by Philip Roth
Sure he was still tempted, and even managed taking care of himself from time to time. Who can bear a marriage of single-minded devotion? He was experienced enough and old enough to understand that affairs, adultery, whatever you call it, take a lot of the built-in pressure out of marriage and teach even the least imaginative that this idea of exclusivity isn’t God-given but a social creation rigorously honored at this point only by people too pathetic to challenge it. He no longer dreamed of “other wives.” A law of life he seemed finally to have learned is that the women you want most to fuck aren’t necessarily the women you want to spend all that much time with, anyway. Fucking yes, but not as a way out of his life or as an escape from the facts. Unlike Nathan’s, what Henry’s life had come to represent was living with the facts—instead of trying to alter the facts, taking the facts and letting them inundate him. He no longer permitted himself to be carried heedlessly off in a sexual whirlwind—and certainly not in the office, where his concentration was entirely on the technical stuff and achieving the ultimate degree of professional perfection. He never let a patient leave his office if he thought to himself, “I could have done it better … it could have fit better … the color wasn’t right…” No, his imperative was perfection—not just the degree of perfection needed for the patient to get through his life, not even the degree of perfection you could realistically hope for, but the degree of perfection that might just be possible, humanly and technically, if you pushed yourself to the limit. If you look at the results with bare eyes it’s one thing, but if you look with loupes it’s another, and it was by the minutest microscopic standards that Henry measured success. He had the highest re-do rate of anybody he knew—if he didn’t like something he’d tell the patient, “Look, I’ll put it in as a temporary, but I’m going to re-do it for you,” and never so as to charge for it but to assuage that exacting, insistent, perfectionist injunction with which he had successfully solidified life by siphoning off the fantasy. Fantasy is speculation that is characteristically you, the you with your dream of self-overpowering, the you perennially bonded to your prize wish, your pet fear, and distorted by a kind of childish thinking that he’d annihilated from his mental processes. Anybody can run away and survive, the trick was to stay and survive, and this was how Henry had done it, not through chasing erotic daydreams, not by fleeing or through adventurous defiance, but by sounding the minutely taxing demands of his profession. Nathan had got everything backwards, overestimating—as was his fantasy—immoderation’s appeal and the virtues of sweeping away the limits on life. The renunciation of Maria had signaled the beginning of a life that, if not quite a “classic,” might be eulogized at his funeral as a damn good stab at equanimity. And equanimity was enough for Henry, even if to his late brother, student and connoisseur of intemperate behavior, it didn’t measure up to the selfless promotion of the great human cause of irresponsible exaggeration.
Exaggeration. Exaggeration, falsification, rampant caricature—everything, thought Henry, about my vocation, to which precision, accuracy, and mechanical exactness are absolutely essential, overstated, overdrawn, and vulgarly enlarged. Witness the galling misrepresentation of my relations with Wendy. Sure when the patient is in the chair, and he’s got the hygienist or assistant working on him, and she’s playing with his mouth with her delicate hands and everything is hanging all over him, sure there is a part of it that stimulates, in the patient, sexual fantasy. But when I am doing an implant, and the whole mouth is torn open, and the tissue detached from the bone, and the teeth, the roots, all exposed, and the assistant’s hands are in there with mine, when I’ve got four, even six, hands working on the patient, the last thing I’m thinking about is sex. You stop concentrating, you let that enter, and you fuck up—and I’m not a dentist who fucks up. I am a success, Nathan. I don’t live all day vicariously in my head—I live with saliva, blood, bone, teeth, my hands in mouths as raw and real as the meat in the butcher’s window!
Home. That was where he was finally headed, through the rush-hour traffic, with Nathan’s raincoat and the envelope back in the trunk. He’d shoved them down in the well beside the spare so as to try to forget for a while disposing of the papers. Now that he was on his way, undetected, he felt as wrung out as a man who’d been ransacking, not his brother’s files, but his brother’s grave, while at the same time increasingly unsettled by the fear that he had been insufficiently thorough. If he’d had to stay till 3 a.m. to be sure nothing compromising in those files had been overlooked, that’s what he should have done. But once it turned dark outside, he could go no further—he’d again begun to sense Nathan’s presence, to feel himself disoriented inside a dream, and desperately wanted to be home with his children and for the strain and the ugliness to be over. If only he’d had it in him to empty the files and light a match—if he could only have been sure that when they saw the ashes in the fireplace they’d assume that Nathan had burned it all, destroyed everything personal before entering the hospital … Stalled in the smelly back-up of commuter cars and heavy trucks outside the Lincoln Tunnel, he was seething suddenly with remorse, because of having done what he’d done and because he hadn’t done more. Seething with outrage too, about “Basel” more than anything—as outraged by what Nathan had got right there as by what he’d got wrong, as much by what he’d been making up as by what he was reporting. It was the two in combination that were particularly galling, especially where the line was thin and everything was given the most distorted meaning.
By the time he got over to Jersey and had pulled off the turnpike to telephone Carol from a Howard Johnson’s, he was thinking that it might be enough for now to store the pages in his safe, to stop at his office before going home and leave the envelope there. Seal it, lock it away, and then bequeath it in his will to some library to open fifty years hence, if anyone should even be interested by then. Keeping it in the safe, he could at least think everything through again in six months. Far less likely then to do the wrong thing—the thing that Nathan would expect him to do, were Nathan waiting to see what became of the manuscript. Already once this week—while writing that eulogy—he had pretended to be dead … suppose he were at it again, waiting to see me confirm his imaginings. The thought was absurd and yet he couldn’t stop thinking it—his brother was provoking him to enact the role that he had assigned him, the role of a mediocrity. As though that word could begin to describe the structure he had built himself!
Long ago, before their parents had sold the Newark house and moved to Florida, back before Carnovsky, when everything had been different for everyone, Henry, with Carol, had driven his mother and father down to Princeton to hear Nathan deliver a public lecture. While dialing home from the restaurant, Henry remembered that after the lecture, during the question period, Nathan had been asked by a student if he wrote “in quest of immortality.” He could hear Nathan laughing and giving the answer—it was as close to his dead brother as he’d come all day. “If you’re from New Jersey,” Nathan had said, “and you write thirty books, and you win the Nobel Prize, and you live to be white-haired and ninety-five, it’s highly unlikely but not impossible that after your death they’ll decide to name a rest stop for you on the Jersey Turnpike. And so, long after you’re gone, you may indeed be remembered, but mostly by small children, in the backs of cars, when they lean forward and tell their parents, ‘Stop, please, stop at Zuckerman—I have to make a pee.’ For a New Jersey novelist that’s as much immortality as it’s realistic to hope for.”
Ruthie answered the phone, the very child whom Nathan had pictured playing her violin over Henry’s coffin, whom he had placed in tears beside her father’s grave, bravely proclaiming, “He was the best, the best…”
He had never loved his middle child more than when he heard her ask, “Are you okay? Mom was worried that one of us should have gone with you. So was I. Where are you?”
She was the best, the best daughter ever. He had only to hear that kindly, thoughtful child’s grown-up voice to know th
at he had done the only thing there was to do. My brother was a Zulu, or whoever the people are who wear bones in their noses; he was our Zulu, and ours were the heads he shrunk and stuck up on the post for everyone to gape at. The man was a cannibal.
“I wish you’d called—” Carol began, and he felt like someone who survives a harrowing ordeal and only afterwards begins to weaken and appreciate how precarious it all had been. He felt as though he’d survived a murder attempt by himself disarming the murderer. Then, beneath what he recognized as the thinking of someone utterly exhausted, he saw with clarity all the ugliness that lay behind what Nathan had written: he was out to murder my whole family the way he’d murdered our parents, murder us with contempt for what we are. How he must have loathed my success, loathed our happiness and the way we live. How he must have loathed the way he lived to want to see us squirm like that.
Only minutes later, within sight of the headlights of the cars streaking homeward along the turnpike, Henry stood at the dark edge of the parking area down from the restaurant and, pushing open the metal flap at the top of a tall brown trash can, let the papers pour out into the garbage. He dropped the envelope in too, once it was empty, then pushed Nathan’s raincoat in on top of that. He was a Zulu, he thought, a pure cannibal, murdering people, eating people, without ever quite having to pay the price. Then something putrid was stinging his nostrils and it was Henry who was leaning over and violently beginning to retch, Henry vomiting as though he had broken the primal taboo and eaten human flesh—Henry, like a cannibal who out of respect for his victim, to gain whatever history and power is there, eats the brain and learns that raw it tastes like poison. This was no squeezing out of those tears of grief he’d hoped to shed the day before, nor was it the forgiveness that he had expected to overtake him at the funeral home, nor was it like that surge of hatred when he’d first seen his name recklessly typed across the pages of “Basel”—this was a realm of emotion unlike any he had known or would wish to know again, this quaking before the savagery of what he’d finally done and had wanted to do most of his life, to his brother’s lawless, mocking brain.
* * *
How did you find out that he was dead?
The doctor called around noon. And told me just like that. “It didn’t work, and I don’t know what to say. There was every chance that it would, and it just didn’t.” He was strong and relatively young, and the doctor didn’t even know why it failed. It was just the wrong decision to take. And it wasn’t even necessary. The doctor just called and said, “I don’t know what to tell you, I don’t know what to say…”
Were you tempted to go to the funeral?
No. No, there was no point. It was over. I didn’t want to go to the funeral. It would have been a false situation.
Do you feel responsible for his death?
I feel responsible in that if he hadn’t met me it wouldn’t have happened. He met me and suddenly he felt this horrible urge to quit his life and be another person. But he was so driven that perhaps if it hadn’t been me it would have been somebody else. I tried to tell him not to do it, I thought it was my duty to warn him beforehand, but I also didn’t think he could live as he was—he was too unhappy. He couldn’t bear to live as he was. And for me to have refused him would really have meant the continuation of that. I was probably only the catalyst but of course I was deeply involved. Of course I feel responsible. If only I had fought it! I knew it was a major operation, and I knew there was a risk, but you hear of people having it all the time, seventy-year-old men have it and go bouncing about. He was so healthy, I never imagined that this could happen. But nonetheless I was deeply involved—you feel guilty if you haven’t given somebody a new pair of shoelaces and they die. You always feel when somebody dies that you didn’t do something that you should have done. In this case, I should have stopped him from dying.
Shouldn’t you just have called it quits and stopped seeing him?
I suppose I should have, yes, when I saw the way that it was going. Every instinct told me to stop. I’m a very ordinary woman in my way; I suppose it was all much too intense for me. It certainly was a drama of the sort I’m not accustomed to. I had never been through all those hoops before. Even if he had lived, I don’t know if I could have kept up with the intensity. He very quickly gets bored—got bored. I’m convinced that if he’d had the operation and come back and was free to move as he wanted in the world, he would have been bored with me in three or four years and moved on to somebody else. I would have left my husband, taken our child, and perhaps have had a couple of years of what one calls happiness, and then been worse off than I was before and have had to go back and live with my family in England, alone.
But what you had with him wasn’t boring.
Oh, no—we were both of us too far in over our heads for that, but it could have become boring to him. After a certain age people do have a pattern that’s theirs, and there’s little that can be done about it. It needn’t have been boring, but it very well might have been.
And what did you do when they were having the funeral?
I took the child for a walk in the park. I didn’t want to be alone. There was nobody I could talk to. Thank goodness it was in the morning and my beloved husband wasn’t coming back until the evening and I had time to pull myself together. I had no one to share it with, but I couldn’t have shared it with anyone if I had gone there. It would have been his family, his friends, his ex-girlfriends, a Jewish funeral, which I don’t think he really wanted. Which I know he didn’t want.
It wasn’t.
I was afraid it was going to be, and I knew that was what he didn’t want. Of course nobody told me about the funeral arrangements. He’d confided about me only to the surgeon.
What happened was that his editor read a eulogy. That was it.
Well, that’s what he would have wanted. A flattering eulogy, I hope.
Flattering enough. And then in the evening, you went down there to the apartment.
Yes.
Why?
My husband was with the ambassador, at a meeting. I didn’t know he was going to be gone. Not that I wanted him with me. It’s always a dreadful business trying to keep one’s expression in order. I sat upstairs by myself. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I didn’t go down there looking for what he’d written—I went to see the apartment. As I couldn’t go to the hospital, couldn’t go to the funeral, it was the nearest I could come to saying goodbye. I went down to see the apartment. When I went into the study there was the box on his desk—it had “Draft #2” written on it. It was what he’d been working on during the time he was with me. His last thoughts, it turned out. I always said, “Don’t write about me,” but I knew he always used everybody else and I didn’t see why he shouldn’t use me. I wanted to see—well, I suppose I thought there might be a message in it, in some way.
You went downstairs “to say goodbye.” What does that mean?
I just wanted to sit alone in the apartment. Nobody knew I had a key. I just wanted to sit there for a while.
And what was it like?
It was dark.
Did it frighten you?
Yes and no. Secretly I’ve always believed in ghosts. And been afraid of them. Yes, I was frightened. But I sat there, and I thought, “If he’s here … then he’ll come.” I started to laugh. I had a kind of conversation with him—one-sided. “Of course you wouldn’t, how could you come back when you have no belief in these totally idiotic things?” I started to wander about like Garbo in Queen Christina, touching all the furniture. Then I saw the cardboard box on his desk, with “Draft #2” on it and the date he’d gone into the hospital. I used to say to him when I went into his study, “Be careful what you leave out, because anything that’s on that desk, upside down or anywhere, I will read. If it’s there. I don’t go snooping, but I’ll read anything that’s left out. I can’t help it.” We joked about it. He’d say, “Mankind divides into two groups, those who will read other people’s correspon
dence and those who won’t, and you and I, Maria, fall on the wrong side of the line. We are people who open medicine cabinets to look at other people’s prescription drugs.” There was the box, and I was drawn to it, as they say, like a magnet. I thought, “There may be some message in it.”
Was there?
There sure was. Something called “Christendom.” A section, a chapter, a novella—I couldn’t be certain. And I thought, “That’s a little threatening. Is ‘Christendom’ the enemy? Is it me?” And I picked it up and I started to read it. And perhaps a lot of the love I had felt for him went at that moment. Well, not a lot of it, not when I read it again, but some of it, the first time round. The second time what touched me more than anything was his longing just to shed it all and have another life, his longing to be a father and a husband, things the poor man never was. I suppose he realized that he had missed that. However much one hates the sentimentality, it’s a big thing to have missed in your life, not to have had a child. And he was so touching about Phoebe. Whereas everybody else in “Christendom” he changes, Phoebe alone he perceives as she is, as just a child, a little girl.
