The Anatomy Lesson

by Philip Roth

  Bucking as best he could what he’d had to drink with Jaga and to smoke with Gloria, he got himself upright in his chair and with his notebook open on the lapboard and the collar fixed around his neck, tried to invent what he still didn’t know. He thought of his little exile next to hers. Hers next to Dr. Kotler’s. Exile like theirs is an illness, too; either it goes away in two or three years or it’s chronic and you’ve got it for good. He tried to imagine a Poland, a past, a daughter, a lover, a postcard, as though his cure would follow if only he began anew as a writer of stories wholly unlike his own. The Sorrows of Jaga. But he couldn’t get anywhere. Though people are weeping in every corner of the earth from torture and ruin and cruelty and loss, that didn’t mean that he could make their stories his, no matter how passionate and powerful they seemed beside his trivialities. One can be overcome by a story the way a reader is. but a reader isn’t a writer. Desperation doesn’t help either: it takes longer than one night to make a story, even when it’s written in a sitting. Besides, if Zuckerman wrote about what he didn’t know, who then would write about what he did know?

  Only what did he know? The story he could dominate and to which his feelings had been enslaved had ended. Her stories weren’t his stories and his stories were no longer his stories either.

  To prepare himself to leave his playmat and travel eight hundred miles to Chicago—when the farthest he’d been in a year was to get a pain suppressor out on Long Island—he first spent fifteen minutes under the new hundred-dollar shower head guaranteed by Hammacher Schlemmer to pummel you into health with hot water. All that came out was a fainthearted drizzle. Some neighbor in the old brownstone running a dishwasher or filling a tub. He emerged looking sufficiently boiled but feeling no better than when he’d gone under. He frequently emerged feeling no better even when the pressure was way up and the water gushed forth as prescribed. He smeared the steam from the medicine-chest mirror and contemplated his reddened physique. No invidious organic enemy visible, no stigmata at all; only the upper torso, once a point of pride, looking just as frail as it had after the regular morning shower, the one to offset the stiffness of sleep. On the advice of the physiotherapist, he stood under scalding showers three times a day. The heat, coupled with the pounding of the water, was supposed to unglue the spasm and serve as a counterirritant to the pain. “Hyperstimulation analgesia”—principle of the acupuncture needles, and of the ice packs that he applied between scalding showers, and of jumping off the roof of the Stanhope Hotel.

  While drying himself, he probed with his fingertips until he’d located the worst of the muscular soreness midway along the upper left trapezius, the burning tenderness over the processes and to the right of the third cervical vertebra, and the movement pain at the intersection of the long head of the left biceps tendon. The intercostals between the eighth and ninth ribs were only moderately sore, a little improved really since he’d last checked back there two hours before, and the aching heaviness in the left deltoid was manageable, more or less—what a pitcher might feel having thrown nine innings on a cold September night. If it were only the deltoid that hurt, he’d go through life a happy man; if he could somehow contract with the Source of All Pain to lake upon himself, even unto death, the trapezial soreness, or the cervical rawness—any one of his multitude of symptoms in exchange for permanent relief from everything else…

  He sprayed the base of his neck and the shoulder girdle with the morning’s second frosting of ethyl chloride (gift of his last osteopath). He refastened the collar (fined by the neurologist) to support his neck. At breakfast he’d taken a Percodan (rheumatologist’s grudging prescription) and debated with himself—craven sufferer vs. responsible adult—about popping a second so soon. Over the months he’d tried keeping himself to four Percodan pills on alternate days to avoid getting hooked. Codeine constipated him and made him drowsy, while Percodan not only halved the pain but provided a nice gentle invigorating wallop to a woefully enfeebled sense of well-being. Percodan was to Zuckerman what sucking stones were to Molloy—without ‘em he couldn’t go on.

  Despite dire warnings about the early hour from his former self, he wouldn’t have minded a drag on a joint: eight hundred miles of traveling too nerve-racking to contemplate otherwise. He kept a dozen handy in the egg compartment of the refrigerator, and a loose ounce (obtained by Diana from the Finch pharmacopoeia) in a plastic bag in the butter compartment. One long drag in case he hailed a taxi with no shocks: all he seemed to ride in with his neck brace were cars shipped secondhand from Brazzaville Yellow Cab. Though he couldn’t depend upon marijuana to cool things down like Percodan, a few puffs did manage to detach him, sometimes for as long as half an hour, from engrossment with the pain and nothing else. By the time he got to the airport the second Percodan (precipitously swallowed despite all the hemming and hawing) would have begun its percolation. and he’d have the rest of the joint for further assistance on the flight. Two quick puffs—after the first long drag—and then, carefully, he pinched out the joint and dropped it for safekeeping into a matchbox in his jacket pocket.

  He packed his bag: gray suit, black shoes, black socks. From inside his closet door he chose one of his sober foulards, then from the dresser one of his blue buttondown shirts. Uniform for medical-school interview—for all public outings going on twenty-five years. To fight baldness he packed the hormone drops, the pink No. 7 dressing, a jar of Anton’s specially prepared conditioner, and a bottle of his shampoo. To fight pain he packed the electronic suppressor, three brands of pills, a sealed new spray-cap bottle of ethyl chloride, his large ice bag, two electric heating pads (the narrow, nooselike pad that wrapped around his throat, the long, heavy pad that draped over his shoulders), the eleven joints left in the refrigerator, and a monogrammed Tiffany’s silver flask (gift of Gloria Galanter) that he filled to the iip with hundred-proof Russian vodka (gift of husband Marvin’s firm: case of Stolichnaya and case of champagne for his fortieth birthday). Last he packed Dr. Kotler’s pillow. He used to travel to Chicago with a pen and a pad and a book to read.

  He wouldn’t phone lo say where he was going until he got out to LaGuardia. He wouldn’t even bother then. It wasn’t going to require very much teasing from any of his women to deter him, not if he thought of the Brazzaville taxis and the East River Drive potholes and the inevitable delay at the airport. Suppose he had to stand in a line. Suppose he had to carry his suitcase into the terminal. He had trouble only that morning carrying his toothbrush up to his mouth. And of all he couldn’t handle, the suitcase would be just the beginning. Sixteen hours of organic chemistry? twelve of biology? eight of physics? He couldn’t follow an article in Scientific American. With his math he couldn’t even understand the industrial bookkeeping in Business Week. A science student? He wasn’t serious.

  There was also some question as to whether he was sane, or was entering that stage of chronic ailing known as the Hysterical Search for the Miraculous Cure. That might be all that Chicago was about: purifying pilgrimage to a sacred place. If so, beware—astrology lies just around the corner. Worse, Christianity. Yield to the hunger for medical magic and you will be carried to the ultimate limit of human foolishness, to the most preposterous of all the great pipe dreams devised by ailing mankind—to the Gospels, to (he pillow of our leading dolorologist, the voodoo healer Dr. Jesus Christ.

  To give his muscles a rest from the effort of packing his bag, and to recover the courage to fly to Chicago—or, alternatively, to undo the grip of the cracked idea that would really send him flying (off the Stanhope roof)—he stretched across the unmade sheets in the dark cube of his bedroom. The room jutted off the parlor-floor apartment into the enclosed well of the rear courtyard. In an otherwise handsome, comfortable flat, it was the one gloomy room, undersized, underheated, only a shade more sunlight than a crypt. The two unwashable windows were permanently grated against burglars. The side window was further obscured by the trunk of the courtyard’s dying tree, and the rear window half-blinded by an a
ir conditioner. A tangle of extension cords lay coiled on the carpet—for the pain suppressor and the heating pads. Half the kitchen glasses had accumulated on the bedside table—water to wash down his pills—along with a cigarette-rolling machine and a packet of cigarette papers. On a piece of paper toweling were scattered stray green flecks of cannabis weed. The two open books, one atop the other, had been bought secondhand at the Strand: a 1920 English text on orthopedic medicine, with horrific surgical photography, and the fourteen hundred pages of Gray’s Anatomy, a copy of the 1930 edition. He’d been studying medical books for months, and not so as to bone up for any admissions committee. The jailhouse lawyer stores his well-thumbed library under the bed and along the cell walls; so does the patient serving a stretch to which he thinks himself illegally sentenced.

  The cassette tape recorder was on the unoccupied half of the double bed, just where he’d fallen asleep with it at 4 a.m. So was his file folder on Milton Appel, which he’d spent his night clutching instead of Diana. He’d phoned and begged her to stay with him after Gloria had gone back to Marvin and Jaga had left in tears for the Bronx, and after he’d flailed about between his chair and the floor trying to dream up, from Jaga’s clues, some story that was hers and not his. Hopeless—and not only because of the grass and the vodka. If you get out of yourself you can’t be a writer because the personal ingredient is what gets you going, and if you hang on to the personal ingredient any longer you’ll disappear right up your asshole. Dante got out of hell easier than you’ll escape Zuckerman-Carnovsky. You don’t want to represent her Warsaw—it’s what her Warsaw represents that you want: suffering that isn’t semi-comical, the world of massive historical pain instead of this pain in the neck. War, destruction, anti-Semitism, totalitarianism, literature on which the fate of a culture hinges, writing at the very heart of the upheaval, a martyrdom more to the point—some point, any point—than bearing the cocktail-party chitchat as a guest on Dick Cavett. Chained to self-consciousness. Chained to retrospection. Chained to my dwarf drama till I die. Stories now about Milton Appel? Fiction about losing my hair? I can’t face it. Anybody’s hair but mine. “Diana, come over, spend the night.” “No.” “Why no? Why not?” “Because I’m not going to suck you off for ten consecutive hours on your playmat and then listen to you for ten hours more screaming about this Milton Appel.” “But that’s all over.” But she’d hung up: he’d become another of her terrible men.

  He flipped on the tape recorder and rewound the side. Then he pushed “Play.” When he heard his voice, spooky and lugubrious because of a defect in the audio mechanism, he thought: I might as well have depressed “Regress.” This is where I came in.

  “Dear Professor Appel,” intoned his warbling ghost, “my friend Ivan Felt sent on to me your odd request for him to ask me to write an Op Ed piece on behalf of Israel. Maybe it wasn’t so odd. Maybe you’ve changed your mind about me and the Jews since you distinguished for Elsa Stromberg between anti-Semites like Goebbels (to whose writing she compared my own in the tetters column of Inquiry) and those like Zuckerman who just don’t like us. It was a most gracious concession.”

  He pushed “Stop,” then “Fast Forward,” and then tried “Play” again. He couldn’t be so stupid as he sounded. The problem was the speed of the tape.

  “You write to Felt that we “grown-ups’ should not kid ourselves (it’s okay if we kid students’) about ‘the differences between characters and authors.’ However, would this not seem to contradict—”

  He lay there listening till the reel ended. Anybody who says “Would this not seem to contradict” should be shot. You said I said. He said you said. She said I said he said you said. All in this syrupy, pedantic, ghostly drone. My life in art.

  No, it wasn’t a fight he needed; what he desperately needed was a reconciliation, and not with Milton Appel. He still couldn’t imagine having fallen out with his brother. Certainly it happens, yet when you hear about families in which brothers don’t speak it’s so awful, so stupid, it seems so impossible. He couldn’t believe that a book could seem no more to Henry than a murder weapon. It was too dull a point of view for a man of Henry’s intelligence to sustain for four years. Perhaps he was only waiting for Nathan, as the elder, to write him a letter or give him a ring.

  Zuckerman could not believe that Henry, the sweetest and most thoughtful kid. burdened always with too big. too kind a heart, could really continue hating him year after year.

  Without any evidence, Zuckerman located his true enemy in Carol. Yes, they were the ones who knew how to hate and keep hating, the mice who couldn’t look you straight in the eye. Don’t touch him, she’d told Henry, or you’ll wind up a caricature in a book—so will I, so will the children. Or maybe it was the money: when families split apart like this, it’s usually not literature that does it. Carol resented that Nathan had been left half of Henry’s parents’ estate, Nathan, who’d made a million by defaming his benefactors, left a hundred thousand bucks after taxes. Oh, but that wasn’t Carol. Carol was a liberal, responsible, well-meaning woman whose enlightened tolerance was her pride. Yet if nothing was holding Henry back, why no message even on Nathan’s birthday? He’d been getting birthday calls from Henry since his first year at college. “Well, how does it feel, Natey, to be seventeen?” To be twenty-Five. To be thirty. “Forty?” Zuckerman would have said—”It would feel better, Hesh, if we cut the crap and had lunch.” But the biggest of birthdays came and went, and no call or card or telegram from the remaining member of his family; just Marvin’s champagne in the morning and Marvin’s wife in the afternoon, and in the early evening, drunken Jaga, her cheek crushed to the playmat and her rear raised to face him, and crying out, “Nail me, nail me, crucify me with your Jewish prick!” even while Zuckerman wondered who had been more foolish, Henry for failing to seize the occasion of the milestone to declare a truce or himself for expecting that his turning forty should automatically unburden Henry of what it meant having Nathan Zuckerman as his brother.