Philip Roth - Everyman

Shortly after the folly with the childlike Varga Girl in the running shorts and the tank top, he decided to sell the condominium and move back to New York. He considered his giving up on the shore a failure, almost as painful a failure as what had happened to him as a painter in the past half year. Even before 9/11 he had contemplated a retirement of the kind he'd been living for three years now; the disaster of 9/11 had appeared to accelerate his opportunity to make a big change, when in fact it had marked the beginning of his vulnerability and the origin of his exile. But now he'd sell the condo and try to find a place in New York close to Nancy 's apartment on the Upper West Side. Because the condo's value had almost doubled in the short time he'd owned it, he might be able to shell out enough cash down to buy a place up by Columbia big enough for all of them to live together under one roof. He'd pay the household expenses and she could meet her own expenses with the child support. She could cut back to working three days a week and spend four full days with the children, as she'd been wanting to do – but couldn't afford to do – since she'd returned to her job from maternity leave. Nancy, the twins, and himself. It was a plan worth proposing to her. She might not mind his assistance, and he was hungering for the company of an intimate to whom he could give and from whom he could receive, and who better in all the world than Nancy?

He allowed himself a couple of weeks to determine how workable the plan was and to gauge how desperate he might seem presenting it. Finally, when he'd decided that for the time being he would propose nothing to Nancy but rather go into New York for a day to begin on his own to investigate the possibility of finding an apartment in his price range that could comfortably accommodate the four of them, the rush of bad news came over the phone, first about Phoebe and the next day about three of his former colleagues.

He learned of Phoebe's stroke when the phone rang a little after six-thirty in the morning. It was Nancy calling from the hospital. Phoebe had phoned her about an hour earlier to tell her that something was happening to her, and by the time Nancy got her to the emergency room her speech was so thick she could barely make herself understood and she'd lost movement in her right arm. They had just finished the MRI and Phoebe was now resting in her room.

"But a stroke, someone as youthful and healthy as your mother? Was it something to do with the migraines? Is that possible?"

"They think it was from the medication she was taking for the migraines," Nancy said. "It was the first drug that had ever helped. She realized the medication posed a minute danger of causing a stroke. She knew that. But once she found that it worked, once she was rid of that pain for the first time in fifty years, she decided it was worth the risk. She'd had three miraculous years pain free. It was bliss."

"Till now," he said sadly. "Till this. Do you want me to drive up?"

"I'll let you know. Let's see how things go. They believe she's out of trouble."

"Will she recover? Will she be able to speak?"

"The doctor says so. He thinks she'll recover one hundred percent."

"Wonderful," he said, but thought, Let's see what he thinks a year from now.

Without his even asking her, Nancy told him, "When she leaves the hospital, she's going to come to stay with me. Matilda will be there during the day and I'll be there the rest of the time." Matilda was the Antiguan nanny who'd begun looking after the children once Nancy had gone back to work.

"That's good," he said.

"It's going to be a total recovery, but the rehab will take a long time."

He was to have driven into New York that very day to begin the search for an apartment for all of them; instead, after consulting Nancy, he went into the city to visit Phoebe at the hospital and then drove back to the shore that evening to resume his life there alone. Nancy, the twins, and himself – it had been a ridiculous idea to begin with, and unfair as well, an abdication of the pledge he'd made to himself after having moved to the shore, which was to insulate his all too responsive daughter from the fears and vulnerabilities of an aging man. Now that Phoebe was so ill, the change he'd imagined for them was impossible anyway, and he determined never to entertain any such plan for Nancy again. He could not let her see him as he was.

At the hospital, Phoebe lay there looking stunned. In addition to the slurred speech caused by the stroke, her voice was barely audible, and she was having difficulty swallowing. He had to sit right up against the hospital bed in order to understand what she was saying. They hadn't been this close to each other's limbs in over two decades, not since he'd gone off to Paris and was there with Merete when his own mother had the stroke that killed her.

"Paralysis is terrifying," she told him, staring down at the lifeless right arm by her side. He nodded. "You look at it," she said, "you tell it to move…" He waited while the tears rolled down her face and she struggled to finish the sentence. When she couldn't, he finished it for her. "And it doesn't," he said softly. Now she nodded, and he remembered the heated eruption of fluency that had come in the wake of his betrayal. How he wished she could scald him in that lava now. Anything, anything, an indictment, a protest, a poem, an ad campaign for American Airlines, a one-page ad for the Reader's Digest – anything as long as she could recover her speech! Playfully-full-of-words Phoebe, frank and open Phoebe, muzzled! "It's everything you can imagine," she painstakingly told him.

Her beauty, frail to begin with, was smashed and broken, and tall as she was, under the hospital sheets she looked shrunken and already on the way to decomposing. How could the doctor dare to tell Nancy that the mercilessness of what had befallen her mother would leave no enduring mark? He leaned forward to touch her hair, her soft white hair, doing his best not to cry himself and remembering again – the migraines, Nancy's birth, the day he'd come upon Phoebe Lambert at the agency, fresh, frightened, intriguingly innocent, a properly raised girl and, unlike Cecilia, unclouded by a crushing history of childhood chaos, everything about her sound and sane, blessedly not prone to outbursts, and yet without her being at all simple: the very best in the way of naturalness that Quaker Pennsylvania and Swarthmore College could produce. He remembered her reciting from memory for him, unostentatiously and in flawless Middle English, the prologue to The Canterbury Tales and, too, the surprising antique locutions she'd picked up from her starchy father, things like "We must be at pains to understand this" and "It is not going too far to say," which could have made him fall for her even without that first glimpse of her striding single-mindedly by his open office door, a mature young woman, the only one in the office who wore no lipstick, tall and bosomless, her fair hair pulled back to reveal the length of her neck and the delicate small-lobed ears of a child. "Why do you laugh sometimes at what I say," she asked him the second time he took her to dinner, "why do you laugh when I'm being perfectly serious?" "Because you charm me so, and you're so unaware of your charm." "There's so much to learn," she said while he accompanied her home in the taxi; when he replied softly, without a trace of the urgency he felt, "I'll teach you," she had to cover her face with her hands. "I'm blushing. I blush," she said. "Who doesn't?" he told her, and he believed that she'd blushed because she thought he was referring not to the subject of their conversation – all the art she'd never seen – but to sexual ardor, as indeed he was. He wasn't thinking in the taxi of showing her the Rembrandts at the Metropolitan Museum but of her long fingers and her wide mouth, though soon enough he'd take her not just to the Metropolitan but to the Modern, the Frick, and the Guggenheim. He remembered her removing her bathing suit out of sight in the dunes. He remembered them, later in the afternoon, swimming back together across the bay. He remembered how everything about this candid, unaffected woman was so unpredictably exciting. He remembered the nobility of her straightness. Against her own grain, she sparkled. He recalled telling her, "I can't live without you," and Phoebe's replying, "Nobody has ever said that to me before," and his admitting, "I've never said it before myself."