Philip Roth - Everyman

But now, instead of ending, it continued; now not a year went by when he wasn't hospitalized. The son of long-lived parents, the brother of a man six years his senior who was seemingly as fit as he'd been when he'd carried the ball for Thomas Jefferson High, he was still only in his sixties when his health began giving way and his body seemed threatened all the time. He'd married three times, had mistresses and children and an interesting job where he'd been a success, but now eluding death seemed to have become the central business of his life and bodily decay his entire story.

The year after he had carotid artery surgery he had an angiogram in which the doctor discovered that he'd had a silent heart attack on the posterior wall because of an obstructed graft. The news stunned him, though fortunately Nancy had come down by train to accompany him to the hospital and her reassurance helped restore his equanimity. The doctor then went on to perform an angioplasty, and inserted a stent in his left anterior descending artery, after ballooning the artery open where new deposits of plaque had formed. From the table he could watch the catheter being wiggled up into the coronary artery – he was under the lightest sedation and able to follow the whole procedure on the monitor as though his body were somebody else's. A year later he had another angioplasty and another stent installed in one of the grafts, which had begun to narrow. The following year he had to have three stents installed at one go – to repair arterial obstructions whose location, as the doctor told him afterward, made the procedure no picnic to perform.

As always, to keep his mind elsewhere he summoned up his father's store and the names of the nine brands of watches and seven brands of clocks for which his father was an authorized distributor; his father didn't make much money selling watches and clocks, but he loaded up on them because they were a steady item and brought window-shoppers in from the street. What he did with these seed memories during each of his angioplasties was this: he would tune out the badinage the doctors and nurses invariably exchanged while setting up, tune out the rock music pumped into the chilly, sterile room where he lay strapped to the operating table amid all the intimidating machinery designed to keep cardiac patients alive, and from the moment they got to work anesthetizing his groin and puncturing the skin for the insertion of the arterial catheter, he would distract himself by reciting under his breath the lists he'd first alphabetized as a small boy helping at the store after school – "Benrus, Bulova, Croton, Elgin, Hamilton, Helbros, Ovistone, Waltham, Wittnauer" – focusing all the while on the distinctive look of the numerals on the dial of the watch as he intoned its brand name, sweeping from one through twelve and back again. Then he'd start on the clocks – "General Electric, Ingersoll, McClintock, New Haven, Seth Thomas, Telechron, Westclox" – remembering how the wind clocks ticked and the electric clocks hummed until finally he heard the doctor announce that the procedure was over and that everything had gone well. The doctor's assistant, after applying pressure to the wound, placed a sandbag on the groin to prevent bleeding, and with the weight resting there, he had to lie motionless in his hospital bed for the next six hours. His not being able to move was the worst of it, strangely – because of the thousands of involuntary thoughts that suffused the slow-moving time – but the following morning, if all had gone well overnight, he was brought a tray of inedible breakfast to look at and a sheaf of post-angioplasty instructions to follow and by eleven A.M. he would have been discharged. On three separate occasions he'd arrived at home and was hurriedly undressing for a much-needed shower when he'd found a couple of the EKG electrode pads still stuck to him, because the nurse helping to discharge him had forgotten to peel them from his chest and throw them in the garbage. One morning he looked down in the shower to find that no one had bothered to remove the IV feeding needle, a gadget they called a heplock, from his black-and-blue forearm, and so he had to dress and drive over to his internist's office in Spring Lake to have the heplock taken out before it became a source of infection.

The year after the three stents he was briefly knocked out on an operating table while a defibrillator was permanently inserted as a safeguard against the new development that endangered his life and that along with the scarring at the posterior wall of his heart and his borderline ejection fraction made him a candidate for a fatal cardiac arrhythmia. The defibrillator was a thin metal box about the size of a cigarette lighter; it was lodged beneath the skin of his upper chest, a few inches from his left shoulder, with its wire leads attached to his vulnerable heart, ready to administer a shock to correct his heartbeat – and confuse death – if it became perilously irregular.

Nancy had been with him for this procedure too, and afterward, when he got back to his room and he lowered one side of his hospital gown to show her the visible bulge that was the embedded defibrillator, she had to turn away. "Darling," he said to her, "it's to protect me – there's nothing to be upset about." "I know that it's to protect you. I'm glad there is such a thing that's able to protect you. It's just a shock to see because," and finding herself too far along to come up with a comforting lie, she said, "because you've always been so youthful." "Well, I'm more youthful with it than I would be without it. I'll be able to do everything I like to do, only without having to worry about the arrhythmia putting me at serious risk." But she was pale with helplessness and couldn't stop the tears from running down her face: she wanted her father to be the way he was when she was ten and eleven and twelve and thirteen, without impediment or incapacity – and so did he. She couldn't possibly have wanted it as much as he did, but for that moment he found his own sorrow easier to accept than hers. The desire was strong to say something tender to alleviate her fears, as though, all over again, she were the more vulnerable of the two.

He never really stopped worrying about her, nor did he understand how it happened that such a child should be his. He hadn't necessarily done the right things to make it happen, even if Phoebe had. But there are such people, spectacularly good people – miracles, really – and it was his great fortune that one of these miracles was his own incorruptible daughter. He was amazed when he looked around himself and saw how bitterly disappointed parents could be – as he was with his own two sons, who continued to act as if what had happened to them had never happened before or since to anyone else – and then to have a child who was number one in every way. Sometimes it seemed that everything was a mistake except Nancy. So he worried about her, and he still never passed a women's clothing shop without thinking of her and going in to find something she'd like, and he thought, I'm very lucky, and he thought, Some good has to come out somewhere, and it has in her.

He was remembering now her brief period as a track star. When Nancy was thirteen she'd placed second in a race at her all-girls school, a run of about two miles, and she saw the possibility of something in which she could be exceptional. She was good in everything else, but this was another kind of stardom. For a while he gave up swimming at the club first thing so they could run together in the early morning and sometimes, too, in the day's waning hours. They'd go to the park and it would be just the two of them and the shadows and the light. She was running for the school team by then, and during a meet she was rounding a bend when her leg gave way and she fell to the track in agony. What had happened was something that can happen to a girl in early puberty – because the bones don't fully harden by that age, what would have been in a mature woman merely a strained tendon was more dramatic for Nancy: the tendon held but a piece of bone in the hip pulled away. Along with the track coach, he rushed Nancy to the hospital emergency room, where she was in great pain and very fearful, especially when she heard there was nothing to be done, though at the same time she was told, correctly enough, that the injury would heal by itself over a period of time. But that was the end of her track career, not just because recovery would take the rest of the season but because puberty was upon her, and soon her breasts enlarged and her hips widened and the speed that was hers when she had her childish body disappeared. And then, as if the end of her championship running and the alteration of her physique weren't enough to leave her reeling, that very year delivered the misery of her parents' divorce.