The Counterlife by Philip Roth

Author:Philip Roth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

4. Gloucestershire

A YEAR AFTER being put on the drugs, still alive and feeling fit, no longer plagued by cartoon visions of male erections and ejaculations, when I have begun to contain the loss by forcing myself to understand that this is not the worst deprivation, not at my age and after my experience, just as I’ve begun to accept the only real wisdom—to live without what I no longer have—a temptress appears to test to the utmost this tenuous “adjustment.” If for Henry there’s Wendy, who is there for me? As I haven’t had to endure his marriage or suffer his late sexual start, a vampire-seductress won’t really do to lure me to destruction. It can’t be for more of what I’ve tasted that I risk my life, but for what’s unknown, a temptation by which I’ve never before been engulfed, a yearning mysteriously kindled by the wound itself. If the uxorious husband and devoted paterfamilias dies for clandestine erotic fervor, then I shall turn the moral tables: I die for family life, for fatherhood.

I’m over the worst of my fear and bewilderment, able again to engage men and women in ordinary social conversation without thinking bitterly all the while how unfit I am for sexual contention, when into the duplex at the top of the brownstone moves just the woman to do me in. She’s twenty-seven, younger than I am by seventeen years. There is a husband and a child. Since the child’s birth over a year ago, the husband has grown estranged from his pretty wife and the hours they used to pass in bed they now spend in acrimonious discussion. “The first months after I’d had the baby he was monstrous. So cold. He would come in and ask, ‘Where’s the baby?’ I didn’t exist. It’s odd that I can’t keep his attention any longer, but I can’t. I feel quite lonely. My husband, when he even deigns to speak, tells me it’s the human condition.” “When I found you,” I say to her, “you were hanging ripe, ready for plucking.” “No,” she replies, “I was already on the ground, rotting at the foot of the tree.”

She speaks in the most mesmeric tones, and it’s the voice that does the seducing, it’s the voice that I have to caress me, the voice of the body I can’t possess. A tall, charming, physically inaccessible Maria, with curling dark hair, a smallish oval face, elongated dark eyes, and those caressing tones, those gently inflected English ups and downs, a shy Maria who seems to me beautiful but considers herself “at best a near-miss,” a Maria I love more each time we meet to speak, until at last the end is ordained and I go to meet my brother’s fate. And whether in the service of flagrant unreality, who will ever know?

“Your beauty is dazzling.” “No,” she says. “It’s dazzled me.” “It can’t, really.” “It does.” “I don’t have admirers anymore, you know.” “How can that be?” I ask. “Must you believe that all your women are beautiful?” “You are.

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