The Anatomy Lesson (4 page)

He was also losing his hair. Either from all the worrying or all the drugs. He saw hair on the thesaurus when he rose from a session on the playmat. Hair came away by the combfu
l
as he prepared himself at the bathroom mirror for his next empty day. Shampooing in the shower, he found the strands of hair looped in the palms of his hands doubling and tripling with every rinse
—
he expected to see things getting better and with each successive rinsing they got worse.

In the Yellow Pages he found
“
Anton Associates Trichological Clinic
”
—the least outlandish ad under
“
Scalp Care
”
—and went off to the basement of the Commodore Hotel to se
e
if they could make good on their modest promise to
“
control all controllable hair problems.
”
He had the time, he had the hair problem, and it would be something like an adventure voyaging from the playmat to midtown one afternoon a week. The treatments couldn
’
t be less effective than what he
’
d been getting at Manhattan
’
s finest medical facilities for his neck, arms, and shoulders. In happier times he might have resigned himself with little more than a pang to the dismaying change in his appearance, but with so much else giving way in life, he decided
“
No, no further
”
: vocationally obstructed, physically disabled, sexually mindless. intellectually inert, spiritually depressed—but not bald overnight, not that too.

The initial consultation took place in a sanitary white office with diplomas on the wall. The sight of Anton, a vegetarian and a yoga practitioner as well as a scalp specialist, made Zuckerman feel a hundred and lucky even to have retained his teeth. Anton was a small and vibrant man in his sixties who looked to be still in his forties: his own hair, gleaming like a black polished helmet, stopped just short of cheekbone and brow. As a boy in Budapest. he told Zuckerman. he had b
een a champion gymnast and ever
since had devoted himself to the preservation of physical well-being through exercise, diet, and ethical living. He was particularly chagrined, while taking Zuckerman
’
s history, to
learn
of the heavy drinking. He asked if Zuckerman was under any undue pressure: pressure was a leading cause of premature hair loss.
“
I
’
m under pressure.
”
Zuckerman replied,
“
from prematurely losing hair.
”
He wouldn
’
t go into the pain, couldn
’
t narrate that enigma to yet another expert with a w
al
lful of diplomas. He wished, in fact, that he
’
d stayed at home. His hair at the center of his life! His receding hairline where his fiction used to be! Anton turned a lamp on Zuckerman
’
s scalp and lightly combed the thinning hair from one side to the other. Then he extracted from the teeth of the comb the hairs that had come loose during the examination and piled them carefully onto a tissue for analysis in the lab.

Zuckerman felt no bigger than his topmost bald spot as he was led along a narrow white corridor into the clinic—a dozen curtained cubicles with plumbing, each just large enough to hold a trained trichological technician and a man losing his hair. Zuckerman was introduced to a small, delicate young woman in a white unbelted smock reaching to below her knees and a white bandanna that gave her the look of a stem and dedicated nun, a novice in a nursing order. Jaga was from Poland; her name, explained Anton, was pronounced with a
“
Y
”
but spelled with an initial
“
J.
”
Mr. Zuckerman, he told Jaga—
”
the well-known American writer
”
—was suffering premature hair loss.

Zuckerman sat down before the mirror and contemplated his hair loss, while Anton elaborated on the treatment: white menthol ointment to strengthen the follicles, dark tar ointment to cleanse and disinfect, steamer to stimulate circulation, then fingertip massage, followed by Swedish electric massage and two minutes under the ultraviolet rays. To finish off, No. 7 dressing and fifteen drops of the special hormone solution, five to the hairline at each of the temples, five where it was thinnest at the crown. Zuckerman was to apply the drops himself every morning at home: the drops to promote growth and then, sparingly, the pink dressing to prevent splitting and breaking of the hair ends he had left. Jaga nodded, Anton bounded off to the lab with his pile of specimens, and in the cubicle his treatment began, recalling to Zuckerman a second Mann protagonist with whom he now shared a dubious affinity: Herr von Aschenbach, tinting his locks and rouging his cheeks in a Venetian barbershop.

At the end of the hour session
, Anton returned to guide Zuck
erman back to the office. Facing each other across Anton
’
s desk, they discussed the laboratory results.

“
I have completed the microscopical examination of your hair and scalp scrapings. There is a condition which we call folliculitis simplex, which means there is clogging of the hair follicles. Over a period of time it has led to some loss of hair. Also, by robbing the hair of its natural sebum flow it has created dryness of the hair, with consequent breakage and splitting—which could lead to further loss of hair. I am afraid,
”
said Anton, attempting in no way to soften the blow,
“
that there are quite a lot of follicles of the scalp which are devoid of hair. I am hoping that with some at least the papilla is only impaired and not destroyed. In this case regrowth can take place to some extent, in those areas. But only time will give us the answer to this. However, apart from the empty follicles, I feel that the prognosis in your case is good and that, with correct regular treatment and your help, your hair and scalp should respond and be restored to a healthy condition. We should be able to stop the clogging, obtain a freer flow of sebum, and restore the elasticity to the hair; then it will grow strong once again, making the overall appearance quite a bit thicker. The most important thing is that the loss of hair must not be allowed to continue.
”

It was the longest, most serious, most detailed and thoughtful diagnosis that Zuckerman had ever got from anyone for anything he had suffered in his life. Certainly the most optimistic he had heard in the last eighteen months. He couldn
’
t remember ever having had a book reviewer who
’
d given a novel of his as full, precise, and accurate a reading as Anton had given his scalp.
“
Thank you, Anton,
”
Zuckerman said.

“
But.
”

“
Yes?
”

“
There is a but,
”
said Anton gravely.

“
What is it?
”

“
What you do at home is just as important as what we do when you attend here for treatment. Number one, you must not drink to excess. You must stop this immediately. Number two, whatever is causing you undue pressure you must come to terms with. That there is undue pressure, I need no microscope to discover;
I
have only to look at you with my two eyes. Whatever it may be, you must eliminate it from your life. And quickly. Otherwise, Mr. Zuckerman, I must be honest with you: we are fighting a losing battle.
”

In the full-length mirror on his bathroom door, he saw at the start of each day a skinny old man holding Nathan
’
s pajamas: denuded scalp, fleshy hips, bony frame, softening belly. Eighteen months without his regular morning exercises and his long after-noon walks and his body had aged twenty years. Awakening as always promptly at eight, he worked now—worked with the same stubborn resolve with which formerly he could mount a morning-long assault on a single recalcitrant page—to fail back to sleep until noon. Steady, dogged, driven Zuckerman, unable ordinarily to go half an hour without reaching for a pad to write on or a book to underline, now with a bed sheet pulled over his head to shorten the time until evening, when he could hit the bottle. Self-regulating Zuckerman emptying another fifth, self-controlled Zuckerman sucking the last of a roach, self-sufficient Zuckerman helplessly clinging to his harem (
enlarged to include his trichol
ogical technician). Anything to cheer him up or put him out.

His comforters told him it was only tension and he should
learn
to relax. It was only loneliness and would disappear once he was back reading after dinner across from another worthy wife. They suggested that he was always finding new ways to be unhappy and didn
’
t know how to enjoy himself unless he was suffering. They agreed with the psychoanalyst that the pain was self-inflicted: penance for the popularity of
Carnovsky,
comeuppance for the financial bonanza—the enviable, comfortable American success story wrecked by the wrathful cells. Zuckerman was taking
“
pain
”
back to its root in
poena,
the Latin word for punishment: poena for the family portrait the whole country had assumed to be his, for the tastelessness that had affronted millions and the shamelessness that had enraged his tribe. The crippling of his upper torso was, transparently, the punishment called forth by his crime: mutilation as primitive justice. If the writing arm offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee. Beneath the ironic carapace of a tolerant soul, he was the most unforgiving Yahweh of them all. Who else could have written so blasphemously of Jewish moral suffocation but a self-suffocating Jew like Nathan? Yes, your illness is your necessity—that was the gist of it—and what prevents your recovery is you, you choosing to be incurable, you bullying into submission your own inbuilt will to be well. Unconsciously, Zuckerman was
frightened
of everything—another assumption generally accepted among his diagnosticians: frightened of success and frightened of failure: frightened of being known and frightened of being forgotten: frightened of
being bizarre and frightened of
being ordinary; frightened of being admired and frightened of being despised; frightened of being alone and frightened of being among people; frightened, after
Carnovsky.
of himself and his instincts, and frightened of being frightened. Cowardly betrayer of his verbal life—collaborator with the enemies of his filthy mouth. Unconsciously suppressing his talent for fear of what it
’
d do next.

But Zuckerman wasn
’
t buying it. His unconscious wasn
’
t that unconscious. Wasn
’
t that conventional. His unconscious, living with a published writer since 1953, understood what the job entailed. He had great faith in his unconscious—he could never have come this far without it. If anything, it was tougher and smarter than he was, probably what
protected
him against the envy of rivals, or the contempt of mandarins, or the outrage of Jews, or the charge by his brother Henry that what had shocked their ailing father into his fatal coronary in 1969 was Zuckerman
’
s hate-filled, mocking best-seller. If the Morse code of the psyche was indeed being tapped out along the wires of physical pain, the message had to be more original than
“
Don
’
t ever write that stuff again.
”

Of course one could always interpret a difficulty like this as a test of character. But what was twenty years of writing fiction? He didn
’
t need his character tested. He already had enough obstinacy to last a lifetime. Artistic principles? Up to his ears in them. If the idea was to marshal still more grim determination in the face of prolonged literary labors, then his pain was sadly misinformed. He could accomplish that on his own. Doomed to it by the mere passage of mine. The resolute patience he already possessed made life more excruciating by the year. Another twenty like the last twenty and there
’
d be no frustration to challenge him.

No, if the pain intended to accomplish something truly worthwhile, it would not be to strengthen his adamancy but to
undo
the stranglehold. Suppose there was the message flashing forth from a buried Nathan along the fibers of his nerves: Let the others write the books. Leave the fate of literature in their good hands and relinquish life alone in your room. It isn
’
t life and it isn
’
t you. It
’
s ten talons clawing at twenty-six letters. Some animal carrying on in the zoo like that and you
’
d think it was horrifying.
“
But surely they could hang a tire for him to swing on—at least bring in a little mate to roll around with him on the floor.
”
If you were to watch some certified madman groaning over a table in his little cell, o
bserve him trying to make some
thing sensible out of
QWERTYUIOP
,
ASDFGHJKL
, and
ZXCVBNM
, see him engrossed to the exclusion of ail else by three such nonsensical words, you
’
d be appalled, you
’
d clutch his keeper
’
s arm and ask,
“
Is there nothing to be done? No anti-hallucinogen? No surgical procedure?
”
But before the keeper could even reply,
“
Nothing—it
’
s hopeless,
”
the lunatic would be up on his feet, out of his mind, and shrieking at you through his bars:
“
Stop this infernal interference! Stop this shouting in my ears! How do I complete my life
’
s great work with all these g
aping visitors and their noise!
”