by Philip Roth
“So, have your affairs.”
“They’re murder too, you know. You can’t always control your feelings in those things. You can’t control the other person’s feelings either. I have one now who wants to run away with me to British Columbia. He says we can live off the land. He’s handsome. He’s young. Bushy hair. Very savage. He came up to the house to restore some antiques and he started by restoring me. He lives in a terrible loft. He says, ‘I can’t believe I’m fucking you.’ When he’s fucking me. That excites me, Nathan. We take baths together. It’s fun. But is that any reason to run out on being Adam and Toby’s mother and Marvin’s wife? When the kids lose something, who’s going to find it for them if I’m in British Columbia? ‘Mommy, where is my eraser?’ ‘Just a second, dear, I’m in the bathroom. Wait. I’ll look for it.’ Somebody’s looking for something, I help—that’s mothers. You lost something, I have to look. ‘Mommy, I found it.’ ‘I’m glad you found it, dear.” And I am—when they find the eraser, Nathan, I’m happy. That’s how I fell in love with Marvin. The very first time I was in his apartment, and within five minutes, he looked at me and said, ‘Where’s my cigarette lighter, Gloria, my good lighter?’ And I got up and looked around, and I found it. ‘Here it is, Marvin.’ ‘Oh, good.’ I was hooked. That was it. Look, I live for the baths Itake with my Italian bambino and his bushy hair and his iron biceps—but how can I leave these people and expect that they’ll find what they lose on their own? With you it’s okay—with you it’s like a brother. You need and I need and that’s it. Besides, you know what a good girl you’ve got in Cos Cob’s cunning little whore.” She’d accidentally met Diana when she stopped by unannounced one afternoon and the chauffeur dragged in a potted palm tree to liven up the sickroom. “She’s perfect for you. Underage, upper-class, and really slutty in that little toy skirt—juicy, tike when you bite into a fresh apple or a good pear. I like the gun-molt mouth. Clever contrast to the high IQ. While we were debating where to put the tree I saw her down the corridor—in the bathroom, making herself up. A bornb could have gone off in there and she wouldn’t have known it. I wouldn’t drop her.”
“I’m in no position,” said Zuckerman, impaled upon Gloria’s knuckle, “to drop anyone.”
“That’s good. Some women might see you as prey. That’s all some women want—a suffering male who’s otherwise well off. All the slow curing, the taking credit for it. and if God forbid he doesn’t survive the cure, owning his life after death. Show me a woman who wouldn’t love to be the widow of a famous man. To own it all.”
“Talking about all the women, or are we talking about you?”
“If it’s God’s blessing, Nathan, that it happens, I can’t think of a single woman who wouldn’t put up with it. Luckily this kid’s too young and snotty to know the fundamentals yet. Fine. Let her be fresh to you when you start to whine. You’re better off. No Jewish mother like me would ever minimize the importance of a morbid affliction. Read this book Carnovsky if you don’t believe it. Jewish mothers know how to own their suffering boys, [f I were in your shoes I’d keep my eye out for that.”
Jaga, during his opening hour at Anton’s Trichological Clinic, had looked to him first, in white bandanna and long white smock, like a novice in a nursing order; then she spoke, and the Slavic accent—along with the clinician’s get-up and the dutiful weary professionalism with which she worked her fingers across his scalp—reminded him of the women physicians in Cancer Ward, another of the works from which he’d taken stem instruction during his week in traction. His was the last appointment of the day, and after his second session, as he was leaving the Commodore and heading home, he caught sight of her ahead of him out on Vanderbilt Place. She was in a weatherworn black felt coat whose red embroidered hem was coming loose at the back. The shoddy look of a coat once stylish somewhere else subverted somewhat that aura of detached superiority that she affected alone in a cubicle with a balding man. The hurried agitated gait made her look like someone on the run. Maybe she was: running from more of the questions he’d begun to ask during the pleasant fingertip massage. She was small and fragile, with a complexion the color of skim milk and a tiny, pointed, bony, tired face, a face a little ratlike until, at the end of the session, she undid the bandanna and disclosed the corn-silk sheen of her ash-blond hair, and with it a delicacy otherwise obscured in that mask so tiny and taut with strain. The undecipherable violet eyes were suddenly startling. Still, he made no effort on the street to catch up. He couldn’t run because of the pain, and when he remembered the heavy sarcasm with which she’d spit on his few amiable questions, he decided against calling her name. “Helping people,” she replied, when he asked how she got into trichology. “I love helping anyone with a problem.” Why had she emigrated to America? “I dreamed all my life of America.” What did she make of it here? “Everybody so nice. Everybody wishing you to have a good day. We do not have such nice people in Warsaw.”
The next week, to his invitation for a drink, she said yes—curtly, as though she’d said no. She was in a hurry, could stay for no more than a quick glass of wine. In the booth at the bar she drank three quick glasses, and then explained her American sojourn without his having even inquired. “I was bored in Warsaw. I had ennui. I wanted a change.” The next week she again said yes as though it were no, and this time she had five glasses of wine. “Hard to believe you left simply because you were bored.” “Don’t be banal,” she told him. “I don’t want your sympathy. The client needs sympathy, not the technician with her full head of hair.” The following week she came to his apartment, and through the prism glasses he watched as by herself she finished off the bottle he’d given her to open. Because of the pain he could no longer uncork a wine bottle. He was sipping vodka through a bent glass straw.
“Why do you lie on the floor?” she asked.
“Too tedious to go into.”
“Were you in an accident?”
“Not that F remember. Were you, Jaga?”
“You must live more through people,” she told him.
“How do you know how I should live?”
Drunkenly she tried to pursue her theme. “You must team to live through other people.” Because of the wine and because of her accent, two-thirds of what she was saying was incomprehensible to him.
At the door he helped her into the coat. She had stitched up the hem since he’d first spotted her hurrying along Vanderbilt Place, but what the coat needed was a new lining. Jaga seemed herself to have no lining at all. She looked like something that had been peeled of its rind, exposing a wan semi-transparent whiteness that wasn’t even an inner membrane but the bare, pallid pulp of her being. He thought that if he touched her the sensation would make her scream.
“There’s something corrupt about both of us,” she said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Monomaniacs tike you and me. I must never come here again.”
Soon she was stopping by every evening on her way home. She began wearing eye shadow and to smell of a peppery perfume, and the face tightened up like a little rat’s only when he persisted.in asking the stupidest of his questions. She arrived in a new silk blouse the same pale violet as her eyes; though the topmost button was left carelessly undone, she made no move toward the playmat. She stretched instead across the sofa, snuggled cozily there under the afghan and poured out glass after glass of red wine—and then ran off to the Bronx. She climbed the library ladder in her stocking feet and browsed through the shelves. She asked from the topmost rung if she could borrow a book, and then forgot to take it home. Each day another nineteenth-century American classic was added to the stack left behind his desk. Half contemptuously, satirizing herself, him, his library, his ladder, deriding seemingly every human dream and aspiration, she labeled where she piled the books “My spot.”
“Why not take them with you?” Zuckerman asked.
“No, no, not with great novels. I am too old for this form of seduction. Why do you allow me to come he
re anyway, to the sacred sanctuary of art? I am not an ‘interesting character.’”
“What did you do in Warsaw?”
“I did in Warsaw the same as I do here.”
“Jaga, why not give me a break? Why not a straight answer to one lousy question?”
“Please, if you are looking for somebody interesting to write about, invite from the clinic one of Anton’s other girls. They are younger and prettier and sillier, they will be flattered that you ask lousy question. They have more adventures to tell than I do. You can get into their pants and they can get into your books. But if you are looking at me for sex, I am not interested. I hate lust. It’s a nuisance. I don’t like the smells, I don’t like the sounds. Once, twice with somebody is fine—beyond that, it’s a partnership in dirt.”
“Are you married?”
“I am married. I have a daughter of thirteen. She lives with her grandmother in Warsaw. Now do you know everything about me?”
“What does your husband do?”
“What does he ‘do’? He is not a graphomaniac like you. Why does an intelligent man ask stupid questions about what people ‘do’? Because you are an American or because you are this graphomaniac? If you are writing a book and you want me to help you with my answers. I cannot. I am too dull. I am just Jaga with her upskis and downskis. And if you are trying to write a book by the answers that you get, then you are too dull.”
“I ask you questions to pass the time. Is that sufficiently cynical to suit you?”
“I don’t know about politics, I am not interested in politics, I don’t want to answer questions about Poland. I don’t care about Poland. To hell with all those things. I came here to get away from all that and I will appreciate it if you will leave me be about things that are the past.”
On a windy November evening, with rain and hail blowing up against the windows, and the temperature down below freezing, Zuckerman offered Jaga ten dollars for a cab. She threw the money at him and left. Minutes later she was back, the black felt coat already sopping wet. “When do you want to see me again?”
“Up to you. Whenever you’re feeling resentful enough.”
As though to bite, she lunged for his lips. The next afternoon she said, “The first time I kissed anyone in two years.”
“What about your husband?”
“We don’t even do that anymore.”
The man with whom she’d defected wasn’t her husband. This was revealed to him the first time Jaga undid the remaining buttons of the new silk blouse and knelt beside him on the playmat.
“Why did you defect with him?”
“You see, I should not have told you even that much. I say ‘defect’ and you are excited. An interesting character. You are more excited by the word ‘defect’ than you are by my body. My body is too skinny.” She removed her blouse and bra and threw them onto the desk, by the pile of unborrowed books. “My breasts are not the right size for an American man. I know that. They are not the right American shape. You did not know that I would look this old.”
“On the contrary, it’s a child’s body.”
“Yes, a child. She suffered from the Communists, poor child—I’ll put her in a book. Why must you be so banal?”
“Why must you be so difficult?”
“It’s you who is difficult. Why don’t you just let me come here and drink your wine and pretend with borrowing books and kiss you, if I feel like it. Any man with half of a heart would do this. At moments you should be forgetting about writing books all the time. Here”—and after undoing her skin and raising her slip, she turned around on her knees and leaned her weight forward onto the palms of her hands. “Here, you can see my ass. Men like that. You can do it to me from behind. The first time and you can do anything you want to me, anything at all that pleases you, except to ask me more of your questions.”
“Why do you hate it so much here?”
“Because I am left out here! Stupid man, of course I hate it here! I live with a man who is left out. What can he do here? It’s all right that I work in a hair clinic. But not for a man. He would take a job like that and he would crumble up in a year. But I begged him to run away with me, to save me from that madness, and so I cannot ask him to start to sweep floors in New York City.”
“What did he work at before coming here?”
“You would misunderstand if i told you. You would think it was ‘interesting.’”
“Maybe I misunderstand less than you think.”
“He saved me from the people who were poisoning my life. Now I must save him from exile. He saved me from my husband. He saved me from my lover. He saved me from the people destroying everything I love. Here I am his eyes, his voice, his source of survival. If I left, it would kill him. It isn’t a matter of being loved, it’s a matter of loving somebody—whether you can believe that or not.”
“Nobody asked you to leave him.”
Jaga uncorked a second bottle of wine and, seated naked on the floor beside him, quickly drank half of it down. “But I want to.” she said.
“Who is he?”
“A boy. A boy who did not use his head. That is what my lover asked him in Warsaw. He saw us in a café and he came up to him and he was furious. ‘Who are you?’ he shouted at the boy.”
“What did the boy answer?”
“He answered, ‘None of your business.’ To you that does not sound so heroic. But it is, when one man is half the age of the other.”
“He ran away with you to be a hero, and you ran away with him to run away.”
“And now you think you understand why I love my spot on your desk. Now you think you understand why I get myself drunk on your expensive claret. “She is plotting to trade him for me.’ Only that is not so. Even with my émigré vulnerability, I will not fall in love with you.”
“Good.”
“I will let you do anything you want to me, but I will not fall in love.”
“Fine.”
“Only good, only fine? No, in my case it is excellent. Because I am the best woman in the world for falling in love with the wrong man. I have the record in the Communist countries. Either they are married, or they are murderers, or they are like you, men finished with love. Gentle, sympathetic, kind with money and wine, but interested in you mainly as a subject. Warm ice. I know writers.”
“I won’t ask how. But go on.”
“I know writers. Beautiful feelings. They sweep you away with their beautiful feelings. But the feelings disappear quickly once you are no longer posing for them. Once they’ve got you figured out and written down, you go. All they give is their attention.”
“You could do worse.”
“Oh yes, all that attention. It’s lovely for the model white it lasts.”
“What were you in Poland?”
“I told you. Champion woman to fall in love with the wrong man.” And again she offered to assume any posture for penetration that would please and excite him. “Come however you like and don’t wait for me. That is better for a writer than more questions.”
And what is better for you? It was difficult to do her the kindness of not asking. Jaga was right about writers—all along, Zuckennan had been thinking that if only she told him enough, he might find in what she said something to start him writing. She insulted him, she berated him, when it was time to go she sometimes grew so angry that she had all she could do not to reach out and strike him. She wanted to collapse and be rescued, and she wanted to be heroic and prevail, and she seemed to hate him most for reminding her, merely by taking it all in, that she could manage neither. A writer on the wane, Zuckennan did his best to remain unfazed. Mustn’t confuse pleasure with work. He was there to listen. Listening was the only treatment he could give. They come, he thought, and tell me things, and I listen, and occasionally I say, “Maybe I understand more than you think,” but there’s no treatment I can offer to cure the woes of all the outpatients crossing my path, bent beneath their burdens and their separate griefs. Monstrous that a
ll the world’s suffering is good to me inasmuch as it’s grist to my mill—that all I can do, when confronted with anyone’s story, is to wish to turn it into material, but if that’s the way one is possessed, that is the way one is possessed. There’s a demonic side to this business that the Nobel Prize committee doesn’t talk much about. It would be nice, particularly in the presence of the needy, to have pure disinterested motives like everybody else, but, alas, that isn’t the job. The only patient being treated by the writer is himself.
After she’d gone, and after Gloria had stopped by with his dinner, and some hours before he resumed composing into his tape recorder another rejoinder to Appel. he told himself, “Start tonight. Get on with it tonight,” and began by transcribing every word he could still remember of the protracted tirade delivered that afternoon by Jaga while he lay beneath her on the playmat. Her pelvis rose and fell like something ticking, an instrument as automatic as a metronome. Light, regular, tireless thrusts, thrusting distinct as a pulsebeat, thrusting excruciatingly minute, and all the while she spoke without stopping, spoke like she fucked, steady voluptuous coldness, as though he was a man and this was an act that she didn’t yet entirely despise. He felt like a convict digging a tunnel with a spoon.
“I hate America,” she told him. “I hate New York. I hate the Bronx. I hate Bruckner Boulevard. In a village in Poland there are at least two Renaissance buildings. Here it is just ugly houses, one after another, and Americans asking you their direct questions. You cannot have a spiritual conversation with anyone. You cannot be poor here and I hate it.” Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock. “You think I’m morbid and psychopathic. Crazy Jaga. You think I should be like an American girl—typical American: energetic, positive, talented. Like all these intelligent American girls with their thinking, ‘I can be an actress, I can be a poet, I can be a good teacher. I’m positive, I’m growing—I hadn’t been growing when I was growing, but now I’m growing.” You think I should be one of those good good boring American girls with their naiveté that goodness does it, that energy does it, that talent does it. ‘How can a man like Nathan Zuckerman fall in love with me for two weeks, and then abandon me? I am so good and energetic and positive and talented and growing—how can that be?’ But I am not so naive, so don’t worry. I have some darkness to go back to. Whatever darkness was behind them, it was explained to them by the psychiatrist. And now for them it’s all recovery. Make my life meaningful. Growth. They buy this. Some of them, the smart ones, they sell it. ‘The relationship I had, I learned something from it. It’s good for my growth.’ If they have a darkness, it’s a nice darkness. When you sleep with them, they smile. They make it wonderful.” Tick tock. “They make it beautiful.” Tick tock. “They make it warm and tender.” Tick tock. “They make it loving. But I do not have this good American optimism. I cannot stand to lose people. I cannot stand it, And I am not smiling. And I am not growing. I am disappearing!” Tick tock. Tick tock. “Did I tell you, Nathan, that I was raped? When I left here that day in the rain?” “No, you didn’t tell me that.” “I was walking to the subway in that rain. I was drunk. And I thought I couldn’t make it—I was too drunk to walk. And I waved for a taxi, to take me to the station. And this limousine stopped. I don’t remember very much. It was the limousine driver. He had a Polish name, too—that’s what I remember. I think I had a blackout when I was in the limousine. I don’t even know whether I did something provocative. He drove me and drove me and drove me. I thought I was going to the subway, and then he stopped and he said that I owed him twenty dollars. And I didn’t have twenty dollars. And I said, ‘Well, I can only write you a check.’ And he said, ‘How can I know the check is good?’ And I said, ‘You can call my husband.’ That is the last thing I wanted to do, but I was so drunk, and so I didn’t know what I was doing. And I gave him your number.” “Where were you at this point?” “Somewhere. I think on the West Side. So he said. ‘Okay, let’s call your husband on the telephone. Here’s a restaurant and we can go inside and we can call.’ And I went inside and it wasn’t a restaurant—it was some stairway. And there he pushed me down and raped me. And after that he drove me to the station.” “And was it horrible or was it nothing?” “Ah. you want ‘material.’ It was nothing. I was too drunk to feel anything. He was afraid after I would call the police. Because I told him that I would. I told him. ‘You raped me and I’m going to do something about it. I didn’t leave Poland to come to America and be raped by a Pole.’ And he said, ‘Well, you could have slept with hundreds of men—nobody’s going to believe you.’ And I didn’t even mean to go to the police. He was right—they wouldn’t believe me. I just wanted to tell him that he had done something dreadful. He was white, he had a Polish name, he was good-looking, young—why? Why a man feels like raping a drunken woman? What kind of pleasure can that be? He drives me to the station, asking me if I’m okay, if I can make the train. Even walks me down to the platform and buys me a token.” “Very generous.” “And he never called you?” “No.” “I’m sorry I gave him your number, Nathan.” “It hardly matters.” “That rape itself—it didn’t mean anything. I went home and washed myself. And there waiting for me is a postcard. From my lover in Warsaw. And that’s when I began to cry. That had meaning. Me, a postcard! Finally he writes me—and it’s a postcard! I had a vision, after his postcard, of my parents’ house before the war—a vision of all that went. Your country is ethically maybe a better country than Poland, but even we, even we—you want to come now?” “Even we what?” “Even we deserve a little better than that. I never had a normal life almost from right after I was born. I’m not a very normal person. I once had a little child to tell me that I smell good and that my meatballs are the best in the world. That’s gone too. Now I don’t even have half-home. Now what I have is no-home. All I’m saying is, after you get tired of fucking me, I’ll understand—but please,” she said, just as his body, playing yet another trick, erupted without so much as a warning, “please, don’t just drop me as a friend.”