The Counterlife (10 page)

“Is that right? Well, I was probably never much good at telling the difference.”

“I don't go in for it any more myself,” Shuki said. “It isn't that the girls aren't interested in me—I'm so big now they don't even see me.”

Years back, after taking me to Jaffa and around the Tel Aviv sights, Shuki had entertained me one evening at a noisy café frequented by his journalist friends, where we'd wound up playing chess for several hours before moving on to the red-light district and my special sociological treat, a Rumanian prostitute on Yarkon Street. Now he led me into a barren colorless little place with some pinball machines in the back and nobody at any of the streetside tables except a couple of soldiers and their girls. At our table he said, “No, sit on this side, so I can hear you.”

Though he hadn't become quite the behemoth of his own self-caricature, he bore little resemblance to the dark, slim, mischievous hedonist who'd guided me to Yarkon Street eighteen years earlier—the hair that used to spring from his forehead in tenacious black tiers had thinned down to just a few gray wisps combed across his scalp, and because the face had considerably puffed out, the features seemed larger and less refined. But the biggest change was in the grin, a grin having nothing to do with amusement, though clearly he liked still to be amused and knew how to be amusing. Thinking about his brother's death—and his father's fatal stroke—I found myself equating that grin of his with the dressing over a wound.

“How's New York?” he asked.

“I'm not living in New York anymore. I'm married to an English woman, I've moved to London.”

“You in England? The Jersey boy with the dirty mouth who writes the books Jews love to hate—how do you survive there? How can you stand the silence? I was invited a couple of years ago to lecture at Oxford. I was there six months. At dinner, whatever I said, somebody next to me always replied, ‘Oh, really?'”

“You didn't like the small talk.”

“Truthfully? I didn't mind it. I needed a vacation from this place. Every Jewish dilemma there ever was is encapsulated in this country. In Israel it's enough to live—you don't have to do anything else and you go to bed exhausted. Have you ever noticed that Jews shout? Even one ear is more than you need. Here everything is black and white, everybody is shouting, and everybody is always right. Here the extremes are too great for a country so small. Oxford was a relief. ‘Tell me, Mr. Elchanan, how is your dog?' ‘I don't have a dog.' ‘Oh, really?' My problem began when I got back. My wife's family would meet at our house on Friday nights to argue about politics, and I couldn't get a word in. During six months at Oxford I had learned civility and the rules of civilized discourse, and this turned out to be absolutely crippling in an Israeli discussion.”

“Well,” I said, “that hasn't changed—you still hear the best anti-Semitic cracks in a Dizengoff Street café.”

“The only reason left to live here,” Shuki said. “Tell me about your English wife.”

I told him how I had met Maria in New York a little over a year before, when she and the husband from whom she was already hopelessly estranged had moved into the duplex upstairs from my apartment. “They were divorced four months back and we married and moved to England. Life is fine there. If it wasn't for Israel, everything in London would be wonderful.”

“Yes? Israel's also to blame for living conditions in London? I'm not surprised.”

“Last night, at a dinner party, when Maria mentioned where I was off to today, I wasn't the most popular boy at the table. You might have thought from the skiing holidays in Switzerland and the summer houses in Tuscany and the BMWs in the garage that all these nice, liberal, privileged Englishmen would have been a little leery of revolutionary socialism. But no, when it comes to Israel, it's the Sayings of Chairman Arafat right down the line.”

“Of course. In Paris as well. Israel is one of those places you know so much better before you wind up there.”

“They were all friends of Maria's, younger than I, in their thirties, television people, in publishing, a couple of journalists—all bright and successful. I was put right in the dock: how long can the Israelis keep importing cheap Jewish labor from North Africa to do their dirty work? It's well known in W11 that Oriental Jews are brought to Israel to be exploited as an industrial proletariat. Imperialist colonization, capitalist exploitation—all carried on from behind the facade of Israeli democracy and the fiction of Jewish national unity. And that was only the beginning.”

“And you championed our wickedness?”

“I didn't have to. Maria did.”

He looked alarmed. “You haven't married a Jew, Nathan.”

“No, my record's intact. She just finds the moral posturing of the fashionable left very very depressing. But mostly what she resented was that defending Israel should appear to everyone to fall automatically upon her new husband. Maria isn't someone who relishes a fight, so her vehemence surprised me. So did theirs. I asked her on the way home how strong this Israel-hatred is in England. She says that the press thinks it is, and thinks it should be, but, in her words, ‘it just bloody well isn't.'”

“I'm not sure she's right,” Shuki said. “In England I myself sensed a certain, shall we say,
distaste
for Jews—a willingness to not always, in every circumstance, think the very best of us. I was interviewed one morning on BBC radio. We'd been on the air two minutes when the interviewer said to me, ‘You Jews learned a lot from Auschwitz.' ‘What's that?' I asked. ‘How to be Nazis to the Arabs,' he said.”

“What did you say?”

“I couldn't speak. On the Continent I just grit my teeth—there the anti-Semitism is so pervasive and ingrained, it's positively Byzantine. But in civilized England, with people so well-spoken, so well-bred, even I was caught off guard. I'm not known around here as this country's leading P.R. man, but if I'd had a gun I would have shot him.”

*   *   *

At dinner the evening before, Maria had looked about ready to reach for a weapon herself. I'd never seen her so combative or incensed, not even during the divorce negotiations, when her husband seemed out to wreck our marriage before it began by forcing her to sign a legal document guaranteeing that Phoebe would be domiciled in London and not in New York. If Maria refused, he threatened to go to court and sue for custody, citing our adulterous liaison as grounds for claiming that she was an unfit mother. Assuming that I might be reluctant to be exiled from America until the turn of the century for the sake of his visitation rights, Maria immediately began to imagine herself returning to London unmarried, alone with Phoebe, and being plagued there by his bullying. “Nobody, but nobody, would ever want to get into a serious recrimination with him. If I'm on my own and he starts in, it'll be worse than just lonely and hard.” She was equally as frightened of my resentment if, after accepting his conditions and agreeing to move to England, I found that cutting myself off from familiar sources had begun to damage my work. She lived in dread of yet another husband suddenly becoming estranged after she had taken the irrevocable step of becoming pregnant.

It bewildered her still to recall her ex-husband's coldness to her after she'd had Phoebe. “At any point up to then,” she explained, “he could have said, with perfect justice, this isn't working for me. And
had
he said that, I would have said, absolutely, it just isn't, and however painful that is, that's it, and we will do other things with our lives. But why he couldn't perceive that clearly until after I had my baby—I mean I
had
accepted all the limitations of our relationship, otherwise I wouldn't have had a child. I
do
accept limitations. I expect them. Everybody tells me I'm submissive just because I happen to recognize the utter ridiculousness of railing against the kinds of disappointment that are simply inevitable. There's something every woman wants, and that's a man to blame. I refused to do it. To me the shortcomings of our marriage were no shock. I mean he had some dreadful qualities, but so many wonderful ones as well. No, what was a shock to me, after the baby came, was overt, relentless bad behavior—mistreatment, which is what happened as soon as my child was born and which I had never encountered before. I had encountered many, many things I didn't like, but they were things one can look at one way or another. But not misbehavior. There it is—that's what's happened. And if it were ever to happen to me again, I don't know what I'd do.”

I assured her it wouldn't and told her to sign the agreement. I wasn't going to let him get away with this kind of shit, and I certainly wasn't going to give her up and, with her, my desire, at forty-four, after three childless marriages, to have a house, if not exactly full of babies, with a child in it of my own, and a young wife whom, though she described herself to me more than once as “mentally very lazy” and “intellectually very reclusive” and “sexually rather shy,” I hadn't tired of in any way through our several hundred secret afternoons. I'd waited months before asking her to leave him, even though I was already thinking about it the first time we arranged to meet in my apartment. When she stubbornly resisted my proposal, I couldn't tell if it was because she took me to be another male bully simply wanting his way or whether she truly believed that I was dangerously self-deluded.

“I've fallen in love with you,” I told her. “You're too self-aware to ‘fall in love.' You know,” she said, looking at me across my bed, “if you were really so convinced of the comic absurdity that you're so good at showing, you wouldn't be taking any of this seriously. Why can't you think of this as strictly a business meeting?” When I said I wanted a child, she replied, “Do you really want to spend a lot of time dealing with the melodrama of family life?” When I said that I couldn't get enough of her, she replied, “No, no, I've read your books—you need a lionlike temptress in here to give your libido a good thrashing. You need a woman who goes around organizing herself into the right kind of highly stylized erotic postures whenever she sits down—and that is definitely not me. You want a new experience and I'll only be the same old thing. It won't be dramatic at all. It'll be a long dull English evening in front of the fire with a very sensible, responsible, respectable woman. In time you'll need all sorts of polymorphous perversity to keep up your interest, and I'm really quite content, as you see, with simple penetration. I know that it's not on anymore, but I'm not interested in sucking elbows and all those things, truly I'm not. Just because I'm free in the afternoons for certain immoral purposes, you may have got the wrong idea. I don't want six men at a time, outdated as that sounds. Sometimes in the past, when I was younger, I had fantasies about that sort of thing, but real men, they're rarely nice enough to want
one
at a time. I don't want to dress like a chambermaid and indulge anyone's apron fetishism. I don't have the desire to be tied up and whipped, and as for buggery, it's never given me much pleasure. The idea is exciting but I'm afraid it hurts, so we can't found a marriage on that. If the truth be known, I really just like to arrange flowers and do a little bit of writing here and there—and that's it.” “Then why do I have erotic thoughts about you?” “Really? What are they? Tell me.” “I had them all morning.” “What were we doing?” “You were assiduously performing fellatio.” “Oh, I thought it was going to be something more unusual. That I wouldn't really do.” “Maria, how can I be so hooked if you're as ordinary as you say?” “I think you like me because I don't have the usual feminine vices. I think a lot of those women who seem bright also seem very ferocious. What you like is that I seem bright without being ferocious, somebody who
is
really rather ordinary and is not determined to kick you in the teeth. But why carry it further—why marry me and have a child and settle down like everyone else to an impostor's life?” “Because I've decided to give up the artificial fiction of being myself for the genuine, satisfying falseness of being somebody else.
Marry me.
” “God, when you want something, you look at me so
scarily.
” “Because I'm conspiring with you
to escape.
I love you! I want to live with you! I want to have a child!” “Please,” she replied, “do try to confine your fantasies in my presence. I really thought you were more worldly than this.”

But I continued to confine nothing that I felt and in time she came to believe me, or collapsed in the face of my insistence—or both—and after that, the next thing I knew I was advising her to sign a document that would effectively sever me from my American life until tiny Phoebe was old enough to vote. Of course it wasn't what I had been anticipating and I did worry what effect moving abroad might have on my writing, but a courtroom custody battle would have been horrible for every reason, and I also believed that two or three years on, when everyone's divorce-delirium had abated, when Phoebe was older and beginning school and Maria's ex-husband was himself remarried and perhaps even a father again, it would be possible to renegotiate the custody stipulations. “And if it's not possible?” “It will be,” I told her; “we'll live two or three years in London, he'll calm down, and it will all work out.” “Will it? Can it? Does it ever? I dread thinking what happens when things start going wrong in England with your fantasy of family life.”

When Maria had begun defending Israel against our fellow dinner-party guests, who'd been arguing as though the alleged crimes of what they called “appalling Zionism” were somehow mine to answer for, I wondered if what was driving her on weren't perhaps fears she continued to have about things going wrong for us in England rather than the reputation of the Jewish state. It was difficult otherwise to understand why someone who considered head-on confrontations hell, who despised
any
situation that required raising her voice, should place herself at the center of an argument she'd never seemed at all concerned with before. The closest I'd seen her get to entangling herself in the problems of Jews, and Jewish problems with Gentiles, was in a far more subdued, secluded setting, the bedroom of my Manhattan apartment when she'd told me what it was like for her living in a “Jewish city.”