by Philip Roth
SHE
(Laughing) Yes.
HE
You did really?
SHE
Yes.
HE
Didn't they teach you anything at Harvard?
SHE
(Laughs softly again) We were very in love when we got married, and the prospect of the future, of merely having a future, seemed glorious. To get married seemed like the greatest adventure possible. The newest thing we could possibly do. The great next step. (Silence) Are you glad you went away? Are you glad you did what you did?
HE
I would have answered differently several weeks ago. I would have answered differently several hours ago.
SHE
What's changed that answer?
HE
Meeting a young woman like you.
SHE
What interests you so much about me?
HE
Your youth and your beauty. The speed with which we've entered into communication. The erotic environment you create out of words.
SHE
New York is full of beautiful young women.
HE
I've been without the companionship of a woman and all that goes with it for years now. This is a startling turn of events and not necessarily in my interest. Someone wrote—I don't remember who—"Great love later in life comes at cross-purposes to everything."
SHE
Great love? Can you explain yourself, please?
HE
It's a sickness. It's a fever. It's a kind of hypnosis. I can only explain it by saying that I want to be alone in a room with you. I want to be under your spell.
SHE
Well, I'm glad. I'm glad you're getting what you want. It's a good thing.
HE
It's heartbreaking.
SHE
Why?
HE
Why do you think? You're a writer. You want to be a writer. Why would a man of seventy-one find this heartbreaking?
SHE
(Delicately) Because you have all this feeling again and you can't take it to its next step.
HE
That's correct.
SHE
But there's pleasure in this, isn't there?
HE
Of the heartbreaking variety.
SHE
(She's learned something) Hmmm. (After a long pause, with mock theatricality) Oh, what is to be done?
HE
Do you have any suggestions?
SHE
No. I have no idea what's to be done. I'm going away because I can't think what to do about anything.
HE
You seem close to tears all the time.
SHE
(Laughing) Well, it helps me not, I'll tell you that.
HE
(Laughs too, but remains silent. The flirtation is infernal, the man within the man in flames.)
SHE
Have you been out today? The whole city is close to tears. Yes, yes, I'm close to tears. It's momentous for me, you can imagine. Can you imagine how we felt last night when—
HE
I was here. I saw it. Did you notice that I was here?
SHE
And you obviously noticed I was here. Something seized you, though, before you met me. It wasn't me. You decided to come see our apartment. Something seized you—what was it? You know, the death threats don't explain to me the extreme thing that you've done with your life. However much you explain by saying I'm a writer who's had these threats made against my life, it is an extreme thing to have done, to go off and live the way you have. I have to keep wondering, What's the real story there? So there were these postcards. So what? The postcards are a pretext. You go away for a year, if it's the postcards, and you have friends and girlfriends, and in time the postcards stop and you come back. But a man who sequesters himself, secludes himself the way you did, does so for a much larger reason. People don't give up on life for a completely circumstantial and external reason like a death threat.
HE
What might that larger reason be?
SHE
Escaping pain.
HE
What pain?
SHE
The pain of being present.
HE
Aren't you describing yourself?
SHE
Perhaps. The pain of being present in the present moment. Yes, that could be said to describe very neatly the extreme thing I'm doing. But for you it wasn't merely the present moment. It was being present at all. It was being present in the presence of anything.
HE
Did you ever read a short novel called The Shadow-Line?
SHE
By Conrad? No. I remember a boyfriend telling me about it once, but I never read it.
HE
The opening line goes, "Only the young have such moments." These are moments Conrad describes as "rash." In the first few pages he lays everything out. "Rash moments"—the two words make up the entire sentence. He goes on, "I mean moments when the still young are inclined to commit rash actions, such as getting married suddenly or else throwing up a job for no reason." It goes like that. But these rash moments don't just happen in youth. Coming here last night was a rash moment. Daring to return is another. With age there are rash moments too. My first was leaving, my second is returning.
SHE
Billy thinks that he's indulging a rash moment on my part because if he doesn't, I'll get swamped with depression and fear. But he thinks that it's a rash moment. I never thought of myself as a desperate person. I hate to think that I'd be doing something desperate.
HE
I think you'll like it there. I'll miss you.
SHE
Well, it's your house. You can come up. You can have forgotten something and come up. We can have lunch.
HE
You can have forgotten something and come down.
SHE
Sure.
HE
Okay. You're less curt with me than you were last night. The fact that I haven't followed Bush's lies shouldn't make me an antagonist.
SHE
Was I nasty?
HE
I didn't feel that you cared for me much. Unless I intimidated you.
SHE
Of course you did. I read all those books in college and all the ones since. You might not be aware of it, locked up alone in the Berkshires, but there are many like me, people my age, and older (laughing) and younger, for whom you fill an important need. We admire you.
HE
Well, I haven't seen myself in the public mirror for many years. I don't know that.
SHE
I just told you.
HE
I still don't know it. But it's wonderful to learn of your admiration, because I've quickly come to admire you.
SHE
(Astonished) You've come to admire me? "Why?
HE
I hate to say this to you, but "someday you'll understand." (She laughs)
HE
You postmodernists laugh a lot.
SHE
I laugh because I find things funny.
HE
Are you laughing at me?
SHE
I'm laughing at the situation. You're speaking to me like you're my father. Someday I'll understand. Is the pleasure in the doing of it or only in the having done it? Writing, I mean. I'm changing the subject.
HE
In the doing of it. The pleasure of the having done it lasts a short time. There's pleasure in holding the bundle of pages in your hand, and there's pleasure when the first copy arrives. I pick it up and set it down a hundred times. I eat with it beside me. I've taken it to bed with me.
SHE
I know that. When my story was published, I slept with the copy of The New Yorker under my pillow.
HE
You're a very charming young woman.
SHE
Thank you, thank you.
HE
This is why
I live in the country.
SHE
I understand.
HE
It's all a little distressing for me to come back to New York, and this is a little distressing too. I think I better go.
SHE
Okay. Perhaps we'll see each other alone and talk again.
HE
That would do it to me, my friend.
SHE
I would like to be your friend.
HE
Why?
SHE
Because I have no one like you.
HE
You don't know me.
SHE
I don't. I have no interactions like this.
HE
Must you use that language? You're a writer—give up "interactions."
SHE
(Laughing) I have no conversations like this. I have no situations like this.
HE
I didn't mean to correct you. It's not my business. Excuse me.
SHE
I understand. If you want to get together and talk again, my number is your number. You can always call me.
HE
It's not as if I answered a rental ad. It's as if I answered the personals. "Exceedingly attractive, well-educated WMF occasionally available for intimate conversation..." I got more than a new apartment, didn't I?
SHE
Maybe a friend, too.
HE
But this is not a friendship I can have.
SHE
What can you have?
HE
Not much, it seems. Precious things having been taken away has created a predicament that can't be overcome by hard work, et cetera. Do you follow me?
SHE
I don't quite understand. Do you just mean getting older, or is there something else in particular?
HE
(Laughing) I suppose I just mean getting older.
SHE
I understand now.
HE
This is killing me, so I'm going to leave. I'm not going to follow my inclination and try to kiss you.
SHE
Okay.
HE
That wouldn't get us anywhere.
SHE
You're right. I'm glad you came by this afternoon, though. I'm very glad.
HE
Are you a seductress?
SHE
No, no, absolutely not.
HE
You have a husband, you have a lover, and now you want to have me as a friend. Do you collect men? Or do men collect you?
SHE
(Laughing) I suppose I've collected men and that they've collected me.
HE
You're only thirty. Have you collected many men?
SHE
I don't know what's considered many. (She laughs again)
HE
I mean since you left college, between commencement day and this afternoon, which has concluded with your collecting me with your seductive power ... But you're acting childishly now, as though you don't possess such power. Has nobody ever told you about your power?
SHE
I've been told. I was laughing because if you include yourself as a collected man, I wouldn't know how to count the men I've collected.
HE
You have collected me.
SHE
And yet you will not call me again. And you will not kiss me. We may not even see each other again, except with my husband, when we exchange keys, so I don't see how I've collected you.
HE
Because a meeting like this for a man like me is devastating.
SHE
I certainly don't want to devastate you. I'm sorry if I have.
HE
I'm sorry I couldn't devastate you.
SHE
You've given me pleasure.
HE
As I said, this is killing, so I'm going to have to go.
SHE
Thank you for coming by.
On the street, starting back on foot to the hotel, thinking of the scene just enacted—and if he feels himself to be an actor, coming from having rehearsed a scene from an unproduced play, it's because she seemed so like an actress to him, a highly intuitive, intelligent young actress who listens carefully and concentrates totally and responds quietly—he is reminded of the scene in A Doll's House when the dying, lovesick sophisticate Dr. Rank is summoned to spend a moment with her by Torvald Helmer's beautiful wife, the spoiled tease, flirtatious young Nora. The light fading, the room getting smaller, a cab or two going by in the street, the city receding while everything around them becomes close and dark. These two people taking their time with each other, listening to each other. So sexual and so sad. Thick with each of their pasts, though neither knows much of the other's. The pace of it, all that silence and what might be in there. Each of them desperate for entirely different reasons. For him, however, the last desperate scene, most certainly with a cunningly gifted actress slyly passing herself off as a novice writer. A scene constituting the opening of He and She, a play of desire and temptation and flirtation and agony—agony all the time—an improvisation best aborted and left to die. Chekhov has a story called "He and She." Other than the title, he remembers nothing of the story (perhaps there is no such story), though from words of advice about such storytelling in a letter Chekhov wrote while still quite young, he can remember the key sentence even now. A letter by a greatly admired writer he read in his twenties is still fresh to him, while the time and place of appointments he made the day before he now forgets completely. "The center of gravity," wrote Chekhov in 1886, "should reside in two: he and she. " It should. It has. It won't ever again.
My bag was where I had left it, half packed on the hotel dresser when I had rushed off earlier for West 71st Street. A light flashing on my phone indicated that I had a message. But I still didn't know from whom because once I'd got back to the room, all I'd done was to sit at the undersized desk by the window looking down on the 53rd Street traffic, and once again, on hotel stationery, set down as quickly as I could an exchange with Jamie that had not taken place. My chore book recorded what I did do and what I was scheduled to do as an aid to a failing memory; this scene of dialogue unspoken recorded what hadn't been done and was an aid to nothing, alleviated nothing, achieved nothing, and yet, just as on election night, it had seemed terribly necessary to write the instant I came through the door, the conversations she and I don't have more affecting even than the conversations we do have, and the imaginary "She" vividly at the middle of her character as the actual "she" will never be.
But isn't one's pain quotient shocking enough without fictional amplification, without giving things an intensity that is ephemeral in life and sometimes even unseen? Not for some. For some very, very few that amplification, evolving uncertainly out of nothing, constitutes their only assurance, and the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most.
3 Amy's Brain
WHEN AT LAST I lifted the phone to take the message, there was the voice I'd overheard while leaving the hospital the previous Thursday, the youthful voice of the aged Amy Bellette. "Nathan Zuckerman," she said, "I learned your whereabouts from a note left in my mailbox by a colossal pest named Richard Kliman. I don't know if you want to bother to respond or whether you even remember me. We met in Massachusetts in 1956. In the winter. I'd been E. I. Lonoff's student at Athena College. I was working in Cambridge. You were a fledgling writer at the Quahsay Colony. We both stayed as the Lonoffs' guests that night. A snowy evening in the Berkshires a very long time ago. I'll understand if you don't care to call back." She left her number and hung up.
Once again, not thinking, not even about Kliman's motive, which was inscrutable to me—what could he possibly expect to get out of putting Amy and me together? But I did not linger on Kliman, nor did I consider what could have prompted this frail woman who was either recovering or dying from brain cancer to contact me once she learned through Kliman t
hat I was nearby. Nor did I stop to wonder why it should be so easy provoking a response in me when I wanted only to undo the error of trying to ameliorate things and return home to resume living as more than my incapacities.
I dialed her number as though it were the code to restoring the fullness that once encompassed us all; I dialed as though spinning a lifetime counterclockwise were an act as natural and ordinary as resetting the timer on the kitchen stove. My heartbeat was discernible again, not because I was anxiously anticipating being within arm's reach of Jamie Logan but from envisioning Amy's black hair and dark eyes and the confident look on her face in 1956—from remembering her fluency and her charm and her quick mind, crammed back then with Lonoff and literature.
While the phone rang I recalled watching at the luncheonette as she removed the faded red rainhat to reveal her disfigured skull and the battering that bad luck had provided. "Too late," I'd thought, and got up and paid for my coffee and left without intruding. "Leave her to her fortitude."
The setting was a standard-issue Hilton hotel room, bland and drained of anything personal, but my determination to reach her had transported me nearly fifty years back, when gazing upon an exotic girl with a foreign accent seemed to an untried boy the answer to everything. I dialed the number now as a divided being no more or less integrated than anyone else, as the fledgling she'd met in 1956 and as the improbable onlooker (with the unforeseeable biography) that he had become by 2004. Yet never was I less free of that fledgling and his tangle of innocent idealism, precocious seriousness, excitable curiosity, and wanton desire, still comically ungratified, than while I waited for her to answer. When she did, I didn't know whom to picture at the other end of the line: Amy then or now. The voice conveyed the radiant freshness of a young girl about to break into a dance, but the head carved up by a surgeon's knife remained too grim an image to suppress.
"I saw you at a luncheonette on Madison and Ninety-sixth," Amy said. "I was too shy to speak. You're so important now."
"Am I? Not out where I live. How are you, Amy?" I asked, saying nothing about having been so stunned by the brutality of her transformation that I'd been too shy myself to approach her. "I remember very clearly that night we all met. The snowy night in i956. I didn't realize he was still married to his wife at the time of his death until I read the obituary. I thought he had married you."
