by Philip Roth
When at last Helen has fallen asleep—her face rolling familiarly on my shoulder—I take the final exams out of my briefcase and begin where I had had to leave off a hundred or so hours ago. Yes, I have taken my schoolwork with me—and a good thing too. I cannot imagine how I could get through the million remaining hours of the flight without these examination papers to hang on to. “Without this…” and see myself strangling Helen with the coil of her waist-long hair. Who strangles his lover with her hair? Isn’t it somebody somewhere in Browning? Oh, who cares!
“The search for intimacy, not because it necessarily makes for happiness, but because it is necessary, is one of Chekhov’s recurrent themes.”
The paper I have chosen to begin with—to begin again with—is by Kathie Steiner, the girl I had dreamed of adopting. “Good,” I write in the margin alongside her opening sentence; then I reread it and after “necessary” make an insertion mark and write, “for survival(?).” And all the while I am thinking, “And miles below are the beaches of Polynesia. Well, dear, dazzling creature, a lot of good that does us! Hong Kong! The whole damn thing could have taken place in Cincinnati! A hotel room, a police station, an airport. A vengeful megalomaniac and some crooked cops! And a would-be Cleopatra! Our savings gone on this trashy Grade-B thriller! Oh, this voyage is the marriage itself—traversing four thousand miles of the exotic globe twice over, and for no good reason at all!”
Struggling to fix my attention once again on the task at hand—and not on whether Helen and I should have had a child, or who is to blame because we didn’t; refusing to charge myself yet again with all I could have done that I didn’t do, and all I did that I shouldn’t have—I return to Kathie Steiner’s final exam. Jimmy Metcalf instructs the police: “Kick her ass a little, gentlemen, it’ll do the whore some good,” while I subdue my emotions by reading carefully through each of Kathie’s pages, correcting every last comma fault, reminding her about her dangling-modifier problem, and dutifully filling the margin with my commentary and questions. Me and my “finals”; my marking pen and my paper clips. How the Emperor Metcalf would enjoy the spectacle—likewise Donald Garland and his uncharitable chief of police. I suppose I ought to laugh a little myself; but as I am a literature professor and not a policeman, as I am someone who long ago squeezed out what little of the tyrant was ever in him—from the look of things, maybe squeezed out just a bit too much—instead of laughing it all off, I come to Kathie’s concluding sentence, and am undone. The hold I have had on myself since Helen’s disappearance dissolves like that, and I must turn my face and press it into the darkened window of the humming airship that is carrying us back home to complete, in orderly and legal fashion, the disentanglement of our two wrecked lives. I cry for myself, I cry for Helen, and finally I seem to cry hardest of all with the realization that somehow not every last thing has been destroyed, that despite my consuming obsession with my marital unhappiness and my dreamy desire to call out to my young students for their help, I have somehow gotten a sweet, chubby, unharmed and as yet unhorrified daughter of Beverly Hills to end her sophomore year of college by composing this grim and beautiful lament summarizing what she calls “Anton Chekhov’s overall philosophy of life.” But can Professor Kepesh have taught her this? How? How? I am only just beginning to learn it on this flight! “We are born innocent,” the girl has written, “we suffer terrible disillusionment before we can gain knowledge, and then we fear death—and we are granted only fragmentary happiness to offset the pain.”
I am finally extracted from the rubble of my divorce by a job offer from Arthur Schonbrunn, who has left Stanford to become chairman of the comparative literature program at the State University of New York on Long Island. I have already begun seeing a psychoanalyst in San Francisco—only shortly after I began seeing the lawyer—and it is he who recommends that when I return East to teach I continue therapy with a Dr. Frederick Klinger, whom he knows and can recommend as someone who is not afraid to speak up with his patients, “a solid, reasonable man,” as he is described to me, “a specialist,” I am told, “in common sense.” But are reason and common sense what I need? Some would say that I have ruined things by far too narrow a devotion to exactly these attributes.
Frederick Klinger is solid, all right: a hearty, round-faced fellow, full of life, who, with my permission, smokes cigars throughout the sessions. I don’t much like the aroma myself, but allow it because smoking seems even further to concentrate the keenness with which Klinger attends to my despair. Not many years older than me, and sporting fewer gray hairs than I have lately begun to show, he exudes the contentment and confidence of a successful man in his middle years. I gather from the phone calls which, to my distress, he takes during my hour, that he is already a key figure in psychoanalytic circles, a member of the governing bodies of schools, publications, and research institutes, not to mention the last source of hope for any number of souls in disrepair. At first I find myself somewhat put off by the sheer relish with which the doctor seems to devour his responsibilities—put off, to be truthful, by nearly everything about him: the double-breasted chalk-stripe suit and the floppy bow tie, the frayed Chesterfield coat growing tight over the plumpening middle, the two bursting briefcases at the coat rack, the photos of the smiling healthy children on the book-laden desk, the tennis racket in the umbrella stand—put off even by the gym bag pushed behind the big worn Eames chair from which, cigar in hand, he addresses himself to my confusion. Can this snazzy, energetic conquistador possibly understand that there are mornings when on the way from the bed to the toothbrush I have to struggle to prevent myself from dropping down and curling up on the living-room floor? I don’t entirely understand the depth of this plunge myself. Having failed at being a husband to Helen—having failed at figuring out how to make Helen a wife—it seems I would rather sleep through my life now than live it.
How, for instance, have I come to be on such terrible terms with sensuality? “You,” he replies, “who married a femme fatale?” “But only to de-fatalize her, to de-fang her, along the way. All that nagging at her, at Helen, about the garbage and the laundry and the toast. My mother couldn’t have done a better job. About every last detail!” “Too divine for details, was she? Look, she isn’t the Helen born of Leda and Zeus, you know. She’s of the earth, Mr. Kepesh—a middle-class Gentile girl from Pasadena, California, pretty enough to get herself a free trip to Angkor Wat every year, but that’s about it, in the way of supernatural achievement. And cold toast is cold toast, no matter how much jewelry the cook may have accumulated over the years from rich married men with a taste for young girls.” “I was frightened of her.” “Sure you were.” His phone rings. No, he cannot possibly be at the hospital before noon. Yes, he has seen the husband. No, the gentleman does not seem willing to cooperate. Yes, that is most unfortunate. Now back to this uncooperative gentleman. “Sure you were frightened,” he says, “you couldn’t trust her.” “I wouldn’t trust her. And she was faithful to me. I believe that.” “Neither here nor there. Some game she was playing with herself, that’s all. What value did it have when the fact is that the two of you had no real business together ever? From the sound of it the only thing each of you did totally out of character was to marry the other.” “I was frightened of Birgitta, too.” “My God,” he exclaims, “who wouldn’t have been?” “Look, either I’m not making myself clear or you don’t even want to begin to understand me. I’m saying that these were special creatures, full of daring and curiosity—and freedom. They were not ordinary young women.” “Oh, I understand that.” “Do you? I think sometimes that you’d prefer to assign them both to some very tawdry category of humankind. But what made them special is that they weren’t tawdry, not to me, neither one of them. They were exceptional.” “Granted.” The phone rings. Yes, what is it? I am in session, yes. No, no, go ahead. Yes. Yes. Of course he understands. No, no, he’s pretending, pay no attention. All right, increase the dosage to four a day. But no more. And call me if he continues crying
. Call me anyway. Goodbye. “Granted,” he says, “but what were you supposed to do, having married one of these ‘special creatures’? Spend days as well as nights fondling her perfect breasts? Join her opium den? The other day you said the only thing you learned from six years with Helen was how to roll a joint.” “I think saying that is what is known as courting the analyst’s favor. I learned plenty.” “The fact remains—you had your work to do.” “The work is just a habit,” I say, without disguising my irritation with his dogged “demythologizing.” “Perhaps,” I wearily suggest, “reading books is the opiate of the educated classes.” “Is it? Are you thinking of becoming a flower child?” he says, lighting up a new cigar. “Once Helen and I were sunbathing in the nude on a beach in Oregon. We were on a vacation, driving north. After a while we spotted a guy watching us from off in some brush. We started to cover up, but he came toward us anyway and asked if we were nudists. When I said no he gave us a copy of his nudist newspaper in case we wanted to subscribe.” Klinger laughs loudly. “Helen said to me that God Himself must have sent him because it had been, by that time, fully ninety minutes since I’d read anything.” Again Klinger laughs with genuine amusement. “Look,” I tell him, “you just don’t know what it was like when I first met her. It’s not to be so easily disparaged. You don’t know what I was like, nor can you—nor can I, any more—seeing me in this shape. But I was a fearless sort of boy back in my early twenties. More daring than most, especially for that woebegone era in the history of pleasure. I actually did what the jerk-off artists dreamed about. Back when I started out on my own in the world, I was, if I may say so, something of a sexual prodigy.” “And you want to be one again, in your thirties?” I don’t even bother to answer, so narrow and wrongheaded does the common sense he’s mastered strike me. “Why allow Helen,” Klinger continues, “who has disfigured herself so in the frantic effort to be the high priestess of Eros—who very nearly destroyed you with her pronouncements and insinuations—why allow her judgment power over you still? How long do you intend to let her go on rebuking you where you feel weakest? How long do you intend to go on feeling weak over such utter foolishness? What was this ‘daring’ search of hers—?” The telephone. “Excuse me,” he says. Yes, this is he. Yes, go ahead. Hello—yes, I can hear you very well. How is Madrid? What? Well, of course he’s suspicious, what did you expect? But you just tell him that he is behaving stupidly and then forget it. No, of course you don’t want to get into a fight. I understand. Just say it, and then try to have some courage. You can stand up to him. Go back up to the room and tell him. Come on now, you know very well you can. All right. Good luck. Have a good time. I said, then go out and have a good time. Goodbye. “What was this search of hers,” he says, “but so much evasion, a childish flight from the real attainable projects of a life?” “Then, on the other hand,” I say, “maybe the ‘projects’ are so much evasion of the search.” “Please, you like to read and write about books. That, by your own testimony, gives you enormous satisfaction—did, at any rate, and will again, I assure you. Right now you’re fed up with everything. But you like being a teacher, correct? And from what I gather you are not uninspired at it. I still don’t know what alternative you have in mind. You want to move to the South Seas and teach great books to the girls in sarongs at the University of Tahiti? You want to have a go at a harem again? To be a fearless prodigy again, playing at Jack and Jill with your little Swedish daredevil in the working-class bars of Paris? You want a hammer over your head again—though maybe this time one that finds the mark?” “Burlesquing what I’m talking about doesn’t do me any good, you know. It’s obviously not going back to Birgitta that’s on my mind. It’s going ahead. I can’t go ahead.” “Perhaps going ahead, on that road anyway, is a delusion.” “Dr. Klinger, I assure you that I am sufficiently imbued by now with the Chekhovian bias to suspect as much myself. I know what there is to know from ‘The Duel’ and other stories about those committed to the libidinous fallacy. I too have read and studied the great Western wisdom on the subject. I have even taught it. I have even practiced it. But, if I may, as Chekhov also had the ordinary good sense to write: in psychological matters, ‘God preserve us from generalizations.’” “Thank you for the literature lesson. Tell me this, Mr. Kepesh: can you really be in the doldrums about what has befallen her—over what you seem to think you have ‘done’ to her—or are you just trying to prove to us that you are a man of feeling and conscience? If so, don’t overdo it. Because this Helen was bound to spend a night in jail, sooner or later. Destined for it long before she met you. From the sound of it, it’s how she landed on you—in the hope of being saved from the hoosegow, and the other inevitable humiliations. And that you know, as well as I do.”
But whatever he may say, however he may bully, burlesque, or even try a smidgen of charm in order to get me to put the marriage and divorce behind me, I am, whether he believes it or not, never altogether immune from self-recrimination when stories reach me of the ailments that are said to be transforming the one-time Occidental princess of the Orient into a bitter hag. I learn of a debilitating case of rhinitis that cannot seem to be checked by drugs and necessitates that she live with a tissue continuously rubbing away at her nose—at the fluted nostrils that flare as though catching the wind when she achieves her pleasure. I hear tell of extensive skin eruptions, on the cunning fingers (“You like this?… this?… oh, you do like it, my darling!”), and on her wide, lovely lips (“What do you see first in a face? The eyes or the mouth? I like that you discovered my mouth first”). But then Helen’s is not the only flesh slowly taking its revenge, or doing penance, or losing heart, or removing itself from the fray. Eating hardly anything, I have dropped since the divorce to scarecrow weight, and for the second time in my life I am bereft of my potency, even for an entertainment as unambitious as self-love. “I should never have come home from Europe,” I tell Klinger, who has at my request put me on an anti-depressant drug, which pries me out of bed in the morning but then leaves me for the rest of the day with vague, otherworldly feelings of encapsulation, of vast unpassable reaches between myself and the flourishing hordes. “I should have gone all the way and become Birgitta’s pimp. I’d be a happier, healthier member of society. Somebody else could teach the great masterworks of disillusionment and renunciation.” “Yes? You would rather be a pimp than an associate professor?” “That’s one way of putting it.” “Put it your own way.” “This something in me that I turned against,” I say in a fit of hopelessness, “before I even understood it, or let it have a life … I throttled it to death … killed it, practically overnight. And why? Why on earth was murder required?”
In the weeks that follow I attempt, between phone calls, to describe and chronicle the history of this something that, in my hopeless and de-energized state, I continue to think of as “murdered.” I speak at length now not just of Helen but of Birgitta as well. I go back to Louis Jelinek, even to Herbie Bratasky, speak of all that each meant to me, what each excited and alarmed, and of how each was dealt with, in my way. “Your rogues’ gallery,” Klinger calls them one day in the twentieth or thirtieth week of our debate. “Moral delinquency,” he observes, “has its fascination for you.” “Also,” I say, “for the authors of Macbeth and Crime and Punishment. Sorry to have mentioned the names of two works of art, Doctor.” “Quite all right. I hear all sorts of things here. I’m used to it.” “I do seem to get the feeling that it’s somehow against house rules for me to call upon my literary reserves in these skirmishes of ours, but the only point I’m trying to make is that ‘moral delinquency’ has been on the minds of serious people for a long time now. And why ‘delinquents,’ anyway? Won’t ‘independent spirits’ do? It’s no less accurate.” “I only mean to suggest that they aren’t wholly harmless types.” “Wholly harmless types probably lead rather constricted lives, don’t you think?” “On the other hand, one oughtn’t to underestimate the pain, the isolation, the uncertainty, and everything else unpleasant that may
accompany ‘independence’ of this kind. Look at Helen now.” “Please, look at me now.” “I am. I do. I suspect that she is worse off. You at least haven’t put all your eggs in that basket.” “I cannot maintain an erection, Dr. Klinger. I cannot maintain a smile, for that matter.” Whereupon his phone rings.
Fastened to no one and to nothing, drifting, drifting, sometimes, frighteningly, sinking; and, with the relentlessly clever and commonsensical doctor, quarreling, bickering, and debating, arguing yet again the subject which had been the source of so much marital bitterness—only when I am supine it is generally I who wind up taking Helen’s part, while he who sits up takes mine.
