by Philip Roth
It was the first time they’d met on Eighty-first Street. No sooner had Felt entered the living room and begun pulling off his jacket, his cap. and the assortment of old sweaters that he was wearing under the windbreaker and over the T-shirt, than he was appraising aloud all he saw: “Velvet curtains. Persian carpet. Period mantelpiece. Overhead the ornamented plaster. below the gleaming parquet floor. Ah. but properly ascetic all the same. Not a hint of hedonism yet somehow—cushy. Very elegantly under-furnished. Nathan. The pad of a well-heeled monk.”
But how Felt sardonically sized up the decor interested Zuckerman less than the new diagnosis. They just kept coming, these diagnoses. Everybody had a slant. The illness with a thousand meanings. They read the pain as his fifth book.
“Buried anger?” Zuckerman asked him. “Where’d you get that idea?”
“Carnovsky. Incomparable vehicle for the expression of your inadmissible loathings. Your hatred flows at flood level—so much hatred the heap of flesh can’t contain it. Yet, outside the books, you act like you ain’t even here. Moderation itself. Altogether. your books give off a greater sense of reality than you do. The first time I saw you, the night you came down into the dining room at Quahsay, the Glittering Guest of the Month, I said to little Gina. the lesbian poet, ‘I’ll bet that fellow never gets mad outside of those best-sellers.’ Do you? Do you know how to?”
“You’re tougher than I am. Ivan.”
“That’s a flattering way of saying I’m nastier than you are.”
“When do you get angry outside of the writing?”
“I get angry when I want to get rid of somebody. They’re in my way. Anger is a gun. I point it and I fire, and I keep firing till they disappear. I’m like you are in the writing outside the writing and in the writing. You button your lip. I’ll say anything.”
By now, with all Felt’s layers of clothes impeded and strewn across the floor, the pad of the well-heeled monk looked as if it had just been sacked.
“And,” Zuckerman asked, “you believe what you’re saying when you say anything?”
Felt looked over at him from the sofa as though Zuckerman were demented. “It doesn’t matter whether / believe it. You’re such a good soldier you don’t even understand. The thing is to make them believe it. You are a good soldier. You seriously entertain the opposition point of view. You do all that the right way. You have to. You’re always astonished how you provoke people by pouring out the secrets of your disgraceful inner life. You get stunned. You gel sad. It’s a wonder to you that you’re such a scandal. The wonder to me is that you can possibly care. You, down with a case of the Bad-Taste Blues! To require the respect of men and women’s tender caresses. Poppa’s approval and Momma’s love. Nathan Zuckerman! Who’d believe it?”
“And you require nothing? You believe that?”
“I sure don’t let guilt enter everything, not the way you good soldiers do. It’s nothing, guilt—it’s self-indulgence. They despisc me? They call me names? They don’t approve? All the better. A girl tried to commit suicide at my place last week. Dropped by with her pills for a glass of my water. Swallowed them while I was off teaching my afternoon dopes. J was furious when I found her. I phoned for an ambulance, but I’d be damned if I’d go with her. If she had died? Fine with me. Let her die if that’s what she wants. I don’t stand in their way and nobody stands in mine. I say, ‘No, I don’t want any more of this—it’s not for me.” And I start firing until it’s gone. All you need from them is money—the rest you take care of yourself.”
“Thanks for the lesson.”
“Don’t thank me,” said Felt. “I learned it in high school, reading you. Anger. Point it and fire it and just keep firing until they disappear. You’ll be a healthy novelist in no time.”
Appel’s paragraph, xeroxed by Felt and sent on to Zuckerman in New York:
Truth to tell. I don’t know that there’s much we can Jo—first the Jews were destroyed by gas. and now it may be in oil. Too many around New York are shameful on this matter: it’s as if their circumcisions were acquired for other reasons. The people who raised hell about Vietnam are not saying much on Israel (but for a few souls). However, insofar as public opinion mailers, or the tiny fraction of oil we can reach, let me offer a suggestion that may irritate you but which I’ll make nonetheless. Why don’t you ask your friend Nate Zuckerman to write something in behalf of Israel for the Times Op Ed page. He could surely gel in there. If I come out in support of Israel there, that’s not exactly news; it’s expected. But if Zuckerman came out with a forthright statement, that would be news of a kind, since he has prestige with segments of the public that don’t care for the rest of us. Maybe he has spoken up on this. but if so I haven’t seen it. Or does he still feel that, as his Carnovsky says, the Jews can slick their historical suffering up their ass? (And yes, I know that there’s a difference between characters and authors; but I also know that grown-ups should not pretend that it’s quite the difference they tell their students it is.) Anyway, brushing aside my evident hostility to his view on these matters, which is neither here nor there. I honestly believe that if he were to come out publicly, it would be of some interest. I think we’re at the point where the whole world is getting ready to screw the Jews. At such points even the most independent of souls might find it worth saying a word.
Well, now he was angry outside of the books. Moderation? Never heard of it. He got down a copy of Carnovsky. Had it really been proposed in these pages that Jews can stick their suffering quote unquote? A sentiment so scathing just dropped like a shoe? He looked in his book for the source of Appel’s repugnance and found it a third of the way through: penultimate line of two thousand words of semi-hysterical protest against a family’s obsession with their minority plight—declaration of independence delivered by Carnovsky to his older sister from the sanctuary of his bedroom at the age of fourteen.
So: undeluded by what grown-ups were pretending to their students, Appel had attributed to the author the rebellious outcry of a claustrophobic fourteen-year-old boy. This was a licensed literary critic? No, no—an overwrought polemicist for endangered Jewry. The letter could have come from the father in Carnovsky. It could have come from his own real father. Written in Yiddish, it could have come from Appel’s, from that ignorant immigrant junkman who, if he hadn’t driven young Milton even crazier than Carnovsky. had clearly broken his heart.
He pored over the paragraph like a professional litigant, drawn back in a fury to what galled him most. Then he called Diana at school. Needed her to type. Had to see her right away. Anger was a gun and he was opening fire.
Diana Rutherford was a student at Finch, the rich girls’ college around the corner where the Nixons had sent Tricia. Zuckerman was out mailing a letter the first time they met. She wore the standard cowpoke denims, jeans and jacket beaten senseless on the sun-bleached stones of the Rio Grande, then shipped north to Bonwit’s. “Mr. Zuckerman,” she’d said, tapping him on his shoulder as he dropped the envelope in the box, “can I interview you for the school paper?” Only yards away, two roommates were in stitches over her brashness. This was obviously the college character. “Do you write for the school paper’.’” he asked her. “No.” Confessed with a large guileless smile. Guileless, really? Twenty is the age of guile. “Walk me home,” he said; “we’ll talk about it.” “Great,” the character replied. “What’s a smart girl like you doing at a place like Finch?” “My family thought I ought to learn how to cross my legs in a skirt.” But when they got to his door fifty feet down the block, and he asked if she’d like to come up, the brashness gave out and she sashayed back to her friends.
. The next afternoon, when the buzzer rang, he asked who it was through the intercom. “The girl who’s not on the school paper.” Her hands were trembling when he let her in. She lit a cigarette, then removed her coat, and without waiting to be invited, set about examining the books and the pictures. She took everything in room by room. Zuckerman followed.
In the study she asked. “Don’t you have anything out of place here?”
“Only you.”
“Look, it’ll be no contest if you start off hypersardonic.” Her voice quivering, she still spoke her mind, “Nobody like you should have to be afraid of anybody like me.”
In the living room again, he took her coal from the sofa and, before hanging it in the closet, looked at the label. Bought in Milano. Setting somebody back many many hundreds of thousands of lire.
“You always this reckless?” he asked.
“I’m writing a paper on you.” From the edge of the sofa she lit the next cigarette. “That’s a lie. That’s not true.”
“You’re here on a dare.”
“I thought you were somebody I could talk to.”
“About what?”
“Men. I can’t take much more of them.”
He made them coffee and she began with her boyfriend, a law student. He neglected her and she didn’t understand why. He phoned in tears in the middle of the night to say that he didn’t want to see her but he didn’t want to lose her either. Finally she’d written a letter asking him what was going on. “I’m young,” she told Zuckerman. “and I want to fuck. It makes me feel ugly when he won’t do it.”
Diana was a long, narrow girl with a minute behind, small conical breasts, and boyishly clipped dark curls. Her chin was round like a child’s, and so were her dark Red Indian eyes. She was straight and circular, soft and angular, and certainly wasn’t ugly, except for the pout, the Dead End Kid look around the mouth whenever she began to complain. Her clothes were a child’s: tiny suede skirt over a black leotard and, pinched from Momma’s closet to amaze the other girls, high-heeled black shoes with open toes and a sequined strap. The face was really a baby’s too, until she smiled—that was big and captivating. Laughing she looked like someone who’d seen it all and emerged unscathed, a woman of fifty who’d been lucky.
What she’d seen and survived were the men. They’d been in pursuit since she was ten.
“Half your life,” he said. “What have you learned?”
“Everything. They want to come in your hair, they want to beat your ass, they want to call you on the phone from work and get you to finger yourself while you’re doing your homework. I’m without illusions, Mr. Zuckerman. Ever since I was in seventh grade a friend of my father’s has been calling every month. He couldn’t be sweeter to his wife and his kids, but me he’s been calling since I’m twelve. He disguises his voice and every time it’s the same damn thing: ‘How would you like to straddle my cock?’”
“What do you do about it?”
“I didn’t know what to do in the beginning except listen. I got frightened. I bought a whistle. To blow into the mouthpiece. To burst his eardrum. But when I blew it finally, he just laughed. It turned him on more. This is eight years now. He calls me at school once a month. ‘How would you like to straddle my cock?’ I say to him, ‘Is that it? Is that the whole thing?’ He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to. Because it is. Not even to do it. Just to say it. To me.”
“Every month, for eight years, and you’ve done nothing about it except buy a whistle?”
“What am I supposed to do. call the cops?”
“What happened when you were ten?”
“The chauffeur used to play with me when he drove me to school.”
“Is that true?”
“The author of Carnovsky asks me if that’s true?”
“Welt, you might be making yourself interesting by making it up. People do that.”
“I assure you, it’s writers who have to make things up, not girls.”
After an hour he felt as if Temple Drake had hitched up from Memphis to talk about Popeye with Nathaniel Hawthorne. He was stunned. It was a little hard to believe in all she said she’d seen—in all she seemed to be saying she was. “And your parents?” he asked her. “What do they say to these chilling adventures with all the terrible men?”
“Parents?” She came catapulting up onto her feet, sprung by that one word alone from the cushioned nest she’d dug down in the sofa pillows. The length of the leotarded legs, the speed and aggression of the delicate fingers, that mocking, cocky beat she took before driving in her point—a budding female matador, Zuckerman decided. She’d certainly look great in the gear. Might be frightened out of her wits to begin with, but he could also see her going in there and doing it. Come and get me. She’s breaking free and being brave—or trying hard, by tempting fate, to learn. Sure there’s a side of her that wants and invites this erotic attention—along with the side that gets angry and confused; but all in all there is something more intriguing here than mere teenage chance-taking. There’s a kind of perverse autonomy covering up a very interesting, highly strung girl (and woman, and child, and kid). He could remember what it was like saying, “Come and get me.” That of course was before they’d got him. It got him. Whatever you wanted to call it, something had got him.
“Where have you been?” she asked. “There are no more parents. Parents are over. Look. I’ve tried to make a go of it with the law student. I thought he’d help me concentrate on this silly school. He studies, he jogs, he doesn’t do too much dope, and he’s only twenty-three—and for me that’s young. I’ve worked hard on him. damn it, him and his hang-ups, and now, now he doesn’t want to do it at all. I don’t know what the matter is with that boy. I look at him cockeyed and he turns into a baby. Fear, I guess. The sane ones bore you practically to death, and the ones who fascinate you turn out to be nuts. Know what I’ve been pushed to? What I’m just about ready for? To be married. To be married and to get knocked up. and to say to the contractor, ‘Put the pool in over there.’”
Twenty minutes after receiving Zuckerman’s call, Diana was sitting in the study with the pages to be typed and mailed to Appel. He’d filled four long yellow pages before sliding from his chair to the playmat. Back on his back he tried to get the throbbing to subside in his upper arm by kneading the muscle with his fingers. The base of his neck was on fire too, the toll for the longest sustained piece of prose he’d composed sitting upright in over a year. And there were more bullets left in the chamber. Suppose through careful analysis of those early essays I demonstrate how Appel harshly denounces Zuckerman because of a distressing conflict with Poppa insufficiently settled in himself—show that it’s not only the menace of Islam that’s provoked this reappraisal of my “case” but Ocean Hill-Brownsville and black anti-Semitism, the condemnation of Israel in the Security Council, even the New York teachers’ strike; that it’s the media dada of loud Jewish Yippies whose playpen goals he ludicrously associates with me. Now for my reappraisal of him. It isn’t that Appel thinks he was wrong about Zuckerman in 1959. Or wrong about his own rootlessness in 1946. Right then, and now that he’s changed his mind, right again. The “mind” may change, or appear to, but never the inquisitor’s passion for punishing verdicts. Behind the admirable flexibility of judicious reappraisal the theoretical substructure is still blast-proof concrete: none of us as seriozny as Appel. “The Irrefutable Rethinkings of Milton Appel.” “Right and Rigid in Every Decade: The Polemical Spasms of a Hanging Judge.” He came up with titles by the dozen.
“I’ve never heard anybody like you on the phone,” Diana said. She sat submerged in her secretarial camouflage: shapeless overalls and a bulky sweater intended originally to help him dictate his fiction. When she showed up in the child’s skirt, little dictation was ever taken. The skirt was another reason to give up. “You should see yourself.” she said. “Those prism glasses, that contorted face. You should see what you look like. You let something like this get inside you and it builds and builds until your head comes off. And with your hair in it. That’s exactly why you’re losing your hair. It’s why you have all this pain. Look at you. Have you looked in a mirror?”
“Don’t you get angry about things? I’m angry.”
“Yes. sure, of course I do. There’s always somebody in the background of anybody’s l
ife driving you mad and giving you cystitis. But I think about them. I do my yoga. I run around the block and play tennis and I try to get rid of it. I can’t live like that. I’d have an upset stomach for the rest of my life.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Well, I think I do. You have it at school.”
“You can’t equate this with school.”
“Well, you can. You get the same kind of knocks at college. And they’re damn hard to gel over. Especially when they seem to you totally unjust.”
“Type the letter.”
“I’d better read it first.”
“Not necessary.”
Through the prism glasses he impatiently watched her reading ii, meanwhile kneading away at his upper arm to try to subdue the pain. What helped sometimes with the deltoid muscle was the electronic pain suppressor. But would the neurons even register that low-voltage shock, what with this supercharge of indignation lighting up his brain?
“I’m not typing this letter. Not if this is what it says.”
“What the hell business is it of yours what it says?”
“I refuse to type this letter, Nathan. You’re a crazy man when you start on these things, and this letter is crazy. ‘If the Arabs were undone tomorrow by a plague of cheap solar power, you wouldn’t give my books a second thought.’ You’re off your head. That makes no sense. He wrote what he wrote about your books because that is what he thinks. Period. Why even care what these people think, when you are you and they are nobody? Look at you. What a vulnerable, resentful mouth! Your hair is actually standing on end. Who is this little squirt anyway? Who is Milton Appel? I never read any books by him. They don’t teach him at school. I can’t fathom this in a man like you. You’re an extremely sophisticated, civilized man—how can you be caught in a trap by these people and let them upset you to such a degree?”
“You’re a twenty-year-old girl from an ultra-privileged Christian-Connecticut background, and I accept that you have no idea what this is all about.”