by Philip Roth
He’d first met Jenny while visiting the retreat of some friends on a wooded mountainside in a village up the Hudson called Bearsville. The daughter of a local schoolteacher, she’d been down to art school at Cooper Union and then three years on her own with a knapsack in Europe, and now. back where she’d begun, was living alone in a wood shack with a cat and her paints and a Franklin stove. She was twenty-eight, robust, lonely, blunt, pink-complexioned, with a healthy set of largish white teeth, baby-fine carrot-colored hair, and impressive muscles in her arms. No long temptress fingers like his secretary Diana—she had hands. “Someday, if you like,” she said to Zuckerman. “I’ll tell you stories about my jobs—’My Biceps and How I Got Them.’” Before leaving for Manhattan, he’d stopped off at her cabin unannounced, ostensibly to look at her landscapes. Skies. trees, hills, and roads just as blunt as she was. Van Gogh without the vibrating sun. Quotations from Van Gogh’s letters to his brother were tacked up beside the easel, and a scarred copy of the French edition of the letters, the one she’d lugged around Europe in her knapsack, lay in the pile of art books by the daybed. On the fiberboard walls were pencil drawings: cows, horses, pigs, nests, flowers, vegetables—all announcing with the same forthright charm, “Here I am and I am real.”
They strolled through a ravaged orchard out behind the cabin. sampling the crop of gnarled fruit. Jenny asked him. “Why does your hand keep stealing up to your shoulder?” Zuckerman hadn’t even realized what he was doing: the pain, at this point, had only cornered about a quarter of his existence, and he still thought of it as something tike a spot on his coat that had only to be brushed away. Yet no matter how hard he brushed, nothing happened. “Some sort of strain.” he replied. “From stiff-arming the critics?’she asked. “More likely stiff-arming myself. What’s it like alone up here?” “A lot of painting, a lot of gardening, a lot of masturbating. It must be nice to have money and buy things. What’s the most extravagant thing you’ve ever done?” The most extravagant, the most foolish, the most vile, the most thrilling—he told her, then she told him. Hours of questions and answers, but for a while no further than that. “Our great sexless rapport,” she called it. when they spoke for long stretches on the phone at night. “Tough luck for me, maybe, but I don’t want to be one of your girls. I’m better off with my hammer, building a new floor.” “How’d you learn to build a floor?” “It’s easy.”
One midnight she’d called to say she’d been out in the garden bringing in the vegetables by moonlight. “The natives up here tell me it’s going to freeze in a few hours. I’m coming down to Lemnos to watch you lick your wounds.” “Lemnos? I don’t remember Lemnos.” “Where the Greeks put Phiioctetes and his foot.”
She’d stayed for three days on Lemnos. She squirted the base of his neck with anesthetizing ethyl chloride; she sat unclothed astride his knotted back and massaged between his shoulder blades; she cooked them dinner, coq au vin and cassoulet—dishes tasting strongly of bacon—and the vegetables she’d harvested before the frost; she told him about France and her adventures there with men and women. Coming from the bathroom at bedtime, he caught her by the desk looking into his datebook. “Oddly furtive,” he said, “for someone so open.” She merely laughed and said, “You couldn’t write if you didn’t do worse. Who’s ‘D’? Who’s ‘G’? How many do we come to all together?” “Why? Like to meet some of the others?” “No thanks. I don’t think I want to get into that. That’s what I thought I was phasing myself out of up on my mountaintop.” On the last morning of that first visit he wanted to give her something—something other than a book. He’d been giving women books (and the lectures that went with them) ail his life. He gave Jenny ten $100 bills. “What’s this for?” she said. “You just told me that you couldn’t stand coming down here looking like a yokel. Then there’s the curiosity about extravagance. Van Gogh had his brother, you have me. Take it.” She returned three hours later with a scarlet cashmere cloak, burgundy boots, and a big bottle of Bal à Versailles. “I went to Bergdorf’s,” she said rather shyly, but proudly—“here’s your change,” and handed him two quarters, a dime, and three pennies. She took off all her yokel clothes and put on just the cloak and the boots. “Know what?” she said, looking in the mirror. “I feel like I’m pretty.” “You are pretty.” She opened the bottle and dabbed at herself with the stopper: she perfumed the tip of her tongue. Then again to the mirror. A long look. “I feel tall.” That she wasn’t and wouldn’t be. She phoned from the country that evening to tell him about her mother’s reaction when she stopped by the house, wearing the cloak and smelling of Bal à Versailles, and explained it was a gift from a man. “She said,’! wonder what your grandmother will say about that coat.” “Well, a harem’s a harem, Zuckerman thought. “Ask your grandmother’s size and I’ll get her one too.”
The two weeks of hospital traction began with Jenny reading to him in the afternoons from The Magic Mountain, then back at his apartment at night drawing pictures in her sketchbook of his desk, his chair, his bookshelves, and his clothes, pictures that she taped to the wall of his room the next time she came to visit. Each day she made a drawing of an old American sampler with an uplifting adage stitched in the center, and this too she taped to the wall he could see. “To deepen your outlook.” she told him.
The only antidote 10 mental suffering is physical pain.
KARL MARX
One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it.
JANE AUSTEN
If one is strong enough to resist certain shocks, to solve more or less complicated physical difficulties, then from forty to fifty one is again in a new relatively normal tideway.
V. VAN GOGH
She devised a chart to trace the progress of the treatment on his outlook. At the end of seven days it looked like this:
On the eighth afternoon, when she arrived with her drawing pad at room 611, Zuckerman was gone; she found him at home, on the playmat. half drunk. “Too much inlook for the outlook,” he told her. “That all-encompassing. Too isolating. Broke down.”
“Oh,” she said lightly, “I don’t think this constitutes much of a breakdown. Icouldn’t have tasted an hour.”
“Life smaller and smaller and smaller. Wake up thinking about my neck. Go to sleep thinking about my neck. Only thought, which doctors to turn to when this doesn’t help the neck. There to get well and knew I was getting worse. Hans Castorp better at all this than I am. Jennifer. Nothing in that bed but me. Nothing but a neck thinking neck-thoughts. No Settembrini, no Naphta, no snow. No glamorous intellectual voyage. Trying to find my way out and I only work my way further in. Defeated. Ashamed.” He was also angry enough to scream.
“No, the problem was me.” She poured him another drink. “I wish I were more of an entertainer. I only wish I weren’t this lough lump. Well, forget it. We tried—it didn’t work.”
He sat at the kitchen table rubbing his neck and finishing the vodka while she made her bacony lamb stew. He didn’t want her out of his sight. Levelheaded Jenny, let’s make the underside of domesticity the whole thing—live with me and be my sweet tough lump. He was about ready to ask her to move in. “I said to myself in bed, ‘Come what may, when I get out of here I throw myself back into work. H” it hurts it hurts and the hell with it. Muster all your understanding and just overcome it.”‘
“And?”
‘Too elementary for understanding. Understanding doesn’t touch it. Worrying about it, wondering about it, fighting it, treating it, trying to ignore it, trying to figure out what it is—it makes my ordinary inwardness look like New Year’s Eve in Times Square. When you’re in pain all you think-about is not being in pain. Back and back and back to the one obsession. I should never have asked you to come down. I should have done it alone. But even this way I was too weak. You, a witness to this.”
“Witness to what? Come on, for my outlook it was just fine. You don’t know how I’ve loved running around here wearing a skirt. I’ve been taking care of myself
a long time now in my earnest, blustery way. Well, for you I can be softer, gentler, calmer—you’ve provided a chance for me to provide in a womanly way. No need for anybody to feel bad about that. It’s guilt-free time, Nathan, for both of us. I’ll be of use to you, you be of use to me, and let’s neither of us worry about the consequences. Let my grandmother do that.”
Choose Jenny? Tempting if she’d have it. Her spunk, her health, her independence, the Van Gogh quotations, the unwavering will—how all that quieted the invalid frenzy. But what would happen when he was well? Choose Jenny because of the ways in which she approximates Mrs. Zuckermans I, II, and III? The best reason not to choose her. Choose like a patient in need of a nurse? A wife as a Band-Aid? In a fix like this, the only choice is not to choose. Wait it out, as is.
It was the severe depression brought on by the eight days imprisoned in traction—and by the thought of waiting it out as is—that sent him running to the psychoanalyst. But they didn’t get on at all. He spoke of the appeal of illness, the returns on sickness, he told Zuckerman about the psychic payoff for the patient. Zuckerman allowed that there might well be profits to be reckoned in similarly enigmatic cases, but as for himself, he hated being sick: there was no payoff that could possibly compensate for his disabling physical pain. The “secondary gains” the analyst identified couldn’t begin to make up for the primary loss. But perhaps, the analyst suggested, the Zuckerman who was getting paid off wasn’t the self he perceived as himself but the ineradicable infant, the atoning penitent, the guilty pariah—perhaps it was the remorseful son of the dead parents, the author of Carnovsky.
It had taken three weeks for the doctor to say this out loud. It might be months before he broke the news of the hysterical conversion symptom.
“Expiation through suffering?” Zuckerman said. “The pain being my judgment on myself and that book?”
“Is it?” the analyst asked.
“No,” Zuckerman replied, and three weeks after it had begun, he terminated the therapy by walking out.
One doctor prescribed a regimen of twelve aspirin per day, another prescribed Butazolidin, another Robaxin, another Percodan. another Valium, another Prednisone; another told him to throw all the pills down the toilet, the poisonous Prednisone first, and “learn to live with it.” Untreatable pain of unknown origins is one of the vicissitudes of life—however much it impaired physical movement, it was still Wholly compatible with a perfect state of health. Zuckerman was simply a well man who suffered pain. “And I make it a habit.” continued the no-nonsense doctor, “never to treat anybody who isn’t ill. Furthermore.” he advised. “after you leave here, steer clear of the psychosomologists. You don’t need any more of that.” “What’s a psychosomologist?” “A baffled little physician. The Freudian personalization of every ache and pain is the crudest weapon to have been bequeathed to these guys since the leech pot. If pain were only the expression of something else, it would all be hunky-dory. But unhappily life isn’t organized as logically as that. Pain is in addition to everything else. There arc hysterics, of course, who can mime any disease, but they constitute a far more exotic species of chameleon than the psychosomologists lead all you gullible sufferers to believe. You are no such reptile. Case dismissed.”
It was only days after the psychoanalyst had accused him, for the first time, of giving up the fight that Diana, his part-time secretary, took Zuckerman—who was able still to drive in forward gear but could no longer tum his head to back up—took him out in a rent-a-car to the Long Island laboratory where an electronic pain suppressor had just been invented. He’d read an item in the business section of the Sunday Times announcing the laboratory’s acquisition of a patent on the device, and the next morning at nine phoned to arrange an appointment. The director and the chief engineer were in the parking lot to welcome him when he and Diana arrived; they were thrilled that Nathan Zuckerman should be their first “pain patient” and snapped a Polaroid picture of him at the front entrance. The chief engineer explained that he had developed the idea to relieve the director’s wife of sinus headaches. They were very much in the experimental stages, still discovering refinements of technique by which to alleviate the most recalcitrant forms of chronic pain. He got Zuckerman out of his shirt and showed him how to use the machine. After the demonstration session, Zuckerman felt neither belter nor worse, but the director assured him that his wife was a new woman and insisted that Zuckerman take a pain suppressor home on approval and keep it for as long as he liked.
Isherwood is a camera with his shutter open, I am the experiment in chronic pain.
The machine was about the size of an alarm clock. He set the timer, put two moistened electrode pads above and below the site of the pain, and six times a day gave himself a low-voltage shock for five minutes. And six times a day he waited for the pain to go away—actually he waited for it to go away a hundred times a day. Having waited long enough, he then took Valium or aspirin or Butazolidin or Percodan or Robaxin; at five in the evening he said the hell with it and began taking the vodka. And as tens of millions of Russians have known for hundreds of years, that is the best pain suppressor of ail.
By December 1973, he’d run out of hope of finding a treatment, drug, doctor, or cure—certainly of finding an honest disease. He was living with it, but not because he’d learned to. What he’d learned was that something decisive had happened to him, and whatever the unfathomable reason, he and his existence weren’t remotely what they’d been between 1933 and 1971. He knew about solitary confinement from writing alone in a room virtually every day since his early twenties; he’d served nearly twenty years of that sentence, obediently and on his best behavior. But this was confinement without the writing and he was taking it only a little better than the eight days harnessed to room 611. Indeed, he had never left off upbraiding himself with the question that had followed him from the hospital after his escape: What if what was happening to you were really terrible?
Yet, even if this didn’t register terrible on the scale of global misery, it felt terrible to him. He felt pointless, worthless, meaningless, stunned that it should seem so terrible and undo him so completely, bewildered by defeat on a front where he hadn’t even known himself to be at war. He had shaken free at an early age from the sentimental claims of a conventional, protective, worshipful family, he had surmounted a great university’s beguiling purity, he had torn loose from the puzzle of passionless marriages to three exemplary women and from the moral propriety of his own early books; he had worked hard for his place as a writer—eager for recognition in his striving twenties, desperate for serenity in his celebrated thirties—only at forty to be vanquished by a causeless, nameless, unbeatable phantom disease. It wasn’t leukemia or lupus or diabetes, it wasn’t multiple sclerosis or muscular dystrophy or even rheumatoid arthritis—it was nothing. Yet to nothing he was losing his confidence, his sanity, and his self-respect.
He was also losing his hair. Either from all the worrying or all the drugs. He saw hair on the thesaurus when he rose from a session on the playmat. Hair came away by the combful as he prepared himself at the bathroom mirror for his next empty day. Shampooing in the shower, he found the strands of hair looped in the palms of his hands doubling and tripling with every rinse—he expected to see things getting better and with each successive rinsing they got worse.
In the Yellow Pages he found “Anton Associates Trichological Clinic”—the least outlandish ad under “Scalp Care”—and went off to the basement of the Commodore Hotel to see if they could make good on their modest promise to “control all controllable hair problems.” He had the time, he had the hair problem, and it would be something like an adventure voyaging from the playmat to midtown one afternoon a week. The treatments couldn’t be less effective than what he’d been getting at Manhattan’s finest medical facilities for his neck, arms, and shoulders. In happier times he might have resigned himself with little more than a pang to the dismaying change in his appearance, but with so much else g
iving way in life, he decided “No, no further”: vocationally obstructed, physically disabled, sexually mindless. intellectually inert, spiritually depressed—but not bald overnight, not that too.
The initial consultation took place in a sanitary white office with diplomas on the wall. The sight of Anton, a vegetarian and a yoga practitioner as well as a scalp specialist, made Zuckerman feel a hundred and lucky even to have retained his teeth. Anton was a small and vibrant man in his sixties who looked to be still in his forties: his own hair, gleaming like a black polished helmet, stopped just short of cheekbone and brow. As a boy in Budapest. he told Zuckerman. he had been a champion gymnast and ever since had devoted himself to the preservation of physical well-being through exercise, diet, and ethical living. He was particularly chagrined, while taking Zuckerman’s history, to learn of the heavy drinking. He asked if Zuckerman was under any undue pressure: pressure was a leading cause of premature hair loss. “I’m under pressure.” Zuckerman replied, “from prematurely losing hair.” He wouldn’t go into the pain, couldn’t narrate that enigma to yet another expert with a wallful of diplomas. He wished, in fact, that he’d stayed at home. His hair at the center of his life! His receding hairline where his fiction used to be! Anton turned a lamp on Zuckerman’s scalp and lightly combed the thinning hair from one side to the other. Then he extracted from the teeth of the comb the hairs that had come loose during the examination and piled them carefully onto a tissue for analysis in the lab.