The Counterlife (36 page)

Long ago, before their parents had sold the Newark house and moved to Florida, back before
Carnovsky,
when everything had been different for everyone, Henry, with Carol, had driven his mother and father down to Princeton to hear Nathan deliver a public lecture. While dialing home from the restaurant, Henry remembered that after the lecture, during the question period, Nathan had been asked by a student if he wrote “in quest of immortality.” He could hear Nathan laughing and giving the answer—it was as close to his dead brother as he'd come all day. “If you're from New Jersey,” Nathan had said, “and you write thirty books, and you win the Nobel Prize, and you live to be white-haired and ninety-five, it's highly unlikely but not impossible that after your death they'll decide to name a rest stop for you on the Jersey Turnpike. And so, long after you're gone, you may indeed be remembered, but mostly by small children, in the backs of cars, when they lean forward and tell their parents, ‘Stop, please, stop at Zuckerman—I have to make a pee.' For a New Jersey novelist that's as much immortality as it's realistic to hope for.”

Ruthie answered the phone, the very child whom Nathan had pictured playing her violin over Henry's coffin, whom he had placed in tears beside her father's grave, bravely proclaiming, “He was the best, the best…”

He had never loved his middle child more than when he heard her ask, “Are you okay? Mom was worried that one of us should have gone with you. So was I. Where
are
you?”

She
was the best, the best daughter ever. He had only to hear that kindly, thoughtful child's grown-up voice to know that he had done the only thing there was to do. My brother was a Zulu, or whoever the people are who wear bones in their noses; he was our Zulu, and ours were the heads he shrunk and stuck up on the post for everyone to gape at. The man was a cannibal.

“I wish you'd called—” Carol began, and he felt like someone who survives a harrowing ordeal and only afterwards begins to weaken and appreciate how precarious it all had been. He felt as though he'd survived a murder attempt by himself disarming the murderer. Then, beneath what he recognized as the thinking of someone utterly exhausted, he saw with clarity all the ugliness that lay behind what Nathan had written:
he was out to murder my whole family the way he'd murdered our parents, murder us with contempt for what we are. How he must have loathed my success, loathed our happiness and the way we live. How he must have loathed the way
he
lived to want to see us squirm like that.

Only minutes later, within sight of the headlights of the cars streaking homeward along the turnpike, Henry stood at the dark edge of the parking area down from the restaurant and, pushing open the metal flap at the top of a tall brown trash can, let the papers pour out into the garbage. He dropped the envelope in too, once it was empty, then pushed Nathan's raincoat in on top of that. He was a Zulu, he thought, a pure cannibal, murdering people, eating people, without ever quite having to pay the price. Then something putrid was stinging his nostrils and it was Henry who was leaning over and violently beginning to retch, Henry vomiting as though
he
had broken the primal taboo and eaten human flesh—Henry, like a cannibal who out of respect for his victim, to gain whatever history and power is there, eats the brain and learns that raw it tastes like poison. This was no squeezing out of those tears of grief he'd hoped to shed the day before, nor was it the forgiveness that he had expected to overtake him at the funeral home, nor was it like that surge of hatred when he'd first seen his name recklessly typed across the pages of “Basel”—this was a realm of emotion unlike any he had known or would wish to know again, this quaking before the savagery of what he'd finally done and had wanted to do most of his life, to his brother's lawless, mocking brain.

*   *   *

How did you find out that he was dead?

The doctor called around noon. And told me just like that. “It didn't work, and I don't know what to say. There was every chance that it would, and it just didn't.” He was strong and relatively young, and the doctor didn't even know why it failed. It was just the wrong decision to take. And it wasn't even necessary. The doctor just called and said, “I don't know what to tell you, I don't know what to say…”

Were you tempted to go to the funeral?

No. No, there was no point. It was over. I didn't want to go to the funeral. It would have been a false situation.

Do you feel responsible for his death?

I feel responsible in that if he hadn't met me it wouldn't have happened. He met me and suddenly he felt this horrible urge to quit his life and be another person. But he was so driven that perhaps if it hadn't been me it would have been somebody else. I tried to tell him not to do it, I thought it was my duty to warn him beforehand, but I also didn't think he could live as he was—he was too unhappy. He couldn't bear to live as he was. And for me to have refused him would really have meant the continuation of that. I was probably only the catalyst but of course I was deeply involved. Of course I feel responsible. If only I had fought it! I knew it was a major operation, and I knew there was a risk, but you hear of people having it all the time, seventy-year-old men have it and go bouncing about. He was so healthy, I never imagined that this could happen. But nonetheless I was deeply involved—you feel guilty if you haven't given somebody a new pair of shoelaces and they die. You always feel when somebody dies that you didn't do something that you should have done. In this case, I should have stopped him from dying.

Shouldn't you just have called it quits and stopped seeing him?

I suppose I should have, yes, when I saw the way that it was going. Every instinct
told
me to stop. I'm a very ordinary woman in my way; I suppose it was all much too intense for me. It certainly was a drama of the sort I'm not accustomed to. I had never been through all those hoops before. Even if he had lived, I don't know if I could have kept up with the intensity. He very quickly gets bored—got bored. I'm convinced that if he'd had the operation and come back and was free to move as he wanted in the world, he would have been bored with me in three or four years and moved on to somebody else. I would have left my husband, taken our child, and perhaps have had a couple of years of what one calls happiness, and then been worse off than I was before and have had to go back and live with my family in England, alone.

But what you had with him wasn't boring.

Oh, no—we were both of us too far in over our heads for that, but it could have
become
boring to him. After a certain age people do have a pattern that's theirs, and there's little that can be done about it. It needn't have been boring, but it very well might have been.

And what did you do when they were having the funeral?

I took the child for a walk in the park. I didn't want to be alone. There was nobody I could talk to. Thank goodness it was in the morning and my beloved husband wasn't coming back until the evening and I had time to pull myself together. I had no one to share it with, but I couldn't have shared it with anyone if I had gone there. It would have been his family, his friends, his ex-girlfriends, a Jewish funeral, which I don't think he really wanted. Which I know he didn't want.

It wasn't.

I was afraid it was going to be, and I knew that was what he didn't want. Of course nobody told me about the funeral arrangements. He'd confided about me only to the surgeon.

What happened was that his editor read a eulogy. That was it.

Well, that's what he would have wanted. A flattering eulogy, I hope.

Flattering enough. And then in the evening, you went down there to the apartment.

Yes.

Why?

My husband was with the ambassador, at a meeting. I didn't know he was going to be gone. Not that I wanted him with me. It's always a dreadful business trying to keep one's expression in order. I sat upstairs by myself. I didn't know what to do with myself. I didn't go down there looking for what he'd written—I went to see the apartment. As I couldn't go to the hospital, couldn't go to the funeral, it was the nearest I could come to saying goodbye. I went down to see the apartment. When I went into the study there was the box on his desk—it had “Draft #2” written on it. It was what he'd been working on during the time he was with me. His last thoughts, it turned out. I always said, “Don't write about me,” but I knew he always used everybody else and I didn't see why he shouldn't use me. I wanted to see—well, I suppose I thought there might be a message in it, in some way.

You went downstairs “to say goodbye.” What does that mean?

I just wanted to sit alone in the apartment. Nobody knew I had a key. I just wanted to sit there for a while.

And what was it like?

It was dark.

Did it frighten you?

Yes and no. Secretly I've always believed in ghosts. And been afraid of them. Yes, I was frightened. But I sat there, and I thought, “If he's here … then he'll come.” I started to laugh. I had a kind of conversation with him—one-sided. “Of course you wouldn't, how could you come back when you have no belief in these totally idiotic things?” I started to wander about like Garbo in
Queen Christina,
touching all the furniture. Then I saw the cardboard box on his desk, with “Draft #2” on it and the date he'd gone into the hospital. I used to say to him when I went into his study, “Be careful what you leave out, because anything that's on that desk, upside down or anywhere, I will read. If it's there. I don't go snooping, but I'll read anything that's left out. I can't help it.” We joked about it. He'd say, “Mankind divides into two groups, those who will read other people's correspondence and those who won't, and you and I, Maria, fall on the wrong side of the line. We are people who open medicine cabinets to look at other people's prescription drugs.” There was the box, and I was drawn to it, as they say, like a magnet. I thought, “There may be some message in it.”

Was there?

There sure was. Something called “Christendom.” A section, a chapter, a novella—I couldn't be certain. And I thought, “That's a little threatening. Is ‘Christendom' the enemy? Is it me?” And I picked it up and I started to read it. And perhaps a lot of the love I had felt for him went at that moment. Well, not a lot of it, not when I read it again, but some of it, the first time round. The second time what touched me more than anything was his longing just to shed it all and have another life, his longing to be a father and a husband, things the poor man never was. I suppose he realized that he had missed that. However much one hates the sentimentality, it's a big thing to have missed in your life, not to have had a child. And he was so touching about Phoebe. Whereas everybody else in “Christendom” he changes, Phoebe alone he perceives as she is, as just a child, a little girl.

But what about the first time round?

I saw the other side of him, the irrational, the violent side of him. I don't mean physically, I mean how he would turn everything that wasn't familiar to him into the outsider—that I had been used in that way too, and that my family had been maligned most terribly. Of course, like all English families
they
thought of the outsider as the outsider, but it doesn't mean that they have those feelings that he had given them, of superiority and loathing—of apartheid, so to speak. My sister, perhaps not the best character in the world, is nonetheless only a poor, pathetic girl who never found her place anywhere, who's never been able to do anything, but to her he ascribed these terrible feelings about Jews and a disgusting sense of superiority that, if you knew Sarah, was ludicrous. You see, he had met my sister Sarah once, when she came to visit—I'd introduced them, as though he were just a neighbor. But what he had taken from my sister was so far from what she was that I thought there was something deeply twisted in him that he couldn't help. Because he had been brought up as he was, ringed round by all that Jewish paranoia, there was something in him that twisted everything. It seemed to me that
he
was my sister—
he
was the one who thought of “the other” as the other in that derogatory sense. He'd put all his feelings, actually, onto her—his Jewish feelings about Christian women turned into a Christian woman's feelings about a Jewish man. I thought that the great verbal violence, that “hymn of hate” he ascribed to Sarah, was in
him.

But what about love for you in “Christendom”?

Oh, the subject is his love for, in quotations, me. But you can see at the end of it, when they have this quarrel, what the chances are for that love. Even though you know he goes back to her, and they pick up their lives, their lives are going to be tremendously difficult. You know that absolutely. Because he had tremendous ambivalence about a Christian woman. I was a Christian woman.

But you're talking about what “Christendom” is like, not about what Nathan was like. This never came up between you, did it?

It never came up because we never lived together. We had a romantic affair. Never before had I been so romantically involved with anyone. Nothing came up between us, except that operation. We met as if in a time capsule, imprisoned by my fear of discovery, like something one reads about in a nineteenth-century novel. There's a sense in which it's completely fictitious. I could believe I made the whole thing up. And that's not just because it's now gone—it was the same when it was in the very active present. I don't know what our life would have been like had we been able to live together. I saw no violent feelings—because of the drug there wasn't even a chance for good old-fashioned genital aggression. I saw only tenderness. The drug had done that as well—overtenderized him. That was what he secretly couldn't stand. It was the aggression he wanted to recover too.