The Anatomy Lesson (20 page)

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A double vodka on takeoff, then over some waterway in Pennsylvania three drags on a joint in the airplane toilet, a
nd Zuck
erman was managing well enough. Not much more pain than he would have felt at home doing nothing but tending pain. And every time his determination began to crumble and he told himself that he was running away on a ridiculous impulse, running away to nothing that made sense or promised relief, running away from what it was impossible to escape, he opened the medical-school catalogue and reread the chart on page 42 that laid out the daily course load for a medical student
’
s first year. You start at eight-thirty, five mornings a week, with Biology 310/311. From nine-thirty to noon. Clinics 300 and 390. An hour for lunch, and from one to five every afternoon. Anatomy 301. Then the evening
’
s homework. Days and nights, filled not by him with what little he knew but by them with all he didn
’
t. He turned to the description of Clinics 390.

introduction
TO
the patient.
This course is offered in the first year of training … Each student will interview a patien
t
before the group, focusing on the present complaint, the illness onset, reaction
t
o the illness and hospitalization, life changes related, personality characteristics. coping styles, etc….

Sounds familiar. Sounds like the art of fiction, except that the coping style and the personality characteristics belong to a patient
in off the street. Other people. Somebody should have told me about them a long time ago.

360.
fetal-maternal medicine.
The student will work full-time in
the labor-delivery floor. He will be required to review the bibliography related to methods and techniques of recording maternal and
fetal physiologic parame
ters during labor and delivery…

361.
obstetrics: birth rooms
. This elective will primarily encompass
inpatient obstetrics, especially birth-room experience. Some continuity of care can be achieved by post-partum follow-up on selected
patients…

Not until Michigan did Zuckerman discover that if you take obstetrics as your specialty you specialize in gynecology too. Tumor formations. Infected reproductive organs. Well, it
’
d bestow a new perspective on an old obsession. What
’
s more, he owed it to women after
Carnovsky.
From what he
’
d read of the reviews in the feminist press, he could expect a picture of himself up in the post office, alongside the mug shot of the Marquis de Sade. once the militants took Washington and began guillotining the thousand top misogynists in the arts. He came off no better there than with the disapproving Jews. Worse. They had put him on the cover of one of their magazines,
why does this man hate women?
Those girls meant business—wanted blood. Well, he
’
d tum the tables and tend to abnormalities in the discharge of theirs. Relieving menstrual disorders beats he said she said I said you said on anyone
’
s scale of values. In memory of the mother to whom he
’
d intended no harm. In the name of ex-wives who had done their damnedest. For his ministering harem. Where I have fornicated, there shall I diagnose, prescribe, operate. and cure. Up with colposcopy, down with Carnovsky.

Going to medical school is nuts, a sick mart
’
s delusion about heating himself. And Jenny saw it coming:
I
should have gone to Bearsvitle.

But he was
not
a sick man—he was
fighting
the idea of himself as sick. Every thought and feeling ensnared by the self-ness of pain, pain endlessly circling back on itself, diminishing everything except isolation—first it
’
s the pain that empties the world, then it
’
s the effort to overcome it. He refused to endure one day more.

Other people. So busy diagnosing everybody else there
’
s no time to over
-
diagnose yourself. The unexamined life—the only one worth living.

The man beside him in the aisle seat was filing into his attache case the papers that had been absorbing his attention since they
’
d come on board. As the plane began its descent, he turned to Zuckerman and. in a neighborly way, he asked,
“
Going out on business?
”

“
That
’
s right.
”

“
What line you in?
”

“
Pornography,
”
Zuckerman said.

He looked to be amused by the novel reply.
“
Selling it or buying it?
”

“
Publish it. Out to Chicago to see Hefner. Hugh Hefner.
Playboy
“

“
Oh, everyone knows who Hefner is. I read the other day in
The Wall Street Journal
where he grosses a hundred and fifty million a year.
”

“
Don
’
t rub it in,
”
Zuckerman said.

The man laughed amiably and seemed ready to leave it at that. Until curiosity got the better of him.
“
What exactly do you publish?
”

“
Lickety Split,
”
said Zuckerman.

“
That
’
s the publication?
”

“
You never see
Lickety Split
?
On your newsstand?
”

“
No, afraid I haven
’
t.
”

“
But you see
Playboy,
don
’
t you?
”

“
I see it occasionally.
”

“
Open it up to look at, right?
”

“
From time to time.
”

“
Well, personally I find
Playboy
boring. That
’
s why I don
’
t gross a hundred and fifty million: my magazine isn
’
t as boring as his. Okay, I admit it, I
’
m extremely envious of Hefner
’
s money. He has much more respectability, he has entree, he has national distribution, and
Lickety Split
is still in the porno ghetto, I
’
m not surprised you haven
’
t seen it.
Lickety Split
is not a mass-distribution publication because it
’
s too dirty. It doesn
’
t have Jean-Paul Sartre in it to make it kosher for a guy like you to buy at a newsstand and go home and jerk off to the tits, i don
’
t believe in that. Hefner is basically a businessman. I don
’
t think that describes me. Sure it
’
s a high-profit business—but with me money is not the paramount issue.
”

It wasn
’
t clear how much the
“
guy like you
”
had been offended by the allusion. He was dressed in a gray double-breasted chalk-stripe suit and a maroon silk t
ie, a tall, fit gray-haired man
in his fifties who, though perhaps not accustomed to such a casual insult, was not about to take too seriously the provocations of a social inferior. Zuckerman imagined Diana
’
s father looking rather like this. He asked Zuckerman,
“
What
’
s your name, sir
—
may I ask?
”

“
Milton Appel. A-p-p-e-i. Accent on the second syllable. Je m
’
appel
l
e Appel.
”

“
Well, I
’
ll keep an eye out for your journal.
”

Putting me down.
“
You do that,
”
Zuckerman said. His neck was hurting and he got up and went off to the toilet to finish the joint.

They were high over the lake, still way above the rippling gray water and the zigzag slabs of floating ice, when he got back to his seat. Wide stretches of the lake were frozen over completely and strewn with shards of ice, a vast waste of slivers looking like the wreckage of millions of frosted light bulbs jettisoned from the sky. He
’
d expected that they
’
d already be passing over the Gold Coast towers and buckling their belts to land. Maybe the descent he
’
d imagined hadn
’
t been the plane
’
s but his own. Probably he should have tolerated this resurgence of pain instead of piling more grass on top of the pills and the vodka. But his plan wasn
’
t to lie on his back for the rest of the day after they had landed. Flipping through the faculty register in the medical-school catalogue, he
’
d come upon the name of one of his oldest friends, Bobby Freytag. In their freshman year, they
’
d been thrown together as roommates just across the Midway in Burton Judson Hall. Now Bobby was a professor of anesthesiology in the School of Medicine and on the staff at Billings Hospital. Knowing Bobby was going to expedite everything. His first lucky break in a year and a half. Nothing now was going to stop him. He
’
d give up New York and move back to Chicago. It was more than twenty years since his graduation. How he
’
d loved it out there then! Eight hundred miles between him and home: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana—the best friends a boy ever had. He figured he
’
d live in Chicago forever, after only his first day. He felt as though he
’
d come out from the East by covered wagon, a removal that immense, that final. He became a large, hearty American six-footer and a contemptuous bohemian all at once, and returned home twelve pounds heavier for his first Christmas vacation, ready to pick a fight with the nearest philistine. In his first year at Chicago he
’
d go down to the lake and make noises there
alone on starry nights—the Gan
tian goat cry he
’
d read about in
Of Time and the River.
He carried
The Waste Land
with him on the El, reading away until Clark Street, where girls no older than himself were taking their clothes off in the striptease bars. If you bought them a drink when they came down off the runway, they did you a favor and put a hand on your cock. He wrote people letters about this. He was seventeen and thought continuously about his courses, his cock, and his pals Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Ohio. Talk to him about medical school in those days and he would have laughed in your face: he wasn
’
t about to spend his life writing out prescriptions. His life was too big for that. Inspiring teachers, impenetrable texts, neurotic classmates, embattled causes, semantic hairsplitting—
”
What do you
mean
by
‘
mean
’
?
”
—his life was
enormous.
He met people his age who were brilliant but terrifically depressed, couldn
’
t get up in the morning, didn
’
t go to class or finish courses. He met geniuses sixteen years old who
’
d placed out of the college in two quarters and were already beginning law school. He met girls who never changed their clothes, who wore black makeup around their eyes and the same Left Bank outfit every day, bold, brash, talkative girls with hair halfway down to their black stockings. He had a roommate who wore a cape. He wore a field jacket and khaki trousers, like the last of the ex-GIs. In Stin
e
way
’
s Drugstore he saw people with white hair who
’
d begun in the college long before the war and were still hanging around contemplating their incompletes and trying to get laid. He joined the Film Society and saw
Bicycle Thief
and
Open City
and
Les Enfants du Paradis.
They were a revelation to him. So was Professor Mackauer
’
s
“
History of Western Civilization
”
—so was the wallowing in ass-wiping throughout Rabelais and all the ripened turds dotting Luther
’
s Table Talk. He
’
d study from six till ten every night, then head off to Jimmy
’
s, where he waited with his friends for the racier members of the faculty to show up. A sociologist of pop culture who
’
d once worked in the fallen world for
Fortune
would drink with them some nights until closing time. Even more glamorous was his teacher in Humanities 3,
“
a published poet
”
who
’
d parachuted into occupied Italy for the OSS and still wore a trench coat. He had a broken nose and read Shakespeare aloud in class and all the girls were in love with him, and so was young Zuckerman. He taught them
The Poetics
,
The Oresieia
,
Passage to India
,
The Alchemist, Portrait of the Artist, King Lear, The Autobiography of Benvenuio Cellini
—taught them all like holy
books. Enrico Fermi gave a lecture in their physical-science survey course and did the ingratiating number up at the blackboard about needing help with the math. When the students clustered around after to ask the usual dumb celebrity questions, he had dared to inquire of the theoretician of The
Bomb
what he was doing now. Fermi laughed.
“
Nothing very important,
”
he told him;
“
after all, I was trained in pre-Fermi physics.
”
It was the cleverest remark that he had ever heard. He was becoming clever in conversation himself, droll, quick, del
i
ciously self-effacing—and full of disgust for the country and its values. The worst days of the Cold War and they were studying
The Communis
t
Manifesto
in the social-science course. On top of being a Jew in Christian America, he was becoming a member of yet another unloved, suspect minority, the
“
eggheads
”
ridiculed by the
Chicago Tribune,
the cultural Fifth Column of the commercial society. For weeks he mooned after a tall blond girl in a plaid flannel skirt who painted abstract pictures. He was floored when he found out she was a lesbian. He was rapidly growing sophisticated—Manischewitz and Velveeta had by now been superseded by
“
wine and cheese,
”
Taystee Bread by
“
French
”
bread when he could afford to eat out—but a lesbian? It never occurred to him. He did. however, have a girl friend, very briefly, who was mulatto. Fondling madly beneath her sweater in the basement of Ida Noyes Hall, he was still sufficiently analytical to think,
“
This is real life,
”
though nothing in life had ever seemed stranger. He made a friend a few years older than himself, a Stineway
’
s regular, who was in psychoanalysis, smoked marijuana, knew about jazz, and was a self-proclaimed Trotskyism To a kid in 1950 this was hot stuff. They went to a jazz club up on Forty-sixth Street, two white Jewish students studiously listening to the music, surrounded on every side by dark, unfriendly, very unstudious faces. One thrilling night he listened to Nelson Algren talk about the prizefights at Jimmy
’
s. Thomas Mann came to Chicago during his first term;
he
spoke at Rockefeller Chapel. Great event: the Goethe Bicentennial. In a German accent Mann spoke the richest English he had ever heard; he spoke
prose,
elegant and powerful and clear—with withering urbanity, pungent phrases intimately describing the genius of Bismarck, Erasmus, and Voltaire as though they were colleagues who
’
d been to dine at his house the evening before. Goethe was
“
a miracle.
”
he said, but the real miracle was to be two rows down from the podium, learning from the Good European how
to speak your own tongue. Mann said
“
greatness
”
fifty times that afternoon: Greatness, Mighty, Sublime. He phoned home that night in ecstasy from ail the erudition, but nobody in New Jersey knew who Thomas Mann was, or even Nelson Aigren.
“
Sorry.
”
he said aloud, after hanging up,
“
sorry it wasn
’
t Sam Levenson.
”
He learned German. He read Galileo, St. Augustine, Freud. He protested the underpaying of the Negroes who worked at the university hospital. The Korean War began and he and his closest friend declared themselves enemies of Syngman Rhee. He read Croce, he ordered onion soup, he put a candle in a Chianti bottle and threw a party. He discovered Charlie Chaplin and W. C. Fields and documentary films and the dirtiest shows in Calumet City. He went up to the Near North Side to look down his nose at the advertising types and the tourists. He swam off the Point with a logical positivist, he savagely reviewed beat novels for
The Maroon,
he bought his first classical records —the Budapest String Quartet—from a homosexual salesman at the co-op whom he called by his first name. He began in conversation to call himself
“
one.
”
Oh, everything was wonderful, as big and exciting a life as could be imagined, and then he made his first mistake. He published a short story while still an undergraduate, an
“
Atlantic First
”
—ten pages about a family of Newark Jews clashing with a family of Syrian Jews in a rooming house at the Jersey shore, the conflict loosely modeled on a battle provoked by a hot-headed uncle and narrated to
him
(disapprovingly) by his father on a visit home. An Atlantic first. It looked as though life had become bigger yet. Writing would intensify everything even further. Writing, as Mann had testified—not least by his own example—was the only worthwhile attainment, the surpassing experience, the exalted struggle, and there was no way to write other than like a fanatic. Without fanaticism, nothing great in fiction could ever be achieved. He had the highest possible conception of the gigantic capacities of literature to engulf and purify life. He would write more, publish more, and life would become colossal.

But what became colossal was the next page. He thought he had chosen life but what he had chosen was the next page. Stealing time to write stories, he never thought to wonder what time might be stealing from him. Only gradually did the perfecting of a writer
’
s iron will beg
in to feel like the evasion of
experience, and the means to im
aginative release, to the expo
sure, revelation, and invention of life, like the sternest form of incarceration. He thought he
’
d chosen the intensification of everything and he
’
d chosen monasticism and retreat instead. Inherent in this choice was a paradox that he had never foreseen. When, some years later, he went to see a production of
Waiting
for Godot,
he said afterwards to the woman who was then his lonely wife,
“
What
’
s so harrowing? It
’
s any writer
’
s ordinary day. Except you don
’
t get Pozzo and Lucky.
”