3 The Ward

One morning only a few days later, one very depressing morning in December 1973, after he’d been up much of the night vainly trying to compose into his tape recorder a more reasonable reply to Milton Appel, Zuckerman came down to the mailbox in his orthopedic collar to see why the postman had rung. He wished he’d brought a coat along: he was thinking of continuing out into the cold and on to the corner to jump from the roof of the Stanhope Hotel. He no longer seemed worth preserving. From 1 to 4 a.m., with the noose of a narrow electric heating pad encircling his cervical spine, he’d gone another fifteen rounds with Appel. And now the new day: what equally useful function could he perform through the interminable hours awake? Cunnilingus was about it. Step right up, sit right down. It was all he was good for. Blotted out everything else. That and hating Appel. Smothered with mothers and shouting at Jews. Yes, illness had done it: Zuckerman had become Carnovsky. The journalists had known it all along.

The problem with jumping is smashing your skull. That can’t be pleasant. And if he wound up merely severing his spinal cord on the hotel canopy—well, he’d be bedridden for life, a fate hundreds of thousands of times worse than what already was making him miserable. On the other hand, a failed suicide that didn’t completely cripple him might provide a new subject—more than could be said so far for success. But what if the pain vanished halfway down, went the way it came, leaped from his body as he sailed from the roof—what then? What if he saw in every salient detail a next book, a new start? Halfway down is probably just where that happens. Suppose he walked to the Stanhope simply as an experiment. Either the pain disappears before I reach the corner or I enter the hotel and wait for the elevator. Either it disappears before I get into the elevator or I go up to the top floor and out through the fire exit onto the roof. I walk straight to the parapet and look sixteen floors down to the traffic, and this pain comes to realize that I’m not kidding, that sixteen floors is a very respectable distance, that after a year and a half it is time to leave me alone. I lean out toward the street and I say to the pain—and I mean what I say—“One minute more and I jump!” I’ll scare it out of me.

But all he scared with such thoughts was himself.

Two manila envelopes in the mailbox, so tightly wedged together that he skinned his knuckles in the excitement of prying them out. The medical-school catalogue, his application forms! What he hadn’t dared to tell Diana was that already, weeks before, he’d sent off his inquiry to the University of Chicago. From his seat in the doctors’ waiting rooms, watching the patients come and go, he’d begun to think: Why not? Four decades, four novels, two dead parents, and a brother I’ll never speak to again—looks from the evidence like my exorcism’s done. Why not this as a second life? They talk in earnest to fifty needy people every day. From morning to night, bombarded by stories, and none of their own devising. Stories intending to lead to a definite, useful, authoritative conclusion. Stories with a clear and practical purpose: Cure me. They follow carefully all the details, then they go to work. And either the job is doable or undoable, while mine is both at best and mostly not.

Tearing open the bigger of the two envelopes—well, he hadn’t known a thrill quite like it since the fall of 1948, when the first of the college mail began to arrive. Each day he raced home after his last class and, over his quart of milk, madly read about the life to come; not even the delivery of the first bound edition of his first published book had promised such complete emancipation as those college catalogues. On the cover of the catalogue now in his hand, a light-and-shadow study of a university tower, stark, soaring, academic Gibraltar, the very symbol of the unassailable solidity of a medical vocation. Inside the front cover, the university calendar. Jan. 4–5: Registration for Winter quarter … Jan. 4: Classes meet … He quickly turned to find “Requirements for Admission” and read until he reached “Selection Policy” and the words that would change everything.

The Committee on Admissions strives to make its decision on the basis of the ability, achievement, personality, character, and motivation of the candidates. Questions of race, color, religion, sex, marital status, age, national or ethnic origin, or geographic location have no bearing in the consideration of any application for the Pritzker School of Medicine.

They didn’t care that he was forty. He was in.

But one page back, bad news. Sixteen hours of chemistry, twelve of biology, eight of physics—merely to qualify, twice as much coursework as he’d been expecting. In science. Well, the sooner the better. When classes meet on January 4, I’ll be there to ignite my Bunsen burner. I’ll pack a bag and fly out to Chicago—over my microscope in a month! Lots of women his age were doing it—what was to stop him? A year’s grind as an undergraduate, four of medical studies, three of residency, and at forty-eight he’d be ready to open an office. That would give him twenty-five years in practice—if he could depend on his health. It was the change of professions that would restore his health. The pain would just dwindle away; if not, he’d cure himself: it would be within his power. But never again to give himself over to doctors who weren’t interested enough or patient enough or simply curious enough to see a puzzle like his through to the end.

That’s where the writing years would be of use. A doctor thinks, “Everybody ends badly, nothing I can do. He’s just dying and I can’t cure life.” But a good writer can’t abandon his character’s suffering, not to narcotics or to death. Nor can he just leave a character to his fate by insinuating that his pain is somehow deserved for being self-induced. A writer learns to stay around, has to, in order to make sense of incurable life, in order to chart the turnings of the punishing unknown even where there’s no sense to be made. His experience with all the doctors who had misdiagnosed the early stages of his mother’s tumor and then failed him had convinced Zuckerman that, even if he was washed up as a writer, he couldn’t do their job any worse than they did.

He was still in the hallway removing sheaves of application blanks from the university envelope when a UPS deliveryman opened the street door and announced a package for him. Yes, it appeared to be happening: once the worst is over, even the parcels are yours. Everything is yours. The suicide threat had forced fate’s hand—an essentially unintelligent idea that he found himself believing.

The box contained a rectangular urethane pillow about a foot and a half long and a foot wide. Promised to him a week before and forgotten by him since. Everything was forgotten in the workless monotony of his empty five hundred days. The evening’s marijuana didn’t help either. His mental activity had come to focus on managing his pain and managing his women: either he was figuring out what pills to take or scheduling arrivals and departures to minimize the likelihood of collision.

He’d been put on to the pillow at his bank. Waiting in line to cash a check—cash for Diana’s connection—trying to be patient despite the burning sensation running along the rim of his winged left scapula, he’d been tapped lightly from behind by a pint-sized white-haired gentleman with an evenly tanned sympathetic face. He wore a smart double-breasted dove-gray coat. A dove-gray hat was in the gloved hand at his side. Gloves of dove-gray suede. “I know how you can get rid of that thing,” he told Zuckerman, pointing to his orthopedic collar. The mildest Old Country accent. A helpful smile.

“How?”

“Dr. Kotler’s pillow. Eliminates chronic pain acquired during sleep. Based on research done by Dr. Kotler. A scientifically designed pillow made expressly for sufferers like yourself. With your wide shoulders and long neck, what you’re doing on an ordinary pillow is pinching nerves and causing pain. Shoulders too?” he asked. “Extend into the arms?”

Zuckerman nodded. Pain everywhere.

“And X-rays show nothing? No history of whiplash, no accident, no fall? Just on you like that, unexplained?”

“Exactly.”

“All acquired during sleep. That’s what Dr. Kotler discovered and how he came up with his pillow. His pillow will restore you to a pain-free life. Twenty dollars plus postage. Comes with a satin pillowcase. In blue only.”

“You don’t happen to be Dr. Kotler’s father?”

“Never married. Whose father I am, we’ll never know.” He handed Zuckerman a blank envelope out of his pocket. “Write on this: name, along with mailing address. I’ll see they send one tomorrow, C.O.D.”

Well, he’d tried everything else, and this playful old character clearly meant no harm. With his white wavy hair and nut-colored face, in his woolens and skins of soft dove-gray, he seemed to Zuckerman like somebody out of a children’s tale, one of those elfin elderly Jews, with large heart-shaped ears and dangling Buddha lobes, and dark earholes that looked as though they’d been dug to a burrow by a mouse; a nose of impressive length for a man barely reaching Zuckerman’s chest, a nose that broadened as it descended, so that the nostrils, each a sizable crescent, were just about hidden by the wide, weighted tip; and eyes that were ageless, polished brown protruding eyes such as you see in photographs taken of prodigious little fiddlers at the age of three.

Watching Zuckerman write his name, the old man asked, “N. as in Nathan?”

“No,” replied Zuckerman. “As in Neck.”

“Of course. You are the young fellow who has handed me those laughs. I thought I recognized you but I wasn’t sure—you’ve lost quite a number of hairs since I saw your last photo.” He removed one glove and extended his hand. “I am Dr. Kotler. I don’t make a production out of it with strangers. But you are no stranger, N. Zuckerman. I practiced in Newark for many, many years, began there long before you were born. Had my office in the Hotel Riviera down on Clinton and High before it was purchased by Father Divine.”

“The Riviera?” Zuckerman laughed and forgot for the moment about his scapula. N. as in Nostalgia. This was a character out of a child’s tale: his own. “The Riviera is where my parents spent their honeymoon weekend.”

“Lucky couple. It was a grand hotel in those days. My first office was on Academy Street near the Newark Ledger. I started with the lumbago of the boys from the paper and an examining table I bought secondhand. The fire commissioner’s girl friend had a lingerie shop just down the street. Mike Shumlin, brother of theatrical producer Herman, owned the Japtex shops. So you’re our writer. I was expecting from the way you hit and run you’d be a little bantamweight like me. I read that book. Frankly the penis I had almost enough of by the five hundredth time, but what a floodgate of memories you opened up to those early, youthful days. A kick for me on every page. You mention Laurel Garden on Springfield Avenue. I attended Max Schmeling’s third fight in the U.S., staged by Nick Kline at Laurel Garden. January 1929. His opponent, an Italian, Corri, was KO’d in one and a half minutes of the first round. Every German in Newark was there—you should have heard them. Saw Willie La Morte beat Corporal Izzie Schwartz that summer—flyweight championship, fifteen rounds. You mention the Empire Burlesque on Washington, near Market. I knew the old guy who managed it, grizzled old guy named Sutherland. Hinda Wassau, the blond Polish striptease queen—knew her personally. One of my patients. Knew producer Rube Bernstein, who Hinda married. You mention the old Newark Bears. I treated young Charlie Keller for his knee. Manager George Selkirk, one of my dearest friends. You mention the Newark Airport. When it opened up, Jerome Congleton was mayor. I attended the dedication. One hangar in those days. There the morning they cut the ribbon on the Pulaski Skyway. What a sight—a viaduct from ancient Rome rising out of the Jersey marshes. You mention the Branford Theater. Favorite place of mine. Saw the first stage shows, featuring Charley Melson and his band. Joe Penner and his ‘Wanna Buy a Duck’ routine. Oh, Newark was my turf then. Roast beef at Murray’s. Lobsters at Dietsch’s. The tube station, gateway to New York. The locust trees along the street with their skinny twisted pods. WJZ with Vincent Lopez. WOR with John B. Gambling. Jascha Heifetz at the Mosque. The B. F. Keith theater—the old Proctor’s—featuring acts direct from the Palace on Broadway. Kitty Doner, with her sister Rose and her brother Ted. Ted sang, Rose danced. Mae Murray making a grand personal appearance. Alexander Moissi, the great Austrian actor, at the Shubert on Broad Street. George Arliss. Leslie Howard. Ethel Barrymore. A great place in those days, our dear Newark. Large enough to be big-time, small enough to walk down the street and greet people you knew. Vanished now. Everything that mattered to me down the twentieth-century drain. My birthplace, Vilna, decimated by Hitler, then stolen by Stalin. Newark, my America, abandoned by the whites and destroyed by the colored. That’s what I thought the night they set the fires in 1968. First the Second World War, then the Iron Curtain, now the Newark Fire. I cried when that riot broke out. My beautiful Newark. I loved that city.”

“So did we all, Dr. Kotler. What are you doing in New York?”

“Good practical question. Living. Eight years now. Man in exile. Child of the times. I gave up my wonderful practice, my cherished friends, took my books and my mementos, packed the last of my pillows, and established myself here at the age of seventy. Life anew in my eighth decade on earth. Now on my way to the Metropolitan Museum. I go for the great Rembrandt. I’m studying his masterpieces a foot at a time. Quite a discipline. Very rewarding. The man was a magician. Also studying Holy Scriptures. Delving into all the translations. Amazing what’s in there. Yet the writing I don’t like. The Jews in the Bible were always involved in highly dramatic moments, but they never learned to write good drama. Not like the Greeks, in my estimation. The Greeks heard a sneeze and they took off. The sneezer becomes the hero, the one who reported the sneeze becomes the messenger, the ones who overheard the sneeze, they became the chorus. Lots of pity, lots of terror, lots of cliff-hanging and suspense. You don’t get that with the Jews in the Bible. There it’s all round-the-clock negotiation with God.”

“You sound like you know how to keep going.”

Wish I could say the same for myself; I wish, he thought childishly, you could teach me.

“Do as I like, Nathan. Always have. Never denied myself what counted. And I believe I know what counted. I’ve been some use to others too. Kept a balance, you might say. I want to send you a pillow. Free of charge. For the wonderful memories you brought back to life. No reason for you to be in this pain. You don’t sleep on your stomach, I trust.”

“On my side and on my back, as far as I know.”

“Heard this story a thousand times. I’m sending a pillow and a case.”

*   *   *

And here they were. Also, tucked in the box, a typewritten note on the doctor’s stationery: “Remember, don’t place Dr. Kotler’s Pillow on top of an ordinary pillow. It does the job by itself. If there is no significant improvement in two weeks, phone me at RE 4–4482. With longstanding problems, manipulation could be required at the outset. For recalcitrant cases there are hypnotic techniques.” The letter was signed “Dr. Charles L. Kotler, Dolorologist.”

And if, by itself, the pillow worked and the pain completely vanished? He couldn’t wait for night to fall so he could take it to sleep. He couldn’t wait for it to be January 4 and the first day of class. He couldn’t wait for 1981—that was when he’d be opening his office. 1982 at the latest. He’d pack the dolorologist’s pillow for Chicago—and he’d leave the harem behind. With Gloria Galanter he’d gone too far, even for a man as disabled as himself. With Roget’s Thesaurus under his head and Gloria sitting on his face, Zuckerman understood just how little one can depend upon human suffering to produce ennobling effects. She was the wife, the coddled and irreplaceable wife, of the genial wizard who’d weaned Zuckerman reluctantly away from his triple-A bonds and nearly doubled his capital in three years. Marvin Galanter was such a fan of Carnovsky that in the beginning he’d refused even to bill Zuckerman for his services; at their first meeting the accountant told Nathan that he would pay any penalties out of his own pocket, should the IRS challenge the shelters. Carnovsky, Marvin claimed, was his own life story; for the author of that book, there was nothing whatsoever that he wouldn’t do.

Yes, he must divest himself at least of Gloria—only he couldn’t resist her breasts. Alone on the playmat, following the rheumatologist’s suggestion to try to find some means to distract himself from his pain, he sometimes thought of nothing but her breasts. Of the four women in the harem, it was with Gloria that his helplessness hit bottom—while Gloria herself seemed the happiest, in a strange and delightful way seemed the most playfully independent, tethered though she was to his wretched needs. She distracted him with her breasts and delivered his food: Greenberg’s chocolate cakes, Mrs. Herbst’s strudel, Zabar’s pumpernickel, beluga in pots from the Caviarteria, the lemon chicken from Pearl’s Chinese Restaurant, hot lasagna from “21.” She sent the chauffeur all the way down to Allen Street for the stuffed peppers from Seymour’s Parkway, and then came over in the car to heat them up for his dinner. She rushed into the little kitchenette in her red-fox Russian cossack coat and, when she came out with the steaming pot, was wearing only her heels. Gloria was nearing forty, a firm, hefty brunette with protruding circular breasts like targets, and electrifying growths of hair. Her face could have been a Spanish mulatto’s: almond eyes, a wide, imposing jaw, and full rounded lips with peculiarly raised edges. There were bruises on her behind. He wasn’t the only primitive she babied and he didn’t care. He ate the food and he tasted the breasts. He ate the food off the breasts. There was nothing Gloria didn’t remember to carry in her bag: nippleless bra, crotchless panties, Polaroid camera, vibrating dildo, K-Y jelly, Gucci blindfold, a length of braided velvet rope—for a treat, on his birthday, a gram of cocaine. “Times have changed,” said Zuckerman, “since all you needed was a condom.” “A child is sick,” she said, “you bring toys.” True, and Dionysian rites were once believed to have a therapeutic effect on the physically afflicted. There was also the ancient treatment known as the imposition of hands. Gloria had classical history on her side. His own mother’s means for effecting a cure were to play casino on the edge of the bed with him when he was home with a fever. So as not to fall behind in her housework, she’d set her ironing board up in his bedroom while they gossiped about school and his friends. He loved the smell of ironing still. Gloria, lubricating a finger and slipping it in his anus, talked about her marriage to Marvin.

Zuckerman said to her, “Gloria, you’re the dirtiest woman I’ve ever met.”

“If I’m the dirtiest woman you’ve ever met, you’re in trouble. I fuck Marvin twice a week. I put down my book, put out my cigarette, turn out the light, and roll over.”

“On your back?”

“What else? And then he puts it in and I know just what to do to make him come. And then he mumbles something about tits and love and he comes. Then I put on the light and roll on my side and light up a cigarette and get on with my book. I’m reading the one you told me about. Jean Rhys.”

“What do you do to make him come?”

“I make three circles this way, and three circles the other way, and I draw my fingernail down his spine like this—and he comes.”

“So you do seven things.”

“Right. Seven things. And then he says something about my tits and love, and he comes. And then he falls asleep and I can turn on the light again and read. This Jean Rhys terrifies me. The other night after reading her book about that shit-on woman and no money, I rolled over and kissed him and said, ‘I love you, sweetheart.’ But it’s hard fucking him, Nathan. And getting harder. You always think in a marriage, ‘This is as bad as it can be’—and next year it’s worse. It’s the most odious duty I’ve ever had to perform. He says to me sometimes when he’s straining to come, ‘Gloria, Gloria, say something dirty.’ I have to think hard, but I do it. He’s a wonderful father and a wonderful husband, and he deserves all the help he can get. But still, one night I really thought I couldn’t take it anymore. I put down my book and I put out the light and finally I said it to him. I said, ‘Marv, something’s gone out of our marriage.’ But he was almost snoring by then. ‘Quiet,’ he mumbles. ‘Shhhhh, go to sleep.’ I don’t know what to do. There’s nothing I can do. The odd thing and the terrible thing and the thing that’s most confusing is that without a doubt Marvin was the real love of my life and beyond a doubt I was the love of Marvin’s life and although we were never never happy, for about ten years we had a passionate marriage and all the trimmings, health, money, kids, Mercedes, a double sink and summer houses and everything. And so miserable and so attached. It makes no sense. And now I have these night monsters, three enormous night monsters: no money, death, and getting old. I can’t leave him. I’d fall apart. He’d fall apart. The kids would go nuts and they’re screwy as it is. But I need excitement. I’m thirty-eight. I need extra attention.”

“So, have your affairs.”

“They’re murder too, you know. You can’t always control your feelings in those things. You can’t control the other person’s feelings either. I have one now who wants to run away with me to British Columbia. He says we can live off the land. He’s handsome. He’s young. Bushy hair. Very savage. He came up to the house to restore some antiques and he started by restoring me. He lives in a terrible loft. He says, ‘I can’t believe I’m fucking you.’ When he’s fucking me. That excites me, Nathan. We take baths together. It’s fun. But is that any reason to run out on being Adam and Toby’s mother and Marvin’s wife? When the kids lose something, who’s going to find it for them if I’m in British Columbia? ‘Mommy, where is my eraser?’ ‘Just a second, dear, I’m in the bathroom. Wait. I’ll look for it.’ Somebody’s looking for something, I help—that’s mothers. You lost something, I have to look. ‘Mommy, I found it.’ ‘I’m glad you found it, dear.’ And I am—when they find the eraser, Nathan, I’m happy. That’s how I fell in love with Marvin. The very first time I was in his apartment, and within five minutes, he looked at me and said, ‘Where’s my cigarette lighter, Gloria, my good lighter?’ And I got up and looked around, and I found it. ‘Here it is, Marvin.’ ‘Oh, good.’ I was hooked. That was it. Look, I live for the baths I take with my Italian bambino and his bushy hair and his iron biceps—but how can I leave these people and expect that they’ll find what they lose on their own? With you it’s okay—with you it’s like a brother. You need and I need and that’s it. Besides, you know what a good girl you’ve got in Cos Cob’s cunning little whore.” She’d accidentally met Diana when she stopped by unannounced one afternoon and the chauffeur dragged in a potted palm tree to liven up the sickroom. “She’s perfect for you. Underage, upper-class, and really slutty in that little toy skirt—juicy, like when you bite into a fresh apple or a good pear. I like the gun-moll mouth. Clever contrast to the high IQ. While we were debating where to put the tree I saw her down the corridor—in the bathroom, making herself up. A bomb could have gone off in there and she wouldn’t have known it. I wouldn’t drop her.”

“I’m in no position,” said Zuckerman, impaled upon Gloria’s knuckle, “to drop anyone.”

“That’s good. Some women might see you as prey. That’s all some women want—a suffering male who’s otherwise well off. All the slow curing, the taking credit for it, and if God forbid he doesn’t survive the cure, owning his life after death. Show me a woman who wouldn’t love to be the widow of a famous man. To own it all.”

“Talking about all the women, or are we talking about you?”

“If it’s God’s blessing, Nathan, that it happens, I can’t think of a single woman who wouldn’t put up with it. Luckily this kid’s too young and snotty to know the fundamentals yet. Fine. Let her be fresh to you when you start to whine. You’re better off. No Jewish mother like me would ever minimize the importance of a morbid affliction. Read this book Carnovsky if you don’t believe it. Jewish mothers know how to own their suffering boys. If I were in your shoes I’d keep my eye out for that.”

*   *   *

Jaga, during his opening hour at Anton’s Trichological Clinic, had looked to him first, in white bandanna and long white smock, like a novitiate in a nursing order; then she spoke, and the Slavic accent—along with the clinician’s get-up and the dutiful weary professionalism with which she worked her fingers across his scalp—reminded him of the women physicians in Cancer Ward, another of the works from which he’d taken stern instruction during his week in traction. His was the last appointment of the day, and after his second session, as he was leaving the Commodore and heading home, he caught sight of her ahead of him out on Vanderbilt Place. She was in a weatherworn black felt coat whose red embroidered hem was coming loose at the back. The shoddy look of a coat once stylish somewhere else subverted somewhat that aura of detached superiority that she affected alone in a cubicle with a balding man. The hurried agitated gait made her look like someone on the run. Maybe she was: running from more of the questions he’d begun to ask during the pleasant fingertip massage. She was small and fragile, with a complexion the color of skim milk and a tiny, pointed, bony, tired face, a face a little ratlike until, at the end of the session, she undid the bandanna and disclosed the corn-silk sheen of her ash-blond hair, and with it a delicacy otherwise obscured in that mask so tiny and taut with strain. The undecipherable violet eyes were suddenly startling. Still, he made no effort on the street to catch up. He couldn’t run because of the pain, and when he remembered the heavy sarcasm with which she’d spit on his few amiable questions, he decided against calling her name. “Helping people,” she’d replied, when he asked how she got into trichology. “I love helping anyone with a problem.” Why had she emigrated to America? “I dreamed all my life of America.” What did she make of it here? “Everybody so nice. Everybody wishing you to have a good day. We do not have such nice people in Warsaw.”

The next week, to his invitation for a drink, she said yes—curtly, as though she’d said no. She was in a hurry, could stay for no more than a quick glass of wine. In the booth at the bar she drank three quick glasses, and then explained her American sojourn without his having even inquired. “I was bored in Warsaw. I had ennui. I wanted a change.” The next week she again said yes as though it were no, and this time she had five glasses of wine. “Hard to believe you left simply because you were bored.” “Don’t be banal,” she told him. “I don’t want your sympathy. The client needs sympathy, not the technician with her full head of hair.” The following week she came to his apartment, and through the prism glasses he watched as by herself she finished off the bottle he’d given her to open. Because of the pain he could no longer uncork a wine bottle. He was sipping vodka through a bent glass straw.

“Why do you lie on the floor?” she asked.

“Too tedious to go into.”

“Were you in an accident?”

“Not that I remember. Were you, Jaga?”

“You must live more through people,” she told him.

“How do you know how I should live?”

Drunkenly she tried to pursue her theme. “You must learn to live through other people.” Because of the wine and because of her accent, two-thirds of what she was saying was incomprehensible to him.

At the door he helped her into the coat. She had stitched up the hem since he’d first spotted her hurrying along Vanderbilt Place, but what the coat needed was a new lining. Jaga seemed herself to have no lining at all. She looked like something that had been peeled of its rind, exposing a wan semi-transparent whiteness that wasn’t even an inner membrane but the bare, pallid pulp of her being. He thought that if he touched her the sensation would make her scream.

“There’s something corrupt about both of us,” she said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Monomaniacs like you and me. I must never come here again.”

Soon she was stopping by every evening on her way home. She began wearing eye shadow and to smell of a peppery perfume, and the face tightened up like a little rat’s only when he persisted in asking the stupidest of his questions. She arrived in a new silk blouse the same pale violet as her eyes; though the topmost button was left carelessly undone, she made no move toward the playmat. She stretched instead across the sofa, snuggled cozily there under the afghan and poured out glass after glass of red wine—and then ran off to the Bronx. She climbed the library ladder in her stocking feet and browsed through the shelves. She asked from the topmost rung if she could borrow a book, and then forgot to take it home. Each day another nineteenth-century American classic was added to the stack left behind on his desk. Half contemptuously, satirizing herself, him, his library, his ladder, deriding seemingly every human dream and aspiration, she labeled where she piled the books “My spot.”

“Why not take them with you?” Zuckerman asked.

“No, no, not with great novels. I am too old for this form of seduction. Why do you allow me to come here anyway, to the sacred sanctuary of art? I am not an ‘interesting character.’”

“What did you do in Warsaw?”

“I did in Warsaw the same as I do here.”

“Jaga, why not give me a break? Why not a straight answer to one lousy question?”

“Please, if you are looking for somebody interesting to write about, invite from the clinic one of Anton’s other girls. They are younger and prettier and sillier, they will be flattered that you ask lousy question. They have more adventures to tell than I do. You can get into their pants and they can get into your books. But if you are looking at me for sex, I am not interested. I hate lust. It’s a nuisance. I don’t like the smells, I don’t like the sounds. Once, twice with somebody is fine—beyond that, it’s a partnership in dirt.”

“Are you married?”

“I am married. I have a daughter of thirteen. She lives with her grandmother in Warsaw. Now do you know everything about me?”

“What does your husband do?”

“What does he ‘do’? He is not a graphomaniac like you. Why does an intelligent man ask stupid questions about what people ‘do’? Because you are an American or because you are this graphomaniac? If you are writing a book and you want me to help you with my answers, I cannot. I am too dull. I am just Jaga with her upskis and downskis. And if you are trying to write a book by the answers that you get, then you are too dull.”

“I ask you questions to pass the time. Is that sufficiently cynical to suit you?”

“I don’t know about politics, I am not interested in politics, I don’t want to answer questions about Poland. I don’t care about Poland. To hell with all those things. I came here to get away from all that and I will appreciate it if you will leave me be about things that are the past.”

On a windy November evening, with rain and hail blowing up against the windows, and the temperature down below freezing, Zuckerman offered Jaga ten dollars for a cab. She threw the money at him and left. Minutes later she was back, the black felt coat already sopping wet. “When do you want to see me again?”

“Up to you. Whenever you’re feeling resentful enough.”

As though to bite, she lunged for his lips. The next afternoon she said, “The first time I kissed anyone in two years.”

“What about your husband?”

“We don’t even do that anymore.”

The man with whom she’d defected wasn’t her husband. This was revealed to him the first time Jaga undid the remaining buttons of the new silk blouse and knelt beside him on the playmat.

“Why did you defect with him?”

“You see, I should not have told you even that much. I say ‘defect’ and you are excited. An interesting character. You are more excited by the word ‘defect’ than you are by my body. My body is too skinny.” She removed her blouse and bra and threw them onto the desk, by the pile of unborrowed books. “My breasts are not the right size for an American man. I know that. They are not the right American shape. You did not know that I would look this old.”

“On the contrary, it’s a child’s body.”

“Yes, a child. She suffered from the Communists, poor child—I’ll put her in a book. Why must you be so banal?”

“Why must you be so difficult?”

“It’s you who is difficult. Why don’t you just let me come here and drink your wine and pretend with borrowing books and kiss you, if I feel like it. Any man with half of a heart would do this. At moments you should be forgetting about writing books all the time. Here”—and after undoing her skirt and raising her slip, she turned around on her knees and leaned her weight forward onto the palms of her hands. “Here, you can see my ass. Men like that. You can do it to me from behind. The first time and you can do anything you want to me, anything at all that pleases you, except to ask me more of your questions.”

“Why do you hate it so much here?”

“Because I am left out here! Stupid man, of course I hate it here! I live with a man who is left out. What can he do here? It’s all right that I work in a hair clinic. But not for a man. He would take a job like that and he would crumble up in a year. But I begged him to run away with me, to save me from that madness, and so I cannot ask him to start to sweep floors in New York City.”

“What did he work at before coming here?”

“You would misunderstand if I told you. You would think it was ‘interesting.’”

“Maybe I misunderstand less than you think.”

“He saved me from the people who were poisoning my life. Now I must save him from exile. He saved me from my husband. He saved me from my lover. He saved me from the people destroying everything I love. Here I am his eyes, his voice, his source of survival. If I left, it would kill him. It isn’t a matter of being loved, it’s a matter of loving somebody—whether you can believe that or not.”

“Nobody asked you to leave him.”

Jaga uncorked a second bottle of wine and, seated naked on the floor beside him, quickly drank half of it down. “But I want to,” she said.

“Who is he?”

“A boy. A boy who did not use his head. That is what my lover asked him in Warsaw. He saw us in a café and he came up to him and he was furious. ‘Who are you?’ he shouted at the boy.”

“What did the boy answer?”

“He answered, ‘None of your business.’ To you that does not sound so heroic. But it is, when one man is half the age of the other.”

“He ran away with you to be a hero, and you ran away with him to run away.”

“And now you think you understand why I love my spot on your desk. Now you think you understand why I get myself drunk on your expensive claret. ‘She is plotting to trade him for me.’ Only that is not so. Even with my émigré vulnerability, I will not fall in love with you.”

“Good.”

“I will let you do anything you want to me, but I will not fall in love.”

“Fine.”

“Only good, only fine? No, in my case it is excellent. Because I am the best woman in the world for falling in love with the wrong man. I have the record in the Communist countries. Either they are married, or they are murderers, or they are like you, men finished with love. Gentle, sympathetic, kind with money and wine, but interested in you mainly as a subject. Warm ice. I know writers.”

“I won’t ask how. But go on.”

“I know writers. Beautiful feelings. They sweep you away with their beautiful feelings. But the feelings disappear quickly once you are no longer posing for them. Once they’ve got you figured out and written down, you go. All they give is their attention.”

“You could do worse.”

“Oh yes, all that attention. It’s lovely for the model while it lasts.”

“What were you in Poland?”

“I told you. Champion woman to fall in love with the wrong man.” And again she offered to assume any posture for penetration that would please and excite him. “Come however you like and don’t wait for me. That is better for a writer than more questions.”

And what is better for you? It was difficult to do her the kindness of not asking. Jaga was right about writers—all along, Zuckerman had been thinking that if only she told him enough, he might find in what she said something to start him writing. She insulted him, she berated him, when it was time to go she sometimes grew so angry that she had all she could do not to reach out and strike him. She wanted to collapse and be rescued, and she wanted to be heroic and prevail, and she seemed to hate him most for reminding her, merely by taking it all in, that she could manage neither. A writer on the wane, Zuckerman did his best to remain unfazed. Mustn’t confuse pleasure with work. He was there to listen. Listening was the only treatment he could give. They come, he thought, and tell me things, and I listen, and occasionally I say, “Maybe I understand more than you think,” but there’s no treatment I can offer to cure the woes of all the outpatients crossing my path, bent beneath their burdens and their separate griefs. Monstrous that all the world’s suffering is good to me inasmuch as it’s grist to my mill—that all I can do, when confronted with anyone’s story, is to wish to turn it into material, but if that’s the way one is possessed, that is the way one is possessed. There’s a demonic side to this business that the Nobel Prize committee doesn’t talk much about. It would be nice, particularly in the presence of the needy, to have pure disinterested motives like everybody else, but, alas, that isn’t the job. The only patient being treated by the writer is himself.

After she’d gone, and after Gloria had stopped by with his dinner, and some hours before he resumed composing into his tape recorder another rejoinder to Appel, he told himself, “Start tonight. Get on with it tonight,” and began by transcribing every word he could still remember of the protracted tirade delivered that afternoon by Jaga while he lay beneath her on the playmat. Her pelvis rose and fell like something ticking, an instrument as automatic as a metronome. Light, regular, tireless thrusts, thrusting distinct as a pulsebeat, thrusting excruciatingly minute, and all the while she spoke without stopping, spoke like she fucked, steady voluptuous coldness, as though he was a man and this was an act that she didn’t yet entirely despise. He felt like a convict digging a tunnel with a spoon.

“I hate America,” she told him. “I hate New York. I hate the Bronx. I hate Bruckner Boulevard. In a village in Poland there are at least two Renaissance buildings. Here it is just ugly houses, one after another, and Americans asking you their direct questions. You cannot have a spiritual conversation with anyone. You cannot be poor here and I hate it.” Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock. “You think I’m morbid and psychopathic. Crazy Jaga. You think I should be like an American girl—typical American: energetic, positive, talented. Like all these intelligent American girls with their thinking, ‘I can be an actress, I can be a poet, I can be a good teacher. I’m positive, I’m growing—I hadn’t been growing when I was growing, but now I’m growing.’ You think I should be one of those good good boring American girls with their naïveté that goodness does it, that energy does it, that talent does it. ‘How can a man like Nathan Zuckerman fall in love with me for two weeks, and then abandon me? I am so good and energetic and positive and talented and growing—how can that be?’ But I am not so naïve, so don’t worry. I have some darkness to go back to. Whatever darkness was behind them, it was explained to them by the psychiatrist. And now for them it’s all recovery. Make my life meaningful. Growth. They buy this. Some of them, the smart ones, they sell it. ‘The relationship I had, I learned something from it. It’s good for my growth.’ If they have a darkness, it’s a nice darkness. When you sleep with them, they smile. They make it wonderful.” Tick tock. “They make it beautiful.” Tick tock. “They make it warm and tender.” Tick tock. “They make it loving. But I do not have this good American optimism. I cannot stand to lose people. I cannot stand it. And I am not smiling. And I am not growing. I am disappearing!” Tick tock. Tick tock. “Did I tell you, Nathan, that I was raped? When I left here that day in the rain?” “No, you didn’t tell me that.” “I was walking to the subway in that rain. I was drunk. And I thought I couldn’t make it—I was too drunk to walk. And I waved for a taxi, to take me to the station. And this limousine stopped. I don’t remember very much. It was the limousine driver. He had a Polish name, too—that’s what I remember. I think I had a blackout when I was in the limousine. I don’t even know whether I did something provocative. He drove me and drove me and drove me. I thought I was going to the subway, and then he stopped and he said that I owed him twenty dollars. And I didn’t have twenty dollars. And I said, ‘Well, I can only write you a check.’ And he said, ‘How can I know the check is good?’ And I said, ‘You can call my husband.’ That is the last thing I wanted to do, but I was so drunk, and so I didn’t know what I was doing. And I gave him your number.” “Where were you at this point?” “Somewhere. I think on the West Side. So he said, ‘Okay, let’s call your husband on the telephone. Here’s a restaurant and we can go inside and we can call.’ And I went inside and it wasn’t a restaurant—it was some stairway. And there he pushed me down and raped me. And after that he drove me to the station.” “And was it horrible or was it nothing?” “Ah, you want ‘material.’ It was nothing. I was too drunk to feel anything. He was afraid after I would call the police. Because I told him that I would. I told him, ‘You have raped me and I’m going to do something about it. I didn’t leave Poland to come to America to be raped by a Pole.’ And he said, ‘Well, you could have slept with hundreds of men—nobody’s going to believe you.’ And I didn’t even mean to go to the police. He was right—they wouldn’t believe me. I just wanted to tell him that he had done something dreadful. He was white, he had a Polish name, he was good-looking, young—why? Why a man feels like raping a drunken woman? What kind of pleasure can that be? He drives me to the station, asking me if I’m okay, if I can make the train. Even walks me down to the platform and buys me a token.” “Very generous.” “And he never called you?” “No.” “I’m sorry I gave him your number, Nathan.” “It hardly matters.” “That rape itself—it didn’t mean anything. I went home and washed myself. And there waiting for me is a postcard. From my lover in Warsaw. And that’s when I began to cry. That had meaning. Me, a postcard! Finally he writes me—and it’s a postcard! I had a vision, after his postcard, of my parents’ house before the war—a vision of all that went. Your country is ethically maybe a better country than Poland, but even we, even we—you want to come now?” “Even we what?” “Even we deserved a little better than that. I never had a normal life almost from right after I was born. I’m not a very normal person. I once had a little child to tell me that I smell good and that my meatballs are the best in the world. That’s gone too. Now I don’t even have half-home. Now what I have is no-home. All I’m saying is, after you get tired of fucking me, I’ll understand—but, please,” she said, just as his body, playing yet another trick, erupted without so much as a warning, “please, don’t just drop me as a friend.”

Bucking as best he could what he’d had to drink with Jaga and to smoke with Gloria, he got himself upright in his chair and with his notebook open on the lapboard and the collar fixed around his neck, tried to invent what he still didn’t know. He thought of his little exile next to hers. Hers next to Dr. Kotler’s. Exile like theirs is an illness, too; either it goes away in two or three years or it’s chronic and you’ve got it for good. He tried to imagine a Poland, a past, a daughter, a lover, a postcard, as though his cure would follow if only he began anew as a writer of stories wholly unlike his own. The Sorrows of Jaga. But he couldn’t get anywhere. Though people are weeping in every corner of the earth from torture and ruin and cruelty and loss, that didn’t mean that he could make their stories his, no matter how passionate and powerful they seemed beside his trivialities. One can be overcome by a story the way a reader is, but a reader isn’t a writer. Desperation doesn’t help either: it takes longer than one night to make a story, even when it’s written in a sitting. Besides, if Zuckerman wrote about what he didn’t know, who then would write about what he did know?

Only what did he know? The story he could dominate and to which his feelings had been enslaved had ended. Her stories weren’t his stories and his stories were no longer his stories either.

*   *   *

To prepare himself to leave his playmat and travel eight hundred miles to Chicago—when the farthest he’d been in a year was to get a pain suppressor out on Long Island—he first spent fifteen minutes under the new hundred-dollar shower head guaranteed by Hammacher Schlemmer to pummel you into health with hot water. All that came out was a fainthearted drizzle. Some neighbor in the old brownstone running a dishwasher or filling the tub. He emerged looking sufficiently boiled but feeling no better than when he’d gone under. He frequently emerged feeling no better even when the pressure was way up and the water gushed forth as prescribed. He smeared the steam from the medicine-chest mirror and contemplated his reddened physique. No invidious organic enemy visible, no stigmata at all; only the upper torso, once a point of pride, looking just as frail as it had after the regular morning shower, the one to offset the stiffness of sleep. On the advice of the physiotherapist, he stood under scalding showers three times a day. The heat, coupled with the pounding of the water, was supposed to unglue the spasm and serve as a counterirritant to the pain. “Hyperstimulation analgesia”—principle of the acupuncture needles, and of the ice packs that he applied between scalding showers, and of jumping off the roof of the Stanhope Hotel.

While drying himself, he probed with his fingertips until he’d located the worst of the muscular soreness midway along the upper left trapezius, the burning tenderness over the processes and to the right of the third cervical vertebra, and the movement pain at the insertion of the long head of the left biceps tendon. The intercostals between the eighth and ninth ribs were only moderately sore, a little improved really since he’d last checked back there two hours before, and the aching heaviness in the left deltoid was manageable, more or less—what a pitcher might feel having thrown nine innings on a cold September night. If it were only the deltoid that hurt, he’d go through life a happy man; if he could somehow contract with the Source of All Pain to take upon himself, even unto death, the trapezial soreness, or the cervical rawness—any one of his multitude of symptoms in exchange for permanent relief from everything else …

He sprayed the base of his neck and the shoulder girdle with the morning’s second frosting of ethyl chloride (gift of his last osteopath). He refastened the collar (fitted by the neurologist) to support his neck. At breakfast he’d taken a Percodan (rheumatologist’s grudging prescription) and debated with himself—craven sufferer vs. responsible adult—about popping a second so soon. Over the months he’d tried keeping himself to four Percodan pills on alternate days to avoid getting hooked. Codeine constipated him and made him drowsy, while Percodan not only halved the pain but provided a nice gentle invigorating wallop to a woefully enfeebled sense of well-being. Percodan was to Zuckerman what sucking stones were to Molloy—without ’em couldn’t go on.

Despite dire warnings about the early hour from his former self, he wouldn’t have minded a drag on a joint: eight hundred miles of traveling too nerve-racking to contemplate otherwise. He kept a dozen handy in the egg compartment of the refrigerator, and a loose ounce (obtained by Diana from the Finch pharmacopoeia) in a plastic bag in the butter compartment. One long drag in case he hailed a taxi with no shocks: all he seemed to ride in with his neck brace were cars shipped secondhand from Brazzaville Yellow Cab. Though he couldn’t depend upon marijuana to cool things down like Percodan, a few puffs did manage to detach him, sometimes for as long as half an hour, from engrossment with the pain and nothing else. By the time he got to the airport the second Percodan (precipitously swallowed despite all the hemming and hawing) would have begun its percolation, and he’d have the rest of the joint for further assistance on the flight. Two quick puffs—after the first long drag—and then, carefully, he pinched out the joint and dropped it for safekeeping into a matchbox in his jacket pocket.

He packed his bag: gray suit, black shoes, black socks. From inside his closet door he chose one of his sober foulards, then from the dresser one of his blue button-down shirts. Uniform for medical-school interview—for all public outings going on twenty-five years. To fight baldness he packed the hormone drops, the pink No. 7 dressing, a jar of Anton’s specially prepared conditioner, and a bottle of his shampoo. To fight pain he packed the electronic suppressor, three brands of pills, a sealed new spray-cap bottle of ethyl chloride, his large ice bag, two electric heating pads (the narrow, nooselike pad that wrapped around his throat, the long, heavy pad that draped over his shoulders), the eleven joints left in the refrigerator, and a monogrammed Tiffany’s silver flask (gift of Gloria Galanter) that he filled to the lip with hundred-proof Russian vodka (gift of husband Marvin’s firm: case of Stolichnaya and case of champagne for his fortieth birthday). Last he packed Dr. Kotler’s pillow. He used to travel to Chicago with a pen and a pad and a book to read.

He wouldn’t phone to say where he was going until he got out to LaGuardia. He wouldn’t even bother then. It wasn’t going to require very much teasing from any of his women to deter him, not if he thought of the Brazzaville taxis and the East River Drive potholes and the inevitable delay at the airport. Suppose he had to stand in a line. Suppose he had to carry his suitcase into the terminal. He had trouble only that morning carrying his toothbrush up to his mouth. And of all he couldn’t handle, the suitcase would be just the beginning. Sixteen hours of organic chemistry? twelve of biology? eight of physics? He couldn’t follow an article in Scientific American. With his math he couldn’t even understand the industrial bookkeeping in Business Week. A science student? He wasn’t serious.

There was also some question as to whether he was sane, or was entering that stage of chronic ailing known as the Hysterical Search for the Miraculous Cure. That might be all that Chicago was about: purifying pilgrimage to a sacred place. If so, beware—astrology lies just around the corner. Worse, Christianity. Yield to the hunger for medical magic and you will be carried to the ultimate limit of human foolishness, to the most preposterous of all the great pipe dreams devised by ailing mankind—to the Gospels, to the pillow of our leading dolorologist, the voodoo healer Dr. Jesus Christ.

To give his muscles a rest from the effort of packing his bag, and to recover the courage to fly to Chicago—or, alternatively, to undo the grip of the cracked idea that would really send him flying (off the Stanhope roof)—he stretched across the unmade sheets in the dark cube of his bedroom. The room jutted off the parlor-floor apartment into the enclosed well of the rear courtyard. In an otherwise handsome, comfortable flat, it was the one gloomy room, undersized, underheated, only a shade more sunlight than a crypt. The two unwashable windows were permanently grated against burglars. The side window was further obscured by the trunk of the courtyard’s dying tree, and the rear window half-blinded by an air conditioner. A tangle of extension cords lay coiled on the carpet—for the pain suppressor and the heating pads. Half the kitchen glasses had accumulated on the bedside table—water to wash down his pills—along with a cigarette-rolling machine and a packet of cigarette papers. On a piece of paper toweling were scattered stray green flecks of cannabis weed. The two open books, one atop the other, had been bought secondhand at the Strand: a 1920 English text on orthopedic medicine, with horrific surgical photography, and the fourteen hundred pages of Gray’s Anatomy, a copy of the 1930 edition. He’d been studying medical books for months, and not so as to bone up for any admissions committee. The jailhouse lawyer stores his well-thumbed library under the bed and along the cell walls; so does the patient serving a stretch to which he thinks himself illegally sentenced.

The cassette tape recorder was on the unoccupied half of the double bed, just where he’d fallen asleep with it at 4 a.m. So was his file folder on Milton Appel, which he’d spent his night clutching instead of Diana. He’d phoned and begged her to stay with him after Gloria had gone back to Marvin and Jaga had left in tears for the Bronx, and after he’d flailed about between his chair and the floor trying to dream up, from Jaga’s clues, some story that was hers and not his. Hopeless—and not only because of the grass and the vodka. If you get out of yourself you can’t be a writer because the personal ingredient is what gets you going, and if you hang on to the personal ingredient any longer you’ll disappear right up your asshole. Dante got out of hell easier than you’ll escape Zuckerman-Carnovsky. You don’t want to represent her Warsaw—it’s what her Warsaw represents that you want: suffering that isn’t semi-comical, the world of massive historical pain instead of this pain in the neck. War, destruction, anti-Semitism, totalitarianism, literature on which the fate of a culture hinges, writing at the very heart of the upheaval, a martyrdom more to the point—some point, any point—than bearing the cocktail-party chitchat as a guest on Dick Cavett. Chained to self-consciousness. Chained to retrospection. Chained to my dwarf drama till I die. Stories now about Milton Appel? Fiction about losing my hair? I can’t face it. Anybody’s hair but mine. “Diana, come over, spend the night.” “No.” “Why no? Why not?” “Because I’m not going to suck you off for ten consecutive hours on your playmat and then listen to you for ten hours more screaming about this Milton Appel.” “But that’s all over.” But she’d hung up: he’d become another of her terrible men.

He flipped on the tape recorder and rewound the side. Then he pushed “Play.” When he heard his voice, spooky and lugubrious because of a defect in the audio mechanism, he thought: I might as well have depressed “Regress.” This is where I came in.

“Dear Professor Appel,” intoned his warbling ghost, “my friend Ivan Felt sent on to me your odd request for him to ask me to write an Op Ed piece on behalf of Israel. Maybe it wasn’t so odd. Maybe you’ve changed your mind about me and the Jews since you distinguished for Elsa Stromberg between anti-Semites like Goebbels (to whose writings she compared my own in the letters column of Inquiry) and those like Zuckerman who just don’t like us. It was a most gracious concession.”

He pushed “Stop,” then “Fast Forward,” and then tried “Play” again. He couldn’t be so stupid as he sounded. The problem was the speed of the tape.

“You write to Felt that we ‘grown-ups’ should not kid ourselves (it’s okay if we kid students) about ‘the differences between characters and authors.’ However, would this not seem to contradict—”

He lay there listening till the reel ended. Anybody who says “Would this not seem to contradict” should be shot. You said I said. He said you said. She said I said he said you said. All in this syrupy, pedantic, ghostly drone. My life in art.

No, it wasn’t a fight he needed; what he desperately needed was a reconciliation, and not with Milton Appel. He still couldn’t imagine having fallen out with his brother. Certainly it happens, yet when you hear about families in which brothers don’t speak it’s so awful, so stupid, it seems so impossible. He couldn’t believe that a book could seem no more to Henry than a murder weapon. It was too dull a point of view for a man of Henry’s intelligence to sustain for four years. Perhaps he was only waiting for Nathan, as the elder, to write him a letter or give him a ring. Zuckerman could not believe that Henry, the sweetest and most thoughtful kid, burdened always with too big, too kind a heart, could really continue hating him year after year.

Without any evidence, Zuckerman located his true enemy in Carol. Yes, they were the ones who knew how to hate and keep hating, the mice who couldn’t look you straight in the eye. Don’t touch him, she’d told Henry, or you’ll wind up a caricature in a book—so will I, so will the children. Or maybe it was the money: when families split apart like this, it’s usually not literature that does it. Carol resented that Nathan had been left half of Henry’s parents’ estate, Nathan, who’d made a million by defaming his benefactors, left a hundred thousand bucks after taxes. Oh, but that wasn’t Carol. Carol was a liberal, responsible, well-meaning woman whose enlightened tolerance was her pride. Yet if nothing was holding Henry back, why no message even on Nathan’s birthday? He’d been getting birthday calls from Henry since his first year at college. “Well, how does it feel, Natey, to be seventeen?” To be twenty-five. To be thirty. “Forty?” Zuckerman would have said—“It would feel better, Hesh, if we cut the crap and had lunch.” But the biggest of birthdays came and went, and no call or card or telegram from the remaining member of his family; just Marvin’s champagne in the morning and Marvin’s wife in the afternoon, and in the early evening, drunken Jaga, her cheek crushed to the playmat and her rear raised to face him, and crying out, “Nail me, nail me, crucify me with your Jewish prick!” even while Zuckerman wondered who had been more foolish, Henry for failing to seize the occasion of the milestone to declare a truce or himself for expecting that his turning forty should automatically unburden Henry of what it meant having Nathan Zuckerman as his brother.

He picked up the bedside phone but couldn’t dial even a single digit of the area code, so overtaken was he by fatigue. This had happened before on the brink of phoning Henry. As weary of his sentimentality as of their righteousness. He could not have both that brother and that book.

The number he dialed was Jenny’s. Somebody to whom, as yet, he owed no explanations.

He let it ring. She would be out back with her pad, drawing snowdrifts in the orchard, or in the shed with her ax, splitting wood. He’d received a long letter from Bearsville only the day before, a long, captivating letter in which she’d written, “I feel you’re on the verge of something nuts,” and he’d kept picking it up and looking to be sure she’d said on the verge of something nuts and not already going nuts. Fighting back from a real breakdown would be terrible. It could take as long as medical school. Longer. Even after the dissolution of his marriages—wreckage he still couldn’t square with an orderly personality like his—he’d neither gone nuts nor gone under. However bad it was, always he’d pushed sanely on until a new alliance came along to help restore the old proportions. Only during the last half year had gloomy, frightening bouts of confusion seriously begun to erode the talent for steady living, and that wasn’t from the pain alone: it was also from living without nursing a book that nursed him. In his former life he could never have imagined lasting a week without writing. He used to wonder how all the billions who didn’t write could take the daily blizzard—all that beset them, such a saturation of the brain, and so little of it known or named. If he wasn’t cultivating hypothetical Zuckermans he really had no more means than a fire hydrant to decipher his existence. But either there was no existence left to decipher or he was without sufficient imaginative power to convert into his fiction of seeming self-exposure what existence had now become. There was no rhetorical overlay left: he was bound and gagged by the real raw thing, ground down to his own unhypothetical nub. He could no longer pretend to be anyone else, and as a medium for his books he had ceased to be.

Breathless from running, Jenny answered the phone on the fifteenth ring and Zuckerman immediately hung up. If he told her where he was going she’d try like Diana to stop him. They would all try to stop him, just as lucidity was breaking through. Jaga in her murky accent would shower him with Polish despair: “You want to be like people with real hot ordinary pursuits inside. You want to have fine feelings like the middle class. You want to be a doctor the way some people admit to uncommitted crimes. Hallo Dostoevsky. Don’t be so banal.” Gloria would laugh and say something ludicrous: “Maybe you need a child. I’ll become a bigamist and we’ll have one. Marvin wouldn’t mind—he loves you more than I do.” But Jenny’s real wisdom would stop him. He didn’t even understand why she continued to bother with him. Why any of them did. For Gloria, he supposed, coming to his place to loll around in her G-string was something to do a couple afternoons a week; Diana, the budding matador, would try anything once; and Jaga needed a haven somewhere between the home that was no-home and Anton’s clinic, and his playmat, alas, was the best she could do. But why did Jenny bother? Jenny was in the long line of levelheaded wives, writers’ wives as skillful as explosive experts at defusing a writer’s dreadful paranoia and brooding indignation, at regularly hacking back the incompatible desires that burgeon in the study, lovely women not likely to bite your balls off, lovely, clear-headed, dependable women, the dutiful daughters of their own troubled families, perfect women whom in the end he divorced. What do you prove by going it alone when there’s Jenny’s colossal willingness and her undespairing heart?

Bearsville, N.Y.

Early Pleistocene Epoch

Dear Nathan,

I’m feeling strong and optimistic and whistling marching tunes as I often do when I feel this way, and you are getting more desperate. There is something across your face these days that disappears only after sex and then only for about five minutes. Lately I feel you’re on the verge of something nuts. I know this because there is something in me that is bent to your shape (which sounds more obscene than it is). There’s a great deal that you don’t have to do to please me. My grandmother (who asks me to tell you she wears a size 16 coat) used to say, “All I want is for you to be happy” and it used to gall me. Happiness wasn’t all I wanted. How vapid! Eventually I’ve come to see more depth in that and in simple good nature generally. You have found a girl you could make happy. I am that kind, if that interests you.

I never told you that I went to a psychoanalyst when I came back so confused from France. He told me that men and women whose sexual instincts are particularly unruly are often drawn to styles of extreme repression; with weaker instincts, they might feel free to let the beast in them free. By way of explaining further what I mean about something in me that is bent to your shape. (Erotically speaking, we—women—decide very young that we’ll be either priestesses or sacrifices. And we stick to it. And then midway into your career you long to switch and that is just the opportunity you gave me with the grand that I blew at Bergdorf’s. By way of explaining still further.)

Snowed in. 10 inches fell atop 12 from the night before. Expected high today on this mountain: zero. There is a nice new ice age on the way. I’m painting it. Strange and lunar. Expect to look in the mirror and see I’ve grown saber-teeth. Are you alive and well and still living in New York? I didn’t think so when we spoke on Monday. I hung up and began thinking of you as someone I used to know. Is Milton Appel’s really the final word? Let us name him Tevye and see if you are still upset. He thinks you do what you do for the sadistic joy of it? I thought your book was one genial trick after another. I’m astonished at your doubt. In my view a good novelist is less like a high priest of secular culture than he is like an intelligent dog. Extraordinary sensitivity to some stimuli, like a dog’s sense of smell, and selective impoverishment in the communication of them. The combination produces not talking but barking, whining, frantic burrowing, pointing, howling, groveling, anything. Good dog good book. And you are a good dog. Isn’t that enough? You once wrote a novel called Mixed Emotions. Why don’t you read it? At least read the title. In someone who has made his work and his destiny out of mixed emotions, toward his family, toward his country, toward his religion and his education and even his own sex—skip it. To my point. I can’t say nothing and saying it to myself isn’t the same. There’s a little house for rent up here that you would like. Not primitive like mine but warm and cozy. And nearby. I could see that you were all right. I could introduce you to the people around to talk to. I could introduce you to nature. There’s no beating nature: the most abstract art uses colors that occur in nature. You are forty, the halfway point, and you are exhausted. No punning diagnosis intended, but you are sick of yourself, sick of serving your imagination’s purposes, sick of fighting the alien purposes of the Jewish Appels. Up here you can get past all that. If you won’t get past your pain, maybe you’ll at least lay down the burden of your fiendish dignity and the search for motives, good or bad. I’m not proposing my magic white mountain for the Castorpian seven-year cure. But why not see what happens in seven months? I can’t imagine anyone thinking of New York as home. I don’t think you do or did, ever. You certainly don’t live there that way. You don’t live there at all. You’re locked up on a closed ward. Here in the woods it’s only rarely crushing isolation. Mostly it’s useful solitude. Out here it makes sense living apart from people. And I live here. If worst comes to worst, you can talk to me. It’s beginning to throw me off balance to have only myself and a cat to care about.

More quotations for your outlook. (Intelligent people are corny too.)

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,

che la diritta via era smarrita.

—Dante

It is a good thing in the winter to be deep in the snow, in the autumn deep in the yellow leaves, in the summer among the ripe corn, in spring amid the grass; it is a good thing to be always with the mowers and the peasant girls, in summer with a big sky overhead, in winter by the fireside, and to feel that it always has been and always will be so. One may sleep on straw, eat black bread, well, one will only be the healthier for it.

—Van Gogh

Love,

A Peasant Girl

P.S. I am sorry that your shoulder is still bad, but I don’t think it’s going to stop you. If I were a devil, plotting with my minions how to shut Zuckerman up, and some minion said, “How about plaguing shoulder pain?” I would say, “No, sorry, I just don’t think that will do it.” I hope the pain subsides, and think that if you came up here, in time you’d feel the inner clench loosening. But if it didn’t, you would just live with it and write with it. Life really is stronger than death. If you don’t believe me, come look at my fat new picture book (32 smackers) of seventeenth-century Dutch realism. Jan Steen couldn’t paint an upholstery tack without proclaiming just that.

No, he wouldn’t tell her what he was planning and he wouldn’t rent the house nearby. It’s my vitality I long for, not a deeper retreat; the job is to make sense back among people, not to take a higher degree in surviving alone. Even with you to talk to, winter by the fireside and the big summer sky overhead are not going to produce a potent new man—they’re going to give us a little boy. Our son will be me. No, I cannot be mothered in that warm cozy house. I will not abet that analyst’s inanities about “returning to the infantile mode.” Now to renounce renunciation—to reunite with the race!

Yet what if Jenny’s black bread is my cure? There’s a great deal that you don’t have to do to please me. You have found a girl you could make happy. It’s beginning to throw me off balance to have only myself and a cat to care about. You’d feel the inner clench unloosening.

Yes, and after the novelty of healing me wore off? No doubt Gloria is right and the suffering male (who is otherwise well) is to some women the great temptation, but what happens when the slow curing fails to take place and the tender rewards are not forthcoming? Every morning, nine on the button, she’s off to the studio and shows up next only for lunch—stained with paint and full of painting problems, anxious to bolt a sandwich and get back to work. I know that absorption. So do my ex-wives. If I were healthy and nailed to a book, I might go ahead and make the move, buy a parka and snow boots and turn peasant with Jennifer. Separate by day for deep concentration, toil alone like slaves of the earth over the obstinate brainchild, then coming uncoiled together at night to share food and wine and talk and feeling and sex. But it’s easier to share sex than to share pain. That would dawn on her soon enough, and I’d wind up reading ARTnews from under my ice bag and learning to hate Hilton Kramer, while nights as well as days she slugged it out in the studio with Van Gogh. No, he couldn’t go from being an artist to being an artist’s chick. He had to be rid of all the women. If there wasn’t something suspect about someone hanging around somebody like him, it was surely wrong for him to be hanging on to all of them. They all, with their benevolence, with their indulgence, with their compliance to my need, make off with what I most need to climb out of this pit. Diana is smarter, Jenny’s the artist, and Jaga really suffers. And with Gloria I mostly feel like Gregor Samsa waiting on the floor beneath the cupboard for his sister to bring him his bowl of slops. All these voices, this insistent chorus, reminding me, as though I could forget, how unreasonable I am, how idle and helpless and overprivileged, how fortunate even in my misfortune. If one more woman preaches to me, I’ll be ready for the padded cell.

He phoned Dr. Kotler.

“This is Nathan Zuckerman. What do you mean by ‘dolorologist’?”

“Hello there, Nathan. So my pillow arrived. You’re on your way.”

“It’s here, yes, thank you. You sign yourself ‘dolorologist.’ I’m lying on the pillow at this very moment and thought I’d phone for a definition.”

But he’d phoned to find out about the hypnotic procedures employed in recalcitrant cases; he’d phoned because the orthodox techniques of the highly esteemed doctors had alleviated nothing, because he could hardly afford to reject the prospect of a cure on account of the age or eccentricity of the physician, or because the physician happened to be a nostalgic exile from the same pile of rubble as himself. Everybody comes from somewhere, reaches an age, and speaks with some accent or other. Cure was not going to come either from God or from Mount Sinai Hospital, that much was clear by now. Hypnosis seemed a terrible comedown after years of making the hypnotic phenomena himself, yet if someone actually could talk to the pain directly, without his looking for meaning, without all the interfering ego static …

“Is dolorology a coinage of Kotler’s or a real medical specialty you can study?”

“It’s something every doctor studies every day when the patient walks in and says, ‘Doctor, it hurts.’ But I happen to consider dolorology my particular specialty because of my approach: anti-prescription, anti-machine. I date back to the stethoscope, the thermometer, and the forceps. For the rest you had two eyes, two ears, two hands, a mouth, and the instrument most important of all, clinical intuition. Pain is like a baby crying. What it wants it can’t name. The dolorologist unearths what that is. Chronic pain is a puzzle for which few of my colleagues have time. Most of them are frightened by it. Most doctors are frightened of death and the dying. People need an incredible amount of support when they die. And the doctor who is frightened can’t give it to them.”

“Are you free this afternoon?”

“For Nathan Zuckerman I am free day and night.”

“I’d like to come by, I’d like to talk about what we’ll do if the pillow doesn’t help.”

“You sound distraught, my boy. Come first and have lunch. I overlook the East River. When I moved in I thought I would stand staring at the river four and five hours a day. Now I’m so busy weeks go by and I don’t even know the river is here.”

“I’m interested in discussing hypnosis. Hypnosis, you say in your note, is sometimes useful for what I have.”

“Without minimizing what you have, for far worse than you have. Asthma, migraines, colitis, dermatitis—I have seen a man suicidal from trigeminal neuralgia, a most nightmarish pain that attacks the face, reclaim his life through hypnosis. I’ve seen the people in my practice that everybody else has written off, and now I can’t answer my mail from these patients, given up as incurable, whom I have hypnotized back to health. My secretary needs a secretary, that’s how heavy my mail runs.”

“I’ll be there in an hour.”

But an hour later he was on the unmade bed in the little room dialing Cambridge, Mass. Enough cowering before the attack. But I’m not cowering and it’s not the first attack. And will he sit up and listen, no matter how generous the amplitude with which I patiently spell out his hundred mistakes? You expect him to suffer remorse? You figure you’ll win his blessing by phoning long distance to tell him he can’t read? He expresses the right thoughts about Jews and you express the wrong thoughts about Jews, and nothing you shout is going to change that. But it’s these Appels who’ve whammied my muscles with their Jewish evil eye. They push in the pins and I yell ouch and swallow a dozen Percodans. But what you do with the evil eye is poke it out with a burning stick! But he is not my father’s deputy, let alone the great warrior chieftain that young Nathan longed to please and couldn’t help antagonizing. I am not young Nathan. I am a forty-year-old client at Anton’s Trichological Clinic. To be “understood” is no longer necessary once you seriously begin losing your hair. The father who called you a bastard from his deathbed is dead, and the allegiance known as “Jewishness” beyond their moralizing judgment. It’s from Milton Appel that I found that out, in one of his own incarnations. And you needn’t bother to tell him.

Too late for reason: he had Harvard on the phone and was waiting to be connected to the English Department. The real shitside of literature, these inspired exchanges, but into the bitter shit I go if churning up shit is what it takes to get better. Nothing to lose but my pain. Only Appel has nothing to do with the pain. The pain pre-dates that essay by a year. There are no Jewish evil eyes or double Jewish whammies. Illness is an organic condition. Illness is as natural as health. The motive is not revenge. There is no motive. There are only nerve cells, twelve thousand million nerve cells, any one of which can drive you mad without the help of a book review. Go get hypnotized. Even that’s less primitive than this. Let the oracular little dolorologist be your fairy godfather, if it’s a regressive solution you’re after. Go and let him feed you lunch. Tell Gloria to come over and you can blindfold each other. Move to the mountains. Marry Jenny. But no further appeals to the Court of Appels.

The English Department secretary rang through to Appel’s office, where a graduate student came on the line to tell him that the Distinguished Professor wasn’t there.

“Is he home?”

“Can’t say.”

“Have you his home number?”

“Can’t be reached.”

Disciple, undoubtedly, holding sacred all of the Distinguished Professor’s opinions, including those on me.

“This is Nathan Zuckerman.”

Zuckerman imagined the smirking disciple passing a cryptic comic note to another smirking disciple. Must have them up there by the dozens. Used to be one myself.

“It’s about a piece Appel asked me to write. I’m calling from New York.”

“He hasn’t been well,” the disciple offered. “You’ll have to wait till he gets back.”

“Can’t,” Zuckerman told him. “Haven’t been well either,” and promptly called Boston information. While the operator searched the suburbs for a listing, Zuckerman spread the contents of Appel’s file folder on the bed. He pushed his medical books onto the carpet, and arranged on the bedside table all the unfinished draft letters that he’d eked out in longhand. He couldn’t trust himself to extemporize, not while worked up like this; yet if he waited till he could think straight and talk sensibly, he wouldn’t make the call.

A woman answered at the Appel residence in Newton. The pretty dark wife from the Barnes Hole beach? She must be white-haired by now. Everybody moving on to wisdom but me. All you do on the phone is document his original insight. All you are doing on the phone is becoming one of the crazies of the kind who phone you. When you saw him strolling by you on the beach, were you that impressed by his narrow shoulders and his soft white waist? Of course he hates your work. All that semen underfoot is no longer to his taste. Never was—not in books at least. You two are a perfect mismatch. You draw stories from your vices, dream up doubles for your demons—he finds criticism a voice for virtue, the pulpit to berate us for our failings. Virtue comes with the franchise. Virtue is the goal. He teaches, he judges, he corrects—rightness is all. And to rightness you are acting out indefensible desires by spurious pseudo-literary means, committing the culture crime of desublimation. There’s the quarrel, as banal as that: you shouldn’t make a Jewish comedy out of genital life. Leave the spurting hard-on to goyim like Genet. Sublimate, my child, sublimate, like the physicists who gave us the atomic bomb.

“This is Nathan Zuckerman. May I speak with Milton Appel?”

“He’s resting right now.”

“It’s pretty urgent business.” She didn’t answer, and so somberly he added, “About Israel.”

He was shuffling meanwhile through the letters on the table, looking for an opening shot. He chose (for their adversarial pithiness), then rejected (for lack of tact and want of respect), then reconsidered (for just the sake of those deficiencies) three sentences written the night before, after he’d given up on writing about Jaga; about Jaga he’d been unable to write even three words. Professor Appel, I am convinced that the quality about a man or a group that most invites the violence of neurotic guilt is public righteousness and innocence. The roots of anti-Semitism are deep and twisted and not easily sterilized. However, to the extent that published statements by Jews have any effect at all, one way or another, on Gentile opinion and prejudice, the words “Jews jerk off daily” on lavatory walls would do us all more good than what you want me to write on the Op Ed page.

“This is Milton Appel.”

“This is Nathan Zuckerman. I’m sorry to bother you when you’re resting.”

“What is it you want?”

“Do you have a few minutes to talk?”

“Please, what is it?”

How sick is he? Sicker than I am? Sounds strained. Burdened. Maybe he always does, or maybe there’s something worse in his kidney than stones. Maybe the evil eye works both ways and I’ve given him a malignancy. I can’t say the hatred hasn’t been on that scale.

“My friend Ivan Felt has sent on to me your letter requesting him to ask me to write a piece on Israel.”

“Felt sent that letter on to you? He had no right to do that.”

“Well, he did it. Xeroxed your paragraph about his friend Nate Zuckerman. I have it in front of me. ‘Why don’t you ask your friend Nate Zuckerman to write, etc.… unless he feels the Jews can stick their historical suffering up their ass.’ Odd request. Very odd. To me in that context, infuriatingly odd.” Zuckerman had begun to read now from one of his unfinished letters. “Though since you so regularly change your opinion about my ‘case,’ for all I know you’ve had yet another flexibility spasm since you distinguished in Inquiry between anti-Semites like Goebbels and people like Zuckerman who ‘just don’t like us.’”

His voice was already out of control, quivering so with rage that he even thought to turn on the tape from the night before and let that double for him over the phone until he recovered the modulations of a mature, confident, reasonable, authoritative adult. But no—purgation requires more turbulence than that, otherwise you might as well lie back on Dr. Kotler’s pillow to take your bottle. No—drive pain out with your battering heart the way a clapper knocks sound from a bell. He tried to envision how this would happen. Pain waves springing longitudinally from his silhouetted torso, snaking along the floor, spreading over the furniture, slithering through the blinds, and then throughout his apartment, throughout the whole building, rattling every window in its frame—the roar of his discharged affliction echoing out over all Manhattan, and the evening Post hitting the street headlined: ZUCKERMAN PAIN-FREE AT LAST, 18 Month Ordeal Ends with Sonic Boom. “If I correctly understand your letter to Felt asking him to ask me what apparently you’d rather not ask me directly yourself, you seem to suspect (privately, of course, and not in print or on the lecture circuit) that far from disliking Jews ‘for being Jews,’ and pathologically reviling them in my work, there’s a possibility that I might actually be troubled by their troubles—”

“Look, hold on. You have every right to be angry, but not primarily with me. This paragraph that Felt so kindly sent to you was written in a letter privately addressed to him. He never asked me whether it was okay to forward it. When he did so he must surely have known it could only inflame your feelings, since what I wrote was certainly not civil and obviously represented an eruption of personal feelings. But that seems to me just the sort of thing that would be done by that character in that book he’s written with his two club feet. I regard it as hostile, provocative, and nasty—toward both of us. Whatever you may think of my essay on your work or my general opinions, you probably will grant that if I were writing directly to you and asking you to do a piece on Israel for the Op Ed page, I’d be more civil about it and not do it so as to enrage you, rightly or wrongly.”

“Because you would be more ‘civil’ in a letter written directly to me, despite having written about my work as you did in that piece—” Feeble quibbling. Pedantry. Must not extemporize and lose your way.

He looked everywhere on the bed for his three stinging lines from the night before. The page must have slipped to the floor. He reached to retrieve it without bending his neck or turning his head and, only after rushing to resume the attack, discovered that he was reading Appel the wrong page. “It’s one thing to think you’re pretending to your students when you tell them there’s a difference between characters and the author, if that’s the way you see it these days—but to strip the book of its tone, the plot of its circumstances, the action of its momentum, to disregard totally the context that gives to a theme its spirit, its flavor, its life—”

“Look, I haven’t the energy for Literature 101.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. I was talking about Remedial Reading. And don’t hang up—I have more to say.”

“I’m sorry but I can’t listen to much more. I didn’t expect that you’d like what I wrote about your work any more than I like bad reviews of what I write. In these situations, strain is unavoidable. But I really do feel that both of us might have been spared this exacerbation had Felt shown some manners. I wrote him a personal letter in response to a visit he paid. I had a right to assume that a personal letter wouldn’t be circulated unless I gave permission. He never asked for it.”

“First you scold me, now you scold Felt.” And that’s why he’s sick, Zuckerman realized. The addiction to scolding. He’s overdosed on scolding. All the verdicts, all the judgments—what’s good for the culture, what’s bad for the culture—and finally it’s poisoning him to death. Let’s hope.

“Let me finish,” said Appel. “I was given reason by Felt to suppose that you did indeed feel some strong concern about Israel. It won’t strike you as any less irritating if you know why I wrote it, but at least you should understand that my suggestion wasn’t a mere gratuitous provocation. That I leave to our friend Ivan, whose talent as far as I can tell lies solely in that direction. My letter was for his eyes. If he had behaved decently—”

“Like you. Of course. Mannerly, decently, courteously, decorously, uprightly, civil—oh, what a gorgeous Torah cloth you throw over your meat hooks! How clean you are!”

“And your Torah cloth? No more abuse, please. What is this phone call about, except your Torah cloth? If Felt had behaved decently, he’d have written you: ‘Appel thinks it would be useful if you did a piece for Op Ed on Israel, since things look black and since he feels you, Zuckerman, would reach kinds of people that he can’t.’

“And what kinds of people are they? People like me who don’t like Jews? Or people like Goebbels who gas them? Or the kind of people I pander to by choosing—as you put it so civilly and decently and decorously in Inquiry—by choosing an ‘audience’ instead of choosing readers the way you and Flaubert do. My calculating sub-literary shenanigans and your unsullied critical heart! And you call Felt hostile and nasty! What’s disgusting in Felt, in Appel is virtue—in you it’s all virtue, even the ascribing of dishonorable motives. Then in that bloodthirsty essay you have the fucking gall to call my moral stance ‘superior’! You call my sin ‘distortion,’ then distort my book to show how distorted it is! You pervert my intentions, then call me perverse! You lay hold of my comedy with your ten-ton gravity and turn it into a travesty! My coarse, vindictive fantasies, your honorable, idealistic humanist concerns! I’m a sellout to the pop-porno culture, you’re the Defender of the Faith! Western Civilization! The Great Tradition! The Serious Viewpoint! As though seriousness can’t be as stupid as anything else! You sententious bastard, have you ever in your life taken a mental position that isn’t a moral judgment? I doubt you’d even know how. All you unstained, undegenerate, unselfish, loyal, responsible, high-minded Jews, good responsible citizen Jews, taking on the burdens of the Jewish people and worrying about the future of the State of Israel—and chinning yourselves like muscle-builders on your virtue! Milton Appel, the Charles Atlas of Goodness! Oh, the comforts of that difficult role! And how you play it! Even a mask of modesty to throw us dodos off the track! I’m ‘fashionable,’ you’re for the ages. I fuck around, you think. My shitty books are cast in concrete, you make judicious reappraisals. I’m a ‘case,’ I have a ‘career,’ you of course have a calling. Oh, I’ll tell you your calling—President of the Rabbinical Society for the Suppression of Laughter in the Interest of Loftier Values! Minister of the Official Style for Jewish Books Other than the Manual for Circumcision. Regulation number one. Do not mention your cock. You dumb prick! What if I trotted out your youthful essay about being insufficiently Jewish for Poppa and the Jews—written before you got frozen stiff in your militant grown-upism! I wonder what the kosher butchers over at Inquisition would have to say about that. Awfully strange to me that you should no longer care to remember your great cri de coeur, written before your self became so legitimate and your heart so pure, while my first stories you can’t forget!”

“Mr. Zuckerman, you’re entitled to think anything you want of me, and I’ll have to try to live with that, as you’ve managed obviously to live with what I said about your books. What is strange to me is that you don’t seem to have anything to say about the suggestion itself, regardless of your anger against the person who made it. But what may lie in store for the Jews is a much larger matter than what I think of your books, early or late, or what you think of my thinking.”

Oh, if only he were fourteen and Gilbert Carnovsky, he’d tell him to take what may lie in store for the Jews and stick it up his ass. But he was forty and Zuckerman, and so, demonstrating to himself if to no one else the difference between character and author, he hung up the receiver, and found of course that he wasn’t anything like pain-free. Standing atop the paper-strewn bed, his hands clutched into fists and raised to the ceiling of that dark tiny room, he cried out, he screamed, to find that from phoning Appel and venting his rage, he was only worse.