American Pastoral (Nathan Zuckerman)

by Philip Roth

  "Come to fuck Rita Cohen, have you?"

  "I've come," he said, "to deliver the money."

  "Let's f-f-f-fuck, D-d-d-dad."

  "If you have any feeling for what everyone is going through—"

  "Come off it, Swede. What do you know about 'feeling'?"

  "Why are you treating us like this?"

  "Boo-hoo. Tell me another. You came here to fuck me. Ask anybody. Why does a middle-aged capitalist dog come to a hotel room to meet a young piece of ass? To fuck her. Say it, just say, 'I came to fuck you. To fuck you good.' Say it, Swede."

  "I don't want to say any such thing. Stop all this, please."

  "I'm twenty-two years old. I do everything. I do it all. Say it, Swede."

  Could this lead to Merry, this onslaught of sneering and mockery? She could not insult him enough. Was she impersonating someone, acting from a script prepared beforehand? Or was he dealing with a person who could not be dealt with because she was mad? She was like a gang member. Was she the gang leader, this tiny white-faced thug? In a gang the authority is given to the one who is most ruthless. Is she the most ruthless or are there others who are worse, those others who are holding Merry captive right now? Maybe she is the most intelligent. Their actress. Maybe she is the most corrupt. Their budding whore. Maybe this is all a game to them, middle-class kids out on a spree.

  "Don't I suit you?" she asked. "No crude desires in a big guy like you? Come on, I'm not such a frightening person. You can't have met your match in little me. Look at you. Like a naughty boy. A child in terror of being disgraced. Isn't there anything else in there except your famous purity? I bet there is. I bet you've got yourself quite a pillar in there," she said. "The pillar of society."

  "What is the aim of all this talk? Will you tell me?"

  "The aim? Sure. To introduce you to reality. That's the aim."

  "And how much ruthlessness is necessary?"

  "To introduce you to reality? To get you to admire reality? To get you to partake of reality? To get you out there on the frontiers of reality? It ain't gonna be no picnic, jocko."

  He had braced himself not to become entangled in her loathing for him, not to be affronted by anything she said. He was prepared for the verbal violence and prepared, this time, not to react. She was not unintelligent and she was not afraid to say anything—he knew that much. But what he had not counted on was lust, an urge—he had not counted on being assailed by something other than the verbal violence. Despite the repugnance inspired by the sickly whiteness of her flesh, by the comically childish makeup and the cheap cotton clothes, half reclining on the bed was a young woman half reclining on a bed, and the Swede himself, the superman of certainties, was one of the people whom he could not deal with.

  "Poor thing," she said scornfully. "Little Rimrock rich boy. All locked up like that. Let's fuck, D-d-d-daddy. I'll take you to see your daughter. We'll wash your prick and zip up your fly and I'll take you to where she is."

  "Do I know you will? How do I know you will?"

  "Wait. See how things turn out. The worst is you get yourself some twenty-two-year-old gash. Come on, Dad. Come on over to the bed, D-d-d—"

  "Stop this! My daughter has nothing to do with any of this! My daughter has nothing to do with you! You little shit—you're not fit to wipe my daughter's shoes! My daughter had nothing to do with that bombing. You know that!"

  "Calm down, Swede. Calm down, lover boy. If you want to see your daughter as much as you say, you'll just calm down and come on over here and give Rita Cohen a nice big fuck. First the fuck, then the dough."

  She had raised her knees toward her chest and now, with either foot planted on the bed, she let her legs fall open. The floral skirt was gathered up by her hips and she wore no underwear.

  "There," she said softly. "Put it right there. Attack there. It's all permissible, baby."

  "Miss Cohen..." He did not know what to reach for in his estimable strongbox of reactions—this boiling up of something so visceral in with the rhetorical was not the attack he had prepared himself for. She'd brought to the hotel a stick of dynamite to throw. This was it. To blow him up.

  "What is it, dear?" she replied. "You must speak up like a big boy if you wish to be heard."

  "What does this display have to do with what has happened?"

  "Everything," she said. "You'll be surprised by what a very clear picture of things you're going to get from this display." She edged her two hands down onto her pubic hair. "Look at it," she told him and, by rolling the labia lips outward with her fingers, exposed to him the membranous tissue veined and mottled and waxy with the moist tulip sheen of flayed flesh. He looked away.

  "It's a jungle down there," she said. "Nothing in its place. Nothing on the left side like anything on the right side. How many extras are there? Nobody knows. Too many to count. There are glands down there. There's another hole. There are flaps. Don't you see what this has to do with what happened? Take a look. Take a good long look."

  "Miss Cohen," he said, fixing on her eyes, the one mark of beauty she was blessed with—a child's eyes, he discovered, a good child's eyes that had nothing in common with what she was up to, "my daughter is missing. Someone is dead."

  "You don't get the point. You don't get the point about anything. Look at it. Describe it to me. Have I got it wrong? What do you see? Do you see anything? No, you don't see anything. You don't see anything because you don't look at anything."

  "This makes no sense," he said. "You are subjugating no one by this. Only yourself."

  "You know what size it is? Let's see what kind of guesser you are. It's small. I'm guessing that it's a size four. In a ladies' size that's as small as cunts come. Anything smaller is a child's. Let's see how you'll fit into a teeny size four. Let's see if a size four doesn't provide just the nicest, warmest, snuggest fuck you've ever dreamed of fucking. You love good leather, you love fine gloves—stick it in. But slowly, slowly. Always the first time stick it in slowly."

  "Why don't you stop right now?"

  "Okay, if that's your decision, that you're such a brave man you won't even look at it, shut your eyes and step right up and smell it. Step right up and take a whiff. The swamp. It sucks you in. Smell it, Swede. You know what a glove smells like. It smells like the inside of a new car. Well, this is what life smells like. Smell this. Smell the inside of a brand-new pussy."

  Her dark child's eyes. Full of excitement and fun. Full of audacity. Full of unreasonableness. Full of oddness. Full of Rita. And only half of it was performance. To agitate. To infuriate. To arouse. She was in an altered state. The imp of upheaval. The genie of disaster. As though in being his tormentor and wrecking his family she had found the malicious meaning for her own existence. Kid Mayhem.

  "Your physical restraint is amazing," she said. "Isn't there anything that can get you off dead center? I didn't believe there were any left like you. Any other man would have been overcome by his hard-on hours ago. You are a throwback. Taste it."

  "You're not a woman. This does not make you a woman in any way. This makes you a travesty of a woman. This is loathsome." Rapidly firing back at her like a soldier under attack.

  "And a man who won't look, what's he a travesty of?" she asked him. "Isn't it just human nature to look? What about a man always averting his eyes because it's all too steeped in reality for him? Because nothing is in harmony with the world as he knows it? Thinks he knows it. Taste it! Of course it's loathsome, you great big Boy Scout—I'm depraved!" and merrily laughing off his refusal to lower his gaze by so much as an inch, she cried, "Here!"

  She must have reached inside herself with her hand, her hand must have disappeared inside her, because a moment later it was the whole of her hand that she was extending upward to him. The tips of her fingers bore the smell of her right up to him. That he could not shut out, the fecund smell released from within.

  "This'll unlock the mystery. You want to know what this has to do with what happened?" she said. "This'll tell you."
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br />   There was so much emotion in him, so much uncertainty, so much inclination and counterinclination, he was bursting so with impulse and counterimpulse that he could no longer tell which of them had drawn the line that he would not pass over. All his thinking seemed to be taking place in a foreign language, but still he knew enough not to pass over the line. He would not pick her up and hurl her against the window. He would not pick her up and throw her onto the floor. He would not pick her up for any reason. All the strength left in him would be marshaled to keep him paralyzed at the foot of the bed. He would not go near her.

  The hand she'd offered him she now carried slowly up to her face, making loony, comical little circles in the air as she approached her mouth. Then, one by one, she slipped each finger between her lips to cleanse it. "You know what it tastes like? Want me to tell you? It tastes like your d-d-d-daughter."

  Here he bolted the room. With all his strength.

  That was it. Ten, twelve minutes and it was over. By the time the FBI responded to his phone call and got to the hotel, she was gone, as was the briefcase he had abandoned. He'd bolted not from the childlike cruelty and meanness, not even from the vicious provocation, but from something that he could no longer name.

  Faced with something he could not name, he had done everything wrong.

  Five years pass. In vain, the Rimrock Bomber's father waits for Rita to reappear at his office. He did not take her photograph, did not save her fingerprints—no, whenever they met, for those few minutes, she, a child, was boss. And now she's disappeared. With an agent and a sketch artist to assist him, he is asked to construct a picture of Rita for the FBI, while alone he studies the daily paper and the weekly newsmagazines, searching for the real thing. He waits for Rita's picture to turn up. She is bound to be there. Bombs are going off everywhere. In Boulder, Colorado, bombs destroy a Selective Service office and the ROTC headquarters at the University of Colorado. In Michigan there are explosions at the university and dynamite attacks on a police headquarters and the draft board. In Wisconsin a bomb destroys a National Guard armory; a small plane flies over and drops two jars filled with gunpowder on an ammunition plant. College buildings are attacked with bombs at the University of Wisconsin. In Chicago a bomb destroys the memorial statue to the policemen killed in the Haymarket riots. In New Haven someone firebombs the home of the judge in the trial of nineteen Black Panthers accused of planning to destroy department stores, the police station, and the New Haven Railroad. Buildings are bombed at universities in Oregon, Missouri, and Texas. A Pittsburgh shopping mall, a Washington nightclub, a Maryland courtroom—all bombed. In New York there are a series of explosions—at the United Fruit Line pier, at the Marine Midland Bank, at Manufacturers Trust, at General Motors, at the Manhattan headquarters of Mobil Oil, IBM, and General Telephone and Electronics. A downtown Manhattan Selective Service center is bombed. The criminal courts building is bombed. Three Molotov cocktails go off in a Manhattan high school. Bombs explode in safe-deposit boxes in banks in eight cities. She has to have set off one of them. They'll find Rita, catch her red-handed—catch the whole bunch of them—and she will lead them to Merry.

  In his pajamas, in their kitchen, he sits watching every night for her soot-covered face at the window. He sits alone in the kitchen, waiting for his enemy, Rita Cohen, to return.

  A TWA jet is bombed in Las Vegas. A bomb goes off on the Queen Elizabeth. A bomb goes off in the Pentagon—in a women's restroom on the fourth floor of an air force area of the Pentagon! The bomber leaves a note: "Today we attacked the Pentagon, the center of the American military command. We are reacting at a time when growing U.S. air and naval shelling are being carried out against the Vietnamese; while U.S. mines and warships are used to block the harbors of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam; while plans for even more escalation are being made in Washington." The Democratic Republic of Vietnam—if I hear that from her once again, Seymour, I swear, I'll go out of my mind. It's their daughter! Merry has bombed the Pentagon.

  "D-d-dad!" Above the noise of the sewing machines he hears her crying for him in his office. "D-d-d-daddy!"

  Two years after her disappearance, there is a bomb blast in the most elegant Greek Revival house on the most peaceful residential street in Greenwich Village—three explosions and a fire destroy the old four-story brick townhouse. The house is owned by a prosperous New York couple who are on vacation in the Caribbean. After the explosion, two dazed young women stumble, bruised and lacerated, out of the building. One of them, who is naked, is described as being between sixteen and eighteen. The two are sheltered by a neighbor. She gives them clothes to wear, but while the neighbor rushes off to the bombed-out building to see what more she can do, the two young women disappear. One is the twenty-five-year-old daughter of the owners of the townhouse, a member of a violent revolutionary faction of the Students for a Democratic Society called the Weathermen. The other is unidentified. The other is Rita. The other is Merry. They've roped her into this too!

  He waits all night in the kitchen for his daughter and the girl Weatherman. It is safe now—the surveillance of the house, of the factory, the monitoring of the phones, were dropped more than a year before. It's okay now to show up. He defrosts some soup to feed them. He thinks back to when she had begun to lean toward the sciences. Because of Dawn's cattle, she thought she'd be a vet. It was the stuttering, too, that sent her into the sciences, because when she was focused and concentrated on one of her science projects, doing close work, the stuttering always abated a little. No parent in the world could have seen the connection to a bomb. Everyone would have missed it, not just him. Her interest in science was totally innocent. Everything was.

  The body of a young man found in the rubble of the burned-out house is identified the next day as that of a one-time Columbia student, a veteran of violent antiwar demonstrations, the founder of a radical SDS splinter group, the Mad Dogs. The following day the second young woman who fled the bomb scene is identified: another radical activist but not Merry—the twenty-six-year-old daughter of a left-wing New York lawyer. Even worse is news of another corpse discovered in the rubble at the Village townhouse: the torso of a young woman. "The body of the second victim of the blast was not immediately identified and Dr. Elliott Gross, associate medical examiner, said, 'It will take some time before we have any idea who she is."'

  Alone at the kitchen table, her father knows who she is. Sixty sticks of dynamite, thirty blasting caps, a cache of homemade bombs—twelve-inch pipes packed with dynamite—are found only twenty feet from the body. It was a pipe packed with dynamite that blew up Hamlin's. She was putting the components of a new bomb together, did something wrong, and blew up the townhouse. First Hamlin's, now herself. She did do it, gave the quaint town its big surprise—and this is the result. "Dr. Gross confirmed that the torso had a number of puncture wounds, caused by nails, giving credence to the report from the police source that the bombs were apparently being wrapped to act more as antipersonnel weapons than just as explosive devices."

  The next day more explosions are reported in Manhattan: three midtown buildings bombed simultaneously at about one-forty A.M. The torso's not hers! Merry is alive! Hers is not the body skewered by nails and blown apart! "As a result of the telephoned warning police arrived at the building at 1:20 and evacuated 24 janitors and other workers before the explosion occurred." The midtown bomber and the Rimrock Bomber must be one and the same. Had she known enough to telephone before her first bomb was set to go off, no one would have been killed and she would not be wanted for murder. So at least she has learned something, at least she is alive and there is reason to be sitting every night in the kitchen waiting to see her at the window with Rita.

  He reads about the parents of the two young women who are missing and wanted for questioning in the townhouse explosion. The mother and father of one of them appeal to their daughter on television to disclose how many people were in the building when it exploded. "If there were no others," the mother says, "the
search could be called off until the surrounding walls are removed. I believe in you," the mother tells the missing daughter, who, with SDS comrades, used the house as a bomb factory, "and know that you would not wish to add more sorrow to this tragedy. Please, please telephone or wire or have someone call for you with this information. There is nothing else that we need to know except that you are safe, and nothing we need to say except that we love you and want desperately to help."

  The very words spoken to the press and television by the father of the Rimrock Bomber when she disappeared. We love you and want to help. "Asked if he had been communicating well' with his daughter, the father of the townhouse bomber replied," and no less truthfully or miserably than the father of the Rimrock Bomber answering a similar question, "'As parents, we'd have to say no, not in recent years.'" His daughter is quoted by him as fighting for what Merry too—in her dinner-table outbursts decrying her selfish mother and father and their bourgeois life—proclaimed as the motive for her own struggle: "To change the system and give power to the 90 percent of the people who have no economic or political control now."

  The father of the other missing girl is said by the police investigator to be "very uncommunicative." He says only, "I have no knowledge concerning her whereabouts." And the father of the Rimrock Bomber believes him, understands his uncommunicativeness all too well, knows better than any other father in America the burden of anguish concealed by the emotionless formulation "I have no knowledge concerning her whereabouts." If it hadn't happened to him, he would probably have marveled at the tight-lipped facade. But he knows the truth is that the missing girl's parents are drowning exactly as he is, drowning day and night in inadequate explanations.

  A third body is found in the townhouse rubble, the body of an adult male. Then, a week later, a statement appears in the paper, attributed to the mother of the second missing girl, that dissipates his compassion for both sets of parents. Asked about her daughter, the mother says, "We know she is safe."