The Dying Animal

by Philip Roth

  We went down the spiral steel staircase to my library stacks, and I found a large book of Velázquez reproductions, and we sat side by side and turned the pages for fifteen minutes, a stirring quarter hour in which we both learned something—she, for the first time, about Velázquez, and I, anew, about the delightful imbecility of lust. All this talk! I show her Kafka, Velázquez ... why does one do this? Well, you have to do something. These are the veils of the dance. Don't confuse it with seduction. This is not seduction. What you're disguising is the thing that got you there, the pure lust. The veils veil the blind drive. Talking this talk, you have a misguided sense, as does she, that you know what you're dealing with. But it's not as though you're interviewing a lawyer or hiring a doctor and that whatever's said along the way is going to change your course of action. You know you want it and you know you're going to do it and nothing is going to stop you. Nothing is going to be said here that's going to change anything.

  The great biological joke on people is that you are intimate before you know anything about the other person. In the initial moment you understand everything. You are drawn to each other's surface initially, but you also intuit the fullest dimension. And the attraction doesn't have to be equivalent: she's attracted to one thing, you to the other. It's surface, it's curiosity, but then, boom, the dimension. It's nice that she's from Cuba, it's nice that her grandmother was this and her grandfather was that, it's nice that I play the piano and own a Kafka manuscript, but all this is merely a detour on the way to getting where we're going. It's part of the enchantment, I suppose, but it's the part that if I could have none of, I'd feel much better. Sex is all the enchantment required. Do men find women so enchanting once the sex is taken out? Does anyone find anyone of any sex that enchanting unless they have sexual business with them? Who else are you that enchanted by? Nobody.

  She thinks, I'm telling him who I am. He's interested in who I am. That is true, but I am curious about who she is because I want to fuck her. I don't need all of this great interest in Kafka and Velázquez. Having this conversation with her, I am thinking, How much more am I going to have to go through? Three hours? Four? Will I go as far as eight hours? Twenty minutes into the veiling and already I'm wondering, What does any of this have to do with her tits and her skin and how she carries herself? The French art of being flirtatious is of no interest to me. The savage urge is. No, this is not seduction. This is comedy. It is the comedy of creating a connection that is not the connection—that cannot begin to compete with the connection—created unartificially by lust. This is the instant conventionalizing, the giving us something in common on the spot, the trying to transform lust into something socially appropriate. Yet it's the radical inappropriateness that makes lust lust. No, this just plots the course, not forward but back to the elemental drive. Don't confuse the veiling with the business at hand. Sure, something else might develop, but that something has nothing to do with shopping for curtains and duvet covers and signing on as a member of the evolutionary team. The evolutionary system can work without me. I want to fuck this girl, and yes, I'll have to put up with some sort of veiling, but it's a means to an end. How much of this is cunning? I'd like to think that all of it is.

  "Shall we go together to the theater sometime?" I asked her. "Oh, I'd love to do that," she said, and I didn't know then whether she was alone or had a boyfriend, but I didn't care, and two or three days later—this is all eight years back, in 1992—she wrote a note saying "It was great to be invited to the party, to see your wonderful apartment, your amazing library, to hold in my own hands the handwriting of Franz Kafka. You so generously introduced me to Diego Velázquez..." She included her phone number along with her address, and so I called and proposed an evening out. "Why don't you join me to go to the theater? You know what my work is. I have to go to the theater almost every week, I always have two tickets, and perhaps you'd like to come."

  So we had dinner together in midtown, we went to the play, it wasn't at all interesting, and I was sitting next to her, glancing at her beautiful cleavage and her beautiful body. She has a D cup, this duchess, really big, beautiful breasts, and skin of a very white color, skin that, the moment you see it, makes you want to lick it. At the theater, in the dark, the potency of her stillness was enormous. What could be more erotic in that situation than the seeming absence in the exciting woman of any erotic intention?

  After the play I said we could go for a drink, but there was one disadvantage. "People recognize me because of the television and, wherever we go, the Algonquin, the Carlyle, wherever, they may interfere with our sense of privacy." She said, "I noticed people noticing us already, at the restaurant and at the theater." "Did you mind?" I asked. "I don't know if I minded. I just noticed it. I wondered if you minded." "There's nothing much to be done about it," I said, "it comes with the job." "I suppose," she said, "they thought I was a groupie." "You're decidedly not a groupie," I assured her. "But I'm sure that's what they thought. 'There's David Kepesh with one of his little groupies.' They're thinking I'm some silly overwhelmed girl." "And if they did think that?" I asked. "I don't know if I like that so much. I'd like to graduate college before my parents find their daughter on Page Six of the Post." "I don't think you're going to be on Page Six. That's not going to happen." "I truly hope not," she said. "Look, if this is what's bothering you," I said, "we can circumvent the problem by going to my place. We can go to my apartment. We can have a drink there." "Okay," she said, but only after a serious, quietly thoughtful moment, "that's probably a better idea." Not a good idea, just a better idea.

  We went to my apartment and she asked me to put on some music. I generally played easy classical music for her. Haydn trios, the Musical Offering, dynamic movements from the Beethoven symphonies, adagio movements from Brahms. She particularly liked Beethoven's Seventh, and on succeeding evenings she sometimes would yield to the irresistible urge to stand and move her arms playfully about in the air, as though it were she and not Bernstein conducting. Watching her breasts shift beneath her blouse while she pretended, somewhat like a performing child, to lead the orchestra with her invisible baton was intensely arousing, and, for all I know, maybe there was nothing the least bit childish about it and to excite me by way of the mock conducting was why she did it. Because it couldn't have been long before it dawned on her that to continue to believe, like a youthful student, that it was the elderly teacher who was in charge did not accord with the facts. Because in sex there is no point of absolute stasis. There is no sexual equality and there can be no sexual equality, certainly not one where the allotments are equal, the male quotient and the female quotient in perfect balance. There's no way to negotiate metrically this wild thing. It's not fifty-fifty like a business transaction. It's the chaos of eros we're talking about, the radical destabilization that is its excitement. You're back in the woods with sex. You're back in the bog. What it is is trading dominance, perpetual imbalance. You're going to rule out dominance? You're going to rule out yielding? The dominating is the flint, it strikes the spark, it sets it going. Then what? Listen. You'll see. You'll see what dominating leads to. You'll see what yielding leads to.

  I would sometimes, as I did that night, play a Dvořák string quintet for her—electrifying music, easy enough to recognize and to grasp. She liked me to play the piano, it created a romantic, seductive atmosphere that she liked, and so I did. The simpler Chopin preludes. Schubert, some of the Moments Musicaux. Some movements of the sonatas. Nothing too hard, but pieces I'd studied and didn't play too badly. Usually I play only for myself, even now that I'm better at it, but it was pleasant then to play for her. It was all part of the intoxication—for both of us. Playing music is very funny. Some things come readily now, but most pieces still have a stretch that's trouble for me, passages that I never bothered to solve all those years when I was playing by myself and didn't have a teacher. When I ran into a problem back then, I figured out some nutty way to solve it. Or didn't solve it—certain types of leaps, movement
from one part of the keyboard to another in an intricate way, that was kind of finger-breaking. I didn't yet have a teacher when I knew Consuela, so I did all those stupid improvised things that I invented as solutions to technical problems. I'd had only a few lessons as a kid and, until I got a teacher five years ago, I was mostly self-taught. Very little training. If I had seriously had lessons, I would spend less time practicing than I do today. I get up early and spend two, if I can two and a half hours at daybreak practicing, which is about as much as one can do. Though some days when I'm working toward something, I have another session later on. I'm in good shape, but I get tired after a while. Both mentally and physically. I have a huge amount of music that I've read through. That's a technical term—it doesn't mean looking at it like you look at a book, it means at the piano. I've bought a lot of music, I have everything, piano literature, and I used to read it, and I used to play it, badly. Some passages maybe not so badly. To see how it worked and so on. It wasn't good in terms of playing, but I had some pleasure. And pleasure is our subject. How to be serious over a lifetime about one's modest, private pleasures.

  The lessons were a present to myself on my sixty-fifth birthday for finally getting over Consuela. And I've made a lot of progress. I play some pretty difficult pieces. Brahms intermezzi. Schumann. A difficult Chopin prelude. I chew a bit off a very hard one, and I still don't play it well, but I work on it. When I say to my teacher in exasperation, "I can't do it right. How do you solve this problem?" she says, "Play it a thousand times." Like all enjoyable things, you see, it has unenjoyable parts to it, but my relationship to music has deepened and that's essential to my life now. It's wise to do this now. How much longer can there possibly be girls?

  I can't say that my making music excited Consuela about me the way her conducting Beethoven in jest excited me about her. I still can't say that anything I ever did sexually excited Consuela about me. Which was largely why, from the evening we first went to bed eight years back, I never had a moment's peace, why, whether she realized it or not, I was all weakness and worry from then on, why I could never figure out whether the answer was to see more of her or to see less of her or to see her not at all, to give her up—to do the unthinkable and, at sixty-two, voluntarily relinquish a gorgeous girl of twenty-four who hundreds of times said to me, "I adore you," but who never, even insincerely, could bring herself to whisper, "I desire you, I want you so—I cannot live without your cock."

  That was not Consuela. Yet that was why the fear of losing her to someone else never left me, why she was continually on my mind, why with her or apart from her I never felt sure of her. The obsessional side of it was awful. When you're beguiled it helps not to think too much and just to let yourself enjoy the beguilement. But I had no such pleasure: all I did was think—think, worry, and, yes, suffer. Concentrate on your pleasure, I told myself. Why but for the pleasure do I choose to live as I do, imposing as few constraints on my independence as possible? I had the one marriage, in my twenties the bad first marriage that so many have, the bad first marriage that is as bad as boot camp, but after that I was determined not to have the bad second marriage or the third and the fourth. I was determined, after that, never to live in the cage again.

  That first night we were sitting on the sofa listening to Dvořák. At one point Consuela found a book that interested her—I forget which one, though I'll never forget the moment. She turned around—I was sitting where you are, at the corner of the sofa, and she was sitting there—and she twisted her torso half around, and with the book resting on the arm of the sofa, she started to read, and because of the leaning, the bending forward, under her clothing I saw her buttocks, saw the shape clearly, which was one whopping invitation. She is a tall young woman in a slightly too narrow body. It is as if the body doesn't quite fit. Not because she's too fat. But she's by no means the anorexic type. You see there female flesh, and it is good flesh, abundant—that's why you see it. So there she was, not openly lying across the sofa but, all the same, with her buttocks sort of half turned to me. A woman as conscious of her body as Consuela and doing that is, I concluded, inviting me to begin. The sexual instinct is still intact—none of the Cuban correctitude has interfered. In that half-turned ass, I see that nothing has gotten in the way of the pure thing. All that we'd talked about, all that I'd had to listen to about her family, none of it has interfered. She knows how to turn her ass despite all that. Turns in the primordial way. In display. And the display is perfect. It tells me that I need no longer suppress the wish to touch.

  I started to caress her buttocks, and she liked it. She said, "This is a strange situation. I can never be your girlfriend. For every possible reason. You live in a different world." "Different?" I laughed. "How different?" And right there, of course, you start the lying, and you say, "Oh, it's not such a lofty place, if that's what you're imagining. It's not such a glamorous world. It's not even a world. Once a week I appear on TV. Once a week I'm on the radio. Every few weeks I appear in print in the back pages of a magazine read by twenty people at most. My program? It's a Sunday morning cultural program. Nobody watches. It's not much of a world to worry about. I can bring you into that world easily enough. Please stay with me."

  She looks to be thinking about what I've said, but what sort of thinking can it be? "Okay," she says, "for now. For tonight. But I can never be your wife." "Agreed," I said, but I thought, Who was asking her to be my wife? Who raised the question? I am sixty-two and she's twenty-four. I merely touch her ass and she tells me she can't be my wife? I didn't know such girls continued to exist. She is even more traditional than I imagined. Or maybe more odd, more unusual than I imagined. As I would discover, Consuela is ordinary but without being predictable. Nothing mechanical about her behavior. She's at once specific and mysterious, and strangely full of little surprises. But, in the beginning especially, she was difficult for me to decipher, and, mistakenly—or perhaps not—I chalked that up to her Cubanness. "I love my cozy Cuban world," she told me. "I love the coziness of my family, and I can tell already that's not something you like or want. So I never can really belong to you."

  This naive niceness in combination with her marvelous body was so enticing to me that I wasn't sure even then, on that first night, that I could fuck her as though she were another cavorting Miranda. No, Consuela was not the goat in the clock. It didn't matter what she was saying—she was so damned attractive that not only could I not resist her but I didn't see how any other man could, and it was in that moment, caressing her buttocks while she explained that she could not be my wife, that my terrible jealousy was born.

  The jealousy. The uncertainty. The fear of losing her, even while on top of her. Obsessions that in all my varied experience I had never known before. With Consuela as with no one else, the siphoning off of confidence was almost instantaneous.

  So we went to bed. It happened fast, less because of my intoxication than because of her lack of complexity. Or call it clarity. Call it newly minted maturity, though maturity, I would say, of a simple kind: she was in communion with that body in the very way she wished and wasn't able to be in communion with art. She undressed, and not only was her blouse silk but her underwear was made of silk. She had nearly pornographic underwear. A surprise. You know she has chosen this to please. You know she has chosen this with a man's eye in mind, even if a man were never to see it. You know that you have no idea what she is, how clever she is or how stupid she is, how shallow she is or how deep she is, how innocent she is or how guileful she is, how wily, how wise, even how wicked. With a self-contained woman of such sexual power, you have no idea and you never will. The tangle that is her character is obscured by her beauty. Nonetheless, I was greatly moved by seeing that underwear. I was moved by seeing that body. "Look at you," I said.

  There are two things you notice about Consuela's body. In the first place, the breasts. The most gorgeous breasts I have ever seen—and I was born, remember, in 1930: I have seen quite a few breasts by now. These were round,
full, perfect. The type with the nipple like a saucer. Not the nipple like an udder but the big pale rosy-brown nipple that is so very stirring. The second thing was that she had sleek pubic hair. Normally it's curly. This was like Asian hair. Sleek, lying flat, and not much of it. The pubic hair is important because it returns.

  Yes, I pulled back the covers and she came into my bed, Consuela Castillo, superclassically the fertile female of our mammalian species. And already, that first time, and at only twenty-four, she was willing to sit on top of me. She wasn't sure of herself once she was there, and till I tapped her arm to get her attention and slow her down, she was obliviously overenergetic, caroming about with her eyes shut, off in a child's game of her own. It was a little like her mock conducting. I suppose she was trying to give herself over completely, but she was too young for that and, hard as she tried, that's not what she achieved. However, because she knew how alluring her breasts were and she wanted me to be able to see them at their best, she'd climbed on top of me when I asked her to. And she did something rather pornographic for a first time, and this, again to my surprise, on her own initiative—played with her breasts around my prick. Leaned forward to place my prick between her breasts, for me to see it nestling there while she pressed them together with her hands. She knew how much this vision aroused me, the skin of the one on the skin of the other. I remember I said, "Do you realize that you have the most beautiful breasts I've ever seen?" And like the efficient, thorough private secretary taking a memo, or perhaps like the well-brought-up Cuban daughter, she replied, "Yes, I know that. I see how you respond to my breasts."