The Anatomy Lesson

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When
he is sick, every man wants his mother; if she
’
s not around, other women must do. Zuckerman was making do with four other women. He
’
d never had so many women at one time, or so many doctors,
or d
runk so much vodka, or done so little work, or known despair of such wild proportions. Yet he didn
’
t seem to have a disease that anybody could take seriously. Only the pain—in his neck, arms, shoulders, pain that made it difficult to walk for more than a few city blocks or even to stand very long in one place. Just having a neck, arms, and shoulders was like carrying another person around. Ten minutes out getting the groceries and he had to hurry home and lie down. Nor could he bring back more than one light bagful per trip, and even then he had to hold it cradled up against his chest like somebody eighty years old. Holding the bag down at his side only worsened the pain. It was painful to bend over and make his bed. To stand at the stove was painful, holding nothing heavier than a spatula and waiting for an egg to fry. He couldn
’
t throw open a window, not one that required any strength. Consequently, it was the women who opened the windows for him: opened his windows, fried his egg, made his bed, shopped for his food, and effortlessly, manfully, toted home his bundles. One woman on her own could have done what was needed in an hour or two a day, but Zuckerman didn
’
t have one woman any longer. That was how he came to have four.

To sit up in a chair and read
he wore an orthopedic collar, a
spongy lozenge in a white ribbed sleeve that he fastened around his neck to keep the cervical vertebrae aligned and to prevent him from turning his head unsupported. The support and the restriction of movement were supposed to diminish the hot tine of pain that ran from behind his right ear into his neck, then branched downward beneath the scapula like a menorah held bottom side up. Sometimes the collar helped, sometimes not. but just wearing it was as maddening as the pain itself. He couldn
’
t concentrate on anything other than himself in his collar. The text in hand was from his college days.
The Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse.
Inside the front cover, above his name and the date inscribed in blue ink, was a single penciled notation in his 1949 script, a freshman apercu that read,
“
Metaphysical poets pass easily from trivial to sublime.
”
For the first time in twenty-four years he turned to the poems of George Herbert, He
’
d got the book down to read
“
The Collar,
”
hoping to find something there to help him wear his own. That was commonly believed to be a function of great literature: antidote to suffering through depict
ion of our common fate. As Zuck
erman was learning, pain could make you awfully primitive if not counteracted by steady, regular doses of philosophical thinking. Maybe he could pick up some hints from Herbert.

… Shall I be still in suit?

Have I no harvest but a
t
horn

To let me blood, and no
t
restore

What
I
have lost with cordiall fruit?

Sure there was wine

Before my sighs did drie i
t
: there was
corn

Before my tears did drown it.

I
s the yeare only
l
ost to me
?

Have I no bayes to crown i
t
?

No flowers, no garlands gay? all blasted?

All wasted?

… But as I rav
’
d and grew more fierce and wilde

At every word

Me thought I heard one calling.
Childe:
And I reply
’
d.
My Lord.

As best he could with his aching arm, he threw the volume across the room. Absolutely not! He refused to make of his collar, or of the affliction it was designed to assuage, a metaphor for anything grandiose. Metaphys
ical poets may pass easily from
trivial to sublime, but on the strength of the experience of the past eighteen months, Zuckerman
’
s impression was of proceeding, if at all, in the opposite direction.

Writing the last page of a book was as close as he
’
d ever come to sublimity, and that hadn
’
t happened in four years. He couldn
’
t remember when he
’
d written a
readable
page. Even while he was wearing the collar, the spasm in the upper trapezius and the aching soreness to either side of the dorsal spine made it difficult to type just the address on an envelope. When a Mount Sinai orthopedist had ascribed his troubles to twenty years of hammering away at a manual portable, he at once went off to buy an IBM Selectric II; however, when he tried at home to get to work, he found that he ached as much over the new, unfamiliar IBM keyboard as he had over the last of his little Olivettis. Just a glimpse of the Olivetti stowed away in its battered traveling case at the back of his bedroom closet and the depression came rolling in—the way Bojangles Robinson must have felt looking at his old dancing shoes. How simple, back when he was still healthy, to give it a shove and make room on his desk for his lunch or his notes or his reading or his mail. How he
’
d loved to push them around, those silent uncomplaining sparring partners—the pounding he
’
d been giving them since he was twenty! There when he paid his alimony and answered his fans, there to lay his head beside when overcome by the beauty or ugliness of what he
’
d just composed, there for every page of every draft of the four published novels, of the three buried alive—if Olivettis could talk, you
’
d get the novelist naked. While from the IBM prescribed by the first orthopedist, you
’
d get nothing—only the smug, puritanical, workmanlike hum telling of itself and all its virtues: I am a Correcting Selectric II. I never do anything wrong, Who this man is I have no idea. And from the look of things neither does he.

Writing manually was no better. Even in the good old days, pushing his left hand across the paper, he looked like some brave determined soul learning to use an artificial limb. Nor were the results that easy to decipher. Writing by hand was the clumsiest thing he did. He danced the rumba better than he wrote by hand. He held the pen too tight. He clenched his teeth and made agonized faces. He stuck his elbow out from his side as though beginning the breast stroke, then hooked his hand down and around from his forearm so as to form the letters from above rather than below—the contor
tionist technique by which many
a left-handed child had taught himself how not to smear his words as he proceeded across the page from left to right back in the era of the inkwell. A highly recommended osteopath had even concluded that the cause of Zuckerman
’
s problems was just this: the earnest left-handed schoolboy, straining to overcome the impediment of wet ink, who had begun microscopically to twist the writer
’
s spine off the vertical axis and screw it down cockeyed into his sacrum. His rib cage was askew. His clavicle was crooked. His left scapula winged out at its lower angle like a chicken
’
s. Even his humerus was too tightly packed into the shoulder capsule and inserted in the joint on the bias. Though to the untrained eye he might appear more or less symmetrical and decently proportioned, within he was as misshapen as Richard III. According to the osteopath, he
’
d been warping at a steady rate since he was seven. Began with his homework. Began with the first of his reports on life in New Jersey.
“
In 1666 Governor Carteret provided an interpreter for Robert Treat and also a guide up the Hackensack River to meet with a representative of Oraton, the aged chief of the Hackensacks. Robert Treat wanted Oraton to know that the white settlers wished only peace.
”
Began at ten with Newark
’
s Robert Treat and the euphonious elegance of
interpreter
and
representative,
ended with Newark
’
s Gilbert Car
novsky and the blunt monosyllables
cock
and
cunt,
Such was the Hackensack up which the writer had paddled, only to dock at the port of pain.

When sitting upright at the typewriter became too painful, he tried leaning back in an easy chair and doing the best he could with his imperfect longhand. He had the collar to brace his neck, the firm, uncushioned, back of the upholstered chair to support his spine, and a piece of beaverboard, cut to his specifications, laid across the arms of the chair to serve as a portable desk for his composition books. His place was certainly quiet enough for total concentration. He
’
d had his big study windows double-glazed so that nobody
’
s television or phonograph would blare through from the building backing onto his brownstone apartment. and the ceiling had been soundproofed so he wouldn
’
t be disturbed by the scratching of his upstairs neighbor
’
s two Pekinese. The study was carpeted, a deep copper-brown wool, and the windows were hung to the floor with creamy velvet curtains. li was a cozy, quiet, book-lined room. He
’
d spent half his life sealed off in rooms just like it.
Atop the small cabinet where he
kept his vodka bottle and his glass were favorite old photographs in Plexiglas frames: his dead parents as newlyweds in his grandparents
’
backyard; ex-wives blooming with health on Nantucket; his estranged brother leaving Cornell in 1957. a magna cum laude (and a tabula rasa) in a cap and gown. If during the day he spoke at all, it was only small talk to those pictures; otherwise, / enough silence even to satisfy Proust. He had silence, comfort. time, money, but composing in longhand set off a throbbing pain in his upper arm that in no time at all made him sick to his stomach. He kneaded the muscle with his right hand while he continued to write with the left. He tried not thinking about it. He pretended that it wasn
’
t
his
upper arm hurting but somebody else
’
s. He tried to outwit it by stopping and starting. Stopping long enough helped the pain but hurt the writing; by the tenth time he
’
d stopped he had nothing left to write, and with nothing to write, no reason to be. When he tore off the neck collar and threw himself to the floor, the ripping sound of the Velcro fastener coming undone could have been emitted by his guts. Every thought and feeling, ensnared by the selfness of pain.

In a children
’
s furniture store on Fifty-seventh Street he had bought a soft red plastic-covered playmat that was permanently laid out in his study now, between his desk and his easy chair. When he could no longer bear sitting up, he stretched supine upon the playmat, his head supported by
Roget
’
s Thesaurus.
He
’
d come to conduct most of the business of his waking life on the playmat. From there, no longer laden with an upper torso or saddled with fifteen pounds of head, he made phone calls, received visitors, and followed Watergate on TV. Instead of his own spectacles, he wore a pair of prism glasses that enabled him to see at right angles. They were designed for the bedridden by a downtown optical firm to which he
’
d been referred by his physiotherapist. Through his prism glasses he followed our President
’
s chicanery—the dummy gestures, the satanic sweating, the screwy dazzling lies. He almost felt for him, the only other American he saw daily who seemed to be in as much trouble as he was. Flat out on the floor, Zuckerman could also see whichever of his women was seated upright on the sofa. What the woman in attendance saw were the rectangular opaque undersides of the protruding glasses and Zuckerman explaining Nixon to the ceiling.

He tried from the playmat to dict
ate fiction to a secretary, but
he hadn
’
t the fluency for it and sometimes went as long as an hour without a word to say. He couldn
’
t write without seeing the writing; though he could picture what the sentences pictured, he couldn
’
t picture the sentences unless he saw them unfold and fasten one to the other. The secretary was only twenty and, during the first few weeks particularly, got too easily caught up in his anguish. The sessions were torture for both of them, and generally ended with the secretary down on the playmat. Intercourse, fellatio, and cunnilingus Zuckerman could endure more or less without pain, provided he was supine and kept the thesaurus beneath his head for support. The thesaurus was just the right thickness to prevent the back of his skull failing below the line of his shoulders and setting off the pain in his neck. Its inside cover was inscribed
“‘
From Dad—You have my every confidence,
”
and dated
“
June 24, 1946.
”
A book to enrich his vocabulary upon graduation from grade school.