The Counterlife (23 page)

“I wondered about that myself. But no, there's no woman.”

“Doesn't this Lippman have a wife he's screwing?”

“Lippman's a giant to Henry—I don't think that's in the cards. Sex is a ‘superficiality,' and he's burned all superficiality away. He's discovered the aggressive spirit in himself, assisted by Lippman. He's seen power. He's discovered dynamism. He's discovered nobler considerations, purer intentions. I'm afraid it's Henry who's taken over as the headstrong, unconventional son. He needs a bigger stage for his soul.”

“And this jerkwater settlement, this absolute nowhere, he considers
bigger?
It's the desert—it's the
wilds.
”

“But the biblical wilds.”

“You're telling me it's God then?”

“It's bizarre to me, too. Where that came from, I have no idea.”

“Oh, I know where. Living in that little ghetto when you were kids, from your crazy father—he's gone right back to the roots of that madness. It's that craziness gone in another direction.”

“You never found him crazy before.”

“I always thought he was crazy. If you want the truth, I thought you were all a little nuts. You got off best. You never bothered with it in life—you poured that stuff into books and made yourself a fortune. You turned the madness to profit, but it's still all part of the family insanity on the subject of Jews. Henry's just a late-blooming Zuckerman nut.”

“Explain it any way you like, but he doesn't look insane or sound insane, nor has he completely lost touch with his life. He's looking forward tremendously to seeing the kids at Passover.”

“Only I don't want my kids involved in all this. I never did. If I had I would have married a rabbi. I don't want it, it doesn't interest me, and I didn't think it interested him.”

“I think Henry
assumes
the kids are coming at Passover.”

“Is he inviting me, or just the kids?”

“I thought he was inviting the children. The way I understood it, the visit's already set.”

“I'm not letting them go by themselves. If he was crazy enough to do what he's done to himself, he's crazy enough to keep them there and try to turn Leslie into a little thing with squiggle curls and a dead-white face, a little monstrous religious creature. I'm certainly not sending my girls, not so he can throw them in a bath and shave their heads and marry them to the butcher.”

“I think it may have communicated the wrong idea, my being unable to use the phone there on Saturday. It's not the Orthodoxy that's inspired him, it's the place—Judea. It seems to give him a more serious sense of himself having the roots of his religion all around him.”

“What roots? He left those roots two thousand years ago. As far as I know he's been in New Jersey for two thousand years. It's all nonsense.”

“Well, do what you like, of course. But if the kids could get over for Passover, it might open up communication between you two. Right now he's pouring all his responsibility into the Jewish cause, but that may change when he sees them again. So far he's fenced us all off with this Jewish idealism, but when they show up we might begin to find out if this really is a revolutionary change or just some upheaval he's passing through. The last great outburst of youth. Maybe the last great outburst of middle age. It comes to more or less the same thing: the desire to deepen his life. The desire looks genuine enough, but the means, I admit, seem awfully vicarious. Right now it's a little as though he's out to take vengeance on everything that he wants to believe was once holding him back. He's still very much caught up in the solidarity of it. But once the euphoria starts dwindling away, seeing the children could even lead to a reconciliation with you. If you want that, Carol.”

“My kids would loathe it there. They've been brought up by me, by
him,
not to want to have anything to do with religion of any kind. If he wants to go over there and wail and moan and hit his head on the floor, let him, but the kids are staying here, and if he wants to see them, he'll have to see them right here.”

“But if his determination does start to give way, would you take him back?”

“If he were to come to his senses? Of course I would take him back. The kids are holding up, but this isn't great fun for them, either. They're upset. They miss him. I wouldn't say they were confused, because they're extremely intelligent. They know precisely what's going on.”

“Yes? What is that?”

“They think he's having a nervous breakdown. They're only scared that I will.”

“Will you?”

“If he kidnaps my children, I will. If this madness goes on very much longer, yes, I may well have one.”

“My guess is that this could all be so much fallout from that ghastly operation.”

“Mine too, of course. I think it's clutching at God, or straws, or whatever, out of dread of dying. Some kind of magic charm, some form of placation to make sure it never happens again. Penance. Oh, it's too awful. It makes no sense at all. Who could have dreamed of this happening?”

“May I suggest then that if at Passover you
could
bring yourself—”

“When
is
Passover? I don't even know when Passover
is,
Nathan. We don't
do
any of that. We never did, not even when I was at home with my parents. Even my father, who owned a shoe store, was free of all that. He didn't care about Passover, he cared about golf, which now appears to put him three thousand rungs up the evolutionary scale from his stupid son-in-law. Religion! A lot of fanaticism and superstition and wars and death! Stupid, medieval nonsense! If they tore down all the churches and all the synagogues to make way for more golf courses, the world would be a better place!”

“I'm only telling you that if you do want him back some time in the future, I wouldn't cross him on the Passover business.”

“But I
don't
want him back if he's crazy like this. I do not want to live my life with a crazy Jew. That was okay for your mother but it isn't for me.”

“What you could say is, ‘Look, you can be a Jew in Essex County, too.'”

“Not with me he can't.”

“But you did after all marry a Jew. So did he.”

“No. I married a very handsome, tall, athletic, very sweet, very sincere, very successful, responsible dentist. I didn't marry a Jew.”

“I didn't know you had these feelings.”

“I doubt that you've known anything about me. I was just Henry's dull little wife. Sure I was perfunctorily Jewish—who ever even thought about it? That's the only decent way to be any of those things. But Henry has more than scratched the surface with what he's gone out and done. I simply will not be connected with all that narrow-minded, bigoted, superstitious, and totally unnecessary crap. I certainly don't want my children connected with it.”

“So to come home Henry has to be just as un-Jewish as you.”

“That's right. Without his little curls and his little beanie. Is that why I studied French literature at college, so he could go around here in a beanie? Where does he want to put me now, up in the gallery with the rest of the women? I cannot
stand
that stuff. And the more seriously people take it, the more unattractive it all is. Narrow and constricting and revolting.
And
smug. I will not be trapped into that.”

“Be that as it may, if you want to reunite the family, one approach would be to say to him, ‘Come back and continue your Hebrew studies here, continue learning Hebrew, studying Torah—'”

“He
studies
Torah?”

“At night. Part of becoming an authentic Jew. Authentic's his word—in Israel he can be an authentic Jew and everything about him makes sense. In America being a Jew made him feel artificial.”

“Yes? Well, artificial I thought he was just fine. So did all his girlfriends. Look, there are millions of Jews living in New York—are they artificial? That is totally beyond me. I want to live as a human being. The last thing I want to be strapped into is being an authentic Jew. If that's what he wants, then he and I have nothing more to say to each other.”

“So simply because your husband wants to be Jewish, you're going to allow the family to dissolve.”

“Christ, don't
you
become pious about ‘the family.'
Or
about Being Jewish. No—because my husband, who is an American, who I thought of as my generation, of my era,
free
of all that weight, has taken a giant step back in time,
that's
why I am dissolving the family. As for my kids, their lives are here, their friends are here, their schools are here, their future universities are here. They don't have the pioneer spirit that Henry has, they didn't have the father that Henry had, and they are not going to the biblical homeland for Passover, let alone to a synagogue here. There will be no synagogues in this family! There will be no kosher kitchen in this house! I could not possibly live that life. Fuck him, let him stay there if it's authentic Judaism he wants, let him stay there and find another authentic Jew to live with and the two of them can set up a house with a tabernacle where they can celebrate all their little feasts. But here it is absolutely out of the question—nobody is going around this house blowing the trumpet of Jewish redemption!”

*   *   *

We were halfway to London by the time I was done, and the young fellow beside me was still at his prayer book. Torn wrappers from three or four candy bars were scattered on the seat between us, and perspiration was coursing heavily from beneath his broad-brimmed hat. As there was no turbulence, as the plane was well ventilated and a comfortable temperature, I wondered, like my mother—like
his
mother—if he might not have made himself sick eating all those sweets. Beneath the hat and beard, I thought I could spot a resemblance to somebody I knew; perhaps it was to somebody I'd grown up with in Jersey. But then I'd thought that several times during the last few days about any number of people I'd seen: in the café, watching the passersby on Dizengoff Street, and again outside the hotel while waiting for a taxi, the archetypal Jewish cast of an Israeli face would remind me of somebody back in America who could have been a close relative if not the very same Jew in a new incarnation.

Before putting my notebook back into my briefcase, I reread all I'd written to Henry. Why don't you leave the poor guy alone, I wondered. Another thousand words is just what he needs from you—they'll use it at Agor for target practice. Hadn't I written this for myself anyway, for my own elucidation, trying to make interesting what he could not? I felt, looking back over the last forty-eight hours, that alone with Henry I'd been in the presence of someone shallowly dreaming a very deep dream. I'd tried repeatedly while I was with him to invest this escape he'd made from his life's narrow boundaries with some heightened meaning, but in the end he seemed to me, despite his determination to be something new, just as naïve and uninteresting as he'd always been. Even there, in that Jewish hothouse, he somehow managed to remain perfectly ordinary, while what I'd been hoping—perhaps why I'd even made the trip—was to find that, freed for the first time in his life from the protection of family responsibility, he'd become something less explicable and more original than—than Henry. But that was like expecting the woman next door, whom you suspect of cheating on her husband, to reveal herself to you as Emma Bovary, and, what's more, in Flaubert's French. People don't turn themselves over to writers as full-blown literary characters—generally they give you very little to go on and, after the impact of the initial impression, are barely any help at all. Most people (beginning with the novelist—himself, his family, just about everyone he knows) are absolutely unoriginal, and his job is to make them appear otherwise. It's not easy. If Henry was ever going to turn out to be interesting, I was going to have to do it.

There was another letter for me to write while the events of the last few days were fresh in my mind, and that was an answer to a letter from Shuki that had been hand-delivered to the hotel and was waiting for me at the desk when I'd checked out early that morning. I'd read it first in the taxi to the airport, and now, with the quiet and time to concentrate, I took it out of my briefcase to read again, remembering as I did those few Jews who had crossed my path in my seventy-two hours, how each had presented himself to me—and presented me to himself—and how each had presented the country. I hadn't seen anything really of what Israel was, but I had at least begun to get an idea of what it could be made
into
in the minds of a small number of its residents. I had come to this place more or less cold, to see what my brother was doing there, and what Shuki wanted me to understand was that I was leaving it cold as well—the sparks I'd seen flying at Agor might not mean all I thought. And it was more important than I may yet have realized for me not to be misled. Shuki was reminding me at forty-five—albeit as respectfully and gently as he could—of what I'd been told as a writer (first by my father, as a matter of fact) ever since I began publishing stories at twenty-three: the Jews aren't there for my amusement or for the entertainment of my readers, let alone for their own. I was being reminded to see through to the gravity of the situation before I let my comedy roam and made Jews conspicuous in the wrong way. I was being reminded that every word I write about Jews is potentially a weapon against us, a bomb in the arsenal of our enemies, and that, largely thanks to me, in fact, everyone is now prepared to listen to all kinds of zany, burlesque views of Jews that don't begin to reflect the reality by which we are threatened.