The Counterlife

by Philip Roth

  They were still at this when Carol came up from the garden with the flowers and said it was time to leave. She looked maternally at her father, a gentle smile to try to calm him down. The same operation from which Henry had died at thirty-nine was in the offing for him at sixty-four if his angina got any worse. “You all right?” she asked him. “I’m fine, cookie,” he replied, but when she wasn’t looking, he slipped a nitroglycerin pill under his tongue.

  The little violin piece that Ruth played was introduced by the rabbi, who came across as amiable and unpretentious, a large man, square-faced, red-haired, wearing heavy tortoise-shell glasses and speaking in a mild, mellifluous voice. “Henry and Carol’s daughter, thirteen-year-old Ruth, is going to play the Largo from Handel’s opera Xerxes,” he said. “Talking with her up at the house last night, Ruthie told me that her father called it ‘the most soothing music in all the world’ whenever he heard her practicing. She wants to play it now in his memory.”

  At the center of the altar, Ruth placed the violin under her chin, sharply cranked up her spine, and stared out at the mourners with what looked almost like defiance. In the second before she lifted the bow she allowed herself a glance down at the coffin and seemed to her uncle like a woman in her thirties—suddenly he saw the expression she would wear all her life, the grave adult face that prevents the helpless child’s face from crumbling with angry tears.

  Though not every note was flawlessly extracted, the playing was tuneful and quiet, slow and solemnly phrased, and when Ruthie was finished, you expected to turn around and see sitting there the earnest young musician’s father smiling proudly away.

  Carol got up and stepped past the children into the aisle. Her only concession to convention was a black cotton skirt. The hem, however, was banded in some gaily embroidered American Indian motif of scarlet, green, and orange, and the blouse was a light lime color with a wide yoked neck that revealed the prominence of the collarbone in her delicate torso. Around her neck she wore a coral necklace that Henry had surreptitiously bought for her in Paris, after she’d admired it in a shop window but had thought the price ridiculously high. The skirt he’d bought for her in an open-air market in Albuquerque, when he’d been there for a conference.

  Though gray hairs had begun cropping up along her temple, she was so slight and so peppy that climbing the stairs to the altar she looked as though she were the family’s oldest adolescent girl. With Ruth he believed that he had caught a glimpse of the woman she’d be—in Carol, Zuckerman saw the plucky, crisply pretty college coed before she’d fully come of age, the ambitious, determined scholarship student her friends had called admiringly by her two first initials until Henry had put a stop to it and made people use her given name. At the time, Henry half-jokingly had confided to Nathan, “I really couldn’t get myself worked up with somebody called C.J.” But then even with somebody called Carol, the lust was never to be what it was with a Maria or a Wendy.

  Just as Carol reached the altar lectern, her father took his nitroglycerin pills out of his pocket and accidentally spilled them all over the floor. Handel’s Largo hadn’t soothed him the way it used to soothe Henry. Nathan was able to get his arm under the seat and fish around with his hand until he found a few pills that he could reach and pick up. He gave one to Mr. Goff, and the others he decided to keep in his pocket for the cemetery.

  While Carol spoke, Zuckerman again imagined Henry in his flannel pajamas decorated with the clowns and the trumpets, saw him mischievously eavesdropping from within the dark box as he would from his bed when there was a card party at the house and he left the door to his room ajar so as to hear the adults kibitz downstairs. Zuckerman was remembering back to when absolutely nothing was known in the boys’ bedrooms of erotic temptation or death-defying choice, when life had been the most innocent pastime and family happiness had seemed eternal. Harmless Henry. If he could hear what Carol was saying, would he laugh, would he weep, or would he think with relief, “Now nobody will ever know!”

  But of course Zuckerman knew, Zuckerman who was not so harmless. What was he to do with those three thousand words? Betray his brother’s final confidence, strike a blow against the family of the very sort that had alienated him from them in the first place? The evening before, after thanking Carol for her graciousness and telling her that he would sit down at once to compose a eulogy, he’d located, among the loose-leaf journals stacked atop his file cabinets, the volume in which he’d kept his account of Henry’s affair with the Swiss patient. Must he really go in now and plunder these notes that he’d mercifully all but forgotten—had they been waiting there all these years for an inspiration as unforeseen as this?

  Scattered throughout the handwritten pages were dozens of shortish entries about Henry and Maria and Carol. Some were no more than a line or two long, others ran to almost a page, and before trying to figure out what to say at the funeral, Zuckerman, seated at his desk, had read them all slowly through, thinking as he heavily underscored the promising lines, “Here the ending began, with as commonplace and unoriginal an adventure as this—with the ancient experience of carnal revelation.”

  H. at midnight. “I have to phone somebody. I have to tell somebody that I love her. Do you mind—at this hour?” “No. Go ahead.” “I at least have you to tell. She has nobody. I’m bursting to tell everyone. I’m actually dying to tell Carol. I want her to know how terrifically happy I am.” “She can live without it.” “I realize that. But I keep wanting to say, ‘Do you know what Maria said today? Do you know what little Krystyna said last night when Maria was bathing her?’”

  “She seems far off in the distance, the way the bedposts looked when I was a kid in our room. Remember the knobs on the top of the maple bedposts? I used to put myself to sleep by imagining them to be far far away, until actually they were, and I had to stop because I was scaring myself. Well, she seemed far away just like that, as though I couldn’t possibly reach a hand out and touch her. She was on top of me, far far away, and each time she came, I said, ‘More, do you want more?’ And she nodded her head, like a child playing bouncy-horsy she nodded yes and started off again, red in the face and riding me, and all I wanted was for her to have more and more and more—and all the time I kept seeing her so very far away.”

  “You should see what she looks like, you should see this beautiful blond girl, with those eyes, up on top of me in her black silk camisole.” Maria thought she’d have to go over to New York to buy the black underwear but then she found some down in the village. H. wonders if she oughtn’t to have gone to New York to get it anyway.

  Saturday H. saw her husband in the street. Looks like a nice fellow. Big and handsome. Bigger even than H. Very jolly with his kids. “Will you show him the underwear?” “No.” “Will you wear it when you’re with him?” “No.” “Only for me.” “Only for you.” H. feels sorry for him. Looked so trusting.

  In their motel room, while he watches her dressing to go home.

  H. “You really are my whore, aren’t you?” Maria laughs: “No. I’m not. Whores get money.”

  H. has cash in his wallet—a wad to pay motel, etc., without using credit card. Peels off two crisp hundred-dollar bills and presents them to her.

  She doesn’t at first know what to say. Then apparently she does. “You’re supposed to throw them on the floor,” she tells him. “I think that’s the way it’s done.”

  H. lets them flutter to the floor. In the black silk camisole she bends to pick them up and puts them into her purse. “Thanks.”

  H., to me. “I thought, ‘My God, I’m out two hundred bucks. That’s a lot of dough.’ But I didn’t say a word. I thought, ‘It’s worth two hundred, just to see what it’s like.’”

  “What is it like?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “She still has the money?”

  “She does—she has it. She says, ‘You are a crazy man.’”

  “Sounds like she wants to see what it’s like too.”

  “I gu
ess we both do. I want to give her more.”

  Maria confides that a woman who’d had an affair with her husband before she married him once told a friend of hers, “I was never so bored in my life.” But he is a wonderful man with the children. And he holds her together. “I am the impulsive one,” she says.

  Maria says that whenever she can’t believe that H. is real and their affair is really happening, she goes upstairs and looks at the two hundred-dollar bills hidden away in her underwear drawer. That convinces her.

  H. amazed that he is not in any way guilty or tormented by being so joyously unfaithful to Carol. He wonders how someone who tries so hard to be so good, who is good, can be doing this so easily.

  Carol spoke without notes, though as soon as she began it was clear to Zuckerman that every word had been thought through beforehand and nothing left to chance. If Carol had ever held any mystery for her brother-in-law, it had to do with what if anything lay behind her superagreeable nature; he had never been able to figure out precisely how naïve she was, and what she now had to say didn’t help. The story Carol had chosen to tell wasn’t the one that he had pieced together (and had decided—for now—to keep to himself); Henry’s misery lived in Zuckerman’s recollection with a significance and meaning entirely different. Hers was the story that was intended to stand as the officially authorized version, and he wondered while she recounted it if she believed it herself.

  “There’s something about Henry’s death,” she began, “that I want all of you gathered here today to know. I want Henry’s children to know. I want his brother to know. I want everyone who ever loved him or cared about him to know. I think it may help to soften the force of this stupendous blow, if not this morning, then sometime in the future, when we’re all less stunned.

  “If he had chosen to, Henry could have gone on living without that horrible operation. And if he hadn’t had that operation he’d be working away in his office right now and, in a few hours, would be coming home to me and the kids. It isn’t true that the surgery was imperative. The medication that the doctors had given him when the disease was first diagnosed was effectively controlling his heart problem. He was in no pain and in no immediate danger. But the medication had drastically affected him as a man and put an end to our physical relationship. And this Henry couldn’t accept.

  “When he began seriously considering surgery, I begged him not to risk his life just to preserve that side of our marriage, much as I missed it myself. Of course I missed the warmth and tenderness and intimate affection, but I was coming to terms with it. And we were otherwise so fortunate in our lives together and with our children that it was unthinkable to me that he should undergo an operation that could destroy everything. But Henry was so dedicated to the completeness of our marriage that he wouldn’t be deterred, not by anything.

  “As you all know—as so many of you have been telling me during these last twenty-four hours—Henry was a perfectionist, not just in his work, where everyone knows he was the most meticulous craftsman, but in all his relationships with people. He held nothing back, not from his patients, not from his children, and never from me. It was unthinkable to a man so outgoing, so full of life, that still in his thirties he should be so cruelly disabled. I have to admit to you all, as I never did to him, that however much I opposed the surgery because of the risk, I did sometimes wonder if I could carry on as a loving and useful wife feeling so cut off from him. Over the course of our last year together, when he was so withdrawn and brutally depressed, so tormented by the damage that he felt the marriage to be suffering because of this bewildering thing that had happened, I thought ‘If there could only be some miracle.’ But I’m not someone who makes miracles happen; I’m someone who tends to make do with what’s at hand—even, I’m afraid, with her own imperfections. But Henry would no more accept imperfection in himself than in his work. If I didn’t have the courage to try for a miracle, Henry did—he had the courage, we now know, for everything life could demand of a man.

  “I’m not going to tell you that going on without Henry is going to be easy for us. The children are frightened about the future with no loving father to protect them, and so am I frightened of no Henry by my side. I’d grown used to him, you know. However, I am strengthened by remembering that his life did not come to a senseless end. Dear friends, dear family, my dear, dear, dear children, Henry died to recover the fullness and richness of married love. He was a strong and brave and loving man who desperately wanted the bond of passion between a husband and a wife to continue to live and flourish. And, dearest Henry, dearest, sweetest man of them all, it will—the passionate bond between this husband and this wife will live as long as I do.”

  Just the intimate family, along with Rabbi Geller, followed the hearse to the cemetery. Carol didn’t want the children riding out in one of those funeral-procession black limousines and so drove them herself—the kids, the Goffs, and Nathan—in the family station wagon. The interment lasted no time at all. Geller recited the mourner’s prayer, and the children laid the chrysanthemums from the garden on the coffin lid. Carol asked if anyone wanted to say anything. No one answered. Carol said to her son, “Leslie?” He took a moment to prepare himself. “I just wanted to say…” but afraid of breaking down, he went no further. “Ellen?” Carol said, but Ellen, in tears and clinging to her grandmother’s hand, shook her head no. “Ruth?” Carol asked. “He was the best father,” said Ruth in a loud, clear voice, “the best.” “All right,” said Carol, and the two burly attendants lowered the coffin. “I’ll be a few minutes,” Carol told the family, and she remained alone by the graveside while the rest of them walked down to the parking lot.

  Carol and the kids to Albany to celebrate her parents’ anniversary. Heavy backlog of lab work prevents H. from going along. Maria parks three blocks away and walks from there to the house. Appears as requested in silk jersey dress and black underwear. Has brought her favorite record to play. She waters plants in back hallway that Carol forgot before she left—also plucks out the dead leaves. Then in bed, anal love. After initial difficulties both ecstatic. H.: “This is how I marry you, this is how I make you my wife!” “Yes, and nobody knows, Henry! I am a virgin there no longer and nobody knows! They all think I’m so good and responsible. Nobody knows!” In the bathroom with him afterwards, while arranging her hair with his brush, she sees his pajamas hanging on the back of the door and reaches over to touch them. (“I didn’t realize what she’d done until that night. Then I went in and did it myself, stroked my own pajamas—to see what she’d felt.” Also combed her hairs out of his brush so Carol wouldn’t find them.) Sitting with her in the family room—no lights on—H., famished, ate a quart of ice cream right out of the carton while she played her record for him. Maria: “This is the most beautiful slow movement of the eighteenth century.” H. doesn’t remember what it was. Haydn? Mozart? “I don’t know,” he told me. “I don’t know anything about that kind of music. But it was beautiful, just watching her listen.” Maria: “This makes me think of university, sitting here like this, full of you in every way, and nothing else in the world.” “You are my wife now,” says H., “my other wife.” Played his Mel Tormé record for her—had to dance with her while they had the chance. Glued loin to loin the way he danced in high school with Linda Mandel. Sleeps alone that night in sheets spotted with baby oil, the vibrator, unwashed, on the pillow beside his head. Took it to work with him the next day. Hidden in the office with copy of Fodor’s Switzerland that he’s bought to read, and her photograph. Also took with him the hair of hers that he combed out of the brush. All in the safe. The sheets he stuffed into a black plastic bag and dumped in a trash can at the Millburn Mall five miles from the scene of their marriage. Fodor’s Dostoevsky.

  It was early in the afternoon at the end of September; from the cold touch of the breeze and the light heat of the sun and the dry unsummery whish of the trees you could easily have guessed the month with your eyes closed—perhaps have even guessed the week
. Should it matter to a man, however young and virile, to be sentenced to a lifetime of celibacy when, every year for as long as he lives, there will be autumn days like this to enjoy? Well, that was a question for an old guy with a beard and a gift for impossible riddles, and amiable Mark Geller struck Zuckerman as a rabbi of another kind entirely—consequently he declined the invitation to drive back to the house in Geller’s car, and waited with the children and their grandparents down by the cemetery gate where the station wagon was parked.

  Ruth, looking quite drained, came over and took her uncle’s hand.

  “What is it?” he asked her. “Are you okay?”

  “I just keep thinking that when kids at school talk about their parents, I’ll only be able to say ‘my mother.’”

  “You’ll be able to say your parents, plural, whenever you talk about the past. You had thirteen years of that. Nothing you did with Henry is ever going to go away. He’ll always be your father.”

  “Dad would take us alone, two times a year, without Mom, shopping in New York. It was his treat. Just him and us kids. We went shopping first and then we went to the Plaza Hotel and had lunch in the Palm Court—where they play the violin. Not very well, either. Once in the fall and once in the spring, every year. Now Mom will have to do all the things our dad did. She’ll have to do both their jobs.”

  “Don’t you think she can?”

  “I do, sure I do. Maybe someday she’ll remarry. She really likes to be married. I hope she does do it too.” Then, very gravely, she rushed to add, “But only if she can find somebody who’ll be good to us children as well as herself.”

  They waited there close to half an hour before Carol, walking briskly, emerged from the cemetery to drive everyone home.

  * * *

  Food had been laid out by a local caterer under the patio awning while the mourners were still at the synagogue, and scattered around the downstairs rooms were folding chairs rented from the funeral parlor. The girls from Ruth’s softball team, who had taken the afternoon off from school to help out the Zuckermans, were clearing away the used paper plates and replenishing the serving platters from the reserves in the kitchen. And Zuckerman went looking for Wendy.