Divorce,” Marcia threw in to help him out.
“Professor, don’t get me started on divorce. You understand French?” he asked
her.
“I do if I have to,” she said, laughing.
“Well, I got a son down in Florida, Seymour’s brother, whose speciality is
divorce. / thought his specialite was cardiac surgery. But no, it’s divorce. I
thought I sent him to medical school—I thought that’s where all the bills were
coming from. But no, it was divorce school. That’s what he’s got the diploma in—
divorce. Has there ever been a more terrible thing for a child than the specter
of divorce? I don’t think so. And where will it end? What is the limit? You
didn’t all grow up in this kind of world. Neither did I. We grew up in an era
when it was a different place, when the feeling for
· 364 ·
community, home, family, parents, work … well, it was different. The changes
are beyond conception. I sometimes think that more has changed since 1945 than
in all the years of history there have ever been. I don’t know what to make of
the end of so many things. The lack of feeling for individuals that a person
sees in that movie, the lack of feeling for places like what is going on in
Newark—how did this happen? You don’t have to revere your family, you don’t have
to revere your country, you don’t have to revere where you live, but you have to
know you have them, you have to know that you are part of them. Because if you
don’t, you are just out there on your own and I feel for you. I honestly do. Am
I right, Mr. Orcutt, or am I wrong?”
“To wonder where the limit is?” Orcutt replied.
* * *
“Well, yes,” said Lou Levov, who, the Swede observed—and not for the first time—
had spoken of children and violence without any sense that the subject
intersected with the life of his immediate family. Merry had been used for
somebody else’s evil purposes— that was the story to which it was crucial for
them all to remain anchored. He kept such a sharp watch over each and every one
of them to be certain that nobody wavered for a moment in their belief in that
story. No one in this family was going to fall into doubt about Merry’s absolute
innocence, not so long as he was alive.
Among the many things the Swede could not think about from within the confines
of his box was what would happen to his father when he learned that the death
toll was four.
“You’re right,” Bill Orcutt was saying to Lou Levov, “to wonder where the limit
is. I think everybody here is wondering where the limit is and worrying where
the limit is every time they look at the papers. Except the professor of
transgression. But then we’re all stifled by convention—we’re not great outlaws
like William Burroughs and the Marquis de Sade and the holy saint Jean Genet.
The Let Every Man Do Whatever He Wishes School of Literature. The brilliant
school of Civilization Is Oppression and Morality Is Worse.”
365
And he did not blush. “Morality” without batting an eye. “Transgression” as
though he were a stranger to it, as though it were not he of all the men here—
William III, latest in that long line of Orcutts advertised in their graveyard
as virtuous men—who had transgressed to the utmost by violating the unity of a
family already half destroyed.
His wife had a lover. And it was for the lover that she’d undergone the rigors
of a face-lift, to woo and win him. Yes, now he understood the gushing letter
profusely thanking the plastic surgeon for spending “the five hours of your time
for my beauty,” thanking him as if the Swede had not paid twelve thousand
dollars for those five hours, plus five thousand more for the clinic suite where
they had spent the two nights. It is quite wonderful, dear doctor. It is as
though I have been given a new life. Both from within and from the outside. In
Geneva he had sat up with her all night, held her hand through the nausea and
the pain, and all of it for the sake of somebody else. It was for the sake of
somebody else that she was building the house. The two of them were designing
the house for each other.
To run away to Ponce to live with Sheila after Merry disappeared—no, Sheila had
made him come to his senses and recover his rectitude and go back to his wife
and as much of their life as remained intact, to the wife even a mistress knew
he could not wound, let alone desert, in such a crisis. Yet these other two were
going to pull it off. He knew it the moment he saw them in the kitchen. Their
pact. Orcutt dumps Jessie and she dumps me and the house is for them. She thinks
our catastrophe is over and so she is going to bury the past and start anew—
face, house, husband, all new. Try as you will, you can’t get under my skin
tonight. Not tonight.
They are the outlaws. Orcutt, said Dawn to her husband, lived completely off
what his family once was—well, she was living off what she’d just become. Dawn
and Orcutt: two predators.
The outlaws are everywhere. They’re inside the gates.
366
H,
* * *
h a d a phone call. One of the girls came out of the kitchen to tell him. She
whispered, “It’s from I think Czechoslovakia.”
He took the call in Dawn’s downstairs study, where Orcutt had already moved the
large cardboard model of the new house. After leaving Jessie on the terrace with
the Swede and his parents and the drinks, Orcutt must have gone back to the van
to get the model and carried it into Dawn’s study and set it up on her desk
before proceeding into the kitchen to help her shuck the corn.
Rita Cohen was on the line. She knew about Czechoslovakia because “they” were
following him: they’d followed him earlier in the summer to the Czech consulate;
they’d followed him that afternoon to the animal hospital; they’d followed him
to Merry’s room, where Merry had told him there was no such person as Rita
Cohen.
“How can you do this to your own daughter?” she asked.
“I’ve done nothing to my daughter. I went to see my daughter. You wrote and told
me where she was.”
“You told her about the hotel. You told her we didn’t fuck.”
“I did not mention any hotel. I don’t know what this is all about.”
“You are lying to me. You told your daughter you did not fuck me. I warned you
about that. I warned you in the letter.”
Directly in front of the Swede sat the model of the house. He
367
could see now what he had not been able to envision from Dawn’s explanations—
exactly how the long shed roof let the light into the main hallway through the
high row of windows running the length of the front wall. Yes, now he saw how
the sun would arc through the southern sky and the light would wash—and how
happy it seemed to make her just to say “wash” after “light”—wash over the white
walls, thus changing everything for everyone.
The cardboard roof was detachable, and when he lifted it up he could look right
into the room
s. All the interior walls were in place, there were doors and
closets, in the kitchen there were cabinets, a refrigerator, a dishwasher, a
range. Orcutt had gone so far as to install in the living room tiny pieces of
furniture also fashioned out of cardboard, a library table by the western wall
of windows, a sofa, end tables, an ottoman, two club chairs, a coffee table in
front of a raised fireplace hearth that extended the width of the room. In the
bedroom, across from the bay window, where there were the built-in drawers—
Shaker drawers, Dawn called them—was the large bed, awaiting its two occupants.
On the wall to either side of the headboard were built-in shelves for books.
Orcutt had made some books and put them on the shelves, miniaturized books
fashioned out of cardboard. They even had titles on them. He was good at all
this. Better at this, thought the Swede, than at the painting. Yes, wouldn’t
life be so much less futile if we could do it at the scale of one-sixteenth inch
to a foot? The only thing missing from the bedroom was a cardboard cock with
Orcutt’s name on it. Orcutt should have made a sixteenth-inch scale model of
Dawn on her stomach, with her ass in the air and, from behind, his cock going
in. It would have been nice for the Swede to have found that, too, while he
stood over her desk, looking down at Dawn’s cardboard dreaming and absorbing the
fury of Rita Cohen.
What does Rita Cohen have to do with Jainism? What does one thing have to do
with the other? No, Merry, it does not hang together. What does any of this
* * *
ranting have to do with you, who will not even do harm to water? Nothing hangs
together—none of it
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is linked up. It is only in your head that it is linked up. Nowhere else is
there any logic.
She’s been tracking Merry, trailing her, tracing her, but they’re not connected
and they never were! There’s the logic!
“You’ve gone too far. You go too far. You think you are running the show, D-d-
daddy? You are not running anything!”
But whether he was or wasn’t running the show no longer mattered, because if
Merry and Rita Cohen were connected, in any way, if Merry had lied to him about
not knowing Rita Cohen, then she might as easily have been lying about being
taken in by Sheila after the bombing. If that was so, when Dawn and Orcutt ran
off to live in this cardboard house, he and Sheila could run off to Puerto Rico
after all. And if, as a result, his father dropped dead, well, they’d just have
to bury him. That’s what they’d do: bury him deep in the ground.
(He was all at once remembering the death of his grandfather— what it did to his
father. The Swede was a little kid, seven years old. His grandfather had been
rushed to the hospital the evening before, and his father and his uncles sat at
the old man’s bedside all night long. When his father arrived home it was seven-
thirty in the morning. The Swede’s grandfather had died. His father got out of
the car, went as far as the front steps of the house, and then just sat himself
down. The Swede watched him from behind the living room curtains. His father did
not move, even when the Swede’s mother came out to comfort him. He sat without
moving for over an hour, all the time leaning forward, his elbows on his knees
and his face invisible in his hands. There was such a load of tears inside his
head that he had to hold it like that in his two strong hands to prevent it from
tumbling off of him. When he was able to raise the head up again, he got back in
the car and drove to work.)
Is Merry lying? Is Merry brainwashed? Is Merry a lesbian? Is Rita the
girlfriend? Is Merry running the whole insane thing? Are they out to do nothing
but torture me? Is that the game, the entire game, to torture and torment me?
369
No, Merry’s not lying—Merry is right. Rita Cohen does not exist. If Merry
believes it, I believe it. He did not have to listen to somebody who did not
exist. The drama she’d constructed did not exist. Her hateful accusations did
not exist. Her authority did not exist, her power. If she did not exist, she
could not have any power. Could Merry have these religious beliefs and Rita
Cohen? You had only to listen to Rita Cohen howling into the phone to know that
she was someone to whom there was no sacred form of life on earth or in heaven.
What does she have to do with self-starvation and Ma-hatma Gandhi and Martin
Luther King? She does not exist because she does not fit in. These are not even
her words. These are not a young girl’s words. There are no grounds for these
words. This is an imitation of someone. Someone has been telling her what to do
and what to say. From the beginning this has all been an act. She’s an act; she
did not arrive at this by herself. Someone is behind her, someone corrupt and
cynical and distorted who sets these kids to do these things, who strips a Rita
Cohen and a Merry Levov of everything good that was their inheritance and lures
them into this act.
* * *
“You are going to take her back to all your dopey pleasures? Take her from her
holiness into that shallow, soulless excuse for a life? Yours is the lowest
species on this earth—don’t you know that yet? Are you really able to believe
that you, with your conception of life, you basking unpunished in the crime of
your wealth, have anything whatsoever to offer this woman? Just exactly what? A
life of bad faith lived to the hilt, that’s what, the ultimate in bloodsucking
propriety! Don’t you know who this woman is? Don’t you realize what this woman
has become? Don’t you have any inkling of what she is in communion with?” The
perennial indictment of the middle class, from somebody who did not exist; the
celebration of his daughter’s degradation and the excoriation of his class:
Guilty!— according to somebody who did not exist. “You are going to take her
away from me? You, who felt sick when you saw her? Sick because she refuses to
be captured in your shitty little moral universe? Tell me, Swede—how did you get
so smart?”
370
He hung up. Dawn has Orcutt, I have Sheila, Merry has Rita or she doesn’t have
Rita—Can Rita stay for dinner? Can Rita stay overnight? Can Rita wear my boots?
Mom, can you drive me and Rita to the village?—and my father drops dead. If it
has to be, it has to be. He got over his father’s dying, I’ll get over my
father’s dying. I’ll get over everything. I do not care what meaning it has or
what meaning it doesn’t have, whether it fits or whether it doesn’t fit— they
are not dealing with me anymore. / don’t exist. They are dealing now with an
irresponsible person; they are dealing with someone who does not care. Can Rita
and I blow up the post office? Yes. Whatever you want, dear. And whoever dies,
dies.
Madness and provocation. Nothing recognizable. Nothing plausible. No context in
which it hangs together. He no longer hangs together. Even his capacity for
suffering no longer exists.
A great idea takes hold of him: his capacity for suffering no longer exists.
But that idea, howev
er great, did not make it out of the room with him. Never
should have hung up—never. She’d make him pay a huge price for that. Six foot
three, forty-six years old, a multimillion-dollar business, and broken for a
second time by a ruthless, pint-sized slut. This is his enemy and she does
exist. But where did she come from? Why does she write me, phone, strike out at
me—what does she have to do with my poor broken girl? Nothing!
Once again she leaves him soaked with sweat, his head a ringing globe of pain;
the entire length of his body is suffused with a fatigue so extreme that it
feels like the onset of death, and yet his enemy evinces little more substance
than a mythical monster. Not a shadow enemy exactly, not nothing—but what then?
A courier. Yes. Does her number on him, indicts him, exploits him, eludes him,
resists him, brings him to a total bewildered standstill by saying whatever mad
words come into her head, encircles him in her lunatic cliches and is in and out
like a courier. But a courier from whom? From where?
He knows nothing about her. Except that she expresses perfectly the stupidity of
her kind. Except that he is still her villain, that her
37i
hatred of him is resolute. Except that she’s now twenty-seven. Not a kid
anymore. A woman. But grotesquely fixed in her position. Behaves like a
mechanism of human parts, like a loudspeaker, human parts assembled as a
loudspeaker designed to produce shattering sound, a sound that is disruptive and
