The Counterlife (2 page)

“Melissa?”

“Yes.”

“How old are you?”

“Who is this?”

He hung up just in time. Five, ten, fifteen more of those resounding strokes and the coronary would have settled everything. Gradually his breathing evened out and his heart felt more like a wheel, stuck and spinning vainly in the mud.

He knew he should telephone Carol so that she wouldn't worry, but instead he crossed the street to Central Park. He'd give Nathan an hour; if Nathan wasn't back by then, he'd forget about the operation and go home. He could not leave them fatherless.

Entering the underpass back of the museum, he saw at the other end a big kid, white, about seventeen, balancing a large portable radio on one shoulder and drifting lazily into the tunnel on roller skates. The volume was on full blast—Bob Dylan singing, “Lay, lady, lay … lay across my big brass bed…” Just what Henry needed to hear. As though he'd come inadvertently upon a dear old pal, the grinning kid raised a fist in the air, and gliding up beside Henry he shouted, “Bring back the sixties, man!” His voice reverberated dully in the shadowy tunnel, and amiably enough Henry replied, “I'm with you, friend,” but when the boy had skated by him he couldn't hold everything inside any longer and finally began to cry. Bring it
all
back, he thought, the sixties, the fifties, the forties—bring back those summers at the Jersey Shore, the fresh rolls perfuming the basement grocery in the Lorraine Hotel, the beach where they sold the bluefish off the morning boats … He stood in that tunnel behind the museum bringing back all by himself the most innocent memories out of the most innocent months of his most innocent years, memories of no real consequence rapturously recalled—and bonded to him like the organic silt stopping up the arteries to his heart. The bungalow two blocks up from the boardwalk with the faucet at the side to wash the sand off your feet. The guess-your-weight stall in the arcade at Asbury Park. His mother leaning over the windowsill as the rain starts to fall and pulling the clothes in off the line. Waiting at dusk for the bus home from the Saturday afternoon movie. Yes, the man to whom this was happening had been that boy waiting with his older brother for the Number 14 bus. He couldn't grasp it—he could as well have been trying to understand particle physics. But then he couldn't believe that the man to whom it was happening was
himself
and that, whatever this man must undergo, he must undergo too. Bring the past back, the future, bring me back the
present—
I am only thirty-nine!

He didn't return to Nathan's that afternoon to pretend that nothing of consequence had transpired between them since they were their parents' little boys. On the way over he had been thinking that he had to see him because Nathan was the only family he had left, when all along he had known that there was no family anymore, the family was finished, torn asunder—Nathan had seen to that by the ridicule he'd heaped upon them all in that book, and Henry had done the rest by the wild charges he'd leveled after their ailing father's death from a coronary in Florida. “You killed him, Nathan. Nobody will tell you—they're too frightened of you to say it. But you killed him with that book.” No, confessing to Nathan what had been going on in the office for three years with Wendy would only make the bastard
happy,
prove him
right—
I'll provide him with a sequel to
Carnovsky!
It had been idiotic enough ten years earlier telling him everything about Maria, about the money I gave her and the black underwear and the stuff of hers that I had in my safe, but bursting as I was I had to tell someone—and how could I possibly understand back then that exploiting and distorting family secrets was my brother's livelihood?
He
won't sympathize with what I'm going through—he won't even listen. “Don't want to know,” he'll tell me from behind the peephole, and won't even bother to open the door. “I'd only put it in a book and you wouldn't like that at all.”
And
there'll be a woman there—either some wife he's bored with on the way out or some literary groupie on the way in. Maybe both. I couldn't bear it.

Instead of going directly home, back in Jersey he drove to Wendy's apartment and made her pretend to be a black twelve-year-old girl named Melissa. But though she was willing—to be black, twelve, ten, to be anything he asked—it made no difference to the medication. He told her to strip and crawl to him on her knees across the floor, and when she obeyed he struck her. That didn't do much good either. His ridiculous cruelty, far from goading him into a state of arousal, reduced him to tears for the second time that day. Wendy, looking awfully helpless, stroked his hand while Henry sobbed, “This isn't me! I'm not this kind of man!” “Oh, darling,” she said, sitting at his feet in her garter belt and beginning now to cry herself, “you must have the operation, you must—otherwise you're going to go mad.”

He'd left the house just after nine in the morning and didn't get home until close to seven that evening. Fearing that he was alone somewhere dying—or already dead—at six Carol had called the police and asked them to look for the car; she'd told them that he'd gone for a walk in the Reservation hills that morning and they said that they would go up and check the trails. It alarmed Henry to hear that she had called the police—he had been depending upon Carol not to crack and give way like Wendy, and now his behavior had shattered her too.

He remained himself still too stunned and mortified to grasp the nature of the loss to
all
the interested parties.

When Carol asked why he hadn't phoned to say he wouldn't be home until dinner, he answered accusingly, “Because I'm impotent!” as though it was she and not the drug that had done it.

It was she. He was sure of it. It was having to stay with her and be responsible to the children that had done it. Had they divorced ten years earlier, had he left Carol and their three kids to begin a new life in Switzerland, he would never have fallen ill. Stress, the doctors told him, was a major factor in heart disease, and giving up Maria was the unendurable stress that had brought it on in him. There was no other explanation for such an illness in a man otherwise so young and fit. It was the consequence of failing to find the ruthlessness to take what he wanted instead of capitulating to what he should do. The disease was the reward for the dutiful father, husband, and son. You find yourself in the same place after such a long time, without the possibility of escape, along comes a woman like Maria, and instead of being strong and selfish, you are, of all things, good.

The cardiologist gave him a serious talking-to the next time Henry came for a checkup. He reminded him that since he'd been on the medication his EKG had shown a marked diminution of the abnormality that had first signaled his trouble. His blood pressure was safely under control, and unlike some of the cardiologist's patients, who couldn't brush their teeth without the effort causing severe angina, he was able to work all day standing on his feet without discomfort or shortness of breath. He was again reassured that if there was any deterioration in his condition, it would almost certainly occur gradually and show up first on the EKG or with a change of symptoms. Were that to happen, they would then reevaluate the surgical option. The cardiologist reminded him that he could continue safely along on this regimen for as long as fifteen or twenty years, by which time the bypass operation would more than likely be an outmoded technique; he predicted that by the 1990s they would almost certainly be correcting arterial blockage by other than surgical means. The beta-blocker might itself soon come to be replaced by a drug that did not affect the central nervous system and cause this unfortunate consequence—that sort of progress was inevitable. In the meantime, as he'd advised him already and could only repeat, Henry must simply forget his heart and go out and live. “You must see the medication in context,” the cardiologist said, lightly striking his desk.

And was that the last there was to say? Was he now expected to get up and go home? Dully Henry told him, “But I can't accept the sexual blow.” The cardiologist's wife was someone Carol knew and so of course he couldn't explain about Maria or Wendy or the two women in between, and what each of them had meant to him. Henry said, “This is the most difficult thing I've ever had to face.”

“You haven't had a very difficult life then, have you?”

He was stunned by the cruelty of the reply—to say such a thing to a man as vulnerable as himself! Now he hated the doctor too.

That night, from his study, he again phoned Nathan, his last remaining consolation, and this time found him home. He was barely able to prevent himself from dissolving in tears when he told his brother that he was seriously ill and asked if he could come to see him. It was impossible living alone any longer with his staggering loss.

*   *   *

Needless to say, these were not the three thousand words that Carol had been expecting when she'd phoned the evening before the funeral and, despite all that had driven the two brothers apart, asked if Zuckerman would deliver a eulogy. Nor was the writer ignorant of what was seemly, or indifferent to the conventions that ruled these occasions; nonetheless, once he'd started there was no stopping, and he was at his desk most of the night piecing Henry's story together from the little he knew.

When he got over to Jersey the next morning, he told Carol more or less the truth about what had happened. “I'm sorry if you were counting on me,” he said, “but everything I put down was wrong. It just didn't work.” He supposed that she would now suppose that if a professional writer finds himself stymied by what to say at his own brother's funeral, it's either hopelessly mixed emotions or an old-fashioned bad conscience that's doing it. Well, less harm in what Carol happened to think of him than in delivering to the assembled mourners this grossly inappropriate text.

All Carol said was what she usually said: she understood; she even kissed him, she who had never been his greatest fan. “It's all right. Please don't worry. We just didn't want to leave you out. The quarrels no longer matter. That's all over. What matters today is that you were brothers.”

Fine, fine. But what
about
the three thousand words? The trouble was that words that were morally inappropriate for a funeral were just the sort of words that engaged him. Henry wasn't dead twenty-four hours when the narrative began to burn a hole in Zuckerman's pocket. He was now going to have a very hard time getting through the day without seeing everything that happened as
more,
a continuation not of life but of his work or work-to-be. Already, by failing to use his head and discreetly cobbling together some childhood memories with a few conventionally consoling sentiments, he'd made it impossible for himself to take his place with everyone else, a decent man of mature years mourning a brother who'd died before his time—instead he was again the family outsider. Entering the synagogue with Carol and the kids, he thought, “This profession even fucks up grief.”

Though the synagogue was large, every seat was occupied, and clustered at the rear and along the side aisles were some twenty or thirty adolescents, local youngsters whose teeth Henry had been taking care of since they were children. The boys looked stoically at the floor and some of the girls were already crying. A few rows from the back, unobtrusive in a gray sweater and skirt, sat a slight, girlishly young blonde whom Zuckerman wouldn't even have noticed if he hadn't been looking for her—whom he wouldn't have been able to recognize if not for the photograph that Henry had brought along on his second visit. “The picture,” Henry warned, “doesn't do her justice.” Zuckerman was admiring nonetheless: “Very pretty. You make me envious.” A little immodest little-brother smirk of self-admiration could not be entirely suppressed, even as Henry replied, “No, no, she doesn't photograph well. You can't really see from this what it is she has.” “Oh yes I can,” said Nathan, who was and wasn't surprised by Wendy's plainness. Maria, if not as astonishingly beautiful in
her
picture as she'd first been described by Henry, had been attractive enough in a sternly Teutonic, symmetrical way. However,
this
bland little twat—why, Carol with her curly black hair and long dark lashes looked erotically more promising. It was, of course, with Wendy's picture still in his hand that Zuckerman should have laid into Henry with all he had—that might even have been
why
Henry had brought the picture, to give him the opening, to hear Nathan tell him, “Idiot! Ass! Absolutely not! If you wouldn't leave Carol to run off with Maria, a woman whom you actually
loved,
you are not going into the hospital for dangerous surgery just because some broad at the office blows you every night before you go home for dinner! I have heard your case for that operation and up till now haven't said a word—but my verdict, which is law, is
no
!”

But inasmuch as Henry wasn't dead then but alive—alive and outraged that a man with his moral credentials should be thwarted in this single, small, harmless transgression—inasmuch as he had already accepted the compromise of Wendy when what he had dreamed of and denied himself was to be remade in Europe with a European wife, to become in Basel an unfettered, robust, fully grown-up American expatriate dentist, Zuckerman had found his thoughts moving more along these lines: “This is his rebellion against the deal he's made, the outlet for what's survived of brutish passion. He surely hasn't come to me to be told that life obstructs and life denies and there's nothing to do but accept it. He's here to argue it out in my presence because my strong point isn't
supposed
to be a talent for self-denial—I, in their lore, am the reckless, freewheeling impulsive, to me they've assigned the role of family id, and he is the exemplary brother. No, a certified irresponsible spirit can't now come on in fatherly tones, gently telling him, ‘You don't need what you want, my boy—relinquish your Wendy and you'll suffer less.' No, Wendy is his freedom and his manhood, even if she happens to look to me a little like boredom incarnate. She's a nice kid with an oral hang-up who he's pretty sure will never phone the house—so why
shouldn't
he have her? The more I look at this picture, the more I understand his point. How much is the poor guy asking for?”