The Counterlife (47 page)

And how do I know what's to happen to Phoebe? That terrifies me. You weren't beyond killing your brother, you weren't beyond killing yourself, or grandiosely amusing yourself on the plane up from Israel by staging a lunatic hijack attempt—what if you decide everything will be more interesting if my daughter steps off the towpath into the river? When I think about literary surgery being performed experimentally upon those I love, I understand what drives the antivivisectionists nuts. You had no right to make Sarah, in that crypt, say words she would never have spoken if it weren't for your Jewish hang-up. Not only was it unnecessary, it was cruelly provocative. Since I had already confided to you that Jews seem to me too quick finding fault with Gentiles, condemning things as horrendously anti-Semitic, or even mildly so, when they aren't, you made sure to provide me with a sister who is anti-Semitic in spades. And then that creature at the restaurant, planted there by
you,
and just when everything was so perfect, the loveliest evening I'd had in years. Why do these things always happen when you're all set up for a wonderful time? Why isn't it okay for us to be happy? Can't you imagine
that?
Try for a change confining your fantasies to satisfaction and pleasure. That shouldn't be so hard—most people do it as a matter of course. You are forty-five years old and something of a success—it's high time you imagined life
working out.
Why this preoccupation with irresolvable conflict? Don't you want a new mental life? I was once foolish enough to think that's what this was all about and why you wanted me, not to reenact the dead past but to strike out happily on a new course, to rise in exuberant rebellion against
your
author and remake your life. I had the temerity to think that I was having a tremendous effect. Why did you have to ruin everything with this anti-Semitic outburst against which you now must rage like a zealot from Agor? New York you made into a horror by perversely playing
Carnovsky
out in reverse with that ghastly experiment in impotence. I for one would rather have taken the part of Marvelous Maria the porn-queen fellator in some interminable priapic romp—even all the choking would have been preferable to the terrible sadness of seeing you crushed in that way. And now, in London, the Jews. When everything was going so beautifully, the Jews. Can't you ever forget your Jews? How can that turn out to be—particularly in someone who's been around as much as you—your irreducible core? It
is
boring, boring and regressive and crazy to continue on about your connection to a group into which you simply happened to have been born, and a very long time ago at that. Disgusting as you've discovered my Englishness to be, I'm really
not
wedded to it, or to any label, in the way that most of you Jews do persist in being Jewish. Hasn't the man who has led your life been a loyal child long enough?

You know what it's like being with a Jew when the subject of Jews arises? It's like when you're with people who are on the verge of insanity. Half the time you're with them they're absolutely fine, and some of the time they're completely barking. But there are curious moments when they're hovering, you can see them tipping over the edge. Actually what they are saying is no less reasonable than what they were saying five minutes before, but you know that they have just stepped over that little magic line.

What I'm saying is that all the way back on page 73 I saw where you were preparing to take us, and should have got myself up and out before your plane even landed, let along rushing to the airport to catch you sky-high still on the Holy Land. It works this way (your enveloping mind, I mean) : inasmuch as it has been established by my sister that my mother is determined to make an issue of having our child symbolically sprinkled with the purifying waters of the church, you are now determined to counterattack by demanding that the child, if a boy, shall make his covenant with Yahweh through the ritual sacrifice of his foreskin. Oh, I do see through to your contrary core! We would have argued again—
we who never argue.
I would have said, “I think it's a barbaric mutilation. I think it's physically harmless in a million cases out of a million and one, so that I can't produce any medical arguments against it, except the general one that one would rather not intervene in anyone's body unless it's necessary. But I nonetheless think it's terrible, circumcising boys
or
girls. I just think it's wrong.” And you would have said, “But I would find it very hard having a son who isn't circumcised,” or something even more subtly menacing. And so it would go. And who would win? Guess. It
is
a barbaric mutilation, but, being reasonable and completely your creature, I would of course have given in. I'd say, “I think a child should be like a father in that way. I mean, if the father is
not
circumcised, then I think the child should be like
his
father, because I think it would puzzle a child to be different from his father and would cause all sorts of problems for him.” I'd say—be made to say is nearer the truth—“I think it's better not to interfere with these customs when they cause so much feeling. If you are going to be incensed about anybody interfering with this link between you and your son, I don't care if it looks to me as though an intellectual agnostic is being irrationally Jewish, I now understand the feeling and don't propose to stand in its way. If it's this that establishes for you the truth of your paternity—that regains for you the truth of your
own
paternity—so be it.” And
you
would have said, “And what about
your
paternity—what about your mother, Maria?” and then we would
never
have got to sleep, not for years, because the issue would have been joined and you would have been having the time of your life what with our intercontinental marriage having become so much more
INTERESTING
.

No, I won't do it. I will not be locked into your head in this way. I will not participate in this primitive drama, not even for the sake of your fiction. Oh, darling, the hell with your fiction. I remember how back in New York, when I let you read one of my stories, you immediately ran out and bought me that thick leather-bound notebook. “I've got something for you to write in,” you told me. “Thank you,” I replied, “but do you think I have that much to say?” You didn't seem to realize that writing for me isn't everything about my existence wrestling to be born but just some stories about the mists and the Gloucestershire meadows. And I didn't realize that even a woman as passive as I has to know when to run for her life. Well, I would be just too stupid if I didn't know by now. Admittedly, it's no return to Paradise, but since he and I do have a great deal in common, have a deep bond of class and generation and nationality and background, when we fight like cats and dogs it really has little to do with anything, and afterwards everything goes on just as before, which is how I like it. It's too intense, all this talk that
means
something. You and I argue, and twentieth-century history comes looming up, and at its most infernal. I feel pressed on every side, and it takes the stuffing out of me—but for you, it's your métier, really. All our short-lived serenity and harmony, all our hope and happiness, was a bore to you, admit it. So was the idea of altering your ways in middle age by becoming a calmly detached observer, a bit more of a percipient spy on the agony of others, rather than, as of old, being tossed and torn apart yourself.

You do want to be opposed again, don't you? You may have had your fill of fighting Jews and fighting fathers and fighting literary inquisitors—the harder you fight that sort of local opposition, the more your inner conflict grows. But fighting the goyim it's
clear,
there's no uncertainty or doubt—a good, righteous, guilt-free punch-up! To be resisted, to be caught, to find yourself in the midst of a battle puts a spring in your heel. You're just dying, after all my mildness, for a collision, a clash—anything as long as there's enough antagonism to get the story smoking and everything exploding in the wrathful philippics you adore. To be a Jew at Grossinger's is obviously a bit of a bore—but in England being Jewish turns out to be difficult and just what you consider fun. People tell you,
There are restrictions,
and you're in your element again. You
revel
in restrictions. But the fact is that as far as the English are concerned, being Jewish is something you very occasionally apologize for and that's it. It is hardly my perspective, it strikes me as coarse and insipid, but it still is nothing like the horror you have imagined. But a life without horrible difficulties (which by the way a number of Jews do manage to enjoy here—just ask Disraeli or Lord Weidenfeld) is inimical to the writer you are. You actually
like
to take things hard. You can't weave your stories otherwise.

Well, not me, I like it amiable, the amiable drift of it, the mists, the meadows, and not to reproach each other for things outside our control, and not every last thing invested with urgent meaning. I don't usually give in to strange temptation and now I remember why. When I told you about that scene at Holly Tree Cottage when my mother said, about my Jewish friend, “They smell so funny, don't they?” I saw exactly what you were thinking—not “How awful for someone to say such a thing!” but “Why does she write about those stupid meadows when she can sink her teeth into
that?
Now
there's
a subject!” Perfectly true, but not a subject for me. The last thing I would ever want are the consequences of writing about
that.
For one thing, if I did, I wouldn't really be telling the English anything they didn't know but simply exposing my mother and me to incalculable distress in order to come up with something “strong.” Well, better to keep the peace by writing something weak. I don't entirely share your superstitions about art and its strength. I take my stand for something far less important than axing everything open—it's called tranquillity.

But tranquillity is disquieting to you, Nathan, in writing particularly—it's bad art to you, far too comfortable for the reader and certainly for yourself. The last thing you want is to make readers happy, with everything cozy and strifeless, and desire simply fulfilled. The pastoral is not your genre, and Zuckerman Domesticus now seems to you just that, too easy a solution, an idyll of the kind you hate, a fantasy of innocence in the perfect house in the perfect landscape on the banks of the perfect stretch of river. So long as you were winning me, getting me away from him, and we were struggling with the custody issue, so long as there was that wrestling for rights and possessions, you were engrossed, but now it begins to look to me that you're afraid of peace, afraid of Maria and Nathan alone and quiet with their happy family in a settled life. To you, in that, there's a suggestion of Zuckerman unburdened, too on top of it, that's not earned—or worse, insufficiently
INTERESTING
. To you to live as an innocent is to live as a laughable monster. Your chosen fate, as you see it, is to be innocent of innocence at all costs, certainly not to let me, with my pastoral origins, cunningly transform you into a pastoralized Jew. I think you are embarrassed to find that even you were tempted to have a dream of simplicity as foolish and naïve as anyone's. Scandalous. How can that be? Nothing, but nothing, is simple for Zuckerman. You constitutionally distrust anything that appears to you to be effortlessly gained. As if it were effortless to achieve what we had.

Yet when I'm gone don't think I didn't appreciate you. Shall I tell you what I'm going to miss, despite my shyness and well-known lack of sexual assertiveness? It's feeling your hips between my thighs. It's not very erotic by today's standards, and probably you don't even know what I'm talking about. “My hips between your thighs?” you ask, dumbly rubbing your whiskers. Yes, position A. You'd hardly ever done anything so ordinary in your life before I came along, but for me that was just lovely and I won't forget for a long time what it was like. I will also remember an afternoon down in your apartment before my enemy came home for dinner; there was an old song on the radio, you said it was a song you used to dance to in high school with your little girlfriend Linda Mandel, and so for the first and only time, there in your study, we danced the fox-trot like adolescent kids out of the forties, danced the fox-trot glued loin to loin. When I look back on all this fifteen years from now, you know what I'll think? I'll think, “Lucky old me.” I'll think what we all think fifteen years later: “Wasn't that nice.” But at twenty-eight this is no life, especially if you are going to be Maupassant and milk the irony for all its worth. You want to play reality-shift? Get yourself another girl. I'm leaving. When I see you now in the lift or down in the foyer collecting your mail, I will pretend, though it may only be the two of us who are there, that we have never been anything other than neighbors, and if we meet in public, at a party or a restaurant, and I am with my husband and our friends, I will blush, I do blush, not as much as I used to, but I always blush at a very revealing moment, I blush at the most extraordinary things, though perhaps I can get out of it by coming boldly up to you and saying, “I'd just like to tell you how profoundly I identify with the women characters in your argumentative books,” and nobody will guess, despite my blushing, that I was almost one of them.

P.S. I think Maria is a nice enough name for other people, but not for me.

P.P.S. At the point where “Maria” appears to be most her own woman, most resisting you, most saying I cannot live the life you have imposed upon me, not if it's going to be a life of us quarreling about your Jewishness in England, that is impossible—at this point of greatest strength, she is least real, which is to say
least
her own woman, because she has become again your “character,” just one of a series of fictive propositions. This is diabolical of you.