The Counterlife

 

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

1. Basel

2. Judea

3. Aloft

4. Gloucestershire

5. Christendom

Books by Philip Roth

Copyright

 

To my father at eighty-five

1. Basel

Ever since the family doctor, during a routine checkup, discovered an abnormality on his EKG and he went in overnight for the coronary catheterization that revealed the dimensions of the disease, Henry's condition had been successfully treated with drugs, enabling him to work and to carry on his life at home exactly as before. He didn't even complain of chest pain or of the breathlessness that his doctor might well have expected to find in a patient with advanced arterial obstruction. He was asymptomatic before the routine examination that revealed the abnormality and remained that way during the year before he decided on surgery—without symptoms but for a single terrible side effect from the very medication that stabilized his condition and substantially reduced the risk of a heart attack.

The trouble began after two weeks on the drug. “I've heard this a thousand times,” the cardiologist said when Henry telephoned to report what was happening to him. The cardiologist, like Henry a successful, vigorous professional man not yet into his forties, couldn't have been more sympathetic. He would try to reduce the dose to a point where the medicine, a beta-blocker, continued to control the coronary disease and to blunt the hypertension without interfering with Henry's sexual function. Through a fine-tuning of the medication, he said, you could sometimes achieve “a compromise.”

They experimented for six months, first with the dosage and, when that didn't work, with other brands of the drug, but nothing helped: he no longer awakened with his morning erection or had sufficient potency for intercourse with his wife, Carol, or with his assistant, Wendy, who was sure that it was she, and not the medication, that was responsible for this startling change. At the end of the day, with the outer-office door locked and the blinds down, she worked with all her finesse to arouse him, but work it was, hard labor for both of them, and when he told her it was no use and begged her to stop, had finally to pry open her jaws to make her stop, she was even more convinced that the fault was hers. One evening, when she had burst into tears and told him that she knew it was only a matter of time before he went out and found somebody new, Henry struck her across the face. If it had been the act of a rhino, of a wild man in an orgasmic frenzy, Wendy would have been characteristically accommodating; this, however, was a manifestation, not of ecstasy, but of utter exhaustion with her blindness. She didn't understand, the stupid girl! But of course he didn't either, failed as yet to comprehend the confusion that this loss might elicit in somebody who happened to adore him.

Immediately afterward, he was overcome with remorse. Holding her to him, he assured Wendy, who was still weeping, that she was virtually all he thought about now every day—indeed (though he could not say as much) if Wendy would only let him find work for her in another dental office, he wouldn't have to be reminded every five minutes of what he could no longer have. There were still moments during office hours when he surreptitiously caressed her or watched with the old yearning as she moved about in her formfitting white tunic and trousers, but then he remembered his little pink heart pills and was plummeted into despair. Soon Henry began to have the most demonic fantasies of the adoring young woman who would have done anything to restore his potency being overwhelmed before his eyes by three, four, and five other men.

He couldn't control his fantasies of Wendy and her five faceless men, and yet at the movies with Carol he preferred now to lower his lids and rest his eyes till the love scenes were over. He couldn't stand the sight of the girlie magazines piled up in his barbershop. He had all he could do not to get up and leave the table when, at a dinner party, one of their friends began to joke about sex. He began to feel the emotions of a deeply unattractive person, an impatient, resentful, puritan disdain for the virile men and appetizing women engrossed by their erotic games. The cardiologist, after putting him on the drug, had said, “Forget your heart now and live,” but he couldn't, because five days a week from nine to five he couldn't forget Wendy.

He returned to the doctor to have a serious talk about surgery. The cardiologist had heard that a thousand times too. Patiently he explained that they did not like to operate on people who were asymptomatic and in whom the disease showed every sign of being stabilized by medication. If Henry did finally choose the surgical option, he wouldn't be the first patient to find that preferable to an indefinite number of years of sexual inactivity; nonetheless, the doctor strongly advised him to wait and see how the passage of time affected his “adjustment.” Though Henry wasn't the worst candidate for bypass surgery, the location of the grafts he'd need didn't make him the ideal candidate either. “What does that mean?” Henry asked. “It means that this operation is no picnic in the best of circumstances, and yours aren't the best. We even lose people, Henry. Live with it.”

Those words frightened him so that on the drive home he sternly reminded himself of all those who live of necessity without women, and in far more harrowing circumstances than his own—men in prison, men at war … yet soon enough he was remembering Wendy again, conjuring up every position in which she could be entered by the erection he no longer had, envisioning her just as hungrily as any daydreaming convict, only without recourse to the savage quick fix that keeps a lonely man half-sane in his cell. He reminded himself of how he'd happily lived without women as a prepubescent boy—had he ever been more content than back in the forties during those summers at the shore? Imagine that you're eleven again … but that worked no better than pretending to be serving a sentence at Sing Sing. He reminded himself of the terrible unruliness spawned by unconstrainable desire—the plotting, the longing, the crazily impetuous act, the dreaming relentlessly of the other, and when one of these bewitching others at last becomes the clandestine mistress, the intrigue and anxiety and deception. He could now be a faithful husband to Carol. He would never have to lie to Carol—he'd never have anything to lie
about.
They could once more enjoy that simple, honest, trusting marriage that had been theirs before Maria had appeared in his office ten years earlier to have a crown repaired.

He'd at first been so thrown by the green silk jersey dress and the turquoise eyes and the European sophistication that he could hardly manage the small talk at which he was ordinarily so proficient, let alone make a pass while Maria sat in the chair obediently opening her mouth. From the punctiliousness with which they treated each other during her four visits, Henry could never have imagined that on the eve of her return to Basel ten months later, she would be saying to him, “I never thought I could love two men,” and that their parting would be so horrendous—it had all been so new to both of them that they had made adultery positively virginal. It had never occurred to Henry, until Maria came along to tell him so, that a man who looked like him could probably sleep with every attractive woman in town. He was without sexual vanity and deeply shy, a young man still largely propelled by feelings of decorum that he had imbibed and internalized and never seriously questioned. Usually the more appealing the woman, the more withdrawn Henry was; with the appearance of an unknown woman whom he found particularly desirable, he would become hopelessly, rigidly formal, lose all spontaneity, and often couldn't even introduce himself without flushing. That was the man he'd been as a faithful husband—that's
why
he'd been a faithful husband. And now he was doomed to be faithful again.

The worst of adjusting to the drug turned out to be adjusting to the drug. It shocked him that he was able to live without sex. It could be done, he was doing it, and that killed him—just as once being
unable
to live without it was what killed him. Adjusting meant resigning himself to being this way, and he refused to be this way, and was further demoralized by stooping to the euphemism “this way.” And yet, so well did the adjustment proceed, that some eight or nine months after the cardiologist had urged him not to rush into surgery before testing the effect of the passage of time, Henry could no longer remember what an erection was. Trying to, he came up with images out of the old pornographic funnies, the blasphemous “hotbooks” that had disclosed to kids of his generation the underside of Dixie Dugan's career. He was plagued by mental images of outlandish cocks and by the fantasies of Wendy with all those other men. He imagined her sucking them off. He imagined himself sucking them off. He began secretly to idolize all the potent men as though he no longer mattered as a man himself. Despite his dark good looks and tall, athletic physique, he seemed to have passed overnight from his thirties to his eighties.

One Saturday morning, after telling Carol that he was going for a walk up in the Reservation hills—“to be by myself,” he explained to her somberly—he drove into New York to see Nathan. He didn't phone ahead because he wanted to be able to turn around and come home if he decided at the last minute it was a bad idea. They weren't exactly teenagers anymore, up in the bedroom trading hilarious secrets—since the death of their parents, they weren't even like brothers. Yet he desperately needed someone to hear him out. All Carol could say was that he must not even begin to think of surgery if that meant running the slightest risk of rendering fatherless their three children. The illness was under control and at thirty-nine he remained a tremendous success in every imaginable way. How could all this suddenly matter so when for years now they'd rarely made love with any real passion? She wasn't complaining, it happened to everyone—there wasn't a marriage she knew of that was any different. “But I am only
thirty-nine,”
Henry replied. “So am I,” she said, trying to help by being sensible and firm, “but after eighteen years I don't expect marriage to be a torrid love affair.”

It was the cruelest thing he could imagine a wife saying to a husband
—What do we need sex for anyway?
He despised her for saying it, hated her so that then and there he'd made up his mind to talk to Nathan. He hated Carol, he hated Wendy, if Maria were around he would have hated her too. And he hated men, men with their enormous hard-ons from just looking at
Playboy
magazine.

He found a garage in the East 80s and from a street-corner box nearby dialed Nathan's apartment, reading, while the phone rang, what had been scribbled across the remains of a Manhattan directory chained to the cubicle:
Want to come in my mouth? Melissa 879-0074.
Hanging up before Nathan could answer, he dialed
879-0074. A
man answered. “For Melissa,” said Henry, and hung up again. This time after dialing Nathan, he let the phone ring twenty times.

You can't leave them fatherless.

At Nathan's brownstone, standing alone in the downstairs hallway, he wrote him a note that he immediately tore up. Inside a hotel on the corner of Fifth he found a pay phone and dialed
879-0074.
Despite the beta-blocker, which he'd thought was supposed to
prevent
adrenaline from overcharging the heart, his was pounding like the heart of something wild on a rampage—the doctor wouldn't need a stethoscope to hear it now. Henry grabbed at his chest, counting down to the final boom, even as a voice sounding like a child's answered the phone. “Hullo?”