by Philip Roth
By the time Dr. Klinger arrived at four I was one hundred and fifty-five pounds of remorse. I even began to sob a little when I told him what I had done—against all my misgivings and despite his warning. Now, I said, it was recorded on tape; for all I knew, it would be on page one of tomorrow’s tabloids. A light moment for the straphangers on their way to work. For there certainly was a humorous side to it all; what is a catastrophe without its humorous side? Miss Clark—as I had known all along—is a short, stocky spinster, fifty-six years old.
Unlike Dr. Gordon, Claire, and my father, who continually assure me that I am not being watched other than by those who announce their presence, Dr. Klinger has never even bothered to dispute the issue with me. “And? If it is on page one? What of it?”
“It’s nobody’s business!” Still weeping.
“But you would like to do it, would you not?”
“Yes! Yes! But she ignored me! She pretended I’d asked her to hurry up and be done! I don’t want her any more. I want a new nurse!”
“Have anyone in mind?”
“Someone young—someone beautiful! Why not!”
“Someone who will hear you and say yes.”
“Yes! Why not! It’s insane otherwise! I should have what I want! This is no ordinary life and I am not going to pretend that it is! You want me to be ordinary, you expect me to be ordinary—in this condition! I’m supposed to go on being a sensible man—in this condition! But that is crazy of you, Doctor! I want her to sit on me with her cunt! And why not! I want Claire to do what I want! What makes that ‘grotesque’? To be denied my pleasure in the midst of this—that is the grotesque! I want to be fucked! Why shouldn’t I be fucked? Tell me why that shouldn’t be! Instead you torture me! Instead you prevent me from having what I want! Instead I lie here being sensible! And there’s the madness, Doctor—being sensible!”
I do not know how much of what I said Dr. Klinger even understood; it is difficult enough to follow me when I am speaking deliberately, with concentration, and now I was sobbing and howling with no regard for the TV cameras or the spectators up in the stands … Or is that why I was carrying on so? Was I really so racked by the proposal I’d made that morning to Miss Clark? Or was the display largely for the benefit of my great audience, to convince them that, appearances aside, I am still very much a man—for who but a man has conscience, reason, desire, and remorse?
This crisis lasted for months. I became increasingly lewd with the stout, implacable Miss Clark, until finally one morning I offered her money. “Bend over—take it from behind! I’ll give you anything you want!” How I would get the money into her hands, how I would go about borrowing if she demanded more than I had saved in my account, I tried to figure out during my long, empty days. Who would help me? I couldn’t very well ask my father or Claire, and they were the only two people by whom I was willing to be seen. Ridiculous perhaps, given how sure I was that my image was being mercilessly recorded by television cameras and my daily progress publicized in the Daily News, but then I am not arguing that since my transformation I have been a model of Mature Adult Responsible Behavior. I am only trying to describe, as best I can, the stages I have had to pass through on the way to the present phase of melancholy equilibrium … Of course to assist me—to get hold of the money, to make the financial arrangements, either with Miss Clark or, if need be, with some woman whose profession is not circumscribed by a nurse’s ethical outlook—I could easily have called upon a young bearded colleague, a clever poet from Brooklyn who is no prude and whose sexual adventurousness has made him somewhat notorious in our English Department. But then neither was I a prude, and once upon a time I had had a taste for sexual adventure no less developed than my young friend’s. You must understand that it was not a man of narrow experience and suffocating inhibitions who was being tormented by his desires in that hammock. I had experimented with whores easily enough back in my twenties, and during a year as a Fulbright student in London, I had for several months carried on a thrilling, overwrought affair with two young women—students my age on leave together from university in Sweden, who shared a basement bedroom with me—until the less stable of the pair tried halfheartedly to pitch herself under a lorry. What alarmed me wasn’t the strangeness of my desires in that hammock, but the degree to which I would be severing myself from my own past—and kind—by surrendering to them. I was afraid that the further I went the further I would go—that I would reach a point of frenzy from which I would pass over into a state of being that no longer had anything to do with who or what I once had been. It wasn’t even that I would no longer be myself—I would no longer be anyone. I would have become craving flesh and nothing more.
So, with Dr. Klinger’s assistance, I set about to extinguish—and if not to extinguish, at least (in Klinger’s favorite word) to tolerate—the desire to insert my nipple into somebody’s vagina. But with all my will power—and, like my mother’s, it can be considerable when I marshal my forces—I was helpless once that bath began. Finally it was decided that nipple and areola should be sprayed with a mild anesthetic before Miss Clark started preparing me to meet the day. And this in fact did sufficiently reduce sensation so as to give me the upper hand in the battle against these impractical urges—a battle I won, however, only when the doctors decided, with my consent, to change my nurse.
That did the trick. Inserting my nipple into either the mouth or the anus of Mr. Brooks, the new male nurse, is something I just can’t imagine with anything like the excitement I would imagine my nipple in Claire, or even in Miss Clark, though I realize that the conjunction of male mouth and female nipple can hardly be described as a homosexual act. But such is the power of my past and its taboos, and the power over my imagination of women and their apertures, that I am able now—temporarily anesthetized and in the hands of a man—to receive my morning ablutions like any other invalid, more or less.
And there is still Claire, angelic imperturbable Claire, to “make love” to me, with her mouth if not with her vagina. And isn’t that sufficient? Isn’t that incredible enough? Of course I dream of MORE, dream of it all day long—but what good is MORE to me anyway, when there is no orgasmic conclusion to my excitement, but only this sustained sense of imminent ejaculation in which I writhe from the first second to the last? Actually I have come by now to settle for less rather than MORE. I think I had better if I don’t want Claire to come to see herself as nothing but the female machine summoned each evening to service a preposterous organism that once was David Kepesh. Surely the less time she spends at my nipple, the greater my chances of remaining something other to her (and to myself) than that nipple. Consequently, it is only for half of her hour-long visits that we now engage in sex—the rest of the time we spend in conversation. If I can, I should like to cut the sex play by half yet again. If the excitement is always at the same pitch, neither increasing nor decreasing in intensity once it’s begun, what’s the difference if I experience it for fifteen rather than thirty minutes? What’s the difference if it is for only one minute?
Mind you, I am not yet equal to such renunciation, nor am I convinced that it is desirable even from Claire’s point of view. But it is something, I tell you, simply to entertain the idea after the torment I have known. Even now there are still moments, infrequent but searing, when I have all I can do not to cry out while her lips are rhythmically palpating my nipple, “Fuck on it, Ovington! With your cunt!” But I don’t, I don’t. If Claire were of a mind to, she would have made the suggestion herself already. After all, she is still only a fourth-grade teacher at the Bank Street School, a girl brought up in Schenectady, New York, a Phi Beta Kappa at Cornell. No sense causing her to consider too carefully the grotesqueries she has already, miraculously, declared herself willing to participate in with the likes of me.
SOMETIME BETWEEN the first and the second of the two major “crises” I have survived so far here in the hospital—if hospital it is—I was visited by Arthur Schonbrunn, Dean of Arts and Sciences at
Stony Brook, and someone I have known since Palo Alto, when he was the young hot-shot Stanford professor and I was there getting my Ph.D. It was as the chairman of the newly formed comparative-literature department that Arthur brought me from Stanford to Stony Brook eight years ago. He is nearly fifty now, a wry and charming gentleman, and for an academic uncommonly, almost alarmingly, suave in manner and dress. It was his social expertise as much as our long-standing acquaintanceship that led me (and Dr. Klinger) to settle finally on Arthur as the best person with whom to make my social debut following the victory over the phallic cravings of my nipple. I also wanted Arthur to come so that I could talk to him—if not during this first visit, then the next—about how I might maintain my affiliation with the university. Back at Stanford I had been a “reader” for one of the enormous sophomore classes he lectured in “Masterpieces of Western Literature.” I had begun to wonder if I couldn’t perform some such function again. Claire could read aloud to me the student papers, I could dictate to her my comments and grades … Or was that a hopeless idea? It took Dr. Klinger several weeks to encourage me to believe that there would be no harm in asking.
I never got the chance. Even as I was telling him, a little “tearfully”—I couldn’t help myself—how touched I was that he should be the first of my colleagues to visit, I thought I could hear giggling. “Arthur,” I asked, “are we alone—?” He said, “Yes.” Then giggled, quite distinctly. Sightless, I could still picture my former mentor: in his blue blazer with the paisley lining tailored in London for him by Kilgore, French; in his soft flannel trousers, in his gleaming Gucci loafers, the diplomatic Dean with his handsome mop of salt-and-pepper hair—giggling! And I hadn’t even made my suggestion about becoming a reader for the department. Giggling—not because of anything ludicrous I had proposed, but because he saw that it was true, I actually had turned into a breast. My graduate-school adviser, my university superior, the most courtly professor I have ever known—and yet, from the sound of it, overcome with the giggles simply at the sight of me.
“I’m—I—David—” But now he was laughing so, he couldn’t even speak. Arthur Schonbrunn unable to speak. Talk about the incredible. Twenty, thirty seconds more of uproarious laughter, and then he was gone. The visit had lasted about three minutes.
Two days later came the apology, as elegantly done as anything Arthur’s written since his little book on Robert Musil. And the following week, the package from Sam Goody’s, with a card signed, “Debbie and Arthur S.” A record album of Laurence Olivier in Hamlet.
Arthur had written: “Your misfortune should not have had to be compounded by my feeble, unforgivable performance. I’m at a loss to explain what came over me. It would strike us both as so much cant if I even tried.”
I worked on my reply for a week. I must have dictated easily fifty letters: gracious, eloquent, forgiving, lighthearted, grave, hangdog, businesslike, arch, vicious, wild, literary—and some even sillier than the one I dispatched. “Feeble?” I wrote Arthur. “Why, if anything it is evidence of your earthy vitality that you should have laughed yourself sick. I am the feeble one, otherwise I would have joined in. If I fail to appreciate the enormous comedy of all this, it is only because I am really more of an Arthur Schonbrunn than you are, you vain, self-loving, dandified prick!” But the one I finally settled on read simply: “Dear Debbie and Arthur S.: Thanx mucho for the groovy sides. Dave ‘The Breast’ K.” I checked twice with Claire to be sure she had spelled thanks with that x before she went ahead and mailed my little message. If she mailed it. If she even took it down.
The second crisis that threatened to undo me and that I appear—for the time being—to have weathered might be called a crisis of faith. As it came fully a month after Arthur’s visit, it is hard to know if it was in any way precipitated by that humiliation. I am long since over hating Arthur Schonbrunn for that day—at least I continue to work at being long since over it—and so I tend now to agree with Dr. Klinger, who thinks that what I had to struggle with next was inevitable and can’t be blamed on my three minutes with the Dean. Evidently nothing that has happened can be blamed on anyone, not even on me.
What happened next was that I refused to believe I had turned into a breast. Having brought myself to relinquish (more or less) my dreams of nippled intercourse with Claire, with Miss Clark—with whoever would have me—I realized that the whole thing was impossible. A man cannot turn into a breast other than in his own imagination.
It had taken me six months to figure this out.
“Look, this isn’t happening—it can’t!”
“Why can’t it?” asked Dr. Klinger.
“You know why! Any child knows why! Because it is a physiological and biological and anatomical impossibility!”
“How then do you explain your predicament?”
“It’s a dream! Six months haven’t passed—that’s an illusion, too. I’m dreaming! It’s just a matter of waking up!”
“But you are awake, Mr. Kepesh. You know very well that you’re awake.”
“Stop saying that! Don’t torture me like that! Let me get up! Enough! I want to wake up!”
For days and days—or what pass for days in a nightmare—I struggled to wake myself up. Claire came every evening to suck my nipple and talk, my father came on Sunday to tell me the latest news, Mr. Brooks was there every morning, rousing me from sleep with a gentle pat just at the edge of my areola. At least I imagined that he had just awakened me by touching the edge of my areola. Then I realized that I had not been awakened from a real sleep, but from the sleep that I slept within the nightmare itself. I wasn’t an awakening breast—I was myself, still dreaming.
Oh, how I cursed my captors—though, to be sure, if it was a dream I was only cursing captors of my own invention. Stop torturing me, all of you! Somebody help me get up! I cursed the spectators in the gallery I had constructed, I cursed the technicians on the television circuit I had imagined—Voyeurs! I cried, heartless, ogling, sadistic voyeurs!—until at last, fearing that my battered system might collapse beneath the emotional strain (yes, those were the words of concern that I put into their lying mouths), they decided to place me under heavy sedation. How I howled then!—Cold cunt of a Claire! Idiot, ignoramus of a father! Klinger you quack! Klinger you fraud!—even as the drug enfeebled me, a sedating drug somehow administered to the dreamer by himself.
When I came around, I at last realized that I had gone mad. I was not dreaming. I was crazy. There was to be no magical awakening, no getting up out of bed, brushing my teeth, and going off to teach as though nothing more than a nightmare had interrupted my ordinary and predictable life; if there was ever to be anything at all for me, it was the long road back—becoming sane. And of course the first step toward recovering sanity was this realization that my sense of myself as a breast was the delusion of a lunatic. Rather than being slung in a hammock following an endocrinopathic catastrophe unlike any the endocrinologists had ever known before, I was, more than likely, simply sitting, deluded, in a room in a mental hospital. And that is something we know can and does happen to all too many people, all the time. That I could not see, that I could not taste, that I could not smell, that I could only faintly hear, that I could not make contact with my own anatomy, that I experienced myself as speaking to others like one buried within, and very nearly strangulated by, his own adipose tissue—were these symptoms so unusual in the trance-world of psychosis?
Why I had lost my sanity I couldn’t understand, however. What could have triggered such a thoroughgoing schizophrenic collapse in someone seemingly so well? But then whatever might have caused such a breakdown was undoubtedly so frightening that I would have had to obliterate all memory of it … Only why then was Dr. Klinger—and that it was Dr. Klinger with whom I was talking I was sure; I had to be sure of something if I was to make a start, so I clung to his mildly accented English, to his straightforward manner and his homely humor as proof that at least this in my experience was real—why then was Dr. Klinger te
lling me to accept my fate, when clearly the way back to sanity was to defy this absolutely crazy conception of myself? The answer was obvious—should have been all along. That wasn’t what Klinger was saying. My illness was such that I was taking his words, simple and clear as they were when he spoke them, and giving them precisely their opposite meaning.
When he came that afternoon, I had to call forth all my famous strength of character in order to explain, as simply and clearly as I could, my incredible discovery. I sobbed when I was finished, but otherwise was as inspired in speech as I have ever been. When teaching, one sometimes hears oneself speaking in perfect cadences, developing ideas into rounded sentences, and combining them into paragraphs full to brimming, and it is hard then to believe that the fellow suddenly addressing his hushed students with a golden tongue and great decisiveness could have made such a muddle of his notes only the hour before. Well, harder still to believe that the measured tones in which I had just broken the good news to Dr. Klinger came from the vituperous madman who had had to be sedated by his keepers. If I was still a lunatic—and still a breast, I was still a lunatic—I was now, at least, one of the more lucid and eloquent on my floor.
I said, “Curiously, it’s Arthur Schonbrunn’s visit that convinces me I’m on the right track. How could I ever have believed that Arthur would come here and laugh? How could I take so blatantly a paranoid delusion for the truth? I’ve been cursing him for a month now—and Debbie too, for those idiotic records—and none of it makes any sense at all. Because if there is one person in the world who simply couldn’t lose control like that, it’s Arthur.”
“He is beyond the perils of human nature, this Dean?”
“You know something? The answer to that is yes. He is beyond the perils of human nature.”
“Such a shrewd operator.”
“It isn’t that he’s so shrewd—that’s going at it the wrong way round. It’s that I’ve been so mad. To think that I made all that up!”
