by Philip Roth
“And you championed our wickedness?”
“I didn’t have to. Maria did.”
He looked alarmed. “You haven’t married a Jew, Nathan.”
“No, my record’s intact. She just finds the moral posturing of the fashionable left very very depressing. But mostly what she resented was that defending Israel should appear to everyone to fall automatically upon her new husband. Maria isn’t someone who relishes a fight, so her vehemence surprised me. So did theirs. I asked her on the way home how strong this Israel-hatred is in England. She says that the press thinks it is, and thinks it should be, but, in her words, ‘it just bloody well isn’t.’”
“I’m not sure she’s right,” Shuki said. “In England I myself sensed a certain, shall we say, distaste for Jews—a willingness to not always, in every circumstance, think the very best of us. I was interviewed one morning on BBC radio. We’d been on the air two minutes when the interviewer said to me, ‘You Jews learned a lot from Auschwitz.’ ‘What’s that?’ I asked. ‘How to be Nazis to the Arabs,’ he said.”
“What did you say?”
“I couldn’t speak. On the Continent I just grit my teeth—there the anti-Semitism is so pervasive and ingrained, it’s positively Byzantine. But in civilized England, with people so well-spoken, so well-bred, even I was caught off guard. I’m not known around here as this country’s leading P.R. man, but if I’d had a gun I would have shot him.”
* * *
At dinner the evening before, Maria had looked about ready to reach for a weapon herself. I’d never seen her so combative or incensed, not even during the divorce negotiations, when her husband seemed out to wreck our marriage before it began by forcing her to sign a legal document guaranteeing that Phoebe would be domiciled in London and not in New York. If Maria refused, he threatened to go to court and sue for custody, citing our adulterous liaison as grounds for claiming that she was an unfit mother. Assuming that I might be reluctant to be exiled from America until the turn of the century for the sake of his visitation rights, Maria immediately began to imagine herself returning to London unmarried, alone with Phoebe, and being plagued there by his bullying. “Nobody, but nobody, would ever want to get into a serious recrimination with him. If I’m on my own and he starts in, it’ll be worse than just lonely and hard.” She was equally as frightened of my resentment if, after accepting his conditions and agreeing to move to England, I found that cutting myself off from familiar sources had begun to damage my work. She lived in dread of yet another husband suddenly becoming estranged after she had taken the irrevocable step of becoming pregnant.
It bewildered her still to recall her ex-husband’s coldness to her after she’d had Phoebe. “At any point up to then,” she explained, “he could have said, with perfect justice, this isn’t working for me. And had he said that, I would have said, absolutely, it just isn’t, and however painful that is, that’s it, and we will do other things with our lives. But why he couldn’t perceive that clearly until after I had my baby—I mean I had accepted all the limitations of our relationship, otherwise I wouldn’t have had a child. I do accept limitations. I expect them. Everybody tells me I’m submissive just because I happen to recognize the utter ridiculousness of railing against the kinds of disappointment that are simply inevitable. There’s something every woman wants, and that’s a man to blame. I refused to do it. To me the shortcomings of our marriage were no shock. I mean he had some dreadful qualities, but so many wonderful ones as well. No, what was a shock to me, after the baby came, was overt, relentless bad behavior—mistreatment, which is what happened as soon as my child was born and which I had never encountered before. I had encountered many, many things I didn’t like, but they were things one can look at one way or another. But not misbehavior. There it is—that’s what’s happened. And if it were ever to happen to me again, I don’t know what I’d do.”
I assured her it wouldn’t and told her to sign the agreement. I wasn’t going to let him get away with this kind of shit, and I certainly wasn’t going to give her up and, with her, my desire, at forty-four, after three childless marriages, to have a house, if not exactly full of babies, with a child in it of my own, and a young wife whom, though she described herself to me more than once as “mentally very lazy” and “intellectually very reclusive” and “sexually rather shy,” I hadn’t tired of in any way through our several hundred secret afternoons. I’d waited months before asking her to leave him, even though I was already thinking about it the first time we arranged to meet in my apartment. When she stubbornly resisted my proposal, I couldn’t tell if it was because she took me to be another male bully simply wanting his way or whether she truly believed that I was dangerously self-deluded.
“I’ve fallen in love with you,” I told her. “You’re too self-aware to ‘fall in love.’ You know,” she said, looking at me across my bed, “if you were really so convinced of the comic absurdity that you’re so good at showing, you wouldn’t be taking any of this seriously. Why can’t you think of this as strictly a business meeting?” When I said I wanted a child, she replied, “Do you really want to spend a lot of time dealing with the melodrama of family life?” When I said that I couldn’t get enough of her, she replied, “No, no, I’ve read your books—you need a lionlike temptress in here to give your libido a good thrashing. You need a woman who goes around organizing herself into the right kind of highly stylized erotic postures whenever she sits down—and that is definitely not me. You want a new experience and I’ll only be the same old thing. It won’t be dramatic at all. It’ll be a long dull English evening in front of the fire with a very sensible, responsible, respectable woman. In time you’ll need all sorts of polymorphous perversity to keep up your interest, and I’m really quite content, as you see, with simple penetration. I know that it’s not on anymore, but I’m not interested in sucking elbows and all those things, truly I’m not. Just because I’m free in the afternoons for certain immoral purposes, you may have got the wrong idea. I don’t want six men at a time, outdated as that sounds. Sometimes in the past, when I was younger, I had fantasies about that sort of thing, but real men, they’re rarely nice enough to want one at a time. I don’t want to dress like a chambermaid and indulge anyone’s apron fetishism. I don’t have the desire to be tied up and whipped, and as for buggery, it’s never given me much pleasure. The idea is exciting but I’m afraid it hurts, so we can’t found a marriage on that. If the truth be known, I really just like to arrange flowers and do a little bit of writing here and there—and that’s it.” “Then why do I have erotic thoughts about you?” “Really? What are they? Tell me.” “I had them all morning.” “What were we doing?” “You were assiduously performing fellatio.” “Oh, I thought it was going to be something more unusual. That I wouldn’t really do.” “Maria, how can I be so hooked if you’re as ordinary as you say?” “I think you like me because I don’t have the usual feminine vices. I think a lot of those women who seem bright also seem very ferocious. What you like is that I seem bright without being ferocious, somebody who is really rather ordinary and is not determined to kick you in the teeth. But why carry it further—why marry me and have a child and settle down like everyone else to an impostor’s life?” “Because I’ve decided to give up the artificial fiction of being myself for the genuine, satisfying falseness of being somebody else. Marry me.” “God, when you want something, you look at me so scarily.” “Because I’m conspiring with you to escape. I love you! I want to live with you! I want to have a child!” “Please,” she replied, “do try to confine your fantasies in my presence. I really thought you were more worldly than this.”
But I continued to confine nothing that I felt and in time she came to believe me, or collapsed in the face of my insistence—or both—and after that, the next thing I knew I was advising her to sign a document that would effectively sever me from my American life until tiny Phoebe was old enough to vote. Of course it wasn’t what I had been anticipating and I did worry what effect
moving abroad might have on my writing, but a courtroom custody battle would have been horrible for every reason, and I also believed that two or three years on, when everyone’s divorce-delirium had abated, when Phoebe was older and beginning school and Maria’s ex-husband was himself remarried and perhaps even a father again, it would be possible to renegotiate the custody stipulations. “And if it’s not possible?” “It will be,” I told her; “we’ll live two or three years in London, he’ll calm down, and it will all work out.” “Will it? Can it? Does it ever? I dread thinking what happens when things start going wrong in England with your fantasy of family life.”
When Maria had begun defending Israel against our fellow dinner-party guests, who’d been arguing as though the alleged crimes of what they called “appalling Zionism” were somehow mine to answer for, I wondered if what was driving her on weren’t perhaps fears she continued to have about things going wrong for us in England rather than the reputation of the Jewish state. It was difficult otherwise to understand why someone who considered head-on confrontations hell, who despised any situation that required raising her voice, should place herself at the center of an argument she’d never seemed at all concerned with before. The closest I’d seen her get to entangling herself in the problems of Jews, and Jewish problems with Gentiles, was in a far more subdued, secluded setting, the bedroom of my Manhattan apartment when she’d told me what it was like for her living in a “Jewish city.”
“I rather like it, actually,” she’d said. “Life is sort of fizzy here, isn’t it? A seemingly higher proportion of interesting people around. I like the way they talk. Gentiles have their little pale moments of exuberance, but nothing like this. It’s the way one talks when one’s been drinking. It’s like Virgil. Whenever he tries any of that epic stuff, you knew you were in for twenty-five lines of seriously difficult Latin, all beside the point. ‘And then the good Antaeus begged his son to put him down, saying, “My son, think first of our family, as when…”’ This manic asidedness—well, that’s New York and the Jews. Heady stuff. The only thing I don’t like is that they all seem a bit too quick to find fault with Gentiles in their attitudes toward Jews. You have a touch of it too—finding things horrendously anti-Semitic, or even mildly so, when they really aren’t. I know it’s not entirely unjustified for Jews to be thin-skinned on that score—nonetheless, it’s irritating. Uh-oh,” she said, “I shouldn’t be telling you these things.” “No,” I said, “go on—telling me what you know you shouldn’t be telling is one of your endearing strategies.” “Then I’ll tell you something else that irritates me. About Jewish men.” “Do.” “All the shiksa-fancying. I don’t like that. I don’t like it at all. I don’t feel it with you. Probably I’m deluding myself and you’re the man who invented it. I mean, I know there’s an element of strangeness here, but I like to think all that doesn’t operate too much.” “So other Jewish men fancy you too—is that what you’re saying?” “Are attracted to me because I’m not? In New York? Absolutely. Yes. That happens frequently when my husband and I go out.” “But why should it irritate you?” “Because there are enough politics in sex without racial politics coming into it.” I corrected her: “We’re not a race.” “It is a racial matter,” she insisted. “No, we’re the same race. You’re thinking of Eskimos.” “We are not the same race. Not according to anthropologists, or whoever measures these things. There’s Caucasian, Semitic—there are about five different racial groups. Don’t look at me like that.” “I can’t help it. Some nasty superstitions always tend to crop up when people talk about a Jewish ‘race.’” “See, you’re about to get angry at a Gentile for saying the wrong thing about Jews—proving my thesis. But all I can tell you is that you are a different race. We’re supposed to be closer to Indians than to Jews, actually. I’m talking about Caucasians.” “But I am Caucasian, kiddo. In the U.S. census I am, for good or bad, counted as Caucasian.” “Are you? Am I wrong? Oh, you’re not going to speak to me after this. It’s always a mistake to be frank.” “I’m nuts about you for being frank.” “That won’t last.” “Nothing lasts, but right now it’s true.” “Well then, all I am saying—and I am not talking now about you or race—is that I don’t feel with a lot of men in New York who do seem to want to chat me up that this is a personal thing, that they find me an interesting person who just happens not to be Jewish. On the contrary, this is a type that they had met before and that they quite liked having lunch with, or perhaps doing other things with, only because she was that type.”
As it turned out, if anyone at that dinner party had been overly quick to find fault with Gentiles in their attitude toward Jews, it had been Maria herself. And in the car driving home, when she wouldn’t let up about their hypocritical line on the Middle East, I began to wonder once again whether all this indignation might not have something to do with her anxiety about our English future. I might even be seeing signs of that tendency toward self-annihilating accommodation that had been exploited so cruelly by her former husband once he’d begun losing interest in her.
The car door had barely shut behind her when she said to me, “I assure you, people in this country who have any sense at all, who are people of any kind of discrimination and judgment, are not anti-Israel. I mean, these people bat on about Israel in terms of great disgust, but the man who runs Libya thinks he can fly. It’s just unreal, isn’t it, their selective disapproval? These people disapprove selectively and most strongly of the least reprehensible parties.” “You’re really stirred up by all this.” “Well, there comes a time when even nicely brought-up females lose their self-control. It’s true I have trouble shouting at people, and I don’t necessarily always say what I think, but even I don’t have trouble being angry when people are being insulting and stupid.”
* * *
After I’d repeated to Shuki the gist of the London dinner-table argument of the night before, he asked, “And she’s beautiful too, your foolhardy Christian defender of our incorrigible state?”
“She considers herself Gentile, not Christian.” In my billfold I found the Polaroid snapshot taken at Phoebe’s second birthday party only a few weeks before. It showed Maria bending over the party table, helping the child cut the cake, both of them with the same dark curls, oval face, and feline eyes.
Shuki asked, examining the picture, “She has a job?”
“She used to work for a magazine; now she’s writing fiction.”
“So, gifted as well. Very attractive. Only an English girl can have that expression on her face. Observing everything and giving away nothing. She is surrounded by a large serenity, Maria Zuckerman. Effortless tranquillity—not a trait we’re renowned for. Our great contribution is effortless anxiety.” He turned the photograph over and read aloud the words written there by me. “‘Maria, five months pregnant.’”
“A father finally at forty-five,” I said.
“I see. By marrying this woman and having a child you will be mixing at last in the everyday world.”
“That may be part of it.”
“The only problem is that in the everyday world girls don’t look like this. And if it’s a boy,” Shuki asked, “your English rose will consent to circumcision?”
“Who says circumcision’s required?”
“Genesis, chapter 17.”
“Shuki, I’ve never been completely sold on biblical injunctions.”
“Who is? Still, it’s been a unifying custom among Jews for rather a long time now. I think it would be difficult for you to have a son who wasn’t circumcised. I think you would resent a woman who insisted otherwise.”
“We’ll see.”
Laughing, he handed back the picture. “Why do you pretend to be so detached from your Jewish feelings? In the books all you seem to be worrying about is what on earth a Jew is, while in life you pretend that you’re content to be the last link in the Jewish chain of being.”
“Chalk it up to Diaspora abnormality.”
“Yes? You think in the Diaspora it’s ab
normal? Come live here. This is the homeland of Jewish abnormality. Worse: now we are the dependent Jews, on your money, your lobby, on our big allowance from Uncle Sam, while you are the Jews living interesting lives, comfortable lives, without apology, without shame, and perfectly independent. As for the condemnation of Israel in London W11, it may upset your lovely wife, but, really, it shouldn’t bother you out there. Left-wing virtue-hounds are nothing new. Feeling morally superior to Iraqis and Syrians isn’t really much fun, so let them feel superior to the Jews, if that’s all it takes to make life beautiful. Frankly I think the English distaste for Jews is nine-tenths snobbery anyway. The fact remains that in the Diaspora a Jew like you lives securely, without real fear of persecution or violence, while we are living just the kind of imperiled Jewish existence that we came here to replace. Whenever I meet you American-Jewish intellectuals with your non-Jewish wives and your good Jewish brains, well-bred, smooth, soft-spoken men, educated men who know how to order in a good restaurant, and to appreciate good wine, and to listen courteously to another point of view, I think exactly that: we are the excitable, ghettoized, jittery little Jews of the Diaspora, and you are the Jews with all the confidence and cultivation that comes of feeling at home where you are.”
“Only to an Israeli,” I said, “could an American-Jewish intellectual look like a charming Frenchman.”
“What the hell are you doing in a place like this?” Shuki asked.
“I’m here to see my brother. He’s made aliyah.”
“You’ve got a brother who’s emigrated to Israel? What is he, a religious nut?”
“No, a successful dentist. Or he was. He’s living in a little frontier settlement on the West Bank. He’s learning Hebrew there.”