The Counterlife (35 page)

If Henry was ever going to turn out to be interesting, I was going to have to do it.

Thank you, thank you, Nathan, for redeeming me from my pathological ordinariness, for assisting in my escape from my life's narrow boundaries. What the hell was wrong with him, why did he have to go on like this, why, even at the end of his life, could he leave nothing and no one alone!

Eager though he was to be gone, he spent yet another hour in search of copies of “Draft #2” and looking to locate a “Draft #1.” All he came up with, in a drawer of one of the file cabinets, was a diary Nathan had kept during a lecture stint in Jerusalem two years before and a packet of clippings from a tabloid called
The Jewish Press.
The diary looked to be so much unembellished reporting—scribbled impressions of people and places, snippets of conversation, names of streets and lists of names; as far as Henry could tell, all of it fact, with himself nowhere to be seen. In a file folder in the drawer below, he found a yellow pad whose first pages were covered with fragments of sentences that sounded oddly familiar.
More Old Testament than that—compliance vs. retribution. The betrayal of mother love. Conjecture run wild.
It was the notes for the eulogy that he'd heard delivered that morning. Inside the pad were three successive revisions of the eulogy itself; in each version were marginal emendations and insertions, lines crossed out and rewritten, and all of it, text and corrections, in no one's hand but Nathan's.

He had written his eulogy himself. For delivery in the event he didn't survive the surgery, his own appraisal of himself, disguised as someone else's!

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—

Swarming
all right—
his
version,
his
interpretation,
his
picture refuting and impugning everyone else's and
swarming
over
everything!
And where was his authority?
Where?
If I couldn't breathe around him, it's no wonder—lashing out from behind a fortress of fiction, exerting his mind-control right down to the end over every ego-threatening challenge! Could not even entrust his
eulogy
to somebody else, couldn't extend that much trust to a faithful friend, but intrigued to contrive even his own memorial, secretly supervising those sentiments too, controlling exactly how he was to be judged! Everyone speaking that bastard's words, everyone a dummy up on his knee ventriloquizing his mouthful! My life dedicated to repairing mouths, his spent stopping them up—his spent thrusting those words down everybody's throat! In his words was our fate—
in our mouths were his words!
Everyone buried and mummified in that verbal lava, including finally himself—nothing straightforward, unvarnished, directly alive, nothing faced up to as it actually is. In his mind it never mattered what
actually
happened or what anyone
actually
was—instead everything important distorted, disguised, wrenched ridiculously out of proportion, determined by those endless, calculated illusions cunningly cooked up in this terrible solitude, everything self-calculation, deliberate deception, always this unremittingly dreadful conversion of the facts into something else …

It was the funeral oration that Henry had been unable to compose the night before, the unsayable at last dredged up out of his unlived existence and ready now to be delivered over the file cabinets and the folders and the notepads and the composition books and the stacks of three-ring binders. Unheard but eloquent, Henry at last recited his uncensored assessment of a life spent
hiding
from the flux of disorderly life, from its trials, its judgments, its assailability, a life lived out behind a life-proof shield of well-prepared discourse—of cunningly selected, self-protecting words.

“Thanks for letting me in,” he told the superintendent when he knocked to say he was going. “You saved me a trip over tomorrow.”

She kept the door of her street-floor apartment three-quarters shut on its little chain, showing through the opening only a narrow slice of face.

“Do yourself a favor,” he said, “don't tell anyone I was here. They might try making trouble for you.”

“Yeah?”

“The lawyers. With lawyers every little thing's a production. You know lawyers.” He opened his wallet and offered her two more twenties, this time very calmly, with no palpitations of the heart.

“I got troubles enough,” she said, and with two fingers plucked the money from his hand.

“Then forget you ever saw me.” But she had already shut the door and was turning the lock as though he had been forgotten long ago. He probably hadn't even had to ice the cake and indeed he wondered, out in the street, if the forty bucks more might not lead her to suspect that something was up. But as far as she knew he'd done nothing wrong. The large manila envelope he had carried away with him was nicely concealed beneath an old raincoat of Nathan's that he'd found in the hall closet on the way out. Before opening the closet door, he'd once again been overtaken by the utterly ridiculous fear that Nathan would be hiding there among the coats. He wasn't, and in the elevator Henry just casually draped the raincoat over his arm—and over the envelope stuffed with Nathan's papers—as though it were his own. It could have been. The minds may have been alien but the men were pretty much the same size.

All the way up Madison Avenue there were city trash baskets into which he could easily have dispatched the envelope, but drop these pages into the Manhattan trash, he thought, and they'll wind up serialized in the
New York Post.
He had no intention, however, of bringing this stuff home for Carol to read or for her to come upon inadvertently among his papers; the objective was to spare Carol no less than himself. Ten years, even five years back, he had indeed done what married men do and tried to fuck his way out of his life. Young men fuck their way into their lives with the girls who become their wives, then they are married and someone new comes along and they try to fuck their way out. And then, like Henry, if they haven't already ruined everything, they discover that if they're sensible and discreet, they can manage to be both in and out at the same time. A lot of the emptiness that he had once attempted to fill fucking other women no longer panicked him; he'd discovered that if you're not afraid of it or angry with it, and don't overvalue it, that emptiness passes. If you just sit tight—even alone with someone you are supposed to love, feeling utterly empty with her—it goes away; if you don't fight it or rush off to fuck somebody else, and if you both have something else important to do, it does go away and you can recover some of the old meaning and substance, even for a time the vitality. Then that goes too, of course, but if you will just sit tight, it comes back again … and so it goes and comes, comes and goes, and that's more or less what had happened with Carol and how they had preserved, without ugly warfare or unbearable frustration, their marriage, the children's happiness, and the orderly satisfactions of a stable home.

Sure he was still tempted, and even managed taking care of himself from time to time. Who can bear a marriage of single-minded devotion? He was experienced enough and old enough to understand that affairs, adultery, whatever you call it, take a lot of the built-in pressure out of marriage and teach even the least imaginative that this idea of exclusivity isn't God-given but a social creation rigorously honored at this point only by people too pathetic to challenge it. He no longer dreamed of “other wives.” A law of life he seemed finally to have learned is that the women you want most to fuck aren't necessarily the women you want to spend all that much time with, anyway. Fucking yes, but not as a way out of his life or as an escape from the facts. Unlike Nathan's, what Henry's life had come to represent was
living
with the facts—instead of trying to alter the facts, taking the facts and letting them inundate him. He no longer permitted himself to be carried heedlessly off in a sexual whirlwind—and certainly not in the office, where his concentration was entirely on the technical stuff and achieving the ultimate degree of professional perfection. He never let a patient leave his office if he thought to himself, “I could have done it better … it could have fit better … the color wasn't right…” No, his imperative was perfection—not just the degree of perfection needed for the patient to get through his life, not even the degree of perfection you could realistically hope for, but the degree of perfection that might just be possible, humanly and technically, if you pushed yourself to the limit. If you look at the results with bare eyes it's one thing, but if you look with loupes it's another, and it was by the minutest microscopic standards that Henry measured success. He had the highest re-do rate of anybody he knew—if he didn't like something he'd tell the patient, “Look, I'll put it in as a temporary, but I'm going to re-do it for you,” and never so as to charge for it but to assuage that exacting, insistent, perfectionist injunction with which he had successfully solidified life by siphoning off the fantasy. Fantasy is speculation that is characteristically you, the you with your dream of self-overpowering, the you perennially bonded to your prize wish, your pet fear, and distorted by a kind of childish thinking that he'd annihilated from his mental processes. Anybody can run away and survive, the trick was to stay and survive, and this was how Henry had done it, not through chasing erotic daydreams, not by fleeing or through adventurous defiance, but by sounding the minutely taxing demands of his profession. Nathan had got everything backwards, overestimating—as was
his
fantasy—immoderation's appeal and the virtues of sweeping away the limits on life. The renunciation of Maria had signaled the beginning of a life that, if not quite a “classic,” might be eulogized at
his
funeral as a damn good stab at equanimity. And equanimity was enough for Henry, even if to his late brother, student and connoisseur of intemperate behavior, it didn't measure up to the selfless promotion of the great human cause of irresponsible exaggeration.

Exaggeration. Exaggeration, falsification, rampant caricature—everything, thought Henry, about my vocation, to which precision, accuracy, and mechanical exactness are absolutely essential, overstated, overdrawn, and vulgarly enlarged. Witness the galling misrepresentation of my relations with Wendy. Sure when the patient is in the chair, and he's got the hygienist or assistant working on him, and she's playing with his mouth with her delicate hands and everything is hanging all over him, sure there is a part of it that stimulates, in the
patient,
sexual fantasy. But when I am doing an implant, and the whole mouth is torn open, and the tissue detached from the bone, and the teeth, the roots, all exposed, and the assistant's hands are in there with mine, when I've got four, even six, hands working on the patient, the
last
thing I'm thinking about is sex. You stop concentrating, you let that enter, and you fuck up—and I'm not a dentist who fucks up. I am a success, Nathan. I don't live all day vicariously in my head—I live with saliva, blood, bone, teeth, my hands in mouths as raw and real as the meat in the butcher's window!

Home. That was where he was finally headed, through the rush-hour traffic, with Nathan's raincoat and the envelope back in the trunk. He'd shoved them down in the well beside the spare so as to try to forget for a while disposing of the papers. Now that he was on his way, undetected, he felt as wrung out as a man who'd been ransacking, not his brother's files, but his brother's grave, while at the same time increasingly unsettled by the fear that he had been insufficiently thorough. If he'd had to stay till 3 a.m. to be sure nothing compromising in those files had been overlooked, that's what he should have done. But once it turned dark outside, he could go no further—he'd again begun to sense Nathan's presence, to feel himself disoriented inside a dream, and desperately wanted to be home with his children and for the strain and the ugliness to be over. If only he'd had it in him to empty the files and light a match—if he could only have been sure that when they saw the ashes in the fireplace they'd assume that Nathan had burned it all, destroyed everything personal before entering the hospital … Stalled in the smelly back-up of commuter cars and heavy trucks outside the Lincoln Tunnel, he was seething suddenly with remorse, because of having done what he'd done and because he hadn't done more. Seething with outrage too, about “Basel” more than anything—as outraged by what Nathan had got right there as by what he'd got wrong, as much by what he'd been making up as by what he was reporting. It was the two in combination that were particularly galling, especially where the line was thin and everything was given the most distorted meaning.

By the time he got over to Jersey and had pulled off the turnpike to telephone Carol from a Howard Johnson's, he was thinking that it might be enough for now to store the pages in his safe, to stop at his office before going home and leave the envelope there. Seal it, lock it away, and then bequeath it in his will to some library to open fifty years hence, if anyone should even be interested by then. Keeping it in the safe, he could at least think everything through again in six months. Far less likely then to do the wrong thing—the thing that Nathan would expect him to do, were Nathan waiting to see what became of the manuscript. Already once this week—while writing that eulogy—he had pretended to be dead … suppose he were at it again, waiting to see me confirm his imaginings. The thought was absurd and yet he couldn't stop thinking it—his brother was provoking him to enact the role that he had assigned him, the role of a mediocrity. As though that word could
begin
to describe the structure he had built himself!