by Philip Roth
So she showed herself to me. She undressed until she had only the panties on. She said, "Could you touch my breasts?" "Is that the picture you want, my touching them?" "No, no. Touch them first." So I did. And then she said, "I want pictures facing the camera, and in profile, and then hanging over."
I took about thirty pictures of her. She chose the poses, and she wanted everything. She wanted to have her hands underneath, holding them. She wanted to be squeezing them. She wanted them from the left side, from the right side, she wanted them photographed while she was bending forward. Finally she pulled off her panties, and you could see that her pubic hair was there as it had always been, as I described it: sleek, lying flat. Asian hair. She appeared to be all at once aroused by taking off her panties and my looking at her with nothing on. That happened suddenly. You could see by her nipples that she was aroused. Though by now I no longer was. Still, I asked her, "Do you want to stay for the night? Do you want to sleep with me?" She said, "No. I don't want to sleep with you. I want to be in your arms, though." I was fully dressed, as I am now. And she was sitting on the sofa in my arms, very close to me, and then she took my wrist and she laid my hand on her armpit in order for me to feel the cancer. Felt like a stone. A stone in the armpit. Two small stones, one bigger than the other, meaning that there is a metastasis originating in her breast. But you couldn't feel it in her breast. I asked, "Why can't I feel it in your breast?" and she said, "My breasts are too big. There's too much tissue to feel it. It's deep inside the breast."
I couldn't have slept with her, not even I who'd licked the blood from her. After the years of dwelling on her, just seeing her would have been difficult enough had she shown up under normal circumstances and not in this bizarrely wretched way. So, no, I couldn't have slept with her, and yet I kept thinking about it. Because they're so beautiful, her breasts. I cannot say it often enough. It was so mean, so degrading, these breasts, her breasts—I just thought, They can't be destroyed! As I told you, I'd been masturbating over her without interruption during all the years we were apart. I have been in bed with other women, and I have thought of her, of her breasts, of what it was like with my face sinking into them. Thought of their softness, their smoothness, the way I could sense their weight, their soft weight, and this while my mouth nuzzles somebody else. But at that moment I knew hers was no longer a sexual life. What was at stake was something else.
So I said to her, "Should I go with you to the hospital? I'll do that if you want me to. I insist on doing it. You're virtually alone." She said she wanted to think about it. She said, "It's sweet of you to offer, but I don't know yet. I don't know if I'll want to see you immediately after I've been operated on." She left about half past one; she'd arrived about eight o'clock. She didn't ask what I was going to do with the photographs she'd wanted me to take. She didn't ask me to send her prints. I haven't had them developed yet. I'm curious to see them. I'll enlarge them. I'll send her a set, of course. But I'll have to find somebody I trust to develop them. I should long ago, with my interests, have learned how to develop film myself, but I never did. It would have been useful.
She should be going to the hospital any time now. I'm expecting a message from her any moment, any day. Since I saw her three weeks ago, I haven't heard a word. Will I? Do you think I will? She told me not to contact her. She didn't want anything more from me—that's what she said when she left. I've been all but keeping a vigil by the phone for fear of missing her call.
Ever since her visit, I've myself been on the phone to people I know, to doctors I know, trying to find out about breast cancer treatment. Because I had always understood that the procedure for this sort of thing was surgery first and then the chemotherapy. And that was worrying me while she was here—I kept thinking, There's something about her case I'm failing to understand. Now I learn that giving chemo before isn't entirely unheard of, that it's becoming the standard of care for treatment of locally advanced breast cancer, but the question is, apparently, is that the treatment right for her? What did she mean about sixty percent chance of survival? Why only sixty? Did someone tell her that or did she read it somewhere or, in her panic, did she make it up? Or are they gambling with long-term survival for purposes of vanity? Maybe this is merely a response to the shock—a typical enough response at that—but I can't stop thinking that there's something about her story, either that she didn't tell me or that she herself hasn't been told ... Anyway, that was the story, as I got it, and I haven't as yet heard any more.
She left me at about one-thirty A.M., after the New Year reached Chicago. We had some tea. We drank a glass of wine. Because she asked me to, I turned on the television, and we watched the replay of the New Year beginning in Australia and sweeping across Asia and Europe. She was slightly sentimental. Telling stories. About her childhood. About her father taking her to the opera since she was a little girl. She told a story about a florist. "I was buying flowers on Madison Avenue with my mother last Saturday," she told me, "and the florist said, 'What a nice hat you're wearing,' and I said, 'It's there for a purpose,' and he understood, and he blushed and apologized and gave me a dozen roses for free. So there you see how people respond to a human being in distress. They don't know what to do. Nobody knows what to say or to do. So I'm very grateful to you," she said.
How did I feel? The greatest pain I felt that night was over her being alone and panicking in her bed. Panicking about death. And what will happen now? What do you think? I guess she's not going to ask me to go with her to the hospital. She was pleased that I offered to, but when the time comes, she'll go to the hospital with her mother. She may just have gone berserk New Year's Eve because she was too miserable and frightened to go to the party where she'd been invited and too miserable and frightened to be alone. I don't think she will phone me when she's in a panic. She wanted the offer, but she won't use it.
Unless I'm wrong. Unless two or three months from now she comes to me and says she wants to sleep with me. With me rather than a younger man because I'm old and far from perfect myself. With me because, though still this side of desiccation, the decomposing corpse is no longer quite so well concealed as it is with the men at my gym who managed not to be born before Roosevelt took office.
And will I be able to do it? In all my years, I've never slept with a woman who has been mutilated in this manner. I can speak only of one woman I knew some years ago, and on the way to my apartment, she said, "I have to tell you—because of an operation, I've only got one breast. So I don't want you to be shocked by it." Now, no matter how unflinching you like to think you are, if you're honest about it, the prospect of seeing a woman with one breast is not very inviting, is it? I was able to act a little surprised, but seemingly not about the one breast, and I don't think I exhibited my nervousness at trying to put her at her ease. "Oh, don't be silly, we're not going there to sleep together. We're just good friends and I think we should stay good friends." I once slept with a woman who had a dark brownish wine stain—between her breasts and partly over her breasts, a huge birthmark. This woman was also a tall woman. Six five. The only woman I've ever had to kiss by standing on my toes and craning my neck. I got a crick in the neck from kissing her. When we went to bed, she started to undress by pulling off her skirt and her panties, which women normally don't do. They usually take off the blouse first, they start to undress their upper body. But she kept on her sweater and her bra. I said, "Aren't you going to take off your bra and your sweater?" "Yes, but I don't want you to be surprised." She said, "There's something wrong with me." I smiled, tried to make light of it. "Tell me, what is wrong?" She said, "Well, there's something about my breasts that will shock you." "Oh, don't worry. Show me." And so she did. And I started overdoing things. Kissing the birthmark. Touching it. Playing with it. Being polite. Making her feel happy with it. Saying I loved it. Such things aren't easy to take in stride. But you're supposed to be able to take charge, to act unsymmetrically, to deal with such things with grace. Not to recoil from anything that a
body must abide. That wine stain. It was tragic for her. Six foot five. Men drawn to her, as I was, by this amazing height. And with every man, the same story: "There's something wrong with me."
The photographs. I'll never forget Consuela asking me to take those pictures. To some Peeping Tom peering in from outside, it could only have looked like a scene from pornography. Yet it was as far as you could get from pornography. "Do you have your camera?" "I have my camera," I said. "Would you mind taking pictures of me? Because I want to have pictures of my body as you knew it. As you saw it. Because soon it won't be as it was. I don't know anybody else I could ask to do this. I couldn't ask this of another man. Otherwise I wouldn't have bothered you." "Yes," I told her, "we'll do this. Anything. Say what you want. Ask for whatever you want. Say everything to me." "Could you put on some music," she said, "and then get your camera?" "What music do you want?" I asked. "Schubert. Some Schubert chamber music." "Okay, okay," I said, but not, I told myself, Death and the Maiden.
Yet she hasn't asked me to send her a print. Remember that Consuela is not the most brilliant girl in the world. Because then the photographs would be another story. Then there would be tactics involved. Then her strategy would be something to think about. But with Consuela, there's a semiconscious spontaneity in whatever she does, a rightness, though she may not know quite what she's doing or exactly why. Coming to me to be photographed, that's very close to nature, to an original drifting thought, to intuition, and there is no deliberate reasoning behind it. You could make up the reasoning, but Consuela wouldn't have. She feels she has to do this, she says, to document for me, who loved her body so much, the quality it had, how perfect it was. But there was much more to it than that.
I've noticed that most women are unsure about their bodies, even if, like her, they are altogether lovely. Not all of them know they're lovely. It takes a certain type of woman to know that. Most have complaints about something that they needn't complain about. They often want to hide their breasts. There's some shame whose source I can never fathom, and you must reassure them for a long time before they expose them with any real pleasure and take real pleasure in being looked at. Even the most fortunate of them. There are only a few who show themselves freely, and these days, because of all the politicizing, they're often not the ones with the model of breast you would have invented yourself.
But the erotic power of Consuela's body—well, that is over. Yes, that night I'd had an erection, but I couldn't have sustained it. I'm fortunate enough to have a hard-on and the drive, but I would have been in great trouble if she had asked me to sleep with her that night. I'll be in great trouble when she asks me once she is recovered from the surgery. As she will. Because she will, won't she? Try it out first with someone familiar and someone old. For the sake of her confidence, for the sake of her pride, better with me than with Carlos Alonso or the Villareal boys. Age may not do what cancer does, but it does enough.
Part Two. She asks me three months from now, she calls me and says, "Let's get together," and then she takes her clothes off again. Is that the disaster to come?
There's a painting of Stanley Spencer's that hangs at the Tate, a double nude portrait of Spencer and his wife in their middle forties. It is the quintessence of directness about cohabitation, about the sexes living together over time. It's in one of the Spencer books downstairs. I'll get it later. Spencer is seated, squatting, beside the recumbent wife. He is looking ruminatively down at her from close range through his wire-rimmed glasses. We, in turn, are looking at them from close range: two naked bodies right in our faces, the better for us to see how they are no longer young and attractive. Neither is happy. There is a heavy past clinging to the present. For the wife particularly, everything has begun to slacken, to thicken, and greater rigors than striating flesh are to come.
At the edge of a table, in the immediate foreground of the picture, are two pieces of meat, a large leg of lamb and a single small chop. The raw meat is rendered with physiological meticulousness, with the same uncharitable candor as the sagging breasts and the pendent, unaroused prick displayed only inches back from the uncooked food. You could be looking through the butcher's window, not just at the meat but at the sexual anatomy of the married couple. Every time I think of Consuela, I envision that raw leg of lamb shaped like a primitive club beside the blatantly exhibited bodies of this husband and wife. Its being there, so close to their mattress, becomes less and less incongruous the longer you look. There's melancholy resignation in the somewhat stunned expression of the wife, and there is that butchered hunk of meat having nothing in common with a living lamb, and, for three weeks now, ever since Consuela's visit, I can get neither image out of my mind.
We watched the New Year coming in around the world, the mass hysteria of no significance that was the millennial New Year's Eve celebration. Brilliance flaring across the time zones, and none ignited by bin Laden. Light whirling over nighttime London more spectacular than anything since the splendors of colored smoke billowed up from the Blitz. And the Eiffel Tower shooting fire, a facsimile flame-throwing weapon such as Wernher von Braun might have designed for Hitler's annihilating arsenal—the historical missile of missiles, the rocket of rockets, the bomb of bombs, with ancient Paris the launching pad and the whole of humanity the target. All evening long, on networks everywhere, the mockery of the Armageddon that we'd been awaiting in our backyard shelters since August 6, 1945. How could it not happen? Even on that very night, especially on that night, people anticipating the worst as though the evening were one long air-raid drill. The wait for the chain of horrendous Hiroshimas to link in synchronized destruction the abiding civilizations of the world. It's now or never. And it never came.
Maybe that's what everyone was celebrating—that it hadn't come, never came, that the disaster of the end will now never arrive. All the disorder is controlled disorder punctuated with intervals to sell automobiles. TV doing what it does best: the triumph of trivialization over tragedy. The Triumph of the Surface, with Barbara Walters. Rather than the destruction of the age-old cities, an international eruption of the superficial instead, a global outbreak of sentimentality such as even Americans hadn't witnessed before. From Sydney to Bethlehem to Times Square, the recirculating of clichés occurs at supersonic speeds. No bombs go off, no blood is shed—the next bang you hear will be the boom of prosperity and the explosion of markets. The slightest lucidity about the misery made ordinary by our era sedated by the grandiose stimulation of the grandest illusion. Watching this hyped-up production of staged pandemonium, I have a sense of the monied world eagerly entering the prosperous dark ages. A night of human happiness to usher in barbar-ism.com. To welcome appropriately the shit and the kitsch of the new millennium. A night not to remember but to forget.
Except on the sofa where I sit holding Consuela, my arms encircling her where she is naked, warming her breasts with my hands while we watch New Year's Eve arrive in Cuba. Neither of us had been expecting that to materialize on the screen, but there before us is Havana. From an amphitheater corralling a thousand tourists and calling itself a nightclub comes an embalmed police-state embodiment of the Caribbean hot stuff that used to draw the big spenders in the days of the Mob. The Tropicana Nightclub of the Tropicana Hotel. No Cubans to be seen other than the entertainers in no way entertaining, a lot of young people—ninety-six of them, ABC says—wearing silly white costumes and not so much dancing or singing as circling the stage howling into hand-held mikes. The showgirls look like leggy Latino West Village transvestites walking around in a huff. Atop their heads are overdeveloped lampshades—three feet high, according to ABC. Lampshades on their heads and a rippling great mane of white ruffles down their backs.
"My God," Consuela said, and she began to cry. "This," she said, and so angrily, "this is what he gives the world. This is what he shows them on New Year's Eve." "It is a bit of a grotesque farce. Maybe," I said, "it's Castro's idea of a joke."
Is it, I wonder. Is this unconscious self-satire—
is Castro so out of touch—or is it intentionally satirical and consistent with his hatred of the capitalist world? Castro, so contemptuous of the Batista corruption, corruption that you would have thought to be symbolized for him by tourist nightclubs like this Tropicana, and that is his millennial offering? The pope wouldn't do this—he has great public relations. Only the old Soviet Union could have equaled the tawdriness. There are any number of things for Castro to choose from, any number of old-fashioned socialist-realism tableaux: a celebration at a sugar plantation, in a maternity ward, at a cigar factory. Happy Cuban workers smoking, happy Cuban mothers beaming, happy Cuban newborns nursing ... but to present the crappiest sort of entertainment for tourists? Was it deliberate or stupid or was it thought to be an appropriate joke on all this hysterical celebrating over a meaningless mark on the historical grid? Whatever the motive, he will not spend a dime on it. He will not spend a minute thinking about it. Why should Castro the revolutionary care, why should anyone care, about something that gives us a sense that we're understanding something that we're not understanding? The passage of time. We're in the swim, sinking in time, until finally we drown and go. This nonevent made into a great event while Consuela is here suffering the biggest event in her life. The Big Ending, though no one knows what, if anything, is ending and certainly no one knows what is beginning. It's a wild celebration of no one knows what.
Consuela alone knows, because Consuela now knows the wound of age. Getting old is unimaginable to anyone but the aging, but that is no longer so for Consuela. She no longer measures time like the young, marking backward to when you started. Time for the young is always made up of what is past, but for Consuela time is now how much future she has left, and she doesn't believe there is any. Now she measures time counting forward, counting time by the closeness of death. The illusion has been broken, the metronomic illusion, the comforting thought that, tick tock, everything happens in its proper time. Her sense of time is now the same as mine, speeded up and more forlorn even than mine. She, in fact, has overtaken me. Because I can still tell myself, "I'm not going to die in five years, maybe not in ten years, I'm fit, I'm well, I could even live another twenty," while she...
