The Counterlife

by Philip Roth

  “Our mother’s terribly anti-Semitic, you know.”

  “Is she? No one told me.”

  “I’m telling you. I think you may find that in experimenting with Maria you’ve gone a bit over the top.”

  “I like to go over the top.”

  “Yes, you do. I’ve read your famous ghetto comedy. Positively Jacobean. What’s it called again?”

  “My Darling Self-Image.”

  “Well, if you are, as your work suggests, fascinated with the consequences of transgression, you’ve come to the right family. Our mother can be hellishly unpleasant when it comes to transgression. She can be hard like a mineral—an Anglo-Saxon mineral. I don’t think she really likes the idea of her languid, helpless Maria submitting to anal domination by a Jew. I imagine that she believes that like most virile sadists you fancy anal penetration.”

  “Tell her I take a crack at it from time to time.”

  “Our mother won’t like that at all.”

  “I don’t know a mother who would. That sounds typical enough to me.”

  “I think you’re filled with rage, resentment, and vanity, all of which you cloak beneath this urbane and civilized exterior.”

  “That sounds rather typical too. Though there are clearly those who don’t even bother with the civilized exterior.”

  “Do you understand everything I’m saying to you?” she asked.

  “Well, I hear what you’re saying to me.”

  Suddenly she thrust at me the half of the mince pie still in her hand. I thought momentarily that she was going to push it into my face.

  “Smell this,” she said.

  “Why should I do that?”

  “Because it smells good. Don’t be so defensive because you’re in a church. Smell it. It smells like Christmas. I’ll bet you have no smells associated with Chanukah.”

  “Shekels,” I said.

  “I’ll bet you’d like to do away with Christmas.”

  “Be a good Marxist, Sarah. The dialectic tells us that the Jews will never do away with Christmas—they make too much money off of it.”

  “You laugh very quietly, I notice. You don’t want to show too much. Is that because you’re in England and not in New York? Is that because you don’t want to be confused with the amusing Jews you depict in fiction? Why don’t you just go ahead and show some teeth? Your books do—they’re all teeth. You, however, keep very well hidden the Jewish paranoia which produces vituperation and the need to strike out—if only, of course, with all the Jewish ‘jokes.’ Why so refined in England and so coarse in Carnovsky? The English broadcast on such low frequencies—Maria particularly emits such soft sounds, the voice of the hedgerows, isn’t it?—that it must be terribly worrying whether you’re going suddenly to forget yourself, bare your teeth, and cut loose with the ethnic squawk. Don’t worry about what the English will think, the English are too polite for pogroms—you have fine American teeth, show them when you laugh. You look Jewish, unmistakably. You can’t possibly hide that by not showing your teeth.”

  “I don’t have to act like a Jew—I am one.”

  “Quite clever.”

  “Not as clever as you. You’re too clever and too stupid all at the same time.”

  “I don’t much like myself, either,” she said. “Nonetheless, I do think Maria ought to have told you that she is from the sort of people who, if you knew anything about English society, you would have expected to be anti-Semitic. If you ever read any English novels—have you?”

  I didn’t bother to answer, but I didn’t walk away either. I waited to see just how far my new sister-in-law actually intended to go.

  “I recommend beginning your education with a novel by Trollope,” she said. “It may knock some of the stuffing from your pathetic yearning to partake of English civility. It will tell you all about people like us. Read The Way We Live Now. It may help to explode those myths that fuel the pathetic Jewish Anglophilia Maria’s cashing in on. The book is rather like a soap opera, but the main meat of it from your point of view is a little subplot, an account of Miss Longestaffe, an English young lady from an upper-class home, sort of country gentry, a bit over the hill, and she’s furious that nobody’s married her, and she’s failed to sell herself on the marriage markets, and because she’s determined to have a rich social life in London, she’s going to demean herself by marrying a middle-aged Jew. The interesting bit is all her feelings, her family’s feelings about this comedown, and the behavior of the Jew in question. I won’t spoil it by going on. It will be quite an education, and coming, I think, not a moment too soon. Oh, you’re going to go slightly ape about this stuff, I’m sure. Poor Miss Longestaffe reckons she’s doing the Jew a big favor, you see, by marrying him, even if her sole motive is to get hold of his money, and to have as little to do with him as possible. And she has no thought really of what’s in it for him. In fact, she feels she’s conferring a social favor.”

  “It seems awfully fresh in your mind.”

  “As I was seeing you today, I got it down to look at. Are you interested?”

  “Go on. How does her family take the Jew?”

  “Yes, her family is the point, isn’t it? They’re thunderstruck. ‘A Jew,’ everyone cries, ‘an old fat Jew?’ She’s so upset by their reaction that her defiance turns to doubt, and she has a correspondence with him—he’s called Mr. Brehgert. He’s actually, as it happens, though rather colorless, a thoroughly decent, responsible man, a very successful businessman. However, he is described frequently, as indeed other Jews in the book are, in terms which will set your teeth on edge. What will be particularly instructive to you is their correspondence—what it reveals about the attitudes of a large number of people to Jews, attitudes that only appear to be a hundred years old.”

  “And is that it?” I asked. “Is that all?”

  “Of course not. Do you know John Buchan? He sort of flourished around the First World War. Oh, you’ll like him too. You’ll learn a lot. I would recommend him just on the strength of a few astonishing asides. He’s terribly famous in England, enormously famous, a boy’s adventure-thriller writer. His stories are all about how blond Aryan gentlemen go forth against the forces of evil, which are always amassed in Europe and have huge conspiracies, not unconnected with Jewish financiers, to somehow bring an evil cloud over the world. And of course the blond Aryans win in the end and get back to their manor houses. That’s the usual story. And the Jews are usually at the bottom of it, lurking there somewhere. I really don’t suggest you actually read him—it’s a bit of a labor. Have a friend do it for you. Have Maria do it—she has plenty of time. She can just read out the good bits, for the sake of your education. The thing is that once in every fifty pages you get some overtly anti-Semitic remark which is simply an aside, simply the shared consciousness of all the readers and the writer. It’s not like in Trollope, a developed idea. Trollope is actually interested in the predicament—this is evidence of a shared consciousness. And it wasn’t written in 1870—this sort of mystique is still very much around, even if Maria has failed to inform you. Maria is a child in many ways. You know how children understand to stay off certain subjects. Of course talking her way into a man’s pants is one of Maria’s specialties, I don’t mean to say she can’t do that. In bed she makes it virginal again, I’m sure, with all her natural English delicacy—in bed with Maria we’re back to Wordsworth. I’m sure she even made adultery virginal. Where the orgy is with Maria is in the talk. She mind-fucks a man to death, doesn’t she, Nathan? You should have seen her at Oxford. For her poor tutors it was an agony. But still she doesn’t say it all, you know. There are certain things you don’t tell a man, and certain things, clearly, haven’t been told you. Maria lies in the good way—to maintain peace. However, you ought not, because of her lies and her lapses of memory, to be grievously misled—or unprepared.”

  “For what? Enough of the glories of the English novel—and quite enough about Maria. Unprepared for what from whom?”

  �
��From our mother. You will be making a mistake if, when this infant arrives, you try to stand in the way of a christening.”

  * * *

  In the taxi, I chose not to ask Maria whether she knew how little her sister cared for her, or how profoundly Sarah resented me, or if what had been suggested about their mother’s expectations for our child was, in fact, true. I was too stunned—and then we were on our way to celebrate Maria’s twenty-eighth birthday at her favorite restaurant, and once I’d begun on her sister’s barrage of abuse, that lovingly articulated hymn of hate, I knew there’d be no celebration. What mystified me was that all I’d ever heard about Maria’s relations with Sarah was the unastonishing news that they were no longer anything like as close as they’d been as schoolgirls. She’d said something once about psychiatric problems, but only in passing, while describing the aftereffects of Sarah’s lurid ninety-day marriage to a scion of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, and not to account for her sister’s feelings toward her or Buchanite view of people like me. Maria had certainly never characterized her mother as “terribly anti-Semitic,” though of course I suspected that there could well be more than a trace of it in the layers and layers of social snobbery and the generalized xenophobia that I’d felt at Holly Tree Cottage. What I didn’t know was whether the specter of the baptismal font was only an irresistible finale to a nasty little joke, a hilarious punch line that Sarah figured couldn’t fail to arouse the ire of her sister’s rich middle-aged Jew, or whether the christening of baby Zuckerman, however laughably absurd to contemplate, was something Maria and I would actually have to oppose in an ugly struggle with her mother. What if while resisting the mother who never put a foot wrong, the unfortified daughter obediently collapsed? What if Maria couldn’t even bring herself to fight against what seemed to me, the more I thought about it, not only a more-than-symbolic attempt to kidnap the child but an effort to annul her marriage to the kike?

  I began only then to realize how naïve I’d been not to have seen something like this coming, and to wonder if it hadn’t been me, not Maria, who had been childishly “staying off certain subjects.” I seemed to have almost deliberately blinded myself to the ideology that, of course, might underlie her proper upbringing among the country gentry, and to have failed as well to appreciate the obvious family implications of the unprecedented defiance Maria had dared to display by returning to England divorced from the well-connected young First Secretary at the U.K. mission to the U.N. and married instead to me, the Moor—in their eyes—to her Desdemona. More disturbing even than the ugly encounter with Sarah was the likelihood that I had allowed myself to be beguiled mostly by fantasy, that everything up until now had been largely a dream in which I had served as a mindless co-conspirator, spinning a superficial unreality out of those “charming” differences that had at last broken upon us with their full—if fossilized—social meaning. Living on the river indeed. The swans, the mists, the tides gently lapping at the garden wall—how could that idyll possibly be a real life? And how poisonous and painful would this conflict be? It suddenly looked as though all these months two rational and hardheaded realists had been moonily and romantically circumventing a very real and tricky predicament.

  Yet in New York I’d been so eager to be rejuvenated that I simply hadn’t thought it through. As a writer I’d mined my past to its limits, exhausted my private culture and personal memories, and could no longer even warm to squabbling over my work, having finally tired of my detractors rather the way you fall out of love with someone. I was sick of old crises, bored with old issues, and wanted only to undo the habits with which I had chained myself to my desk, implicated three wives in my seclusion, and, for years on end, lived in the nutshell of self-scrutiny. I wanted to hear a new voice, to make a new tie, to be enlivened by a new and original partner—to break away and take upon myself a responsibility unlike any bound up with writing or with the writer’s tedious burden of being his own cause. I wanted Maria and I wanted a child, and not only had I failed to think it through, I had done so intentionally, thinking-it-through being another old habit for which I had no nostalgia. What could suit me more than a woman protesting how unsuitable she was? As by this time I was wholly unsuitable for myself, ipso facto, we were the perfect pair.

  * * *

  Five months into pregnancy the rush of hormones must do something to the skin, because Maria’s had a visible radiance. It was a great moment for her. There was no movement of the baby yet, but the early sickness was well over and the discomfort of being huge and cumbersome hadn’t begun, and she said that all she felt was coddled and protected and special. Over her dress she was wearing a long black wool cape with a hood that had a tassel dangling from the point; it was soft and warm and I could hold her arm as it emerged from the opening in the side. Her dress was dark green and flowing, a silk jersey dress with a deep round collar and long sleeves that closed around her wrists. That dress looked to me like all you could ask for, plain and sexy and faultless.

  We were seated side by side near the end of a plush banquette, facing the paneled dining room. It was after eight and most of the tables were already occupied. I ordered champagne while Maria found in her purse the Polaroid snapshots of the house—I still hadn’t had a chance to look at them closely and there were lots of things she wanted me to see. Meanwhile, I had taken out of my pocket a long black velvet box. Inside was the bracelet that I’d bought for her the week before just off Bond Street, at a shop specializing in the sort of Victorian and Georgian jewelry that she liked to wear. “It’s light but not flimsy,” the clerk had assured me, “delicate enough for the lady’s small wrists.” Sounded like handcuffs, the price was shocking, but I took it. I could have taken ten. It was a great moment, really, for both of us. Whether it qualified as “real life” remained to be seen.

  “Oh, this is nice,” she said, fixing the clip and then holding her arm out to admire the present. “Opals. Diamonds. The river house. Champagne. You. You,” she repeated, musingly this time, “—so much rock for this moss to adhere to.” She kissed my cheek and was, incarnate, in that moment, the delectability of the female. “I find being married to you a tremendous experiment in pleasure. Isn’t this the best way to be fed?”

  “You look lovely in that dress.”

  “It’s really very ancient.”

  “I remember it from New York.”

  “That was the idea.”

  “I missed you, Maria.”

  “Did you?”

  “I appreciate you, you know.”

  “That’s a very strong card, that one.”

  “Well, it’s so.”

  “I missed you. I tried very hard not to think of you all the time. When will I begin to get on your nerves?” she asked.

  “I don’t think you have to worry tonight.”

  “The bracelet is perfect, so perfect that it’s hard to believe it was your own idea. If a man does something very appropriate it’s usually not. It’s lovely, but you know what else I want, what I want most when we move? Flowers in the house. Isn’t that middle class of me? Mind you, I have a very long list of material desires, but that’s what I thought when I saw the builders there today.”

  After that, it simply wasn’t in me to yield to the impulse pressing me to blurt it out, to say to her, outright, without embellishment, “Look, your mother’s a terrific anti-Semite who expects us to have our child baptized—true or false? And if true, why pretend you’re oblivious to it? That’s more disturbing than anything else.” Instead, as though I felt no urgency about what she knew or was pretending not to know and expected to hear nothing to dismay me, as though I weren’t disturbed about anything at all, I said in a voice as softly civilized as hers, “I’m afraid breaking through to your mother is still beyond me. When she regroups her forces back of that smile, I really don’t know where to look. She was nothing tonight if not glacially correct, but what precisely does she think of us? Can you figure it out?”

  “Oh, what everybody seems to be think
ing, more or less. That we’ve ‘traversed enormous differences.’”

  “‘Traversed’? She said that to you?”

  “She did.”

  “And what did you say to her?”

  “I said, ‘What’s so tremendously different? Of course I know that in one sense we could hardly be more different. But think of all the things we’ve read in common, think of all the things we know in common, we speak the same language—I know far more about him than you think.’ I told her I’ve read masses of American fiction, I’ve seen masses and masses of American films—”

  “But she’s not talking about my Americanness.”

  “Not solely. That’s true. She’s thinking about our ‘associations.’ She says all that’s been obscured by the way we met—a secret liaison in New York. We never met among friends, we never met in public places, we never met to do things, so that we could never exasperate each other with visible signs of all of our differences. Her point is that we got married there without ever really allowing ourselves to be tested. She’s concerned about our life in England. Part of these things, she tells me, is how one’s group perceives one.”

  “And how do they perceive us?”

  “I don’t think people are terribly interested, really. Oh, I think that if they bother at all the first thing everybody thinks, when they hear about a thing like this, is that you’re interested in a young woman to recharge your batteries, and maybe you’re interested in English culture, that might be possible, and the shiksa syndrome, of course—that would all be obvious to them. On my side, equally obvious, they’d say, ‘Well, he may be quite a lot older, and he may be Jewish, but my goodness, he’s a literary star and he has got lots of money.’ They’d think I was after you purely for your status and money.”

  “Despite my being Jewish.”

  “I don’t think many people bother much about that. Certainly not literary types. Along the road where my mother lives, yes, there might be one or two mutters. Lots of people will be quite cynical, outrightly, of course, but then that would be true in New York as well.”