The Dying Animal

by Philip Roth

  Enjoy? Strange word. But Tom, in all situations, is the jovial doctor. I came around to George's unparalyzed side while Tom was mopping his father's face with the wet washcloth. George took it from him—to everyone's surprise, reached out with his good hand, grabbed at the washcloth, got hold of it, and jammed it inside his mouth. "He's so dry," somebody said. George pushed the end of the washcloth around inside his mouth and began to suck on it. When he took it out, there was something adhering to it. Looked like a piece of his soft palate. Betty let out a gasp when she saw it there, and the hospice woman, who was in the room too, patted Betty's back and said, "It's nothing. His mouth is so dry—it's just a little flake of flesh."

  His mouth was aslant, hanging open, that stricken-looking mouth of the dying, but his eyes were focused and there even appeared to be something back of them, something of George that hadn't yet given way. Like the wall left jaggedly standing after a bomb goes off. With the same angry force with which he'd grabbed the washcloth, he pulled down the sheet that was covering him and began to yank at the Velcro at the corner of his diaper, trying to pull the thing off, and revealing those sad sticks that had been his legs. When the tungsten filament inside a light bulb goes—that's what his legs reminded me of. Everything about him, everything fashioned of flesh and blood, reminded me of an inanimate something else. "No, no," Tom said, "let it be, Dad. It's fine." But George wouldn't stop. Pulling angrily, trying in vain to get out of the diaper. When that didn't work, he raised his hand and, kind of growling, pointed at Betty. "What?" she asked him. "I can't understand you. What do you want? What is it, sweetheart?" The noises he was emitting were indecipherable, but it was clear from his gestures that he wanted her to come as close as she could. When she did, he reached out, put his arm around onto her back, and pulled her forward so that he could kiss her mouth. "Oh yes, Daddy," she said, "yes, you are the best father, the very best." What was astonishing was this force welling up in him after all those days of lying there inert and emaciated, somehow hanging on while seemingly breathing his last—the considerable force with which he'd pulled Betty to him and with which he was trying to speak. Maybe, I thought, they shouldn't be letting him die. What if there's more left than they realize? What if that's what he's trying to demonstrate? What if instead of saying goodbye to them he's saying, "Don't let me go. Do everything you can to save me"?

  Then George was pointing at me. "Hello, George," I said. "Hello, friend. It's David, George." And when I got close to him, he grabbed me the way he'd grabbed Betty and kissed me on the mouth. There was no necrotic smell, no sickish stink, no stench whatsoever: just the warm, odorless breath, the pure perfume of being, and the two parched lips. It was the first time George and I had ever kissed in our lives. Again the grunting and he was pointing now to Tom. To Tom and then to his own feet, which were uncovered at the end of the bed. When Tom, thinking George wanted the sheet pulled up over his legs, began to straighten the bedding, George grunted still louder and pointed again at his feet. "He wants you to hold them," Betty said. "One of them he can't even feel," Tom said. "Hold the other one," Betty said. "Okay, Dad, I've got it—I've got you." And Tom began patiently kneading the foot in which there was feeling.

  Next George pointed to the doorway where Kate was standing, watching it all. "He wants you, Ma," Betty said. I moved aside and Kate came over and stood where I'd been, beside the bed, and George reached up for her now, and with his good arm pulled her toward him, and kissed her as forcefully as he'd kissed Betty and me. Kate kissed him back. Then they kissed again, a long kiss this time, a quite passionate kiss. Kate even closed her eyes. She's an exceedingly unsentimental, down-to-earth person, and I'd never before seen her do anything so girlish.

  Meanwhile, George's good hand had moved from her back around to her right arm, and he began to fumble with the button at the wrist of her blouse. He was trying to undo it. "George," Kate whispered softly. She sounded amused. "Georgie, Georgie..." "Help him, Ma. He wants to open the button." Smiling at the instructions from the emotional daughter, Kate submitted and opened the button, but by then George was at the other sleeve, tugging at that button, so she obligingly undid it as well. And all this time he kept hungrily going for her lips. Kate caressed his ruined face, that immensely lonely, cavernous face, kissed his lips each time he offered them, and then his hand went up to the buttons at the front of her blouse and he began to fumble with those.

  His plan was clear: he was trying to undress her. To undress this woman whom, as I knew, as the children surely knew, he had not touched in bed in years. Whom he barely any longer touched at all. "Let him, Ma," Betty said, and so Kate again did as her daughter told her. She reached up with her own hand and helped George undo the front of her blouse. This time when they kissed, his one good hand was grasping at the cloth of her large brassiere. But, abruptly, that was the end of it. The force went out of him just like that, and he never reached her pendulous breasts. He didn't die for another twelve hours, but when he fell back onto the pillows, his mouth agape, his eyes closed, breathing like one who's collapsed at the end of a race, we all knew that what we had witnessed was the last amazing act of George's life.

  Later, when I went to the door to leave, Kate came out onto the front porch and continued with me down the drive to my car. She took my hands in hers and thanked me for coming. I said, "I was glad I was here to see all this." "Yes, that was something, wasn't it?" Kate said. And then with her weary smile she added, "I wonder who it is he thought I was."

  So George was only five months gone, and when Consuela called and left her message—"I want to tell you something. And I want to tell it to you myself, before you hear it from someone"—well, as I said, I listened to the message thinking something had now happened to her. This kind of thing, a premonitory dream followed by its fulfillment, is uncanny enough in one's dreams, but in real life? I didn't know what to do. Should I call her back? I thought it over for fifteen minutes. I didn't call back because I was afraid to. Why does she phone me? What can it be? My life is untroubled and back in my hands. Have I the resilience for Consuela and her aggressive yielding? I am no longer sixty-two—I am seventy. Can I endure at this age that mania of uncertainty? Do I dare relapse into that frenzied trance? Can that possibly be good for my longevity?

  I remembered how for the three years after I lost her, even when I got up in the dark to take a leak, she was all I thought about: even at four a.m., standing over the toilet seven-eighths asleep, the Kepesh one-eighth awake would begin to mutter her name. Generally when an old man pisses at night, his mind is completely blank. If he's capable of thinking of anything, it's only about getting back into bed. But not me, not then. "Consuela, Consuela, Consuela," every single time I got up to go. And she'd done this to me, mind you, without language, without cogitation, without cunning, without an ounce of malevolence, and with no regard to cause and effect. Like a great athlete or a work of idealized sculptural art or an animal glimpsed in the woods, like Michael Jordan, like a Maillol, like an owl, like a bobcat, she'd done it through the simplicity of physical splendor. There was nothing the least bit sadistic in Consuela. Not even the sadism of indifference, which often goes with that magnitude of perfection. She was too square for such cruelty and far too kind. But imagine the sport she could have made of me were she not too well reared a girl ever to exploit to the limit the Amazonian strength of her endowment; imagine if she'd had Amazonian consciousness as well and Machiavellianly grasped the impact she had. Luckily, like most people, she was not practiced in thinking things through, and though she made the whole thing between us happen, she never understood all that happened. If she did, and if, in addition, she'd had the tiniest taste for tormenting the male who's on fire, I would have been a goner, wrecked entirely by my own White Whale.

  But here she was again. No, absolutely no! Never again that assault on my peace of mind!

  But then I thought, She's looking for me, she needs me, and not as a lover, not as a teacher, not so as to resume our erotic
tale with a new installment. So I rang her cell phone and lied and said I went to the store and just got back, and she said, "I'm in the car. I was in front of your building when I left the message." I said, "What are you doing driving around New York on New Year's Eve?" "I don't know what I'm doing," she said. "Are you crying, Consuela?" "No, not yet." And I said, "Did you ring the doorbell?" She said, "No, I didn't, because I didn't dare to." "You can always ring the bell, always. You know that. What's the matter?" "I need you now." "Then come." "Do you have time?" "I always have time for you. Come." "There's something important. I'm coming right away."

  I put down the receiver and I didn't know what to expect. About twenty minutes later, a car stopped, and the moment I opened the door for her I knew something had gone wrong. Because she had a cap on her head like a fez. And that wasn't something she would wear. She has dark black hair, sleek hair that was always cared for, always washed, brushed, combed; she would see the hairdresser every two weeks. But now she was standing there with a fez on her head. She also had a stylish coat on, a belted black Persian lamb coat nearly to the floor, and when she undid the belt, I saw underneath her coat the silk shirt with the cleavage—lovely. So I embraced her and she embraced me, and she let me take her coat, and I said, "Your hat? Your fez?" and she said, "You'd better not do that. The surprise will be too great." I said, "Why?" And she said, "Because I'm very ill."

  We went into the living room, and there again I embraced her, and she pushed her body to me, and you feel the tits, the beautiful tits, and you see over her shoulder the beautiful buttocks. You see the beautiful body. She's now in her thirties, thirty-two, and not less but more lovely, and the face, which seems somehow to have lengthened a bit, is far more womanly—and she's telling me, "I don't have any hair anymore. In October I was told that I've got cancer. I've got breast cancer." I said, "This is awful, this is horrible, how do you feel, how does one deal with such a thing?" Her chemotherapy had begun in early November, and quickly she'd lost her hair. She said, "I have to tell you the story," and we sat down and I said, "Tell me everything." "Well, my aunt, my mother's sister, has had breast cancer, and she was treated for it, and she lost a breast. So I knew that in my family there's danger. I always knew this, and I've always been afraid of it," and all the time she was talking, I was thinking, You, with the most gorgeous tits in the world. And she said, "One morning I was standing under the shower, and I felt something under my armpit, and I knew that this was wrong. I went to my doctor and he said it's probably nothing to worry about, and so I went to a second doctor and a third doctor, you know the story, and the third doctor said it was something to worry about." "And did you panic?" I asked her. "Did you panic, my lovely friend?" I was so shaken, I was panicking. "Yes," she said, "enormously." "At night?" "Yes, I was running around my apartment. I was completely crazy." I started to cry when I heard this, and we were embracing again, and I said, "Why didn't you call me? Why didn't you call me then?" And she said again, "I didn't dare." And I said, "Whom did you think of to call?" And she said, "My mother, of course. But I knew she'd panic too, because I'm her daughter, her one and only daughter, and because she's so emotional, and because everyone has died. David, they're all dead." "Who has died?" "My father is dead." "How?" "His plane crashed. He was on that plane to Paris. He was going for business." "Oh, no." "Yes." "And the grandfather you loved so much?" "He died. Six years ago. It began with losing him. A heart attack." "And your grandmother, with her rosaries? The grandmother who was the duchess?" "She died too. After him. She was old and she died." "Not your kid brother—?" "No, no, he's fine. But I couldn't call him, I couldn't about this. He couldn't handle this. That's when I thought of you. But I didn't know if you were alone." "That's not a problem. Promise me now one thing. If you should start to panic during the night, during the day, anytime, phone me. I'll always come. Here," I said, "write down your address. Write down all your phone numbers, work, home, everything." And I was thinking, She is dying before my eyes, she too is now dying. Instability had merely to enter her cozy Cuban family life with the predictable death of a beloved old grandfather to set rapidly in motion a cascade of misfortune culminating in cancer.

  I said, "Are you afraid right now?" And she said, "Very. Very much afraid. I'm all right for two minutes, I'm thinking of something else, and then the bottom falls out of my stomach and I can't believe what's happening. It's a roller coaster, and it doesn't stop. It can't stop unless the cancer stops. My chances," she said, "are sixty percent to survive and forty percent to die." And then she dropped into the talk about how life is so worthwhile and how she feels sorry for her mother, above all—the banal talk that's inevitable. I wanted to do so many things, I had so many plans, and so on. She began telling me about how foolish all her little anxieties of a few months back now seemed, the worries about work and friends and clothes, and how this had put everything in perspective, and I thought, No, nothing puts anything in perspective.

  I was watching her, listening to her, and when I couldn't hear any more, I said, "Do you mind if I touch your breasts?" She said, "No, go ahead." "You don't mind?" "No. I do mind kissing you, though. Because I don't want anything sexual. But I do know how much you like my breasts, so touch my breasts." So I touched them—and with trembling hands. And of course with an erection. I said, "Is it your left breast or your right breast?" and she said, "It's my right breast." So I put my hand on her right breast. There is a combination of eroticism and tenderness, and it melts you and arouses you, and that's what was happening. You get a hard-on and melt, both at the same time. So we're sitting there with her breast in my hand, and we're talking, and I said, "You don't mind?" And she said, "I even want more of you. Because I know you love my breasts." I said, "What do you want?" "I want you to feel my cancer." I said, "I'll do that. Okay. But later, we'll do that later on."

  It was too soon. I wasn't ready for that. So we talked, and she started to cry, and I tried to comfort her, and then suddenly she stopped crying and became very energetic, very determined. She said to me, "David, I came to you, in fact, with only one request, one question." And I said, "What is it?" And she said, "After you, I never had a boyfriend or a lover who loved my body as much as you loved it." "Have you had boyfriends?"

  At it again. Forget about the boyfriends. But I couldn't. "Have you, Consuela? "Yes, but not many." "Have you slept with men regularly?" "No. Not on a regular basis." "How was your job? Was there nobody at your job who fell in love with you?" "They all did." "I can understand that. But then what," I said. "Were they all gay? Didn't you meet straight men?" "I do, I did, but they're no good." "Why are they no good?" "They're just masturbating on my body." "Well, this is a pity. This is stupid. This is insane." "But you loved my body. And I was proud of it." "But you were proud of it before." "Yes and no. You've seen my body at its most glorious. So I wanted you to see it before it is ruined by what the doctors are going to do." "Stop talking that way, don't think that way. Nobody's going to ruin you. What do the doctors say they're going to do?" And she said, "I've had chemotherapy. That's why I don't take off my cap." "Of course. But where you're concerned, I can stand anything. Do whatever you want." She said, "No, I don't want to show it to you. Because a strange thing happens to your hair. After the chemotherapy, it starts to come out in handfuls. A sort of baby hair begins growing on your head. It's very strange." I asked, "Does your pubic hair disappear?" "No," she said, "it doesn't, it stays. Which is strange too." I said, "Did you ask the doctor?" "Yes," she said, "and the doctor can't explain it. She only answered, 'That's a good question.' Look at my arms," Consuela said. She has long, slender arms and that white-white skin, and the fine lovely hair on her arms was indeed still there. "Look," she said, "there's hair on my arms but not on my head." "Well," I said, "I've known bald men, so why can't I see a bald woman?" She said, "No. I don't want you to see."

  Then she said, "David, may I ask you a big favor?" "Of course. Anything." "Would you mind saying goodbye to my breasts?" I said, "My dear girl, my darling
girl, they're not going to demolish your body, they're not." "Well, I'm lucky that I have so much breast, but they're going to have to take out about a third. My doctor's trying everything to keep the surgery minimal. She's humane. She's wonderful. She's not a butcher. She's not a heartless machine. She's trying first to shrink the cancer with chemo. Then when they operate they can take out as little as possible." "But they can restore it, rebuild it, can't they, whatever it is they take out?" "Yes, they can put in some silicone stuff. But I don't know if I'll want it. Because this is my body and that won't be my body. That won't be anything." "And how do you want me to say goodbye? What do you want? What are you asking me, Consuela?" And at last she told me.

  I got my camera, which is a Leica with a zoom lens, and she stood up. We closed the curtains, we put on all the lights, I found the right Schubert and put that on, and she didn't quite dance then, but it was, rather, an exotic, Oriental sort of movement when she started to undress. Very elegant and so vulnerable. I was sitting on the sofa, and she was standing and undressing. And the way in which she undressed and dropped each item, it was spellbinding. Mata Hari. The spy undressing for the officer. And all the time so extremely vulnerable. She took off her blouse first. Then her shoes. Extraordinary to take off her shoes then. Then she took off her bra. And it was as though a man who had undressed had forgotten to pull his socks off, which makes him look slightly ludicrous. A woman in a skirt with naked breasts is not erotic to me. The skirt somehow confuses the picture. Naked breasts with trousers is very erotic, but over just a skirt it doesn't work. You'd be better off to keep on your bra with a skirt, but a skirt alone with naked breasts is to feed somebody.