The Counterlife (6 page)

Well, that larky, hot stuff was over now, no more mischievously turning what-was into what-wasn't or what-might-be into what-was—there was only the deadly earnest this-is-it of what-is. Nothing a successful, busy, energetic man likes more than a little Wendy on the side, and nothing a Wendy could more enjoy than calling her lover “Doctor Z.”—she's young, she's game, she's in his office, he's the boss, she sees him in his white coat being adored by everyone, sees his wife chauffeuring the children and turning gray while she doesn't think twice about her twenty-inch waist … heavenly all around. Yes, his sessions with Wendy had been Henry's art; his dental office, after hours, his atelier; and his impotence, thought Zuckerman, like an artist's artistic life drying up for good. He'd been reassigned the art of the responsible—unfortunately by then precisely the hackwork from which he needed longer and longer vacations in order to survive. He'd been thrown back on his talent for the prosaic, precisely what he'd been boxed in by all his life. Zuckerman had felt for him terribly, and so, stupidly, stupidly, did nothing to stop him.

*   *   *

Down in the living room, he worked his way through the clan, accepting their sympathies, listening to their memories, answering questions about where he was living and what he was writing, until he had made his way to Cousin Essie, his favorite relative and once upon a time the family powerhouse. She was sitting in a club chair by the fireplace with a cane across her knees. Six years back, when he'd seen her last at his father's funeral in Florida, there'd been a new husband—an elderly bridge player named Metz—now dead, easily thirty pounds less of Essie, and no cane. She was always, as Zuckerman remembered her, large and old, and now she was even larger and older, though seemingly still indestructible.

“So, you lost your brother,” she said, while he was leaning over to kiss her. “I once took you kids to Olympic Park. Took you on all the rides with my boys. At six Henry was the image of Wendell Willkie with that shock of black hair. That little boy adored you then.”

They must return to Basel—Jurgen transferred home. Maria can't stop crying. “I'm going back to be a good wife and a good mother!” In six weeks Switzerland, where she'll have
only
the money to make it real.

“Did he?”

“Christ, he wouldn't let go of your hand.”

“Well, he has now. We're all here at his house and Henry's up at the cemetery.”

“Don't tell me about the dead,” said Essie. “I look in the mirror in the morning and I see the whole family looking back at me. I see my mother's face, I see my sister, I see my brother, I see the dead from all the way back, all of them right in my own ugly kisser. Look, let's you and me talk,” and after he'd helped her up from the chair, she led him out of the living room, struggling forward like some large vehicle plunging ahead on a broken axle.

“What is it?” he asked when they were in the front hallway.

“If your brother died to sleep with his wife, then he's already up with the angels, Nathan.”

“But he was always the best boy, Esther. Son to end all sons, father to end all fathers—well, from the sound of it, the husband to end all husbands too.”

“From the sound of it the shmuck to end all shmucks.”

“But the kids, the folks—Dad would have a fit. How do I practice dentistry in Basel?” “Why would you have to live in Basel?” “Because she loves it, that's why—she says the only thing that made South Orange endurable was me. Switzerland is her
home.
” “There are worse places than Switzerland.” “That's easy for you to say.” So I say no more, just remember her astride him in the black silk camisole, far far away, like the bedposts on his schoolboy bed.

“It's not so shmucky when you're impotent at thirty-nine,” said Zuckerman, “and have reason to think it might never end.”

“Being up at the cemetery isn't going to end either.”

“He expected to live, Essie. Otherwise he wouldn't have done it.”

“And all for the little wife.”

“That's the story.”

“I like better the ones you write.”

Maria tells him that the person who stays behind suffers even more than the one who goes away. Because of all the familiar places.

Coming down the staircase just behind them were two elderly men he had not seen for a very long while: Herbert Grossman, the Zuckermans' only European refugee, and Shimmy Kirsch, designated years ago by Nathan's father as the brother-in-law Neanderthal, and arguably the family's stupidest relative. But as he was the wealthiest in the family as well, one had to wonder if Shimmy's stupidity wasn't something of an asset; watching him one wondered if in fact the passion to live and the strength to prevail might not be, at their core,
quite stupid.
Though the mountainous build had been eroded by age, and his deeply furrowed face bore all the insignia of his lifelong exertion, he was still more or less the person Nathan remembered from childhood—a huge unassailable nothing in the wholesale produce line, one of those rapacious sons of the old greenhorn families who will not shrink from anything even while, fortunately for society, enslaved by every last primitive taboo. For Zuckerman's father, the responsible chiropodist, life had been a dogged climb up from the abyss of his immigrant father's poverty, and not merely so as to improve his personal lot but eventually to rescue everyone as the family messiah. Shimmy had never seen any need to so assiduously cleanse his behind. Not that he wished necessarily to debase himself. All his steadfastness had gone into being what he'd been born and brought up to be—Shimmy Kirsch. No questions, no excuses, none of this who-am-I, what-am-I, where-am-I crap, not a grain of self-mistrust or the slightest impulse toward spiritual distinction; rather, like so many of his generation out of Newark's old Jewish slums, a man who breathed the spirit of opposition while remaining completely in accord with the ways and means of the earth.

Back when Nathan had first fallen in love with the alphabet and was spelling his way to stardom at school, these Shimmys had already begun to make him uncertain as to whether the real oddball wasn't going to be him, particularly when he heard of the notoriously unbrainy ways in which they successfully beat back their competitors. Unlike the admirable father who had taken the night-school path to professional dignity, these drearily banal and conventional Shimmys displayed all the ruthlessness of the renegade, their teeth ripping a chunk out of life's raw rump, then dragging that around with them everywhere, all else paling in significance beside the bleeding flesh between their jaws. They had absolutely no wisdom; wholly self-saturated, entirely self-oblivious, they had nothing to go on but the most elemental manhood, yet on that alone they came pretty damn far. They too had tragic experiences and suffered losses they were by no means too brutish to feel: being bludgeoned almost to death was as much their specialty as bludgeoning. The point was that pain and suffering did not deter them for half an hour from their intention of living. Their lack of all nuance or doubt, of an ordinary mortal's sense of futility or despair, made it tempting sometimes to consider them inhuman, and yet they were men about whom it was impossible to say that they were anything
other
than human: they were what human really is. While his own father aspired relentlessly to embody the best in mankind, these Shimmys were simply the backbone of the human race.

Shimmy and Grossman were discussing Israel's foreign policy. “Bomb 'em,” Shimmy said flatly, “bomb the Arab bastards till they cry uncle. They want to pull our beards again? We'll die instead!”

Essie, cunning, shrewd, self-aware, another sort of survivor entirely, said to him, “You know why I give to Israel?”

Shimmy was indignant. “
You?
You never parted with a dime in your life.”

“You know why?” she asked, turning to Grossman, a far better straight man.

“Why?” Grossman said.

“Because in Israel you hear the best anti-Semitic jokes. You hear even better anti-Semitic jokes in Tel Aviv than on Collins Avenue.”

After dinner H. returns to the office—lab work, he tells Carol—and sits there all evening reading Fodor's
Switzerland,
trying to make up his mind. “Basel is a city with an atmosphere entirely of its own, in which elements of tradition and medievalism are unexpectedly mingled with the modern … behind and around its splendid old buildings and fine modern ones, a maze of quaint old lanes and busy streets … the old merging imperceptibly with the new…” He thinks: “What a terrific victory if I could pull it off!”

“I was there three years ago with Metz,” Essie was saying. “We're driving from the airport to the hotel. The taxi driver, an Israeli, turns to us, and in English he says, ‘Why do Jews have big noses?' ‘Why?' I ask him. ‘Because the air is free,' he says. On the spot I wrote a check for a thousand bucks to the UJA.”

“Come on,” Shimmy told her, “who ever pried a
nickel
out of you?”

“I asked her if she would leave Jurgen. She asked me to tell her first if I would leave Carol.”

Herbert Grossman, whose obstinately lachrymose view of life was the only unyielding thing about him, had meanwhile begun to tell Zuckerman the latest bad news. Grossman's melancholia had at one time driven Zuckerman's father almost as crazy as Shimmy's stupidity; he was probably the only person about whom Dr. Zuckerman had finally to admit, “The poor man can't help it.” Alcoholics could help it, adulterers could help it, insomniacs, murderers, even stammerers, could help it—according to Dr. Zuckerman, anyone could change
anything
in himself through the diligent exercise of his will; but because Grossman had had to flee from Hitler, he seemed to
have
no will. Not that Sunday after Sunday Dr. Zuckerman hadn't tried to get the damn thing going. Optimistically he would rise from the table after their hearty breakfast and announce to the family, “Time to phone Herbert!” but ten minutes later he'd be back in the kitchen, utterly defeated, muttering to himself, “The poor man can't help it.” Hitler had done it—there was no other explanation. Dr. Zuckerman could not otherwise understand someone who simply was not there.

To Nathan, Herbert Grossman seemed now, as he did then, a delicate, vulnerable refugee, a Jew, to recast Isaac Babel's formula and bring it up to date, with a pacemaker in his heart and spectacles on his nose. “Everyone worries about Israel,” Grossman was saying to him, “but you know what I worry about? Right here. America. Something terrible is happening right here. I feel it like in Poland in 1935. No, not anti-Semitism. That will come anyway. No, it's the crime, the lawlessness, people afraid. The money—everything's for sale and that's all that counts. The young people are full of despair. The drugs are only despair. Nobody wants to feel that good if they aren't in deep despair.”

H. phones and for half an hour speaks of nothing but Carol's virtues. Carol is someone whose qualities you can only really know if you've lived with the woman as long as he has. “She's interesting, dynamic, curious, perceptive…” A long and very impressive list. A
startling
list.

“I feel it on the streets,” Grossman said. “You can't even walk to the store. You go out to the supermarket in broad daylight and blacks come up and rob you blind.”

Maria has left. Terrible tearful exchange of farewell presents. After consultation with cultivated older brother, H. gave her a boxed set of Haydn's
London Symphonies.
Maria gave him her black silk camisole.

When Herbert Grossman excused himself to go get something to eat, Essie confided to Zuckerman, “His last wife had diabetes. She made his life a misery. They took her legs off, she went blind, and she still didn't stop bossing him around.”

So the surviving Zuckerman brother passed the long afternoon—waiting to see if Wendy would show up while he listened to the lore of the tribal elders and remembered the journal entries that had not seemed, when he'd written them, to be the doom-laden notes for
Tristan and Isolde.

Maria phoned H. at the office the day before Christmas. His heart began pounding the moment he was told he had an overseas call and didn't stop until long after she'd said goodbye. She wanted to wish him a Merry American Christmas. She told him that it had been very hard for these six months but that Christmas was helping. There was the children's excitement, and Jurgen's family was all there, and they would be sixteen for dinner the next day. She found that even the snow helped some. Was it snowing yet in New Jersey? Did he mind her phoning him like this at the office? Were his children okay? His wife? Was he? Did Christmas make it any easier for him, or wasn't it that hard anymore? “What did you say to that?” I asked. H.: “I was afraid to say anything. I was afraid somebody in the office would hear. I fucked up, I suppose. I said we didn't observe Christmas.”

And could
that
be why he'd let her go, because Maria observed Christmas and we do not? One would have imagined that among secular, college-educated atheists of Henry's generation running away with shiksas had gone out as a felony years ago and was perceived, if at all, as a fictitious issue in a love affair. But then Henry's problem may have been that having passed so long for a paragon, he had got himself ridiculously entangled in this brilliant disguise at just the moment he was destined to burst forth as less admirable and more desperate than anyone ever imagined. How absurd, how awful, if the woman who'd awakened in him the desire to live differently, who meant to him a break with the past, a revolution against an old way of life that had reached an emotional standstill—against the belief that life is a series of duties to be perfectly performed—if that woman was to be nothing more or less than the humiliating memory of his first (and last) great fling
because she observed Christmas and we do not.
If Henry had been right about the origins of his disease, if it did indeed result from the stress of that onerous defeat and those arduous feelings of self-contempt that dogged him long after her return to Basel, then, curiously enough, it was being a Jew that had killed him.