The Counterlife

by Philip Roth

  “What does he do?” Laura said, seemingly translating his question into her own tongue. “He’s a lawyer too. We don’t work together, it’s a bad idea, but we’re on the same wavelength. This time I married a man like myself. I’m not on the creative wavelength, I never was. I thought I was, in college, and even had remnants of it when I first met Nathan. Putting the idea of being a writer ahead of everything else is something I know a little about. I read those books too, and had those thoughts once, and, at a certain expense, even carried on like that in my early twenties. But I was lucky and wound up in law school. Now I’m mostly on the practical wavelength. I only have a real life, I’m afraid. It turns out I don’t need any other.”

  “He never wrote about you, did he?”

  She smiled for the first time, and Henry saw that, if anything, she’d become even plainer, even sweeter. She didn’t seem to hold a single thing against his brother. “I wasn’t interesting enough to write about,” Laura said. “He was too bored with me to write about me. Maybe he wasn’t bored enough. One or the other.”

  “And now what?”

  “For me?” she asked.

  That wasn’t what he meant though he replied, “Yes.” He’d meant something awful—something he didn’t mean—like, “Now that this is over and my office is shut, what do I do with the rest of the day?” It had just slipped out, as though something internal that seemed as if it was external was trying to sabotage him.

  “Well, I’m quite content,” she said. “I’ll just go on with what I have. And you? How’s Carol? Is she here?”

  “I wanted to come by myself.” He should have said that Carol was getting the car and that he had to join her. He’d missed his opportunity to end the conversation before whatever wished to sabotage him went all the way.

  “But didn’t she want to come?”

  His immediate impulse was to set the record straight—the record that Nathan was always distorting—to point out to her, in Carol’s defense, that it was she who had been most perplexed and exasperated by Nathan’s tossing Laura over. But Laura wouldn’t care—she’d forgiven him. “He never wrote about you,” he said, “you don’t know what that’s like.”

  “But he never wrote about Carol, he never wrote about you. Did he?”

  “After I had the argument with him, one of the reasons we decided to stay out of his way was so that he wouldn’t be tempted.”

  She showed no emotion, though he knew what she was thinking—and suddenly he understood everything that Nathan must have come to despise in her. Cold. Bland and upright and blameless and cold.

  “And what do you think today?” Laura asked him in her very quiet, even voice. “Was it worth it?”

  “To be truthful?” Henry said, and it felt truthful as he was about to say it, the first entirely truthful statement he’d been able to make to her. “To be truthful, it wasn’t a bad idea.”

  She displayed nothing, nothing at all, just turned and calmly, coldly walked away, her place immediately taken, before Henry could even move, by a bearded man of about fifty, a tall, thin man wearing gold-rimmed bifocals and a gray hat, looking from the conservative cut of his clothes as though he might be a broker—or perhaps even a rabbi. Henry did, after a moment, think he recognized him as another writer, some literary friend of Nathan’s whose picture Henry had seen in the papers but whose name he’d forgotten—someone who was now going to be as affronted as Laura not to find Henry and his entire family standing on the sidewalk knee-deep in tears.

  He should never have closed the office. He should have stayed in Jersey, seen to his patients, and left it to time to deal with his feelings—a funeral was the last place ever to find what he and Nathan had lost.

  The bearded man didn’t bother with introductions and Henry still couldn’t recall who he was.

  “Well,” he said to Henry, “he did in death what he could never do in life. He made it easy for them. Just went in there and died. This is a death we can all feel good about. Not like cancer. With cancer they go on forever. They try all our patience. After the initial surge, the first sickness, when everybody comes around with the coffee cakes and the casseroles, they don’t die right then, they hang on, usually for six months, sometimes for a year. Not Zuckerman. No dying, no decay—just death. All very thoughtful. Quite a performance. Did you know him?”

  He knows, Henry thought, sees the resemblance—his is the performance. He knows exactly who I am and what I don’t feel. What else is this about? “No,” Henry said, “I didn’t.”

  “Just a fan.”

  “I suppose.”

  “The bereaved editor. He reminds me of an overprivileged kid—only instead of money it’s intellectuals. He’s the only person in the world I can imagine reading a thing like that and thinking it’s a eulogy. That wasn’t a eulogy, it was a book review! Know what he was really thinking when he got the news? I lost my star. For him it’s a career setback. Maybe not a disaster, but for a young editor on the make, who’s already cultivated the grand style, to lose his star—that’s grief. Which book is your favorite?”

  Henry heard himself saying “Carnovsky.”

  “Not Carnovsky as bowdlerized in that book review. The editor’s revenge—editing the real writer right out of existence.”

  Henry stood there on the street corner as though it were all a dream, as though Nathan hadn’t died other than in a dream; he was over in New York at a funeral in a dream, and why the eulogy had celebrated the very thing that had driven him and his brother apart, why he had himself been speechless, why the ex-wife showed up to feel more grief than he did and to silently condemn Carol for not being present, was because that is what happens in a terrible dream. There’s an insult everywhere, one is oneself the loneliest imaginable form of life, and people like this suddenly materialize, as unidentifiable as a force of nature.

  “The deballing of Zuckerman is now complete,” the bearded man informed Henry. “A sanitized death, a travesty of a eulogy, and no ceremony at all—completely secular, having nothing to do with the way Jews bury people. At least a good cry around the hole, a little remorse as they lower the coffin, but no, no one even allowed to go off with the body. Burn it. There is no body. The satirist of the clamoring body—without a body. All backwards and sterile and stupid. The cancer deaths are horrifying. That’s what I would have figured him for. Wouldn’t you? Where was the rawness and the mess? Where was the embarrassment and the shame? Shame in this guy operated always. Here is a writer who broke taboos, fucked around, indiscreet, stepped outside that stuff deliberately, and they bury him like Neil Simon—Simonize our filthy, self-afflicted Zuck! Hegel’s unhappy consciousness out under the guise of sentiment and love! This unsatisfiable, suspect, quarrelsome novelist, this ego driven to its furthest extremes, ups and presents them with a palatable death—and the feeling-police, the grammar-police, they give him a palatable funeral with all the horseshit and mythmaking! The only way to have a funeral is to invite everyone who ever knew the person and just wait for the accident to happen—somebody who comes in out of the blue and says the truth. Everything else is table manners. I can’t get over it. He’s not even going to rot in the ground, this guy who was made for it. This insidious, unregenerate defiler, this irritant in the Jewish bloodstream, making people uncomfortable and angry by looking with a mirror up his own asshole, really despised by a lot of smart people, offensive to every possible lobby, and they put him away, decontaminated, deloused—suddenly he’s Abe Lincoln and Chaim Weizmann in one! Could this be what he wanted, this kosherization, this stenchlessness? I really had him down for cancer. The works. The catastrophe-extravaganza, the seventy-eight-pound death, with the stops all pulled out. A handful of hairless pain howling for the needle, even while begging the nurse’s aide to have a heart and touch his prick—one last blow job for the innocent victim. Instead, the dripping hard-on gets out clean as a whistle. All dignity. A big person. These writers are great—real fakes. Want it all. Madly aggressive, shit on the page, sho
ot on the page, show off their every last fart on the page—and for that they expect medals. Shameless. You gotta love ’em.”

  And what’s this mouth want me to say—you’re a mind reader and I agree? I had him down for cancer too? Henry said absolutely nothing.

  “You’re the brother,” the bearded one whispered, speaking from behind his hand.

  “I am not.”

  “You are—you’re Henry.”

  “Fuck off, you!” Henry told him, making a fist, and then, stepping rapidly from the curb, he was nearly knocked down by a truck.

  * * *

  Next he was in the entryway to Nathan’s brownstone, explaining to an elderly Italian woman with a very dour face and what looked like a killer tumor swelling out of her scalp, that he’d left the keys to his brother’s apartment over in Jersey. She was the one who had come to the door when he’d pushed the superintendent’s bell. “It’s been a helluva day,” he told her. “If my head wasn’t screwed on, I would have forgotten that.”

  What with that growth of hers he should never have said “head.” That was probably why he’d said it. He was still not entirely in control. Something else was.

  “I can’t let no one in,” she told him.

  “Don’t I look like his brother?”

  “You sure do, you look like twins. You gave me a shock. I thought it was Mr. Zuckerman.”

  “I’ve just come from the funeral.”

  “They buried him, huh?”

  “Cremating him.” Just about now, he thought. Nothing now left of Nathan that you couldn’t pour into a baking-soda box.

  “It’ll make it easier,” he explained, his heart pounding away, “if I don’t have to drive back tomorrow with the keys,” and he slipped her the two twenties he’d rolled up in his hand before entering the building.

  Following her to the elevator, he tried to think what pretext he’d offer if anybody came upon him while he was inside Nathan’s apartment but instead began to harangue himself for failing to pay this visit long ago—if only he had, today would have been nothing like today. But the truth was that since their fight, Henry really had not thought about his brother that much, and was kind of amazed that he had got stuck in his resentment and it had all worked out this way. He had certainly never prepared himself for Nathan’s dying or even imagined Nathan capable of dying, not so long as he was himself alive; in front of the funeral parlor, defending against the assault of that overbearing clown, he had even momentarily imagined him to be Nathan—Nathan’s spirit giving it to him, just like Laura, for his heartlessness.

  Suppose he’s tailed me and shows up here.

  There were two locks to be opened, and then he was inside the little hallway alone, thinking how even as an adult one continues, like a child, to believe that when someone dies it’s some kind of trick, that death isn’t entirely death, that they are in the box and not in the box, that they are somehow capable of jumping out from behind the door and crying, “Had you fooled!” or turning up on the street to follow you around. He tiptoed to the wide doorway opening onto the living room and stood at the edge of the Oriental carpet as though the floor were mined. The shutters were closed and the long curtains drawn. Nathan might have been away on a vacation, if he weren’t dead. Next week, he thought, it would be thirty years since he’d taken that Halloween walk in his sleep. Another recollection for his undelivered eulogy—Nathan holding his hand and shepherding him around the neighborhood earlier that night in his pirate costume.

  The furniture looked substantial and the room impressive, the home of a successful and important man, the kind of success with which Henry could never compete, he who had himself been phenomenally successful. It had to do not primarily with money but with some irrational protection accorded the anointed, some invulnerability Nathan had always seemed to possess. It had sometimes driven him crazy when he thought of how Nathan had achieved it, though he knew there was something petty and awful—tragic even—in allowing yourself the minutest perception of wanting to be your brother’s equal. That was why it had been better not to think of him at all.

  Why, asked Henry, is being a good son and husband such a big joke to that society of intellectual elite? What’s so wrong with a straightforward life? Is duty necessarily such a cheap idea, is the decent and the dutiful really shit, while “irresponsible exaggeration” produces “classics”? In the game as played by those literary aristocrats, the rules are somehow completely reversed … But he hadn’t come all the way here so as to stand staring morbidly off into space, summoning up yet again his most rancorous feelings, mesmerized in some sort of regressive freeze while waiting for Nathan to jump out of the box and tell him it was all a joke—he was here because there was a nasty job to be done.

  Inside a deep closet along a wall of the passageway separating the rear of the apartment—Nathan’s study and the bedroom—from the living room, kitchen, and foyer at the front, were four filing cabinets containing his papers. Finding the journals took only seconds—they were stacked up, four columns of them, in chronological sequence, right on top of the filing cabinets: twenty black three-ring binders, each one plump with loose-leaf pages and held round with a stout red rubber band. Though the brain cells might have been burned to cinders, there was still this memory bank to worry about.

  Thanks to Nathan’s orderliness, Henry was able, with none of the difficulties he’d foreseen, to locate a volume identified on the spine with the year of his first adulterous affair—and, sure enough, he had been absolutely right to heed his paranoia and not to reproach himself about that too, for there it all was, every intimate detail, recorded for posterity. Not only were the entries as plentiful as he’d been imagining since the news had reached him of Nathan’s death, but it was all more compromising than he’d remembered.

  To think that he could have been in such hot pursuit, only ten years back, of Nathan’s admiration! The lengths to which I went to gain his attention! Nearly thirty, a father of three, yet my needs with him the needs of a blabbing adolescent boy! And, he thought, reading through the pages, the adolescent with her as well. From the look of it no greater asshole lives than the husband and father fleeing the domestic scene—there could be no sorrier, shallower, more ridiculous spectacle than himself as revealed in those notes. He was stunned to see how little it had taken to bring him so close to squandering everything. For a fuck, according to Nathan—and depend on him to get that right—for a fuck in the ass with a Swiss-German blonde, he had been ready to give up Carol, Leslie, Ruthie, Ellen, the practice, the house … I am a virgin there no longer, Henry. They all think I’m so good and responsible. Nobody knows!

  But had he failed to get into the apartment and to get his hands on these pages, had he really believed he’d been followed, had he turned back to Jersey like a man in a dream fearful of being apprehended, everyone would have known. Because they publish these journals when writers die—biographers plunder them for biographies, and then everyone would have known everything.

  Leaning against the wall in the narrow passageway, he read twice through the journal covering the crucial months, and when he was certain that he had tracked down every entry bearing his or her name, neatly, with a sharp tug, he tore out those pages, and then carefully returned the notebook to its chronological place atop the filing cabinet. From the volumes and volumes of words dating back to when Nathan had been discharged from the army and had moved to Manhattan to become a writer, he had extracted a mere twenty-two pages. He’d bribed his way into the apartment, he was there unlawfully, but by removing fewer than two dozen pages from the five or six thousand closely covered with Nathan’s handwriting, he could not believe that he had committed a flagrant outrage against his brother’s property; he had certainly done nothing to damage Nathan’s reputation or diminish the value of his papers. Henry had merely intervened to prevent a dangerous encroachment upon his own privacy—for were these notes to become public, there was no telling what difficulties they could cause, professionally as we
ll as at home.

  And if by removing those few pages he was doing his old mistress a favor too, well, why shouldn’t he? Theirs had been quite a fling: a brief, regressive, adolescent interlude from which he had mercifully escaped without committing a really stupendous blunder, yet he’d been absolutely mad for her at the time. He remembered watching her kneel in the black silk camisole to pick up the money off the motel floor. He remembered dancing with her in his own dark house, dancing like kids to Mel Tormé after having spent all afternoon in the bedroom. He remembered slapping her face and pulling her hair and how, when he’d asked what it was like coming again and again, she had answered, “Paradise.” He remembered how it had excited him to see her face flush when he made her talk dirty to him in Swiss-German. He remembered hiding the black silk camisole in his office safe when he’d found himself unable to throw it away. The thought of her in that underwear caused him, even now, to press his hand against his cock. But it was illicit enough rummaging through the papers in his dead brother’s apartment—it would have been simply too obscene there in the passageway to jerk himself off because of what he was remembering from ten years back, thanks to Nathan’s notes.

  He looked at his watch—he’d better call Carol. The phone was in the bedroom at the back of the flat. Sitting at the edge of Nathan’s bed, he dialed his home number, prepared for his brother to pop up grinning from beneath the box springs, to leap fully alive out of the clothes closet, telling him, “Tricked you, Henry, had you fooled—put the pages back, kid, you’re not my editor.”

  But I am. He may have given the eulogy, but I can now edit out whatever I like.

  While the phone rang he was astonished by an amazing smell from the courtyard back of the building. It took a while before he realized that the smell was coming from him. It was as though in a nightmare his shirt had been soaked in something more than mere perspiration.