by Philip Roth
Yet their description of how he'd conducted himself over a lifetime was not even a caricature but, in his estimation, a portrayal of what he was not, a description with which they persisted in minimizing everything worthwhile that he believed was apparent to most everyone else. Minimized his decency, then magnified his defects, for a reason that surely could not continue to carry such great force at this late date. Into their forties they remained with their father the children that they'd been back when he'd first left their mother, children who by their nature could not understand that there might be more than one explanation to human behavior—children, however, with the appearance and aggression of men, and against whose undermining he could never manage to sustain a solid defense. They elected to make the absent father suffer, and so he did, investing them with that power. Suffering his wrongdoing was all he could ever do to please them, to pay his bill, to indulge like the best of dads their maddening opposition.
You wicked bastards! You sulky fuckers! You condemning little shits! Would everything be different, he asked himself, if I'd been different and done things differently? Would it all be less lonely than it is now? Of course it would! But this is what I did! I am seventy-one. This is the man I have made. This is what I did to get here, and there's nothing more to be said!
Over the years, luckily, he heard regularly from Howie. In his late fifties Howie, like almost all the partners who reached that age except for the top three or four, had retired from Goldman Sachs; by then he was worth easily fifty million dollars. He was soon sitting on numerous corporate boards, eventually being named chairman of Procter & Gamble, for whom he'd done arbitrage in his early days. In his seventies, still vigorous and eager to be working, he'd become a consultant to a Boston buyout firm specializing in financial institutions and traveled to look for potential acquisitions. Yet despite the continuing responsibilities and the demands on Howie's time, the two brothers exchanged phone calls a couple of times a month, calls that could sometimes go on for as long as half an hour, with one of them laughingly entertaining the other with recollections of their years growing up and of comical moments from their days at school and in the jewelry store.
Now, though, when they spoke, an unwarranted coldness came over him, and to his brother's joviality his response was silence. The reason was ridiculous. He hated Howie because of his robust good health. He hated Howie because he'd never in his life been a patient in a hospital, because disease was unknown to him, because nowhere was his body scarred from the surgical knife, nor were there six metal stents lodged in his arteries along with a cardiac alarm system tucked into the wall of his chest that was called a defibrillator, a word that when he first heard it pronounced by his cardiologist was unknown to him and sounded, innocuously enough, as if it had something to do with the gear system of a bicycle. He hated him because, though they were offspring of the same two parents and looked so very much alike, Howie had inherited the physical impregnability and he the coronary and vascular weaknesses. It was ridiculous to hate him, because there was nothing Howie could do about his good health other than to enjoy it. It was ridiculous to hate Howie for nothing other than having been born himself and not someone else. He'd never envied him for his athletic or academic prowess, for his financial wizardry and his wealth, never envied him even when he thought of his own sons and wives and then of Howie's—four grown boys who continued to love him and the devoted wife of fifty years who clearly was as important to him as he to her. He was proud of the muscular, athletic brother who rarely got less than an A in school, and had admired him since earliest childhood. Himself a youngster with an artistic talent whose single noteworthy physical skill was swimming, he'd loved Howie unabashedly and followed him everywhere. But now he hated him and he envied him and he was poisonously jealous of him and, in his thoughts, all but rose up in rage against him because the force that Howie brought to bear on life had in no way been impeded. Though on the phone he suppressed as best he could everything irrational and indefensible that he felt, as the months passed their calls took up less time and became less frequent, and soon they were hardly speaking at all.
He did not retain for long the spiteful desire for his brother to lose his health—that far he could not go as an envier, since his brother's losing his health would not result in his regaining his own. Nothing could restore his health, his youth, or invigorate his talent. He could, nonetheless, in a frenzied mood, almost reach a point where he could believe that Howie's good health was responsible for his own compromised health, even though he knew better, even though he was not without a civilized person's tolerant understanding of the puzzle of inequality and misfortune. Back when the psychoanalyst had glibly diagnosed the symptoms of severe appendicitis as a case of envy, he was still very much his parents' son and barely acquainted with the feelings that come with believing that the possessions of another might better belong to you. But now he knew; in his old age he had discovered the emotional state that robs the envier of his serenity and, worse, his realism—he hated Howie for that biological endowment that should have been his as well.
Suddenly he could not stand his brother in the primitive, instinctual way that his sons could not stand him.
He had been hoping there would be a woman in the painting classes in whom he might take an interest—that was half the reason for giving them. But pairing up with one of the widows his age toward whom he felt no attraction proved to be beyond him, though the robustly healthy young women he saw jogging along the boardwalk when he took his morning walk, still all curves and gleaming hair and, to his eyes, seemingly more beautiful than their counterparts of an earlier era had ever been, were not sufficiently lacking in common sense to exchange with him anything other than a professionally innocent smile. Following their speedy progress with his gaze was a pleasure, but a difficult pleasure, and at bottom the mental caress was a source of biting sadness that only intensified an unbearable loneliness. True, he had chosen to live alone, but not unbearably alone. The worst of being unbearably alone was that you had to bear it—either that or you were sunk. You had to work hard to prevent your mind from sabotaging you by its looking hungrily back at the superabundant past.
And he'd become bored with his painting. For many years he'd dreamed of the uninterrupted span of time that his retirement would afford him to paint—as had thousands and thousands of other art directors who'd also earned their livelihood working in ad agencies. But after painting almost every day since moving to the shore, he had run out of interest in what he was doing. The urgent demand to paint had lifted, the enterprise designed to fill the rest of his life fizzled out. He had no more ideas. Every picture he worked on came out looking like the last one. His brightly colored abstractions had always been prominently displayed in the Starfish Beach show of local artists, and of the three that were taken by a gallery in the nearby seaside tourist town, all had been sold to the gallery's best customers. But that was nearly two years ago. Now he had nothing to show. It had all come to nothing. As a painter he was and probably always had been no more than the "happy cobbler" he happened to know he'd been dubbed by the satirical son. It was as though painting had been an exorcism. But designed to expel what malignancy? The oldest of his self-delusions? Or had he run to painting to attempt to deliver himself from the knowledge that you are born to live and you die instead? Suddenly he was lost in nothing, in the sound of the two syllables "nothing" no less than in the nothingness, lost and drifting, and the dread began to seep in. Nothing comes without risk, he thought, nothing, nothing—there's nothing that doesn't backfire, not even painting stupid pictures!
He explained to Nancy, when she asked about his work, that he'd had "an irreversible aesthetic vasectomy."
"Something will start you again," she said, accepting the hyperbolic language with an absolving laugh. She had been permeated by the quality of her mother's kindness, by the inability to remain aloof from another's need, by the day-to-day earthborn soulfulness that he had disastrously undervalued and
thrown away—thrown away without beginning to realize all he would subsequently live without.
"I don't think it will," he was saying to their daughter. "There's a reason I was never a painter. I've run smack up against it."
"The reason you weren't a painter," Nancy explained, "is because you've had wives and children. You had mouths to feed. You had responsibilities."
"The reason I wasn't a painter was because I'm not a painter. Not then and not now."
"Oh, Dad—"
"No, listen to me. All I've been doing is doodling away the time."
"You're just upset right now. Don't insult your-self—it's not so. I know it's not so. I have your paintings all over my apartment. I look at them every day, and I can promise you I'm not looking at doodlings. People come over—they look at them. They ask me who the artist is. They pay attention to them. They ask if the artist is living."
"What do you tell them?"
"Listen to me now: they're not responding to doodlings. They're responding to work. To work that is beautiful. And of course," she said, and now with that laugh that left him feeling washed clean and, in his seventies, infatuated with his girl-child all over again, "of course I tell them you're living. I tell them my father painted these, and I'm so proud to say that."
"Good, sweetie."
"I've got a little gallery going here."
"That's good—that makes me feel good."
"You're just frustrated now. It's just that simple. You're a wonderful painter. I know what I'm talking about. If there's anybody in this world equipped to know if you're a wonderful painter or not, it's me."
After all he'd put her through by betraying Phoebe, she still wanted to praise him. From the age of ten she'd been like that—a pure and sensible girl, besmirched only by her unstinting generosity, harmlessly hiding from unhappiness by blotting out the faults of everyone dear to her and by overloving love. Baling forgiveness as though it were so much hay. The harm inevitably came when she concealed from herself just a little too much that was wanting in the makeup of the ostentatiously brilliant young crybaby she had fallen for and married.
"And it's not just me, Dad. It's everybody who comes. I was interviewing babysitters the other day, because Molly can't do it anymore. I was interviewing for a new babysitter and this wonderful girl I ended up hiring, Tanya—she's a student looking to earn some extra money, she's at the Art Students League just like you were—she couldn't take her eyes off the one I have in the dining room, over the sideboard, the yellow one—you know the one I mean?"
"Yes."
"She couldn't take her eyes off it. The yellow and black one. It was really quite something. I was asking her these questions and she was focused over the sideboard. She asked when it was painted and where I had bought it. There's something very compelling about your work."
"You're very sweet to me, darling."
"No. I'm candid with you, that's all."
"Thank you."
"You'll get back to it. It'll happen again. Painting isn't through with you yet. Just enjoy yourself in the meantime. It's so beautiful where you are. Just be patient. Just take your time. Nothing's vanished. Enjoy the weather, enjoy your walks, enjoy the beach and the ocean. Nothing's vanished and nothing's altered."
Strange—all the comfort he was taking from her words and yet he wasn't convinced for a second that she knew what she was talking about. But the wish to take comfort, he realized, is no small thing, particularly from the one who miraculously still loves you.
"I don't go in the surf anymore," he told her.
"You don't?"
It was only Nancy, but he felt humiliated nonetheless by the confession. "I've lost the confidence for the surf."
"You can swim in the pool, can't you?"
"I can."
"Okay, so swim in the pool."
He asked her then about the twins, thinking if only he were still with Phoebe, if only Phoebe were with him now, if only Nancy hadn't to work so hard to shore him up in the absence of a devoted wife, if only he hadn't wounded Phoebe the way that he had, if only he hadn't wronged her, if only he hadn't lied! If only she hadn't said, "I can never trust you to be truthful again."
It didn't begin until he was nearly fifty. The young women were everywhere—photographers' reps, secretaries, stylists, models, account executives. Lots of women, and you worked and traveled and had lunch together, and what was astonishing wasn't what happened—the acquisition by a husband of "someone else"—but that it took so long to happen, even after the passion had dwindled and disappeared from his marriage. It began with a pretty, dark-haired young woman of nineteen whom he hired to work as his secretary and who, within two weeks of taking the job, was kneeling on his office floor with her ass raised and him fucking her fully clothed, with just his fly unzipped. He had not possessed her by coercion, though he had indeed taken her by surprise—but then he, who was conscious of having no peculiarities to flaunt and who believed himself content to live by the customary norms, to behave more or less the same as others, had taken himself no less by surprise. It was an easy entry because she was so moist and, in those daredevil circumstances, it took no time for each of them to achieve a vigorous orgasm. One morning just after she had gotten up from the floor and returned to her desk in the outer office, and while he was still standing, face flushed, in the middle of the room and adjusting his clothing, his boss, Clarence, the group management supervisor and an executive vice president, opened the door and came in. "Where is her apartment?" Clarence asked him. "I don't know," he replied. "Use her apartment," Clarence said severely and left. But they couldn't stop what they were doing where and how they were doing it, even though theirs was one of those office trapeze acts in which everyone has everything to lose. They were too close to each other all day to stop. All either of them could think about was her kneeling on his office floor and him hurling her skirt up over her back and grabbing her by the hair and, after pushing aside her underpants, penetrating her as forcefully as he could and with an utter disregard for discovery.
Then came the shoot in Grenada. He was running the show, and he and the photographer he hired picked the models, ten of them for a towel ad that would be set beside a small natural pool in the tropical forest, with each model clad in a short summer robe, her head turbaned in the client's towel as though she'd just washed her hair. The arrangements had been made, the ad okayed, and he was on the plane sitting alone away from everyone else so he could read a book and fall asleep and fly there unperturbed.
They had a stop in the Caribbean, and he got off the plane and went into the waiting room and looked around, saw all the models, and said hello to them before everyone got onto another, smaller plane and took a short hop to their destination, where they were picked up by several cars and by a small jeeplike vehicle, which he decided to ride in with one of the models whom he'd taken note of when she was hired. She was the only foreign model on the shoot, a Dane named Merete and probably, at twenty-four, the oldest of the ten; the rest were American girls, eighteen and nineteen years old. There was somebody driving, Merete was in the middle, and he was on the outside. It was nighttime and very dark. They were squeezed in tightly together and he had his arm around the top of her seat. Only moments after the car took off his thumb was in her mouth, and without his knowing it, his marriage had come under assault. The young man who started out hoping never to live two lives was about to cleave himself open with a hatchet.
When they got to the hotel and he went to his room, he lay there most of the night thinking only of Merete. The next day when they met, she said to him, "I waited for you." The whole thing was so quick and so intense. They shot all day in the middle of the forest with the small natural pool, worked hard and seriously for the entire day, and when they got back he found that the photographer's rep who was along on the job had rented a house on the beach just for him—he had thrown a lot of work her way, and so the rep rented it for him and he moved out of the hotel and Merete came with him and they liv
ed there on the beach together for three days. In the early morning when he was coming back up the beach from his swim, she would be waiting on the veranda wearing just her bikini underpants. They would start then and there, while he was still wet from his long swim. For the first two days he was always diddling around her ass with his fingers while she went down on him, until finally she looked up and said, "If you like that little hole, why don't you use it?"
Of course he saw her back in New York. Every day that she was free he would go to her place at lunchtime. Then one Saturday he, Phoebe, and Nancy were walking down Third Avenue when he saw Merete walking on the other side of the street with that easy, upright, somnambulant gait whose feral assuredness always slayed him, as if she were not approaching the Seventy-second Street light carrying a bag of groceries but serenely traversing the Serengeti, Merete Jespersen of Copenhagen grazing the grasses of the savanna amid a thousand African antelope. Models didn't all have to be needle-thin in those days, and even before he spotted her by her glide and saw the sheaf of golden hair down her back, he identified her as his very own treasure, the white hunter's prize, by the weight of her breasts inside her blouse and the light heft of the behind whose little hole had come to afford them such delight. He displayed neither fear nor excitement upon seeing her, though he felt extremely ill and had to get to a phone alone to call her—getting to the phone was all he thought about for the rest of the afternoon. This wasn't ravishing the secretary on the office floor. This was the raw supremacy of her creatureliness over his instinct for survival, itself a force to be reckoned with. This was the wildest venture of his life, the one, as he was only faintly beginning to understand, that could wipe out everything. Only in passing did it occur to him that it might be somewhat delusional at the age of fifty to think that he could find a hole that would substitute for everything else.