The Anatomy Lesson (18 page)

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—alt 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 Na
t
han,

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 stupid! 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 [ mean about something in me that is bent to your shape. (Ero
t
ically 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 mined 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.