The Counterlife

by Philip Roth

  “What does Georgina think?”

  “Georgina is very conventional. Georgina probably thinks that I have sort of slightly given up on what I had really wanted in life, and this is a frightfully good second best and has much to recommend it.”

  “What have you given up on?”

  “Something more obvious. More obviously the sort of thing that sorts like me are after.”

  “Which is?”

  “Well, I think that would be … oh, I don’t know.”

  “My advanced years.”

  “Yes, I think someone my own age, more or less. Ordinary people are profoundly disturbed by these age differences. Look, is this a good thing, this kind of talk?”

  “Sure. It gives me a foothold in a foreign land.”

  “Why do you need that? Is something wrong?”

  “Tell me about Sarah. What does she think?”

  “Did something happen between you two?”

  “What could happen?”

  “Sarah is a little ropey sometimes. She sometimes speaks so quickly—it’s like icicles breaking. Snapping. Bu-bu-bu-bup. You know what she said tonight, about my wearing pearls? She said, ‘Pearls are a tremendous emblem of a conventional, privileged, uneducated, unthinking, complacent, unaesthetic, unfashionable, middle-class woman. They’re absolute death, pearls. The only way you can wear them is masses and masses of very large ones, or something that’s different.’ She said, ‘How can you be wearing pearls?’”

  “And what did you tell her?”

  “I said, ‘Oh, because I like them.’ That’s the way you deal with Sarah. One just doesn’t make too much of a fuss, and she eventually clams up and goes away. She knows lots of peculiar people and she can be very peculiar herself. She’s always been completely fucked-up about sex.”

  “That puts her in good company, doesn’t it?”

  “What did she say to you, Nathan?”

  “What could she say?”

  “It was about sex. She’s read you. She thinks sexual nomadism is your bag.”

  “‘And I upped my tent and I went.’”

  “That’s the idea. She thinks no man is a good bet, but a lover as a husband is worst of all.”

  “Is Sarah generalizing off of vast experience?”

  “I wouldn’t think so. I think that anybody in his right mind wouldn’t try to have a sexual relationship with her. She goes through long periods of just disliking men in principle. It isn’t even feminist ranting—it’s all her very own, all these internal battles she’s got going on. I would think that the experience she’s generalizing off of has been very meager and sad. So was mine meager and sad till not long ago. I got very angry, you know, when my husband didn’t speak to me for a year. And when I spoke he insisted on stopping me, smashing me all the time whenever I tried to say anything. Always. I thought about that when you were away.”

  “I actually enjoy listening to you speak.”

  “Do you, really?”

  “I’m listening to you now.”

  “But why? That’s what nobody can figure out. Girls raised like us don’t ordinarily marry men interested in books. They say to me, ‘But you don’t have intellectual conversations, do you?’”

  “Intellectual enough for me.”

  “Yes, I talk intellectual? Do I really? Like Kierkegaard?”

  “Better.”

  “They all think I’d make a marvelous housewife—one of the last terrific ones around. Frankly, I’ve often thought that maybe that is my métier. I see my two sisters going out to work, and I think, I’m now twenty-eight, nearly thirty, and since university I’ve achieved absolutely nothing, aside from Phoebe. And then I think, What’s wrong with that? I have a delightful daughter, I now have a delightful husband who does not smash me all the time whenever I try to speak, and I’ll soon have a second child and a lovely house by the river. And I’m writing my little stories about the meadows, the mists, and the English mud that no one will ever read, and that no one will ever read them doesn’t matter to me at all. There is also a school of thought in the family that says I married you because ever since our father walked out I was always going around looking for him.”

  “According to this school, I am your father.”

  “Only you’re not. Though you do have fatherly qualities here and there, you are definitely not my father. Sarah is the one who sees us as three grossly fatherless women. It’s a cherished preoccupation of hers. She says the father’s body is like Gulliver—something you can rest your feet on, snuggle up in, walk around on top of, thinking, ‘This is mine.’ Rest your feet on it and step off from there.”

  “Is she right?”

  “To a degree. She’s clever, Sarah. Once he was gone we never saw him that often—a day at Christmas, a weekend in the summer, but not much more. And for years now not at all. So, yes, there probably was a sense of the world being very thin at the edges. The mother can be as competent and responsible as ours, but in our world the value was entirely defined by the father’s activity. Somehow we were always out of the run of ordinary life. I didn’t realize until I was older some of the jobs that women might do. I still don’t.”

  “You regret that?”

  “I told you, I have never been happier than being this preposterous, atavistic woman who does not care to assert herself. Sarah is working at it all the time, trying so hard to be assertive, and every time an opportunity is presented to her, a serious opportunity and not just badgering Georgina or me, she goes into a terrible gloom or a terrible panic.”

  “Because she’s a daughter whose father vanished.”

  “When we were at home, she used to go around every March eleventh like the character at the beginning of Three Sisters. ‘It’s a year ago today that Father pissed off.’ She always felt that there was nobody behind us. And there was something uneasy-making about Mother having the ambition for us. Wanting us to be well-educated, putting us through university, wanting us to get good jobs—that was all quite unusual in Mother’s world, it had something vicarious and compensatory written all over it, something desperate, at least for Sarah.”

  * * *

  It was while we were eating our dessert that I heard a woman loudly announcing, in exaggeratedly English tones, “Isn’t that perfectly disgusting.” When I turned to see who’d spoken, I found it was a large, white-haired, elderly woman at the end of our banquette, no more than ten feet away, who was finishing her dinner beside a skeletal old gentleman I took to be her husband. He didn’t seem to be disgusted by anything, nor did he seem quite to be dining with the woman who was, but silently sat contemplating his port. I took them at a glance to be very well-heeled.

  Addressing the room at large, but looking now directly at Maria and me, the woman said, “Isn’t it, though—simply disgusting,” while the husband, who was both present and absent, gave no indication that her observation might be relevant to anything he knew or cared about.

  A moment earlier, convinced by Maria’s customary candidness that it was not she who’d been trying to delude or mislead me but “ropey” Sarah all on her own, reassured by all she’d said that between us nothing was other than as I’d always assumed, I had reached out to touch her, the back of two fingers lightly brushing her cheek. Nothing bold, no alarmingly public display of carnality, and yet when I turned and saw that we were still pointedly being stared down, I realized what had aroused this naked rebuke: not so much that a man had tendered his wife a tiny caress in a restaurant but that the young woman was the wife to this man.

  As though a low-voltage shock were being administered beneath the table, or she had bitten into something awful, the elderly white-haired woman began making odd, convulsive little facial movements, seemingly in some kind of sequence; as though flashing coded signals to an accomplice, she drew in her cheeks, she pursed her lips, she lengthened her mouth—until unable apparently to endure any further provocation, she called out sharply for the headwaiter. He came virtually on the run to see what the trouble was.
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  “Open a window,” she told him, again in a voice that no one in the restaurant could fail to hear. “You must open a window immediately—there’s a terrible smell in here.”

  “Is there, madam?” he courteously replied.

  “Absolutely. The stink in here is abominable.”

  “I’m terribly sorry, madam. I don’t notice anything.”

  “I don’t wish to discuss it—please do as I say!”

  Turning to Maria, I quietly told her, “I am that stink.”

  She was puzzled, even at first a little amused. “You think that this has to do with you?”

  “Me with you.”

  “Either that woman is crazy,” she whispered, “or she’s drunk. Or maybe you are.”

  “If she were one, or the other, or both, it might have to do with me and it might not have to do with me. But inasmuch as she continues looking at me, or me with you, I have to assume that I am that stink.”

  “Darling, she is mad. She is just a ridiculous woman who thinks someone has on too much scent.”

  “It is a racial insult, it is intended to be that, and if she keeps it up, I am not going to remain silent, and you should be prepared.”

  “Where is the insult?” Maria said.

  “The emanations of Jews. She is hypersensitive to Jewish emanations. Don’t be dense.”

  “Oh, this is ridiculous. You are being absurd.”

  From down the banquette, I heard the woman saying, “They smell so funny, don’t they?” whereupon I raised my hand to get the headwaiter’s attention.

  “Sir.” He was a serious, gray-haired, soft-spoken Frenchman who weighed what was said to him as carefully and objectively as an old-fashioned analyst. Earlier, after he’d taken our order, I’d remarked to Maria on the Freudian rigorousness with which he’d done nothing to influence our choice from among the evening’s several specialties whose preparation he’d laconically described.

  I said to him, “My wife and I have had a very nice dinner and we’d like our coffee now, but it’s extremely unpleasant with someone in the restaurant intent upon making a disturbance.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “A window!” she called imperiously, snapping her fingers high in the air. “A window, before we are overcome!”

  Here I stood and, for good or bad, even as I heard Maria entreating me—“Please, she’s quite mad”—made my way out from behind the table and walked to where I could stand facing the woman and her husband, who were seated side by side. He didn’t pay any more attention to me than he did to her—simply continued working on his port.

  “Can I help you with your problem?” I asked.

  “Pardon me?” she replied, but without the flicker of an upward glance, as though I were not even there. “Please, leave us alone.”

  “You find Jews repellent, do you?”

  “Jews?” She repeated the word as though she’d not come upon it before. “Jews? Did you hear that?” she asked her husband.

  “You are most objectionable, madam, grotesquely objectionable, and if you continue shouting about the stink, I am going to request that the management have you expelled.”

  “You will do what?”

  “Have—you—thrown—out.”

  Her twitching face went suddenly motionless, momentarily at least she appeared to have been silenced, and so rather than stand there threatening her any longer, I took that for a victory and started back to our table. My face was boiling hot and had obviously turned red.

  “I’m not good at these things,” I said, slipping back into the seat. “Gregory Peck did it better in Gentleman’s Agreement.”

  Maria did not speak.

  This time when I waved for service, a waiter and the headwaiter came hurrying over. “Two coffees,” I said. “Would you like anything else?” I asked Maria.

  She pretended not even to hear me.

  We’d finished the champagne and all but a little of the bottle of wine, and though I really didn’t want any more to drink, I ordered a brandy, so as to make it known to the surrounding tables and to the woman herself—and to Maria—that we had no intention of curtailing our evening in any way. The birthday celebration would go on.

  I waited until after the coffee and brandy were set down, and then I said, “Why aren’t you speaking? Maria, speak to me. Don’t act as though I was the one who committed the offense. If I had done nothing, I assure you it would have been even less tolerable to you than my telling her to shut up.”

  “You went quite crazy.”

  “Did I? Failed to observe British rules of dignified restraint, did I? Well, that stuff she was pulling is very trying for us people—even more trying than Christmas.”

  “It isn’t necessary now to go for me. All I’m saying is that if she meant that about the window, literally, to you, about you, then she is clearly mad. I don’t believe any sane English person would allow themselves to go so far. Even drunk.”

  “But they might think it,” I said.

  “No. I don’t even think they think it.”

  “They wouldn’t associate stink with Jews.”

  “No. I do not think so. There is no general interest in this occurrence,” Maria said firmly. “I don’t believe you can—if that is what you want to do—extrapolate anything about England or the English, and you mustn’t. Especially as you cannot even be sure, much as you seem to want to be, that your being Jewish had anything even to do with it.”

  “There you are wrong—there you are either innocent or blind in both eyes. She looks over here and what does she see? Miscegenation incarnate. A Jew defiling an English rose. A Jew putting on airs with a knife and a fork and a French menu. A Jew who is injurious to her country, her class, and her sense of fitness. I shouldn’t, inside her mind, be at this restaurant. Inside her mind, this place isn’t for Jews, least of all Jews defiling upper-class girls.”

  “What has come over you? The place is full of Jews. Every New York publisher who comes to London stays at this hotel and eats in this restaurant.”

  “Yes, but she’s probably slow on the uptake, this old babe. In the old days it wasn’t like that, and clearly there are still people who object to Jews in such places. She meant it, that woman. She did. Tell me, where do they get these exquisite sensibilities? What exactly do they smell when they smell a Jew? We’re going to have to sit down and talk about these people and their aversions so that I’m not caught off guard next time we go out to eat. I mean, this isn’t the West Bank—this isn’t the land of the shoot-out, this is the land of the carol service. In Israel I found that everything comes bursting out of everyone all the time, and so probably means half as much as you think. But because on the surface, at least, they don’t seem to be like that here, their little English outbursts are rather shocking—perhaps revealing too. Don’t you agree?”

  “That woman was mad. Why are you suddenly indicting me?”

  “I don’t mean to—I’m overheated. And surprised. Sarah, you see, tried to make clear to me, back in the church, something else that I didn’t know—that your mother, as she put it, is ‘terribly anti-Semitic.’ So much so that I’m mystified I wasn’t told about it long ago so as to know what to expect when I got here. Not terribly anti-American, terribly anti-Semitic. Is it true?”

  “Sarah said that? To you?”

  “Is it true?”

  “It doesn’t have to do with us.”

  “But it’s true. Nor is Sarah England’s greatest Jew-lover—or didn’t you know that either?”

  “That has nothing to do with us. None of it does.”

  “But why didn’t you tell me? I do not understand. You’ve told me everything, why not that? We tell each other the truth. Honesty is one of the things we have. Why did it have to be hidden?”

  She stood up. “Please stop this attack.”

  The bill was paid and in only minutes, leaving the restaurant, we were passing the table of my enemy. She now seemed as innocuous as her husband—once we’d faced off, s
he hadn’t dared to go on about the smell. However, just as Maria and I stepped into the passageway joining the dining room to the hotel lobby, I heard her Edwardian stage-accent rising above the restaurant murmur. “What a disgusting couple!” she announced, summarily.

  * * *

  It turned out that Maria had been embarrassed ever since her adolescence by Mrs. Freshfield’s anti-Semitism, but as she’d never known it to affect anything other than her own equanimity she’d simply endured it as a terrible flaw in someone who was otherwise an exemplary protector. Maria described her mother’s family as “all crazy—a life of drink and boredom, total prejudice overlaid with good manners and silly talk”; anti-Semitism was just one of the stupid attitudes by which her mother could hardly have been uncontaminated. It had more to do with the imprint of her times, her class, and her impossible family than with her character—and if that seemed to me a specious distinction, it wasn’t one that Maria cared to defend, since she herself knew the argument against it.

  What mattered, she said, what explained everything—more or less—was that so long as it had looked as though we’d be living in America, in a house in the country with Phoebe and the new baby, there’d been no need to bring any of this up. Maria admired her mother’s strength, her courage, loved her still for the full life she’d worked so hard to make for her children when there was virtually no one around who would seriously help her out, and she couldn’t bear me despising her for something that wasn’t going to do us any harm and to which I couldn’t have been expected to bring, from my background, even the simplest sort of social understanding. If we had been able to make America our home, her mother would have come for a couple of weeks each summer to visit the children and that would have been all we ever saw of her; even if she had wanted to interfere, she would have been too clever to risk her prestige in a struggle she could only lose, opposing me from such a distance.

  And then once we were legally pledged to live in London, the problem was too big for Maria to confront. She felt that by adapting to the stringent custody guarantees extracted by her ex-husband, I had already taken on more than I’d bargained for; she couldn’t bring herself to announce that in addition there was waiting to pounce upon me in England an anti-Semitic mother-in-law waving a burning cross. What’s more, she hoped that if I weren’t prematurely antagonized, I could probably dislodge her mother’s prejudice just by being myself. Was that so unrealistic? And had she been proved wrong? Though Mrs. Freshfield might seem to me inexplicably aloof, so far she had said nothing to Maria even remotely disparaging about marrying a Jew, nor had she so much as hinted that she expected our infant to be christened. That might please her, Maria had no doubt that it would, but she was hardly deluded enough to expect it, or so fanatical as to be unable to survive without it. Maria was desolated about Sarah; she still had trouble believing that Sarah could have gone so far. But Sarah, whom everyone accepted as peculiar—who had been known all her life for her “petulant little outbursts,” for being “cross and mean,” who never was, as Maria put it, “a purely likable person”—was not her mother. However perturbed her mother might be about the implausible match her daughter had made in New York, she was being positively heroic in suppressing her chagrin. And that wasn’t only the best we could have hoped for—for a beginning it was extraordinary. In fact, if it hadn’t been for that woman turning up at the other end of our banquette, a rather tender evening would have taken most of the sting out of Sarah’s misbehavior down in the crypt, leaving relations between Maria’s anti-Semitic mother and her Jewish husband just as respectful, if remote, as they’d been since our arrival in England.