by Philip Roth
It was the Percodan he’d swallowed on the hospital steps, his third of the day (at least he was hoping it was his third and not his fourth), that had him talking away like this. Percodan could do that: first that lovely opening wallop and then for two hours you didn’t shut up. In addition there was the excitement of seeing earnest, shy, amiable Bobby as a large full-grown physician: a pitch-black chin beard to cover his acne scars, a comer office in Billings overlooking the Midway lawn where once they’d played their Sunday softball, and rows of shelves bearing hundreds of books not one of which the novelist could recognize. It was thrilling just seeing Bobby weigh two hundred pounds. Bobby had been even skinnier than Nathan, a studious bean-pole with asthma, bad skin, and the kindest disposition in the history of adolescence. He was the only grateful seventeen-year-old that Nathan had ever met. Zuckerman was suddenly so proud of him he felt like his father, like Bobby’s father, like the owner of the ladies’ handbag store on Seventy-first Street where Bobby used to go to help on Wednesday nights and Saturday afternoons. A strong weepy feeling started to heat up his eyes, but no, he’d never get Bobby’s backing by lowering his head to the desk and sobbing his heart out. This wasn’t the place or the moment, even if both were urging everything so long held back to come forth in one big purgative gush. Look, it would be nice to shoot somebody too. Whoever had disabled him like this. Only no one was responsible—and unlike the pornographer he didn’t own a gun.
The tears he suppressed, but he couldn’t stop talking. Aside from the Percodan buoying him up, there was the decisive landmark decision made only the minute before—to have no pain even when he had it, to treat it like pleasure instead. He didn’t mean masochistic pleasure either. It was bunk, at least in his case, that the payoff for being in pain was morbid secret gratifications. Everybody wants to make pain interesting—first the religions, then the poets, then, not to be left behind, even the doctors getting in on the act with their psychosomatic obsession. They want to give it significance. What does it mean? What are you hiding? What are you showing? What are you betraying? It’s impossible just to suffer the pain, you have to suffer its meaning. But it’s not interesting and it has no meaning—it’s just plain stupid pain, it’s the opposite of interesting, and nothing, nothing made it worth it unless you were mad to begin with, Nothing made it worth the doctor’s offices and the hospitals and the drugstores and the clinics and the contradictory diagnoses. Nothing made it worth the depression and the humiliation and the helplessness, being robbed of work and walks and exercise and every last shred of independence. Nothing made it worth not being able to make your own bed in the morning without crawling back in immediately afterwards, nothing, not even a harem of a hundred in only their garter belts cooking rice pudding all at the same time. Nobody could make him believe that he’d had this pain for a year and a half because he believed he deserved it. What made him so resentful was that he didn’t. He wasn’t relieving guilt feelings—he didn’t have guilt feelings. If he agreed with the Appels and their admonitions, he wouldn’t have written those books in the first place. He wouldn’t have been able to. He wouldn’t have wanted to. Sure he was weary of the fight, but it didn’t follow that his illness represented capitulation to their verdict. It wasn’t punishment or guilt that he was expiating. He had not been four years to this great university having rational humanism drummed into his skull in order to wind up expiating irrational guilt through organic pain. He hadn’t been writing for twenty years, writing principally about irrational guilt, to wind up irrationally guilty. Nor was he in need of a sickness to gain attention. Losing attention was what he was after—masked and gowned in the operating room, that was objective. He did not wish to be a suffering person for any banal, romantic, ingenious, poetical, theological, or psychoanalytical reason, and certainly not to satisfy Mortimer Horowitz. Mortimer Horowitz was the best reason in the world to stay well. There was nothing in it and he wouldn’t do it. He refused.
Three (or four) Percodan. two-thirds of a gram of marijuana, six ounces of vodka, and he saw everything clearly and couldn’t stop talking. It was over. The eighteen months were over. He’d made up his mind and that was that. I am well.
“I can’t get over it. I was the great performer, glib and satiric and worldly, and you were this earnest, dutiful, asthmatic kid helping his father in the handbag shop. I saw your name in the catalogue and I thought, ‘So that’s where Bobby’s found to hide. Behind the surgeon.’ But what I see is somebody hiding from nothing. Somebody who knows when he’s right and knows when he’s wrong. Somebody who doesn’t have time in the operating room to sit around wondering what to do next and whether it’ll work or not. Somebody who knows how to be right—how to be right quickly. No errors allowed. The stakes never in doubt. Life vs. Death. Health vs. Disease. Anesthesia vs. Pain. What that must do for a man!”
Bobby leaned back and laughed. Big hearty laugh, no oxygen shortage in those lungs anymore. He’s the size of Falstaff. And not from booze but from this usefulness. He’s the size of his worth.
“When you know how to do it, Zuck, it’s very easy. It’s like riding a bike.”
“No, no, people tend to devalue the sophistication of their own special field. It’s easy only because of all you know.”
“Speaking of specialties, in Time they say you’ve had four wives.”
“In life only three. And you?”
“One. One wife,” said Bobby, “one child, one divorce.”
“How’s your father?”
“Not so good. My mom just died. Forty-five years of marriage. He’s in a bad way. In the best of times he’s not your most unemotional Jew—he can’t even tell you it’s Wednesday without tears coming to his eyes. So it’s pretty rough right now. He’s staying at my place for the time being. And your folks?”
“My father died in ‘69. Half out of it with a stroke, and then a coronary. My mother went a year later. Brain tumor. Very sudden.”
“So you’re orphaned. And right now no wife. Is that the problem? Abandonment?”
“I’ve got some girls looking after me.”
“What drug you on, Zuck?”
“None, nothing. Just beat, that’s all. The wives, the books, the girls, the funerals. The death of my folks was strong medicine. I’d been rehearsing it for years in my fiction, but I still never got the idea. But mostly I’m dead tired of the job. It’s not the elevating experience they promised in Humanities 3. Starving myself of experience and eating only words. It brought out the drudge in me. Bob, this ritual that it takes to write. It may look to outsiders like the life of freedom—not on a schedule, in command of yourself, singled out for glory, the choice apparently to write about anything. But once one’s writing, it’s alt limits. Bound to a subject. Bound to make sense of it. Bound to make a book of it. If you want to be reminded of your limitations virtually every minute, there’s no better occupation to choose. Your memory, your diction, your intelligence, your sympathies, your observations, your sensations, your understanding—never enough. You can find out more about what’s missing in you than you really ought to know. All of you an enclosure you keep trying to break out of. And all the obligations more ferocious for being self-imposed.”
“Every construction that helps anybody is also a boundary, I hate to tell you, but that’s true even in medicine. Everybody’s trapped in the thing he does best.”
“Look, it’s simple: I’m sick of raiding my memory and feeding on the past. There’s nothing more to see from my angle: if it ever was the thing I did best, it isn’t anymore. I want an active connection to life and I want it now. I want an active connection to myself. I’m sick of channeling everything into writing. I want the real thing, the thing in the raw, and not for the writing but for itself. Too long living out of the suitcase of myself. I want to start again for ten hundred different reasons.”
But Bobby shook his bearded head: didn’t get it, wouldn’t buy it. “If you were a penniless failure as a writer, and nothing you wrote got pub
lished, and nobody knew your name, and if you were going into social work, say, which only took two years more of study, well, okay. If during all these years as the writer you are you’d been hanging around hospitals and doctors, if for the last twenty years you’d been reading medical books and the medical journals on the side—but as you say yourself, you’re just as stupid about science as you were in 1950. If you really had been living some kind of secret life all these years—but have you? When did you get this great idea?”
‘Two, three months ago.”
“I think you’ve got another problem.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you are just tired. Maybe you want to hang a sign on your door, ‘Gone fishin,” and take off to Tahiti for a year. Maybe you just need your second wind as a writer. You tell me. Maybe you’ve got to get screwed more or something.”
“No help. Tried it. All the outward trappings of pleasure, but the result is the inverse of pleasure. Getting screwed, climbing Mount Everest, writing books—not enough companionship. Mailer ran for Mayor of New York. Kafka talked about becoming a waiter in a Tel Aviv cafe. I want to be a doctor. The dream of breaking out isn’t that rare. It happens to the most hardened writers. The work draws on you and draws on you and you begin to wonder how much of you there is to draw on. Some turn to the bottle, others the shotgun. I prefer medical school.”
“Except, whatever problems are plaguing you in writing, they’re going to be right there, you know, when you’re a doctor. You can grow sick and tired of the real thing too. Tired of the cancers, tired of the strokes, tired of the families taking the bad news. You can get just as tired of malignant tumors as you can of anything else. Look, I’ve had experience right up to here, and it doesn’t pay off as greatly as you might think. You can get so involved in experience, you lose the opportunity to grasp what you’re going through. You pay your money, Zuck. and you take your choice. I happen to think you’re going to be Zuckerman the doctor just the way you’re Zuckerman the writer, no different.”
“But the isolation won’t be there, the solitude won’t be there—it can’t be there. The physical differences are too great. There are a thousand people walking around this hospital. Know who walks around my study, who I palpate and tell to say ‘Ahhh’? Writing is not a very sociable business.”
“I don’t agree with that. Your solitude is of your own making. Working with people is obviously alien to your nature. Your temperament’s your temperament, and it’ll still be yourself you’re telling to say ‘Ahhh.’ ”
“Bob. remember me out here? You don’t remember an isolate, damn it. I was a lively, gregarious, outgoing kid. Laughing. Self-confident. I was practically crazy with intellectual excitement. Your old pal Zuck was not a remote personality. I was somebody burning to begin.”
“And now you’re burning to end. That’s the impression I get anyway, underneath what you say.”
“No, no, no—burning to begin again. Look, I want to take a crack at mod school. What the hell is so wrong with that’.’”
“Because it isn’t like you’re taking a six-month sabbatical. It’s a big investment of time and money. For a man of forty without real demonstrable qualifications, with an unscientific mind, it’s just going to be too arduous.”
“I can do it.”
“Okay—let’s say you even manage to, which I doubt. By the time you’re worth anything you’re going to be damn near fifty. You’ll have plenty of companionship, but you’ll have no recognition, and how the hell are you going to like that when you’re fifty?”
“I’ll love it.”
“Bullshit.”
“You’re wrong. I had the recognition. I had the public. In the end it doesn’t do anything to the public, but to me it did plenty. I sentenced myself to house arrest. Bobby, I have no desire to confess or to be taken for a confessor, and (hat was mostly where their interest got stuck. It wasn’t literary fame, it was sexual fame, and sexual fame stinks. No, I’ll be content to give that up. The most enviable genius in literary history is the guy who invented alphabet soup: nobody knows who he is. There’s nothing more wearing than having to go around pretending to be the author of one’s own books—except pretending not to be.”
“What about money, if you think you don’t need recognition?”
“I made money. Plenty of money. A lot of money and a lot of embarrassment, and I don’t need any more of either.”
“Well, you’ll have plenty of money, minus what it’s going to cost you to go to medical school and to live for ten years. You haven’t sold me on the idea that you want to be a doctor or ought to be a doctor, and you’re not going to sell the admissions committee.”
“What about my grades? All those A’s, damn it. Nineteen-fifties As!”
“Zuck, as a faculty member of this institution I’m quite touched to learn that you’re still hung up on bringing home all those A’s. But I have to tell you, we don’t even look at anything that isn’t an A. The problem is which A we take. And we’re not going to take an A just because we’ve got a writer who doesn’t want to be alone anymore with his typewriter and is sick of screwing his girl friends. This might be a nice out for you from what you’re doing, but we’ve got a doctor shortage in this country and only so many medical-school openings, et cetera and so forth. If I were the dean that’s what I’d tell you. I wouldn’t want to have to be the one to explain your case to the board of trustees. Not the way you’ve explained it. and not with you looking like this. Have you had a good physical lately?”
“I’ve been traveling, that’s all.”
“For more than three hours, from the sound of it.”
Bobby’s phone rang. “Dr. Freytag … What’s the matter? … Come on, pull yourself together. Calm down. Nothing has happened to him… Dad, I don’t know where he is either… He’s not dead—he’s out… Look, come to the hospital and wait in my office. We can go to the Chinese place… Then watch TV and I’ll be home at eight and make us some spaghetti… I don’t care what Gregory eats… I know he’s a beautiful, wonderful boy. but i happen not to care any longer whether he eats or not. Don’t sit there waiting for Gregory. You’re driving yourself nuts with Gregory. Look, you know who’s here, sitting across from my desk? My old roommate Zuck … Nathan. Nathan Zuckerman ... Here, I’ll put him on.” He handed the phone across the desk. “My old man. Say hello.”
“Mr. Freytag—it’s Nathan Zuckerman. How are you?”
“Oh, not so good today. Not good at all. I lost my wife. I lost my Julie.” He began to cry.
“I heard that. I’m terribly sorry. Bobby told me.”
“Forty-five years, wonderful years, and now my Julie’s gone. She’s in the cemetery. How can that be? A cemetery where you can’t even leave a flower or someone will steal it. Look, tell Bobby—is he still there? Did he go out?”
“He’s here.”
“Tell him, please. I forgot to tell him—I have to go there tomorrow. I must go out to the cemetery before it snows.”
Zuckerman passed the phone over to Bobby.
“What is it? , .. No. Gregory can’t take you out. Dad. Gregory can’t take the garbage out. We’re lucky we got him to give up a morning for the funeral… I know he’s a wonderful boy, but you can’t… What?… Sure, just a minute.” To Zuckerman he said, “He wants to say something to you.”
“Yes? Mr. Freytag?”
“Zuck. Zuck—it just now dawned on me. I’m sorry. I’m in a terrible state of confusion. Joel Kupperman—remember? I used to call you Joel Kupperman. the Quiz Kid.”
“That’s right.”
“Sure, you had all the answers.”
“I’ll bet I did.”
“Sure, you and Bobby with your studies. What students you boys were! I was telling Gregory just this morning how his father used to sit at that table and study. He’s a good boy, Zuck. He just needs direction. We are not losing that boy! We made a Bobby, we can make another Bobby. And if” I have to do it singte-handed
I will. Zuck, quick. Bob again, before I forget.”
The phone back over to Bobby.
“Yes. Dad … Dad, tell him one more time how much I loved my homework and the kid’ll knife us both … You’ll get to the cemetery … I understand that. I’ll take care of it… I’ll be home around eight… Dad, live with it—he is not coming home for dinner just because you’d like him to … Because he often doesn’t come home for dinner… I don’t know where, but he’ll eat something. I’m sure. I’ll be home at eight. Just watch the TV till I get there. I’ll see you in a few hours…”
Bobby had been through it lately. Divorce from a depressive wife, contempt from a recalcitrant eighteen-year-old son. responsibility for a bereaved seventy-two-year-old father who filled him with infinite tenderness and infinite exasperation; also, since the divorce, sole responsibility for the son. Because of a severe case of mumps in late adolescence, Bobby could father no children, and Gregory had been adopted while Bobby was still a medical student. To raise an infant then had been an enormous burden, but his young wife was impatient to begin a family, and Bobby had been an earnest and dutiful young man. Of course his parents doted on Gregory from the moment the newborn child arrived. “Everybody doted on him—and what’s come of him? Nothing.”
The voice, weary with loathing, attested more to Bobby’s suffering than to the hardening of his heart. It clearly wasn’t easy to kilt the last of his love for the thoughtless brat. Zuckerman’s own father had had to feel himself leaving life before he could finally face disowning a son. “He’s ignorant, he’s lazy, he’s selfish. A shiny little American consumer. His friends are nobodies, nothings, the kids they make the car commercials for. All they talk about is how to be millionaires before they’re twenty-five—without working, of course. Imagine, when we were in the college, somebody saying “millionaire” with awe. I hear him rattling off the names of the titans in the rock business and I want to wring his neck. I didn’t think it could happen, but with his feet up and his bottle of Bud, watching a doubleheader on TV, he’s even made me hate the White Sox. If I didn’t see Gregory for another twenty years I’d be perfectly happy, But he’s a fucking freeloader and it looks like I’ll have him forever. He’s supposed to be enrolled at some college downtown and I don’t even think he knows which one. He tells me he doesn’t go because he can’t find a place to park. I ask him to do something and he tells me to eat shit and that he’s leaving to live with his mother and never coming back because I’m such a demanding prick. ‘Go, Greg,’ I say, ‘drive up tonight and I’ll pay for the gas.’ But she’s in freezing Wisconsin and sort of screwy, and the louts he knows all hang out down here, and so next thing I know is that instead of leaving home and never coming back he’s screwing some little twat in his room. He’s a honey, Gregory. The morning after my mother died, when I told him his grandfather was coming to stay with us until he was better, he hit the ceiling. ‘Grandpa here? How can Grandpa come here? If Grandpa moves in here, where am I going to fuck Marie? I’m asking a serious question. Tell me. Her house? With her whole family watching?’ This is twelve hours after my mother had dropped dead. I’d been at their place all night with my old man. They’d set up the card table in the living room and were starting their game of gin, just the two of them. Suddenly my mother puts down her hand. ‘I don’t want to play anymore,’ she says. Her head goes back, and that’s it. Massive coronary. Now he’s with us until the worst is over. Gregory goes out to start the night just when my father’s in his pajamas watching the ten o’clock news. “Where’s he going at this hour? Where are you going, bubeleh, at ten o’clock at night?’ The kid thinks he’s hearing Swahili. I say, ‘Dad, forget it.’ ‘But if he’s first going out ten at night, what time is he coming home?’ I tell him that those are questions that exceed all understanding—you have to have the brain of an Ann Landers to answer those questions. Sad business. He’s facing the truth about bubeleh, and just when he’s least prepared. Bubeleh turns out to be a con man and a bullshit artist who can’t even be bothered to go out to the corner to get a quart of milk for Grandpa’s cornflakes. It’s been rough to watch. We’ve been together these last three weeks the way we were when I was a kid working in the store. Only now he’s the kid. The mother dies, the old father becomes the son’s son. We watch the Watergate news together. We eat dinner together. I make breakfast for him in the morning before I go to the hospital. I stop on the way home to get the chocolate-covered cookies that he likes. Before he goes to bed, I give him two with a Valium and a warm glass of milk. The night my mother died I stayed there and slept with him in their bed. During the day, during the first week, he came and sat at my desk while I was down in surgery. He told my secretary about the handbag business. Every day he sat in my office and read the paper for four hours until I came up from the operating room and took him down to the cafeteria for lunch. Nothing like a father’s defenselessness to bring you to your knees. It’s why I can’t forgive that fucking kid. The vulnerability of this old guy and it leaves him absolutely cold. I know he’s only eighteen. But .TO callous? So blind? Even at eight it would stink. But that’s how it worked out, and there we are. I’ve been so busy with my old man I haven’t even had time to think about my mother. That’ll come later, I suppose. What’s it like for you, without them? I still remember your folks and your kid brother when they all came out to visit on the train.”