The Counterlife

by Philip Roth

  It was Wendy actually—when she’d become frightened that Henry was beginning to lose his mind—who had first suggested Nathan as a confidant. Carol, assuming that Nathan hadn’t the slightest authority over his brother any longer, had urged Henry to talk to a psychotherapist in town. And for an hour each Saturday morning—until that horrendous Saturday expedition to New York—he had done it, gone off and spoken with great candor about his passion for Wendy, pretending to the therapist, however, that the passion was for Carol, that it was she whom he was describing as the most playful, inventive sexual partner any man could ever hope to have. This resulted in long, thoughtful discussions of a marriage that seemed to interest the therapist enormously but depressed Henry even further because it was such a cruel parody of his own. As far as Carol knew, not until she’d phoned to tell Nathan that Henry was dead had he even been aware of his brother’s illness. Scrupulously following Henry’s wishes, Zuckerman played dumb on the telephone, an absurd act that only compounded the shock and made clear to him how incapable Henry had been of reaching any decision rationally once the ordeal had begun. Out at the cemetery, while Henry’s children stood at the graveside struggling to speak, Zuckerman had finally understood that the reason to have stopped him was that he had wanted to be stopped. The last thing Henry must have imagined was that Nathan would sit there and accept with a straight face, as justification for such a dangerous operation, the single-minded urging of that maniac-making lust that he had himself depicted so farcically in Carnovsky. Henry had expected Nathan to laugh. Of course! He had driven over from Jersey to confess to the mocking author the ridiculous absurdity of his dilemma, and instead he had been indulged by a solicitous brother who was unable any longer to give either advice or offense. He had come over to Nathan’s apartment to be told how utterly meaningless was Wendy’s mouth beside the ordered enterprise of a mature man’s life, and instead the sexual satirist had sat there and seriously listened. Impotence, Zuckerman had been thinking, has cut him off from the simplest form of distance from his predictable life. As long as he was potent he could challenge and threaten, if only in sport, the solidity of the domestic relationship; as long as he was potent there was some give in his life between what was routine and what is taboo. But without the potency he feels condemned to an ironclad life wherein all issues are settled.

  Nothing could have made this clearer than how Henry had described to him becoming Wendy’s lover. Apparently from the instant she’d come into the office for the interview and he’d closed the door behind her, virtually every word they exchanged had goaded him on. “Hi,” he’d said, shaking her hand, “I heard such marvelous things about you from Dr. Wexler. And now that I look at you, I think you’re almost too good. You’re going to be so distracting, you’re so pretty.”

  “Uh-oh,” she said, laughing. “Maybe I should go then.”

  What had delighted Henry was not only the speed with which he’d put her at her ease but having put himself at ease as well. It wasn’t always like that. Despite his well-known rapport with his patients, he could still be ridiculously formal with people he didn’t know, men no less than women, and sometimes, say, when interviewing someone for a job in his own office, seem to himself as though he were the person being interviewed. But something vulnerable in this young woman’s appearance—something particularly tempting about her tiny breasts—had emboldened him, though precisely at a moment when being emboldened might not be such a great idea. Both at home and in the office everything was going so well that an extraneous adventure with a woman was the last thing he needed. And yet, because everything was going well, he could not rein in that robust, manly confidence that he could tell was knocking her for a loop already. It was just one of those days when he felt like a movie star, acting out some grandiose whatever-it-was. Why suppress it? There were enough days when he felt like a twerp.

  “Sit down,” he said. “Tell me about yourself and what you want to do.”

  “What I want to do?” Someone must have advised her to repeat the doctor’s question if she needed time to think up the right answer or to remember the one she’d prepared. “I want to do a lot of things. My first exposure to a dental practice was with Dr. Wexler. And he’s wonderful—a true gentleman.”

  “He’s a nice guy,” Henry said, thinking, altogether involuntarily, out of this damn excess of confidence and strength, that before it was over he’d show her what wonderful was.

  “I learned a lot in his office of what’s going on in dentistry.”

  He encouraged her gently. “Tell me what you know.”

  “What do I know? I know that a dentist has to make a choice of what kind of practice he wants. It’s a business, you have to choose a market, and yet you’re dealing with something that’s very intimate. People’s mouths, how they feel about them, how they feel about their smiles.”

  Mouths were his business, of course—hers too—and yet talking about them like this—at the end of the day, with the door closed, and the slight, young blonde petitioning for a job—was turning out to be awfully stimulating. He remembered the sound of Maria’s voice telling him all about how wonderful his cock was—“I put my hand into your trousers, and it astonishes me, it’s so big and round and hard.” “Your control,” she would say to him, “the way you make it last, there’s no one like you, Henry.” If Wendy were to get up and come over to the desk and put her hand in his pants, she’d find out what Maria was talking about.

  “The mouth,” Wendy was saying, “is really the most personal thing that a doctor can deal with.”

  “You’re one of the few people who’s ever said that,” Henry told her. “Do you realize that?”

  When he saw the flattery raise the color in her face, he pushed the conversation in a more ambiguous direction, knowing, however, that no one overhearing them could legitimately have charged him with talking to her about anything other than her qualifications for the job. Not that anyone could possibly overhear them.

  “Did you take your mouth for granted a year ago?” he asked.

  “Compared to what I think of it now, yes. Of course, I always cared for my teeth, cared about my smile—”

  “You cared about yourself,” Henry put in approvingly.

  Smiling—and it was a good smile, the badge of utterly innocent, childish abandon—she happily picked up the cue. “I care about me, yes, sure, but I didn’t realize that there was so much psychology involved in dentistry.”

  Was she saying that to get him to slow down, was she asking him politely to please back off about her mouth? Maybe she wasn’t as innocent as she looked—but that was even more exciting. “Tell me a bit about that,” Henry said.

  “Well, what I said before—how you feel about your smile is a reflection of how you feel about yourself and what you present to other people. I think that whole personalities may develop, not only about your teeth, but everything else that goes with it. You’re dealing in a dental office with the whole person, even if it just looks like you’re dealing with the mouth. How do I satisfy the whole person, including the mouth? And when you talk about cosmetic dentistry, that’s real psychology. We had some problems in Dr. Wexler’s office with people who were having crowns done, and they wanted white-white teeth, which didn’t go with their own teeth, with their coloring. You have to get them to understand what natural-looking teeth are. You tell them, ‘You’re going to have the smile that’s perfect for you, but you can’t go through and just pick out the perfect smile and have it put in your mouth.’”

  “And have the mouth,” Henry added, helping her out, “that looks like it belongs to you.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I want you to work with me.”

  “Oh, great.”

  “I think we can make it,” Henry said, but before that took on too much meaning, he moved quickly to present to his new assistant his own ideas, as though by being dead serious about dentistry he could somehow stop himself before he got grossly suggestive. He was wrong. “Most pe
ople, as you must know by now, don’t even think that their mouth is part of the body. Or teeth are part of the body. Not consciously they don’t. The mouth is a hollow, the mouth is nothing. Most people, unlike you, will never tell you what their mouth means. If they’re frightened of dental work it’s sometimes because of some frightening experience early on, but primarily it’s because of what the mouth means. Anyone touching it is either an invader or a helper. To get them from thinking that someone working on them is invading them, to the idea that you are helping them on to something good, is almost like having a sexual experience. For most people, the mouth is secret, it’s their hiding place. Just like the genitals. You have to remember that embryologically the mouth is related to the genitals.”

  “I studied that.”

  “Did you? Good. Then you realize that people want you to be very tender with their mouths. Gentleness is the most important consideration. With all types. And surprisingly enough, men are more vulnerable, particularly if they’ve lost teeth. Because losing teeth for a man is a strong experience. A tooth for a man is a mini-penis.”

  “I hadn’t realized that,” she said, but didn’t seem affronted in any way.

  “Well, what do you think of the sexual prowess of a toothless man? What do you think he thinks? I had a guy here who was very prominent. He had lost all his teeth and he had a young girlfriend. He didn’t want her to know he had dentures, because that would mean he was an old man, and she was a young girl. About your age. Twenty-one?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “She was twenty-one. So I did implants for him, instead of dentures, and he was happy, and she was happy.”

  “Dr. Wexler always says that the most satisfaction comes from the greatest challenge, which is usually a disaster case.”

  Had Wexler fucked her? Henry had never as yet gone beyond the usual flirtation with any assistant of any age—it wasn’t only unprofessional but hopelessly distracting in a busy practice, and could well lead to the dentist’s becoming the disaster case. He realized then that he ought never to have hired her; he had been entirely too impulsive, and was now making things even worse by all this talk about mini-penises that was giving him an enormous hard-on. Yet with everything that was combining these days to make him feel so bold, he couldn’t stop. What’s the worst that could happen to him? Feeling so bold, he had no idea. “The mouth, you mustn’t forget, is the primary organ of experience…” On he went, looking unblinkingly and boldly at hers.

  Nonetheless, a full six weeks passed before he overcame his doubts, not only about crossing the line further than he had at the interview but about keeping her on in the office at all, despite the excellent job she was doing. Everything he’d been saying about her to Carol happened to be true, even if to him it sounded like the most transparent rationalization for why she was there. “She’s bright and alert, she’s cute and people like her, she can relate to them, and she helps me enormously—because of her, when I walk in, I can get right to it. This girl,” he told Carol, and more often than he needed to during those early weeks, “is saving me two, three hours a day.”

  Then one evening after work, as Wendy was cleaning his tray and he was routinely washing up, he turned to her and, because there simply seemed no way around it any longer, he began to laugh. “Look,” he said, “let’s pretend. You’re the assistant and I’m the dentist.” “But I am the assistant,” Wendy said. “I know,” he replied, “and I’m the dentist—but pretend anyway.” “And so,” Henry had told Nathan, “that’s what we did.” “You played Dentist,” Zuckerman said. “I guess so,” Henry said, “—she pretended she was called ‘Wendy,’ and I pretended I was called ‘Dr. Zuckerman,’ and we pretended we were in my dental office. And then we pretended to fuck—and we fucked.” “Sounds interesting,” Zuckerman said. “It was, it was wild, it made us crazy—it was the strangest thing I’d ever done. We did it for weeks, pretended like that, and she kept saying, ‘Why is it so exciting when all we’re pretending to be is what we are?’ God, was it great! Was she hot!”

  Well, that larky, hot stuff was over now, no more mischievously turning what-was into what-wasn’t or what-might-be into what-was—there was only the deadly earnest this-is-it of what-is. Nothing a successful, busy, energetic man likes more than a little Wendy on the side, and nothing a Wendy could more enjoy than calling her lover “Doctor Z.”—she’s young, she’s game, she’s in his office, he’s the boss, she sees him in his white coat being adored by everyone, sees his wife chauffeuring the children and turning gray while she doesn’t think twice about her twenty-inch waist … heavenly all around. Yes, his sessions with Wendy had been Henry’s art; his dental office, after hours, his atelier; and his impotence, thought Zuckerman, like an artist’s artistic life drying up for good. He’d been reassigned the art of the responsible—unfortunately by then precisely the hackwork from which he needed longer and longer vacations in order to survive. He’d been thrown back on his talent for the prosaic, precisely what he’d been boxed in by all his life. Zuckerman had felt for him terribly, and so, stupidly, stupidly, did nothing to stop him.

  * * *

  Down in the living room, he worked his way through the clan, accepting their sympathies, listening to their memories, answering questions about where he was living and what he was writing, until he had made his way to Cousin Essie, his favorite relative and once upon a time the family powerhouse. She was sitting in a club chair by the fireplace with a cane across her knees. Six years back, when he’d seen her last at his father’s funeral in Florida, there’d been a new husband—an elderly bridge player named Metz—now dead, easily thirty pounds less of Essie, and no cane. She was always, as Zuckerman remembered her, large and old, and now she was even larger and older, though seemingly still indestructible.

  “So, you lost your brother,” she said, while he was leaning over to kiss her. “I once took you kids to Olympic Park. Took you on all the rides with my boys. At six Henry was the image of Wendell Willkie with that shock of black hair. That little boy adored you then.”

  They must return to Basel—Jurgen transferred home. Maria can’t stop crying. “I’m going back to be a good wife and a good mother!” In six weeks Switzerland, where she’ll have only the money to make it real.

  “Did he?”

  “Christ, he wouldn’t let go of your hand.”

  “Well, he has now. We’re all here at his house and Henry’s up at the cemetery.”

  “Don’t tell me about the dead,” said Essie. “I look in the mirror in the morning and I see the whole family looking back at me. I see my mother’s face, I see my sister, I see my brother, I see the dead from all the way back, all of them right in my own ugly kisser. Look, let’s you and me talk,” and after he’d helped her up from the chair, she led him out of the living room, struggling forward like some large vehicle plunging ahead on a broken axle.

  “What is it?” he asked when they were in the front hallway.

  “If your brother died to sleep with his wife, then he’s already up with the angels, Nathan.”

  “But he was always the best boy, Esther. Son to end all sons, father to end all fathers—well, from the sound of it, the husband to end all husbands too.”

  “From the sound of it the shmuck to end all shmucks.”

  “But the kids, the folks—Dad would have a fit. How do I practice dentistry in Basel?” “Why would you have to live in Basel?” “Because she loves it, that’s why—she says the only thing that made South Orange endurable was me. Switzerland is her home.” “There are worse places than Switzerland.” “That’s easy for you to say.” So I say no more, just remember her astride him in the black silk camisole, far far away, like the bedposts on his schoolboy bed.

  “It’s not so shmucky when you’re impotent at thirty-nine,” said Zuckerman, “and have reason to think it might never end.”

  “Being up at the cemetery isn’t going to end either.”

  “He expected to live, Essie. Otherwise he wouldn’t have
done it.”

  “And all for the little wife.”

  “That’s the story.”

  “I like better the ones you write.”

  Maria tells him that the person who stays behind suffers even more than the one who goes away. Because of all the familiar places.

  Coming down the staircase just behind them were two elderly men he had not seen for a very long while: Herbert Grossman, the Zuckermans’ only European refugee, and Shimmy Kirsch, designated years ago by Nathan’s father as the brother-in-law Neanderthal, and arguably the family’s stupidest relative. But as he was the wealthiest in the family as well, one had to wonder if Shimmy’s stupidity wasn’t something of an asset; watching him one wondered if in fact the passion to live and the strength to prevail might not be, at their core, quite stupid. Though the mountainous build had been eroded by age, and his deeply furrowed face bore all the insignia of his lifelong exertion, he was still more or less the person Nathan remembered from childhood—a huge unassailable nothing in the wholesale produce line, one of those rapacious sons of the old greenhorn families who will not shrink from anything even while, fortunately for society, enslaved by every last primitive taboo. For Zuckerman’s father, the responsible chiropodist, life had been a dogged climb up from the abyss of his immigrant father’s poverty, and not merely so as to improve his personal lot but eventually to rescue everyone as the family messiah. Shimmy had never seen any need to so assiduously cleanse his behind. Not that he wished necessarily to debase himself. All his steadfastness had gone into being what he’d been born and brought up to be—Shimmy Kirsch. No questions, no excuses, none of this who-am-I, what-am-I, where-am-I crap, not a grain of self-mistrust or the slightest impulse toward spiritual distinction; rather, like so many of his generation out of Newark’s old Jewish slums, a man who breathed the spirit of opposition while remaining completely in accord with the ways and means of the earth.