by Philip Roth
Now, not a day had passed since they’d moved to New Jersey—some days, not even an hour—when she had not plotted running away from him. But even when she looked down at the holes punched into her skin by the tines of his fork and at her blood seeping out of them, even then she could find neither the strength nor the weakness to abandon him to his illness and run for her life. Instead she began to scream at him that what was enraging him was the failure of the Mexican cure—the charlatan was the phony doctor in Mexico, all of whose claims had been filthy lies. At the root of his rage was the cancer. And that was when he told her that it was the writer who had given him the cancer—contending for three decades with the treachery of that writer was what had brought him, at only fifty-eight, face-to-face with death. And that was when even the self- sacrificing devotion of Nurse Possesski gave way and she announced that she could no longer live with someone who was out of his mind—she was leaving!
“For him!” he exclaimed in a triumphant voice, as though it were the cure for his cancer that she had finally revealed. “Leaving the one who loves you for that lying son of a bitch who fucks you every which way and then disappears!”
She said no, but of course it was true—the dream of being rescued was of being rescued by me; it was the very dream she’d enacted on the night she’d pushed Walesa’s six-pointed star beneath the door of my hotel room in Arab Jerusalem and pleaded to be given refuge by the original whose existence so inflamed the duplicate.
“I’m going! I’m getting out of here, Philip, before something worse happens! I cannot live with a savage child!”
But when she rose from the breakfast table, at long last primed to break the bonds of this inexplicable martyrdom, he sobbed hysterically, “Oh, Mommy, I’m sorry,” and tumbled to his knees on the kitchen floor. Pressing her bleeding hand against his mouth, he told her, “Forgive me—I promise I’ll never stab you again!” And then this man who was all malaise, this unshameable, intemperate, conniving madman driven as recklessly by ungovernable compulsion as by meticulous, minute-by-minute miscalculation, this mutilated victim who was all incompleteness and deficiency, whose every scheme was a fiasco and against whose hyperbole she was, as always, undefended, began to lick the wound he had inflicted. Grunting with contrition, growling showily with remorse, he lapped thirstily away at her with his tongue as though the blood oozing out of this woman’s veins were the very elixir for which he’d been searching to prolong the calamity that was his life.
Because by this time he didn’t weigh much over a hundred pounds, it wasn’t that difficult for someone with her strength to lift him off the floor and virtually carry him in her arms up the stairs to the bed. And while she sat beside him there, holding his trembling hands in hers, he revealed where he really came from and who he really was, a story irreconcilable with everything he had told her before. She refused to believe him and, in her letter to me, would not repeat even one detail of the things to which he pleaded guilty. He had to have been delirious, she wrote, because, if he wasn’t, then she would have had to have him either arrested or institutionalized. When, at last, there was nothing disgraceful that a man could do that was left for him to confess to, darkness had enveloped their street and it was time to feed him dinner with her throbbing bandaged hand. But first, using a sponge and a basin of warm water, she gently bathed him right there in the bed and, as she did every night, massaged his legs until he purred. What did it matter in the end who he was and what he had done, or who he thought he was and what he thought he had done or was capable of doing or was emboldened enough to have done or was ill enough to have imagined he had done or imagined he must have done to have made himself fatally ill? Pure or depraved, harmless or ruthless, would-be Jewish savior or thrill-seeking, duplicitous, perverted betrayer, he was suffering, and she was there to assuage that suffering as she had been from the start. This woman whom he had stabbed in the hand at breakfast (while aiming for her face) put him to sleep—without his even having to ask—with a sweetly milking, all-consuming blow job that blotted out all his words, or so she said, or so said whoever had told her what to say in that letter in order to warn me off ever writing a single sentence for publication about these coarse, barbaric irrationalists of mine, these two catastrophists sustained by their demonic conflict and the theatrical, maddening trivia of psychosis. Her letter’s message to me was this: Find your comedy elsewhere. You bow out, and we’ll bow out. He’ll be as good as dead. But dare to ridicule either one of us in a book, and we’ll never leave you alone again. You have met your match in Pipik and Jinx, both of whom are alive and well. And this message, of course, was the very antithesis of the assurance that the letter had been conceived to provide.
The morning after the reconciliation, everything that worked to drain away her courage started up once again, even though it seemed at first that the shock even to him of the savagery with that fork might have at last reined in his desperation. He addressed her, on that morning after, “in a soothing voice like yours,” she wrote, a voice contained, modulated, expressive of all that she longed for and sometimes secretly dreamed of finding by taking the unthinkable revenge of fleeing to the sanctuary of me.
He informed her that they were leaving New Jersey. She was to go out to the backyard and burn in the barbecue pit the four first-draft chapters of His Way. That abhorrent obsession was over. They were going.
She was ecstatic—now she could stay on at her task of keeping him alive (as if, she admitted, she could ever have left him to die in agony by himself). Making a life with his namesake was a fairy tale anyway. I, as he’d reminded her, had wanted her “only for sex” while what he wanted from her, with all the scorching intensity that only the dying can feel, alone and resourceless on their island of fear, was “everything,” she wrote, “everything” that she had in her to give to a patient.
They were leaving New Jersey to move to the Berkshires, where he would write the book on Diasporism that would be his legacy to the Jews.
Since dyslexic Wanda had never read a page I or any other novelist had written, it wasn’t until they’d settled down in western Massachusetts that she learned it was where I’d located the home of the wearily heroic E. I. Lonoff, whose example of Flaubertian anchoritism confirms the highest literary ideals of writer-worshiping Nathan Zuckerman, the young novice of The Ghost Writer. However, if she could not understand how, having begun by stealing my identity, Pipik was now bent on further compounding the theft by turning into parody (his way) the self-obliterating dedication of the selfless Lonoff, she did know that I made my home less than an hour south, in Connecticut’s northwestern hills. And the provocation my proximity was bound to be was enough to reawaken her dread, and with that, of course, the inextinguishable fantasies of breaking free that the edifying encounter with me had inspired. (I should never have found her irresistible, I thought. It didn’t take a genius to foresee this.)
“Oh, darling,” she cried, “forget him, I beg you. We’ll burn His Way and forget he ever existed! You can’t leave where he was born to go to live where he’s living now! You can’t keep following him like this! Our time together is too precious for that! Being anywhere near this man drives you nuts! You’ll only fill up with poison again! Being there will just make you crazy again!”
“Being near him now can only make me sane,” he told her, as senseless on the subject as ever. “Being near him can only make me strong. Being near him is the antidote—it’s how I am going to beat this thing. Being near him is the cure.”
“As far from him as we can!” she pleaded.
“As close to him as we can,” he replied.
“Tempting fate!” she cried.
“Not at all,” he answered. “See him if you want to.”
“I didn’t mean me and fate—I meant you. First you tell me he gave you the cancer, now you tell me he’s the cure! But he has nothing to do with it either way. Forget him! Forgive him!”
“But I do forgive him. I forgive him for who he is, I forg
ive myself for who I am, I even forgive you for who you are. I repeat to you—see him if you wish. See him again, seduce him again—”
“I don’t want to! You’re my man, Philip, my only man! I wouldn’t be here otherwise!”
“Did you say—did I hear you right? Did you actually say ‘You’re my Manson, Philip’?”
“My man! Man! You’re my M-A-N!”
“No. You said ‘Manson.’ Why did you say Manson?”
“I did not say Manson.”
“You said I was your Charles Manson, and I would like to know why.”
“But I didn’t!”
“Didn’t what? Say Charles or say Manson? If you didn’t say Charles but only Manson, did you mean merely to say man-son, did you only mean I was your infantile, helpless creep, your ‘savage child,’ as you told me yesterday, did you mean only to insult me like that again first thing today, or did you mean what you meant—that you live with me like those zombie girls who worshiped Manson’s tattooed dick? Do I terrorize you like Charles Manson? Do I Svengali you and enslave you and scare you into submission—is that the reason you remain loyal to a man who is already half a corpse?”
“But that’s what’s doing this to you—death!”
“It’s you who’s doing this to me. You said I was your Charles Manson!”
And here she screamed, “You are! Yesterday! All those horrible, horrible stories! You are! You’re worse!”
“I see,” he replied in my soothing voice, the voice that only minutes earlier had awakened so much hope in her. “So this is what comes of the fork. You haven’t forgiven me at all. You ask me to forgive him for his diabolical hatred of me, and I do, but you cannot find it in your heart to forgive four little pinpricks on the back of your hand. I tell horrible stories, horrible, horrible stories, and you believe me.”
“I didn’t believe you! I definitely did not believe you.”
“So, you don’t believe me. But you never believe me. I can’t win, even with you. I tell you the truth and you don’t believe me, I tell you lies and you do believe me—”
“Oh, death is doing this, death—this isn’t you!”
“Oops—not me? Who then? Shall I guess? Can’t you think for one single moment about anybody but him? Is looking at me and thinking of him what gets you through our awful life? Is that what you imagine in the bed, is that how you are able, without vomiting, to satisfy my repellent desires—by pretending you’re in Jerusalem satisfying his? What’s the stumbling block? That his is real and mine is fake? That he is healthy and I am sick? That I will die and disappear and he will live on forever through all those wonderful books?”
Later in the morning, while he was sleeping off that tirade in their bed, she did as he had instructed and, in the barbecue pit on the back lawn, destroyed the unfinished manuscript of His Way. She knew that even if he awakened he was far too depleted to haul himself over to the window to watch her, and so, before dumping the contents of his briefcase straight into the flames, she quickly looked to read what she could of his exposé of me. Only there was nothing there. All the pages were blank.
And so too were the tapes on which he’d claimed to have been recording his Diasporism book while she was off working her hospital shift during those last months of his life in the Berkshires. Six weeks after his death, though she still feared that hearing his disembodied voice might unleash those paroxysms of grief that had nearly killed her in the days after she’d relinquished his body to be buried by the Jews, she found herself one night yearning so for his presence that she had sat down with the tape recorder at the kitchen table and discovered that the tapes were blank as well. Alone in that remote little mountainside house, vainly listening for his voice on one tape after another, sitting all night and into the morning playing side after side and hearing absolutely nothing—and remembering too those mystifyingly empty pages that she had burned to cinders that awful morning in New Jersey—she understood, as people will often fully perceive the suffering of their loved ones only after they are gone, that I was the barrier to everything. He had not been lying about that. I was the obstacle to the fulfillment of his most altruistic dreams, choking off the torrent of all the potential originally his. At the end of his life, despite everything that he had been ordained to tell the Jews to prevent their destruction, the thought of my implacable hostility had impeded him from telling them anything, just as the menace of his Mansonish hatred (if I understood this letter correctly) was now supposed to stifle me.
Dear Jinx [I wrote],
You have my sympathy. I don’t know how you survived intact such a harrowing experience. Your stamina, patience, endurance, tolerance, loyalty, courage, forbearance, strength, compassion, your unwavering devotion while watching him struggle helplessly in the death grip of all those deep-buried devils that were tearing to pieces the last of his life—it’s all no less astonishing than the ordeal itself. You must feel that you’ve awakened from a colossal nightmare even as you continue to grieve over your loss.
I’ll never understand the excesses he was driven to by me—or by his mystique of me—all the while pleading the highest motives. Was it enchantment, that I cast a spell? It felt the other way round to me. Was it all about death and his struggle to elude it—to elude it as me, to be born again in me, to consign dying to me? I’d like to be able someday to understand what he was saving himself from. Though maybe to understand that is not my duty.
Recently I listened again to the so-called A-S.A. workout tape that found its way into my tape recorder back in my Jerusalem hotel. What was that chilling thought-stream about? This time round I wondered if maybe he wasn’t Jewish at all but a pathological Gentile, stuck with the Jewish look and out to exact unbridled revenge on the whole vile subspecies as represented by me. Could that possibly be true? Of his entire arsenal of stupid stunts, that sham—if such it was—remains the most sinister, demented, and, alas, compelling … yes, aesthetically alluring to me in its repugnant, sickish, Céline-like way. (Céline was also unhinged, a genius French novelist and clamorous anti-Semite circa World War II whom I try hard to despise—and whose reckless books I teach to my students) But what then to conclude? All I know for sure is that the dreadful wound that never healed preceded my appearance as a writer, I’m certain of that—I’m not, I can’t be, the terrible original blow. All the dizzying energy, all the chaos and the frenzy behind the pointlessness of contending with me, points to something else.
That he was immobilized as an author is not my fault, either. The deathbed tapes were blank and all those pages empty for very good reasons other than fear of my blockading publication. It’s writing that closes people off from writing. The power of the paranoid to project doesn’t necessarily extend to the page, bursting though he may be with ideologies to save the imperiled and with exposés to unfrock the fakes. The inexhaustible access to falsification that fortifies paranoidal rage has nothing in common with the illusion that lifts a book free of the ground.
His Way was never his to write. His Way was what lay in his way, the crowning impossibility to the unrealizable task of burying the shame of what shamed him most. Can you tell me what was so unbearably humiliating about whoever he originally was? Could what he began as have been any more scandalous or any less legitimate than what he became in the effort to escape it by becoming somebody else? The seeming paradox is that he could go so shamelessly overboard in the guise of me while, if my guess is right, he was all but annihilated by shame as himself. In this, actually, he came closer to the experience of authorship than he ever did thinking about writing those books and enacted, albeit back to front, a strategy for clinging to sanity that wouldn’t be unfamiliar to many novelists.
But is anything I’m saying of interest to you? Maybe all you want to know is if I want to get together again now that he’s finally out of the way. I could take a drive up some afternoon. You could show me his grave. I wouldn’t mind seeing it, despite the oddness of reading the name on his stone. I wouldn’t mind seeing
you, either. Your abundant forthcomingness left a strong impression. The temptation is enormous to mine you for every last bit of information you can supply about him, though that, admittedly, isn’t the enticement that comes most pictorially to mind.
Well, I’d love to get together with you—yet I can’t think of a worse idea for either one of us. He may have been resonant with fragments of my inner life but, as best I can figure it out, that wasn’t the charge he carried for you. Rather, there was a macabre, nothing-to-lose, staring-death-in-the-face kind of manhood there, some macabre sense of freedom he had because he was dying—willing to take all kinds of risks and do anything because there’s so little time left—that appeals to a certain type of woman, a macabre manliness that makes the woman romantically selfless. I understand the seduction, I think: something about the way he takes that leads you to give the way you give. But it’s something about the frighteningly enticing way you give that leads me to wonder about what you take in exchange for the crazy burden. In short, you’ll have to complete the recovery from anti-Semitism without me. I’m sure you’ll find that, for a woman so willing to sacrifice herself so much, for a nurse with a body and soul like yours, with your hands, your health, your illness, there will be plenty of Jewish men around who will volunteer to help you on your way to loving our people as you should. But I’m too old for heavy work like that. It’s already taken up enough of my life.