The Counterlife (32 page)

“As I say, these are just a few hunches, clues to answering the question that has to be answered since it's the question that hounded Nathan at every turn. He could never figure out why people were so eager to prove that he couldn't write fiction. To his embarrassment, the furor over the novel seemed to have as much to do with ‘Is it fiction?' as with the question asked by those still struggling to separate from mothers, fathers, or both, or from the stream of mothers and fathers projected onto sexual partners, and that is, ‘Is this
my
fiction?' But the less attached one is to that umbilicus, the less horrible fascination the novel has, at which point it is just what it seemed to me yesterday, and what it is: a classic of irresponsible exaggeration, reckless comedy on a strangely human scale, animated by the impudence of a writer exaggerating his faults and proposing for himself the most hilarious sense of wrongdoing—conjecture run wild.

“I've talked about
Carnovsky
and not about Nathan, and that's all I intend to do. If there were time and we had the whole day to be here together, I'd talk about the books in turn, each at great length, because that's the kind of funeral oration Nathan would have enjoyed—or that would have least displeased him. It would have seemed to him the best safeguard against too much transient, eulogistic cant.
The book
—I could almost hear him telling me this on that beach—
talk about the book, because that is least likely to make asses of us both.
For all the seeming self-exposure of the novels, he was a great defender of his solitude, not because he particularly liked or valued solitude but because swarming emotional anarchy and self-exposure were possible for him only in isolation. That's where he lived an unlimited life. Nathan as an artist, as the author paradoxically of the most reckless comedy, tried, in fact, to lead the ethical life, and he both reaped its rewards and paid its price. But not Carnovsky, who is to some degree his author's brutish, beastly shadow, a de-idealized, travestied apparition of himself and, as Nathan would be the first to agree, the most suitable subject for the entertainment of his friends, especially in our grief.”

*   *   *

When the service was over, the mourners filed into the street, where groups of them lingered together, seemingly reluctant to return too soon to the ordinary business of an October Tuesday. Occasionally somebody laughed, not raucously, just from the kind of joking that goes on after a funeral. At a funeral you can see a lot of someone's life, but Henry wasn't looking. People who had noticed his strong resemblance to the late novelist looked
his
way from time to time, but he chose not to look back. He had no desire to hear yet more from the young editor about
Carnovsky
's wizardry, and it unnerved him to contemplate meeting and talking with Nathan's publisher, who he believed to have been the elderly bald man looking so sad in the first row just beside the casket. He wanted simply to disappear without having to speak to anyone, to return to real society, where physicians are admired, where dentists are admired, where, if the truth be known, no one gives a fuck about a writer like his brother. What these people didn't seem to understand was that when most people think of a writer, it isn't for the reasons that the editor suggested but because of how many bucks he made on his paperback rights.
That,
and not the gift for “theatrical self-transformation,” was what was really enviable: what prize has he won, who's he fucking, and how much money did the “superior artist” make in his little workshop. Period. End of eulogy.

But instead of leaving he stood glancing down at his watch and pretending that he was expecting to be met by someone. If he left now, then nothing that he'd wanted would have happened. Shutting down the office and making this trip hadn't to do with doing “the right thing”—it wasn't a matter of what others thought he should feel, it was what he himself wanted to feel, despite that seven-year estrangement.
My older brother, my only brother,
and yet he'd realized the day before that it was entirely possible for him, after he'd learned from the publisher of Nathan's death, to hang up the office phone and go back to work. It had been alarming to discover just how easy it would have been to wait and read the obituary in the next day's paper, professing to the family that he had not been told or invited to the funeral, let alone asked if he wanted to speak. Yet he couldn't do it—he might not be able to make the speech, he might not be able to feel the feelings, but out of love for his parents and what they would have wished, out of all those memories of what he and Nathan had shared as youngsters, he could at least be there and, in the presence of the body, effect something like a reconciliation.

Henry had been more than prepared to shed his hatred and forgive, but as a result of that eulogy, the bitterest feelings had been reactivated instead: the elevation of
Carnovsky
to the status of a
classic
—a classic of
irresponsible exaggeration
—made him glad that Nathan was dead and that he was there to be sure it was true.

I
should have been the speaker—the cottage at the shore, the Memorial Day picnics, the Scout outings, the car trips, I should have told them all I remember and the hell with whether they thought it was badly written, sentimental crap. I would have given the eulogy and our reconciliation would have been
that.
I was intimidated, intimidated by all those people, as though they were an extension of him. So, he thought, today is just more of the same goddamn thing. It was never going to work, because I was
always
intimidated. And with that quarrel I only reinforced it—quarreling just because I couldn't stand any
more
of his intimidation! How did I get stuck there, when it wasn't ever what I wanted?

It was an awful day, but for all the wrong reasons. Here he wanted to be able to mourn his brother like everyone else and was having instead to contend with the stinkiness of the worst feelings.

When he heard his name called, he felt like a criminal, not from guilt but for having allowed himself to be trapped. It was as though outside a bank he'd just robbed, he'd committed some humane and utterly gratuitous act, like helping a blind man across the street, thereby delaying his getaway and allowing the police to close in. He felt ridiculously caught.

Coming toward him was the last of the three wives Nathan had left, Laura, looking not a day older or any less amiable than when they'd all been in-laws eight years back. Laura had been Nathan's “proper” wife, plainly pretty, if pretty at all, reliable, good-hearted, studiously without flair, back in the sixties a young lawyer with high ideals about justice for the poor and oppressed. Nathan had left her at about the time that
Carnovsky
was published and celebrity seemed to promise more tantalizing rewards. That, at any rate, was what Carol had surmised when they first heard about the separation. Henry wasn't so sure that success was the only motive: he saw what was admirable about Laura, but that may have been more or less all there was—her colorless Wasp uprightness, whose appeal for Nathan Henry could never fathom, was all
too
unmistakable. Ever since adolescence, he had been expecting Nathan to marry someone both very smart and very sultry, a kind of intellectual bar girl, and Nathan never came close. Neither of them did. Even the two women with whom Henry had had his most torrid affairs turned out to be as temperate as his wife, and no less trustworthy and decent. In the end it was like
having
an affair with his wife, for him if not for Carol.

While they embraced he tried to think of something to say that wouldn't immediately reveal to Laura that he was not deeply grieving. “Where did you come from?”—the wrong words entirely. “Where do you live? New York?”

“Same place,” she said, stepping back but holding on momentarily to his hand.

“Still in the Village? By yourself?”

“Not by myself—no. I'm married. Two children. Oh, Henry, what a terrible day. How long did he know he was going to have this operation?”

“I don't know. We had a falling-out. Over that book. I didn't know anything either. I'm as stunned as you are.”

She gave no indication that it was apparent to everyone that he wasn't stunned at all. “But who was with him?” she asked. “Was he living with someone?”

“Is there a woman? I don't know.”

“You literally know nothing about your brother?”

“Well, maybe it's shameful,” he said, hoping to make it less so by saying it.

“I don't know,” Laura said, “but I can't bear to think that he was alone when he went in to have that operation.”

“That editor who gave the eulogy—he seems to have been close to him.”

“Yes, but he just got back last night—he was in the Bahamas. Mind you, he always had girls around. Nathan was never alone for long. I'll bet there's some poor girl at this moment—she may even have been inside. There were a lot of people there. I hope so, for his sake. The thought of him alone … Oh, it's so sad. For you too.”

He couldn't bring himself to lie outright and agree.

“He had a lot more books to write,” Laura said. “Still, he'd accomplished a lot of what he wanted to do. It wasn't a wasted life. But he had much more coming.”

“As I say, I don't know what to make of it myself. But we had a serious quarrel, a falling-out—it was probably stupid on both sides.” Everything he was saying sounded senseless. More than likely their falling-out was what was meant to be, the result of irreconcilable differences for which he, for one, had no need to apologize. He had spoken his mind about that book as he had every right to, and what ensued ensued. Why should writers alone get to say the unsayable?

“Because of
Carnovsky?
” Laura asked. “Yes, well, when I read it, I thought this was not going to go down very well with you or your folks. I understand it, but of course he had to use the life around him, the people he knew best.”

It wasn't the “using,” it was the
distortion,
the
deliberate
distortion—couldn't these people understand that? “Which sexes are your children?” he asked, again sounding to himself as insipid as he felt, as though he were speaking a language he barely knew. The ex-wife, Henry thought, so obviously distraught over Nathan's death, was utterly in control, while the brother who was not distressed was unable to say anything right.

“A boy and a girl,” she said. “Perfect arrangement.”

“Who is your husband?” That didn't come out like English spoken by an English-speaking person, either. He was speaking no known language. Perhaps the only English that would have sounded right was the truth. He's dead and I don't give a shit. I wish I did but I don't.

“What does he do?” Laura said, seemingly translating his question into her own tongue. “He's a lawyer too. We don't work together, it's a bad idea, but we're on the same wavelength. This time I married a man like myself. I'm not on the creative wavelength, I never was. I thought I was, in college, and even had remnants of it when I first met Nathan. Putting the idea of being a writer ahead of everything else is something I know a little about. I read those books too, and had those thoughts once, and, at a certain expense, even carried on like that in my early twenties. But I was lucky and wound up in law school. Now I'm mostly on the practical wavelength. I only have a real life, I'm afraid. It turns out I don't need any other.”

“He never wrote about you, did he?”

She smiled for the first time, and Henry saw that, if anything, she'd become even plainer, even
sweeter.
She didn't seem to hold a single thing against his brother. “I wasn't interesting enough to write about,” Laura said. “He was too bored with me to write about me. Maybe he wasn't bored enough. One or the other.”

“And now what?”

“For
me?
” she asked.

That wasn't what he meant though he replied, “Yes.” He'd meant something awful—something he
didn't
mean—like, “Now that this is over and my office is shut, what do I do with the rest of the day?” It had just slipped out, as though something internal that seemed as if it was external was trying to sabotage him.

“Well, I'm quite content,” she said. “I'll just go on with what I have. And you? How's Carol? Is she here?”

“I wanted to come by myself.” He should have said that Carol was getting the car and that he had to join her. He'd missed his opportunity to end the conversation before whatever wished to sabotage him went all the way.

“But didn't she want to come?”

His immediate impulse was to set the record straight—the record that Nathan was always distorting—to point out to her, in Carol's defense, that it was she who had been most perplexed and exasperated by Nathan's tossing Laura over. But Laura wouldn't care—she'd forgiven him. “He never wrote about you,” he said, “you don't know what that's like.”

“But he never wrote about Carol, he never wrote about you. Did he?”

“After I had the argument with him, one of the reasons we decided to stay out of his way was so that he wouldn't be tempted.”

She showed no emotion, though he knew what she was thinking—and suddenly he understood everything that Nathan must have come to despise in her. Cold. Bland and upright and blameless and cold.

“And what do you think today?” Laura asked him in her very quiet, even voice. “Was it worth it?”

“To be truthful?” Henry said, and it
felt
truthful as he was about to say it, the first entirely truthful statement he'd been able to make to her. “To be truthful, it wasn't a bad idea.”