by Philip Roth
As soon as he moved into the village, he turned the sunny living room of his three-room condo into an artist's studio, and now, after taking his daily hour-long four-mile walk on the boardwalk, he spent most of the remainder of each day fulfilling a long-standing ambition by happily painting away, a routine that yielded all the excitement he'd expected. He missed nothing about New York except Nancy, the child whose presence had never ceased to delight him, and who, as a divorced mother of two four-year-olds, was no longer protected in the way that he'd hoped. In the aftermath of their daughter's divorce, he and Phoebe—equally weighed down by anxiety—had stepped in and, separately, spent more time with Nancy than they had since she'd gone off to the Midwest to college. There she'd met the poetic husband-to-be, a graduate student openly disdainful of commercial culture and particularly of her father's line of work, who, once he discovered himself no longer simply half of a quiet, thoughtful couple who liked to listen to chamber music and read books in their spare time but a father of twins, found the tumult of a young family's domestic existence unbearable—especially for someone needing order and silence to complete a first novel—and charged Nancy with fostering this great disaster with her ongoing lament over his impeding her maternal instinct. After work and on weekends he absented himself more and more from the clutter created in their undersized apartment by the needs of the two clamoring tiny creatures he had crazily spawned, and when he finally upped and left his publishing job—and parenthood—he had to go clear back to Minnesota to regain his sanity and resume his thinking and evade as much responsibility as he possibly could.
If her father could have had his way, Nancy and the twins would have moved to the shore too. She could have commuted to work on the Jersey line, leaving the kids with nannies and babysitters costing half as much as help in New York, and he would have been nearby to look after them as well, to take them to and from preschool, to oversee them at the beach, and so on. Father and daughter could have met to have dinner once a week and to take a walk together on weekends. They'd all be living beside the beautiful sea and away from the threat of Al Qaeda. The day after the destruction of the Twin Towers he'd said to Nancy, "I've got a deep-rooted fondness for survival. I'm getting out of here." And just ten weeks later, in late November, he left. The thought of his daughter and her children falling victim to a terrorist attack tormented him during his first months at the shore, though once there he no longer had anxiety for himself and was rid of that sense of pointless risk taking that had dogged him every day since the catastrophe had subverted everyone's sense of security and introduced an ineradicable precariousness into their daily lives. He was merely doing everything he reasonably could to stay alive. As always—and like most everyone else—he didn't want the end to come a minute earlier than it had to.
The year after the insertion of the renal stent, he had surgery for another major obstruction, this one in his left carotid artery, one of the two main arteries that stretch from the aorta to the base of the skull and supply blood to the brain and that if left obstructed could cause a disabling stroke or even sudden death. The incision was made in the neck, then the artery feeding the brain was clamped shut to stop the blood flowing through it. Then it was slit open and the plaque that was causing the blockage scraped out and removed. It would have been a help not to have to face this delicate an operation alone, but Nancy was swamped by her job and the demands of caring for the children without a mate, and at that time there was no one else in his life whom he could ask for assistance. Nor did he want to disrupt his brother's hectic schedule to tell him about the surgery and cause him to be concerned, especially as he would be out of the hospital the following morning, providing there were no complications. This wasn't the peritonitis crisis or the quintuple bypass surgery—from a medical point of view it was nothing extraordinary, or so he was led to believe by the agreeable surgeon, who assured him that a carotid endarterectomy was a common vascular surgical procedure and he would be back at his easel within a day or two.
So he drove off alone in the early morning to the hospital and waited in a glassed-in anteroom on the surgical floor along with another ten or twelve men in hospital gowns scheduled for the first round of operations that day. The room would probably be full like this until as late as four in the afternoon. Most of the patients would come out the other end, and, too, over the course of the weeks, a few might not; nonetheless, they passed the time reading the morning papers, and when the name of one of them was called and he got up to leave for the operating room, he gave his sections of the paper to whoever requested them. You would have thought from the calm in the room that they were going off to get their hair cut, rather than, say, to get the artery leading to the brain sliced open.
At one point, the man to his side, having handed him that day's sports section, quietly began talking to him. He was probably only in his late forties or early fifties, but his skin was pasty and his voice was not strong or assured. "First my mother died," he said, "six months later my father died, eight months after that my only sister died, a year later my marriage broke down and my wife took everything I had. And that's when I began to imagine someone coming to me and saying, 'Now we're going to cut off your right arm as well. Do you think you can take that?' And so they cut off my right arm. Then later they come around and they say, 'Now we're going to cut off your left arm.' Then, when that's done, they come back one day and they say, 'Do you want to quit now? Is that enough? Or should we go ahead and start in on your legs?' And all the time I was thinking, When, when do I quit? When do I turn on the gas and put my head in the oven? When is enough enough? That was how I lived with my grief for ten years. It took ten years. And now the grief is finally over and this shit starts up."
When his turn came, the fellow beside him reached over to take the sports section back, and he was shepherded to the operating room by a nurse. Inside, half a dozen people were moving about in the glare of the lights making preparations for his surgery. He could not locate the surgeon among them. It would have reassured him to see the surgeon's friendly face, but either the doctor hadn't entered the operating room yet or he was off in some corner where he couldn't quite be seen. Several of the younger doctors were already wearing surgical masks, and the look of them made him think of terrorists. One of them asked whether he wanted a general or a local anesthetic, the way a waiter might have asked if he preferred red or white wine. He was confused—why should the decision about anesthesia be made this late? "I don't know. Which is better?" he said. "For us, the local. We can monitor the brain function better if the patient is conscious." "You're telling me that's safer? Is that what you're saying? Then I'll do it."
It was a mistake, a barely endurable mistake, because the operation lasted two hours and his head was claustrophobically draped with a cloth and the cutting and scraping took place so close to his ear, he could hear every move their instruments made as though he were inside an echo chamber. But there was nothing to be done. No fight to put up. You take it and endure it. Just give yourself over to it for as long as it lasts.
He slept well that night, by the next day felt fine, and at noon, after he lied and said a friend was waiting downstairs to pick him up, he was released and went out to the parking lot and cautiously drove himself home. When he got to the condo and sat down in his studio to look at the canvas he could soon resume painting, he burst into tears, just as his father had after he'd got home from his near-fatal bout of peritonitis.
But now, instead of ending, it continued; now not a year went by when he wasn't hospitalized. The son of long-lived parents, the brother of a man six years his senior who was seemingly as fit as he'd been when he'd carried the ball for Thomas Jefferson High, he was still only in his sixties when his health began giving way and his body seemed threatened all the time. He'd married three times, had mistresses and children and an interesting job where he'd been a success, but now eluding death seemed to have become the central business of his life and bodily decay his entire story.
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The year after he had carotid artery surgery he had an angiogram in which the doctor discovered that he'd had a silent heart attack on the posterior wall because of an obstructed graft. The news stunned him, though fortunately Nancy had come down by train to accompany him to the hospital and her reassurance helped restore his equanimity. The doctor then went on to perform an angioplasty, and inserted a stent in his left anterior descending artery, after ballooning the artery open where new deposits of plaque had formed. From the table he could watch the catheter being wiggled up into the coronary artery—he was under the lightest sedation and able to follow the whole procedure on the monitor as though his body were somebody else's. A year later he had another angio-plasty and another stent installed in one of the grafts, which had begun to narrow. The following year he had to have three stents installed at one go—to repair arterial obstructions whose location, as the doctor told him afterward, made the procedure no picnic to perform.
As always, to keep his mind elsewhere he summoned up his father's store and the names of the nine brands of watches and seven brands of clocks for which his father was an authorized distributor; his father didn't make much money selling watches and clocks, but he loaded up on them because they were a steady item and brought window-shoppers in from the street. What he did with these seed memories during each of his angioplasties was this: he would tune out the badinage the doctors and nurses invariably exchanged while setting up, tune out the rock music pumped into the chilly, sterile room where he lay strapped to the operating table amid all the intimidating machinery designed to keep cardiac patients alive, and from the moment they got to work anesthetizing his groin and puncturing the skin for the insertion of the arterial catheter, he would distract himself by reciting under his breath the lists he'd first alphabetized as a small boy helping at the store after school—"Benrus, Bulova, Croton, Elgin, Hamilton, Helbros, Ovistone, Waltham, Wittnauer"—focusing all the while on the distinctive look of the numerals on the dial of the watch as he intoned its brand name, sweeping from one through twelve and back again. Then he'd start on the clocks—"General Electric, Ingersoll, McClintock, New Haven, Seth Thomas, Telechron, Westclox"—remembering how the wind clocks ticked and the electric clocks hummed until finally he heard the doctor announce that the procedure was over and that everything had gone well. The doctor's assistant, after applying pressure to the wound, placed a sandbag on the groin to prevent bleeding, and with the weight resting there, he had to lie motionless in his hospital bed for the next six hours. His not being able to move was the worst of it, strangely—because of the thousands of involuntary thoughts that suffused the slow-moving time—but the following morning, if all had gone well overnight, he was brought a tray of inedible breakfast to look at and a sheaf of post-angioplasty instructions to follow and by eleven A.M. he would have been discharged. On three separate occasions he'd arrived at home and was hurriedly undressing for a much-needed shower when he'd found a couple of the EKG electrode pads still stuck to him, because the nurse helping to discharge him had forgotten to peel them from his chest and throw them in the garbage. One morning he looked down in the shower to find that no one had bothered to remove the IV feeding needle, a gadget they called a heplock, from his black-and-blue forearm, and so he had to dress and drive over to his internist's office in Spring Lake to have the heplock taken out before it became a source of infection.
The year after the three stents he was briefly knocked out on an operating table while a defibrillator was permanently inserted as a safeguard against the new development that endangered his life and that along with the scarring at the posterior wall of his heart and his borderline ejection fraction made him a candidate for a fatal cardiac arrhythmia. The defibrillator was a thin metal box about the size of a cigarette lighter; it was lodged beneath the skin of his upper chest, a few inches from his left shoulder, with its wire leads attached to his vulnerable heart, ready to administer a shock to correct his heart-beat—and confuse death—if it became perilously irregular.
Nancy had been with him for this procedure too, and afterward, when he got back to his room and he lowered one side of his hospital gown to show her the visible bulge that was the embedded defibrillator, she had to turn away. "Darling," he said to her, "it's to protect me—there's nothing to be upset about." "I know that it's to protect you. I'm glad there is such a thing that's able to protect you. It's just a shock to see because," and finding herself too far along to come up with a comforting lie, she said, "because you've always been so youthful." "Well, I'm more youthful with it than I would be without it. I'll be able to do everything I like to do, only without having to worry about the arrhythmia putting me at serious risk." But she was pale with helplessness and couldn't stop the tears from running down her face: she wanted her father to be the way he was when she was ten and eleven and twelve and thirteen, without impediment or incapacity—and so did he. She couldn't possibly have wanted it as much as he did, but for that moment he found his own sorrow easier to accept than hers. The desire was strong to say something tender to alleviate her fears, as though, all over again, she were the more vulnerable of the two.
He never really stopped worrying about her, nor did he understand how it happened that such a child should be his. He hadn't necessarily done the right things to make it happen, even if Phoebe had. But there are such people, spectacularly good people—miracles, really—and it was his great fortune that one of these miracles was his own incorruptible daughter. He was amazed when he looked around himself and saw how bitterly disappointed parents could be—as he was with his own two sons, who continued to act as if what had happened to them had never happened before or since to anyone else—and then to have a child who was number one in every way. Sometimes it seemed that everything was a mistake except Nancy. So he worried about her, and he still never passed a women's clothing shop without thinking of her and going in to find something she'd like, and he thought, I'm very lucky, and he thought, Some good has to come out somewhere, and it has in her.
He was remembering now her brief period as a track star. When Nancy was thirteen she'd placed second in a race at her all-girls school, a run of about two miles, and she saw the possibility of something in which she could be exceptional. She was good in everything else, but this was another kind of stardom. For a while he gave up swimming at the club first thing so they could run together in the early morning and sometimes, too, in the day's waning hours. They'd go to the park and it would be just the two of them and the shadows and the light. She was running for the school team by then, and during a meet she was rounding a bend when her leg gave way and she fell to the track in agony. What had happened was something that can happen to a girl in early puberty—because the bones don't fully harden by that age, what would have been in a mature woman merely a strained tendon was more dramatic for Nancy: the tendon held but a piece of bone in the hip pulled away. Along with the track coach, he rushed Nancy to the hospital emergency room, where she was in great pain and very fearful, especially when she heard there was nothing to be done, though at the same time she was told, correctly enough, that the injury would heal by itself over a period of time. But that was the end of her track career, not just because recovery would take the rest of the season but because puberty was upon her, and soon her breasts enlarged and her hips widened and the speed that was hers when she had her childish body disappeared. And then, as if the end of her championship running and the alteration of her physique weren't enough to leave her reeling, that very year delivered the misery of her parents' divorce.
When she sat on his hospital bed and wept in his arms it was for many reasons, not least for his having left her when she was thirteen. She'd come to the shore to assist him and all his cool-headed and sensible daughter could do was relive the difficulties that had resulted from the divorce and confess to the undying fantasy of a parental reconciliation that she had spent more than half of her life hoping for. "But there's no remaking reality," he said softly, rubbing her bac
k and stroking her hair and rocking her gently in his arms. "Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes. There's no other way."
That was the truth and the best he could do—and exactly what he'd told her many years earlier, when he held her in his arms in the taxi coming home from the emergency room while she shook with sobs because of the inexplicable turn of events.
All these procedures and hospitalizations had made him a decidedly lonelier, less confident man than he'd been during the first year of retirement. Even his cherished peace and quiet seemed to have been turned into a self-generated form of solitary confinement, and he was hounded by the sense that he was headed for the end. But instead of moving back to attackable Manhattan, he decided to oppose the sense of estrangement brought on by his bodily failings and to enter more vigorously into the world around him. He did this by organizing two weekly painting classes for the village residents, an afternoon class for beginners and an evening class for those already somewhat familiar with paints.
There were about ten students in each class, and they loved meeting in his bright studio room. By and large, learning to paint was a pretext for their being there, and most of them were taking the class for the same reason he was giving it: to find satisfying contact with other people. All but two were older than he, and though they assembled each week in a mood of comradely good cheer, the conversation invariably turned to matters of sickness and health, their personal biographies having by this time become identical with their medical biographies and the swapping of medical data crowding out nearly everything else. At his studio, they more readily identified one another by their ailments than by their painting. "How is your sugar?" "How is your pressure?" "What did the doctor say?" "Did you hear about my neighbor? It spread to the liver." One of the men came to class with his portable oxygen unit. Another had Parkinson's tremors but was eager to learn to paint anyway. All of them without exception complained—sometimes jokingly, sometimes not—about increasing memory loss, and they spoke of how rapidly the months and the seasons and the years went by, how life no longer moved at the same speed. A couple of the women were being treated for cancer. One had to leave halfway through the course to return to the hospital for treatment. Another woman had a bad back and occasionally had to lie on the floor at the edge of the room for ten or fifteen minutes before she could get up and resume working in front of her easel. After the first few times, he told her she should go into his bedroom instead and lie down for as long as she liked on his bed—it had a firm mattress and she would be more comfortable. Once when she did not come out of the bedroom for half an hour, he knocked and, when he heard her crying inside, opened the door and went in.
