Philip Roth - Everyman

As soon as he moved into the village, he turned the sunny living room of his three-room condo into an artist's studio, and now, after taking his daily hour-long four-mile walk on the boardwalk, he spent most of the remainder of each day fulfilling a long-standing ambition by happily painting away, a routine that yielded all the excitement he'd expected. He missed nothing about New York except Nancy, the child whose presence had never ceased to delight him, and who, as a divorced mother of two four-year-olds, was no longer protected in the way that he'd hoped. In the aftermath of their daughter's divorce, he and Phoebe – equally weighed down by anxiety – had stepped in and, separately, spent more time with Nancy than they had since she'd gone off to the Midwest to college. There she'd met the poetic husband-to-be, a graduate student openly disdainful of commercial culture and particularly of her father's line of work, who, once he discovered himself no longer simply half of a quiet, thoughtful couple who liked to listen to chamber music and read books in their spare time but a father of twins, found the tumult of a young family's domestic existence unbearable – especially for someone needing order and silence to complete a first novel – and charged Nancy with fostering this great disaster with her ongoing lament over his impeding her maternal instinct. After work and on weekends he absented himself more and more from the clutter created in their undersized apartment by the needs of the two clamoring tiny creatures he had crazily spawned, and when he finally upped and left his publishing job – and parenthood – he had to go clear back to Minnesota to regain his sanity and resume his thinking and evade as much responsibility as he possibly could.

If her father could have had his way, Nancy and the twins would have moved to the shore too. She could have commuted to work on the Jersey line, leaving the kids with nannies and babysitters costing half as much as help in New York, and he would have been nearby to look after them as well, to take them to and from preschool, to oversee them at the beach, and so on. Father and daughter could have met to have dinner once a week and to take a walk together on weekends. They'd all be living beside the beautiful sea and away from the threat of Al Qaeda. The day after the destruction of the Twin Towers he'd said to Nancy, "I've got a deep-rooted fondness for survival. I'm getting out of here." And just ten weeks later, in late November, he left. The thought of his daughter and her children falling victim to a terrorist attack tormented him during his first months at the shore, though once there he no longer had anxiety for himself and was rid of that sense of pointless risk taking that had dogged him every day since the catastrophe had subverted everyone's sense of security and introduced an ineradicable precariousness into their daily lives. He was merely doing everything he reasonably could to stay alive. As always – and like most everyone else – he didn't want the end to come a minute earlier than it had to.

The year after the insertion of the renal stent, he had surgery for another major obstruction, this one in his left carotid artery, one of the two main arteries that stretch from the aorta to the base of the skull and supply blood to the brain and that if left obstructed could cause a disabling stroke or even sudden death. The incision was made in the neck, then the artery feeding the brain was clamped shut to stop the blood flowing through it. Then it was slit open and the plaque that was causing the blockage scraped out and removed. It would have been a help not to have to face this delicate an operation alone, but Nancy was swamped by her job and the demands of caring for the children without a mate, and as yet he'd met no one at Starfish Beach whom he could ask for assistance. Nor did he want to disrupt his brother's hectic schedule to tell him about the surgery and cause him to be concerned, especially as he would be out of the hospital the following morning, providing there were no complications. This wasn't the peritonitis crisis or the quintuple bypass surgery – from a medical point of view it was nothing extraordinary, or so he was led to believe by the agreeable surgeon, who assured him that a carotid endarterectomy was a common vascular surgical procedure and he would be back at his easel within a day or two.

So he drove off alone in the early morning to the hospital and waited in a glassed-in anteroom on the surgical floor along with another ten or twelve men in hospital gowns scheduled for the first round of operations that day. The room would probably be full like this until as late as four in the afternoon. Most of the patients would come out the other end, and, too, over the course of the weeks, a few might not; nonetheless, they passed the time reading the morning papers, and when the name of one of them was called and he got up to leave for the operating room, he gave his sections of the paper to whoever requested them. You would have thought from the calm in the room that they were going off to get their hair cut, rather than, say, to get the artery leading to the brain sliced open.

At one point, the man to his side, having handed him that day's sports section, quietly began talking to him. He was probably only in his late forties or early fifties, but his skin was pasty and his voice was not strong or assured. "First my mother died," he said, "six months later my father died, eight months after that my only sister died, a year later my marriage broke down and my wife took everything I had. And that's when I began to imagine someone coming to me and saying, 'Now we're going to cut off your right arm as well. Do you think you can take that?' And so they cut off my right arm. Then later they come around and they say, 'Now we're going to cut off your left arm.' Then, when that's done, they come back one day and they say, 'Do you want to quit now? Is that enough? Or should we go ahead and start in on your legs?' And all the time I was thinking, When, when do I quit? When do I turn on the gas and put my head in the oven? When is enough enough? That was how I lived with my grief for ten years. It took ten years. And now the grief is finally over and this shit starts up." When his turn came, the fellow beside him reached over to take the sports section back, and he was shepherded to the operating room by a nurse. Inside, half a dozen people were moving about in the glare of the lights making preparations for his surgery. He could not locate the surgeon among diem. It would have reassured him to see the surgeon's friendly face, but either the doctor hadn't entered the operating room yet or he was off in some corner where he couldn't quite be seen. Several of the younger doctors were already wearing surgical masks, and the look of them made him think of terrorists. One of them asked whether he wanted a general or a local anesthetic, the way a waiter might have asked if he preferred red or white wine. He was confused – why should the decision about anesthesia be made this late? "I don't know. Which is better?" he said. "For us, the local. We can monitor the brain function better if the patient is conscious." "You're telling me that's safer? Is that what you're saying? Then I'll do it."

It was a mistake, a barely endurable mistake, because the operation lasted two hours and his head was claustrophobically draped with a cloth and the cutting and scraping took place so close to his ear, he could hear every move their instruments made as though he were inside an echo chamber. But there was nothing to be done. No fight to put up. You take it and endure it. Just give yourself over to it for as long as it lasts.

He slept well that night, by the next day felt fine, and at noon, after he lied and said a friend was waiting downstairs to pick him up, he was released and went out to the parking lot and cautiously drove himself home. When he got to the condo and sat down in his studio to look at the canvas he could soon resume painting, he burst into tears, just as his father had after he'd got home from his near-fatal bout of peritonitis.