by Philip Roth
“Here,” I said. “Here is where you could have ended up—where you ended up. With him. Living chaotically with him.”
You are not here to help her understand herself. Go no further. You are not the Jewish Interpersonal Therapy Workshop. It only looks that way tonight. One patient shows up, spends his hour telling you his favorite lies, then he exits, after exposing himself, and another materializes, takes possession of the pillow, and begins telling her favorite lies. The storification of everyday life, the poetry you hear on the Phil Donahue show, stuff she probably hears on the Donahue show, and I sit here as if I hadn’t heard the fucked-up-shiksa story from the Scheherazade of fucked-up shiksas; as if I hadn’t got myself morbidly enfolded in its pathos over thirty years ago, I sit and I listen as though to do so is my fate. In the face of a story, any story, I sit captivated. Either I am listening to them or I am telling them. Everything originates there.
“Christianity saved me from a lot of craziness,” she said, “but not from anti-Semitism. I think I really got into hating Jews when I was a Christian. Before, it was just my family’s stupid thing. Know why I started hating Jews? Because they didn’t have to put up with any of this Christian nonsense. Death to self, you have to kill yourself, suffering makes you a better servant of Him—and they laughed at all our suffering. Only allow God to live through you so that you become nothing more than a vessel. So I became nothing more than a vessel while the Jews became doctors and lawyers and rich. They laughed at our suffering, they laughed at His suffering. Look, don’t get me wrong, I loved being nothing. I mean I loved it and I hated it. I could be what I believed I was, a piece of shit, and get praised for it. I wore little plaid skirts, wore my hair in a ponytail, didn’t fuck, and meanwhile the Jews were all smart, they were middle class, they were fucking, they were educated, they were down in the Caribbean at Christmastime, and I hated them. That started when I was a Christian, and it just kept growing at the hospital. Now, from A-S.A., I understand why else I hated them. Their cohesiveness, I hated that. Their superiority, what the Gentiles call greed, I hated that. Their paranoia and their defensiveness, always being strategic and careful, always clever—the Jews drove me crazy just by being Jews. Anyway, that was my legacy from Jesus. Until Philip.”
“From Jesus to Philip.”
“Yeah, looks that way. Done it all over again, haven’t I? With him.” She sounded amazed. An amazing experience and it was hers.
And mine? From Jesus to Philip—to Philip. From Jesus to Walter Sweeney to Rodney to Philip to Philip. I am the next apocalyptic solution.
“And it’s only just dawning on you here,” I asked, “that he might constitute a bit of a relapse?”
“I was coasting along, you see, winging along there, being a nurse, seven years—I told you about all that, I told you about killing somebody—”
“Yes, you did.”
“But with him I didn’t know how to get out. I never know how to get out. One guy is battier than the other and I don’t know how to get out. My trouble is I get very passionate and ecstatic. It takes me a long time to get disillusioned with the whole unreality of everything. I guess I was still loving people taking an interest in me the way he took an interest in my anti-Semitism. Yeah, he did take over from Jesus. He was going to purify me like the church. I need it black and white, I guess. There’s really very little that is black and white, and I realize that the whole world is nothing but gray areas, but these mad dogmatic people, they’re kind of protection, you know?”
“Who is he? Who is this mad dogmatic person?”
“He’s not a crook, he’s not a fake, you’re all wrong thinking that. His whole life is the Jews.”
“Who is he, Wanda Jane?”
“Yeah, Wanda Jane. That’s me. Perfect little Wanda Jane, who has to be invisible and a servant. Jinx the Battler, Jinx the Amazon, Jinx who thinks for herself, who answers for herself, who makes decisions for herself and stands up for herself, Jinx who holds the dying in her arms and watches every kind of suffering a human being can suffer, Jinx Possesski who’s afraid of nothing and is like an Earth Mother to her dying people, and Wanda Jane who is nothing and is afraid of everything. Don’t call me Wanda Jane. It’s not funny. It reminds me of those people I once lived with in Ohio. You know who I always hated more than the Jews? Want to know my secret? I hated the fucking Christians. I ran and ran and ran until all I did was circle back. Is that what everybody does or just me? Catholicism goes very deep. And the craziness and the stupidity goes very deep. God! Jesus! Judaism makes my third great religion and I’m still not even thirty-five. I got a ways to go yet with God. I ought to sashay over tomorrow to the Muhammadans and sign on with them. They sound like they got it all together. Great on women. The Bible. I didn’t read the Bible—I would open the Bible and point, and whatever phrase I was pointing at would give me an answer. An answer! It was games. The whole thing is lunatic games. Yet I freed myself. I did it. I got better. I got born again as an atheist. Hallelujah. So life isn’t perfect and I was an anti-Semite. If that was the worst that I wound up, given where I began, that was a victory, for God’s sake. Who doesn’t have something they hate? Who was I harming? A nurse who shot off her mouth about Jews. So what. Live with it. But, no, still couldn’t bear being their offspring, still couldn’t stand anything if it came from Ohio, and this is how I got involved with Philip and A-S.A. I’ve just spent a year with a lunatic Jew. And didn’t know it. Wanda Jane didn’t know it until he got on the phone one hour ago and put in a call to Meir Kahane, to the absolute king of religious nuts, to the Jewish Avenger himself. I’m sitting in Jerusalem, in a hotel room, with three crazy bastards in skullcaps screaming all at once for Philip to write down Demjanjuk’s confession, screaming where they are going to take Demjanjuk’s son and how they are going to cut him up into little pieces and mail him back to his dad, and still I don’t understand. Not until he puts in that call to Kahane’s number does it dawn on me that I am living an anti-Semite’s nightmare. Everything I learned at A-S.A., right down the tube. A roomful of screaming Jews plotting to murder a Gentile child—my Polish grandfather who drove the tractor used to tell me that that’s what they did all the time back in Poland! Maybe you intellectuals can turn your noses up at this stuff and think that it’s all beneath you, but all this crazy stuff you think is trashy lies is just more life to me. Crazy stuff’s what most people I’ve known live with every day. It’s Walter Sweeney all over again. Dying on his knees—and I found him there. Imagine what that was like. You know what my Philip said when I told him about finding Walter Sweeney praying on his knees and dead of starvation? ‘Christianity,’ he said, ‘goyische nachis,’ and he spat. I just go from one to the next. Rodney. Want to know what it was, Rodney’s Christian Interpersonal Therapy? A guy who hadn’t even graduated high school, and Wanda Jane goes to him for therapy. Well, I got therapy, all right. Yeah, you guessed it. Don’t talk to me about that penile implant. Don’t make me talk about that.”
When she said “implant,” I thought of the way an explorer, concluding his epochal voyage, claims all the land he sees for the crown by implanting the royal flag—before they send him back in chains and he is beheaded for treason. “You might as well tell me everything,” I said.
“But you think everything is lies when it’s true, so terribly, terribly, terribly true.”
“Tell me about the implant.”
“He got it for me.”
“That I can believe.”
She was crying now. Rolling down her cheeks were plump tears that had all the fullness of her own beautifully upholstered frame, an embattled child’s enormous outpouring of pent-up tears, attesting to a tender nature that was simply indisputable now even to me. This raving madman had somehow got himself a wonderful woman, an out-and-out saint with a wonderful heart whose selfless life had gone monstrously wrong.
“He was afraid,” she said. “He wept and wept. It was so awful. He was going to lose me to some other man, a man who could still do
it. He was going to lose me, he said. I would leave him all alone to die in agony with the cancer—and how could I say no? How can Wanda Jane say no when someone is suffering like that? How can a nurse who has seen all I’ve seen say no to a penile implant if that is going to give him the strength to fight on? Sometimes I think that I am the only one who follows the teachings of our Lord. That’s what I sometimes think when I feel him pushing that thing inside me.”
“And who is he? Tell me who he is.”
“Another fucked-up Jewish boy. The fucked-up shiksa’s fucked-up Jewish boyfriend, a wild, hysterical animal, that’s who he is. That’s who I am. That’s who we are. Everything’s about his mother.”
“Not really.”
“His mother didn’t love him enough.”
“But that’s out of my book, isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“I wrote a book, a hundred years ago.”
“I know that. But I don’t read. He gave it to me but I didn’t read it. I have to hear the words. That was the hardest part of school, the reading. I have a lot of trouble with my d’s and b’s.”
“As in ‘double.’”
“I’m dyslexic.”
“You’ve had a lot to overcome, haven’t you?”
“You can say that again.”
“Tell me about his mother.”
“She used to lock him out of the house. On the landing outside their apartment. He was all of five years old. ‘You don’t live here anymore.’ That’s what she would tell him. ‘You are not our little boy. You belong to somebody else.’”
“Where was this? In what city? Where was the father in all this?”
“Don’t know, he doesn’t say anything about the father. All he ever says is that he was always locked out by the mother.”
“But what had he done?”
“Who knows? Assault. Armed robbery. Murder. Crimes beyond description. I guess the mother knew. He used to set his jaw and wait on the landing for her to open up. But she was as stubborn as he was and wouldn’t give in. A little five-year-old boy was not going to be in charge of her. A sad story, isn’t it? Then it got dark. That’s when he folded. He’d start to whimper like a dog and beg for his dinner. She’d say, ‘Get dinner from the people you belong to.’ Then he’d beg to be forgiven six or seven times more and she would figure he was broken enough and open up the door. Philip’s whole childhood is about that door.”
“So this is what made the outlaw.”
“Is it? I thought it’s what made the detective.”
“Might be what made both. The angry boy outside the door, overcome by helplessness. Unjust persecution. What a rage must have boiled up in that five-year-old child. What defiance must have been born in him out there on that landing. The thing excluded. Cast out. Banished. The family monster. I am alone and despicable. No, that’s not my book, I don’t go anywhere like that far. I believe he got that from another book. The infant put out by his parents to perish. Ever hear of Oedipus Rex?”
Can I help it if I felt tickled with adoration for this beguiling woman on my bed when she said to me, gaily, with the Mae West slyness in her voice of the woman rich with amorous surprises, “Honey, even us dyslexies know about Oedipus Rex.”
“I don’t know what to make of you,” I said, truthfully.
“It’s not easy to know what to make of you, either.”
A pause followed, filled with fantasies of our future together. A long, long pause and a long, long look, from the chair to the bed and back.
“So. How did he settle on me?” I asked.
“How?” She laughed. “You’re joking.”
“Yes, how?” I was laughing now too.
“Look in the mirror someday. Who else was he going to settle on, Michael Jackson? I can’t believe you two. I see you guys coming and going. Look, don’t think this has been easy for me. It’s totally weird. I think I’m dreaming.”
“Well, not totally. It took some doing on his part.”
“Well, not much.” And that’s when I got that particular smile again, that slow curling upward at the corner of the mouth that was to me the epitome of sexual magic, as I’ve said. It has to be clear even to a small child reading this confession that from the moment I’d pushed back the bureau and let her slip into my room in that dress, I had been struggling to neutralize her erotic attraction and to eradicate the carnal thoughts aroused in me by the desperate, disheveled look of her recumbent on my bed. Don’t think it’d been easy for me, honey, when she’d moaned in a whisper, “Put me in your bag and take me with you.” But while drinking in the roman-fleuve of her baffled quest for guardianship (among the Protestants, the Catholics, and the Jews), I had maintained as best I could the maximum skepticism. Charm there was, admittedly, but her verbal authority was really not great, and I told myself that, in any circumstance less drastic than this (if, say, I’d sidled up to her at one of those Chicago singles bars when she was a nurse hanging out), after five minutes of listening I would have been hard put not to try my luck with someone who wasn’t being endlessly reborn. Yet, all this said, the effect of her smile was to make me tumescent.
I didn’t know what to make of her. A woman forged by the commonplace at its most cruelly ridiculous smiles up from a hotel bed at a man who has every reason in the world to be nowhere near her, a man to whom she is the mate in no way whatsoever, and the man is underground with Persephone. You are in awe of eros’s mythological depths when something like that happens to you. What Jung calls “the uncontrollability of real things,” what a registered nurse just calls “life.”
“We aren’t indistinguishable, you know.”
“That word. That’s the word. He uses it a hundred times a day. ‘We’re indistinguishable.’ He’s looking in the mirror and that’s what he says—‘We’re indistinguishable.’”
“Well, we’re not,” I informed her, “not by a long shot.”
“No? What is it then, you’ve got a different Life line? I do palmistry. I learned it once, hitchhiking. I read palms instead of books.”
And I did next the stupidest thing I’d yet done in Jerusalem and perhaps in my entire life. I got up from the chair by the window and stepped across to the bed and took hold of the hand that she was extending. I placed my hand in hers, in the nurse’s hand that had been everywhere, the nurse’s tabooless, transgressive hand, and she ran her thumb lightly along my palm and then palpated in turn each of its cushioned corners. For at least a full minute she said only, “Ummm … ummm …,” all the while carefully studying my hand. “It’s not surprising,” she finally told me very, very quietly, as though not to awaken a third person in the bed, “that the Head line is surprisingly long and deep. Your Head line is the strongest line in the hand. It’s a Head line dominated by imagination rather than by money or heart or reason or intellect. There’s a strong warlike component to your Fate line. Your Fate line sort of rises in the Mount of Mars. You actually have three Fate lines. Which is very unusual. Most people don’t have any.”
“How many does your boyfriend have?”
“Only one.”
And I was thinking, If you want to get killed, if you are determined to die on your knees like Walter Sweeney, then this is the way to get the job done. This palm reader is his treasure. This recovering anti-Semite fingering your Fate line is that madman’s prize!
“All of these lines from the Mount of Venus into your Life line indicate how deeply you’re ruled by your passions. The deep, deep clear lines on this part of the hand—see?—intersect with the Life line. They actually aren’t crossed, which means that rather than passion bringing you misfortune, it doesn’t. If they were crossed, I’d say that in you sexual appetite leads to decadence and corruption. But that’s not true. Your sexual appetite is quite pure.”
“What do you know,” I replied, thinking, Do this and he will hunt you down to the ends of the earth and kill you. You should have fled. You didn’t need her answers to all your questions. Her answers ar
e as useless to you if they are true as they are if they are false. This is his trap, I thought, just as she looked up into my face with that smile that was her Fate line and said, “It’s all such complete bullshit but it’s sort of fun—you know?” Stop. Breathe. Think. She believes you are in possession of Smilesburger’s million and is simply changing sides. Anything could be happening and you’d be the last to know.
“It’s sort of the hand of a … I mean if I didn’t know anything about you, if I were reading the hands of a stranger and didn’t know who you were, I would say it’s sort of the hand of a … of a great leader.”
I should have fled. Instead I implanted myself and then I fled. I penetrated her and I ran. Both. Talk about the commonplace at its most ridiculous.
8
The
Uncontrollability
of Real Things
Here is the Pipik plot so far.
A middle-aged American Jew settles into a suite at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel and proposes publicly that Israeli Jews of Ashkenazi descent, who make up the more influential half of the country’s population and who constituted the original cadre that settled the state, return to their countries of origin to resurrect the European Jewish life that Hitler all but annihilated between 1939 and 1945. He argues that this post-Zionist political program, which he has called “Diasporism,” is the only means by which to avert a “second Holocaust,” in which either the three million Jews of Israel will be massacred by their Arab enemies or the enemies will be decimated by Israeli nuclear weapons, a victory that, like a defeat, would destroy the moral foundations of Jewish life for good. He believes that, with assistance from traditional Jewish philanthropic sources, he can raise the money and marshal the political will of influential Jews everywhere to institute and realize this program by the year 2000. He justifies his hopefulness by alluding to the history of Zionism and comparing his supposedly unattainable dream to the Herzlian plan for a Jewish state, which, in its own time, struck Herzl’s numerous Jewish critics as contemptibly ludicrous, if not insane. He concedes the troubling persistence of a substantial anti-Semitic European population but proposes to implement a massive recovery program that will rehabilitate those several tens of millions still powerless before the temptations of traditional anti-Semitism and enable them to learn to control their antipathy to their Jewish compatriots once the Jews have been re-rooted in Europe. He calls the organization that will implement this program Anti-Semites Anonymous and is accompanied on his proselytizing fund-raising travels by a member of the charter chapter of A-S.A., an American nurse of Polish and Irish Catholic extraction, who identifies herself as a “recovering anti-Semite” and who came to be influenced by his ideology when he was her cancer patient in the Chicago hospital where she worked.
