Philip Roth - Operation Shylock

When she said “implant,” I thought of the way an explorer, concluding his epochal voyage, claims all the land he sees for the crown by implanting the royal flag — before they send him back in chains and he is beheaded for treason. “You might as well tell me everything,” I said.

“But you think everything is lies when it’s true, so terribly, terribly, terribly true.”

“Tell me about the implant.”

“He got it for me.”

“That I can believe.”

She was crying now. Rolling down her cheeks were plump tears that had all the fullness of her own beautifully upholstered frame, an embattled child’s enormous outpouring of pent-up tears, attesting to a tender nature that was simply indisputable now even to me. This raving madman had somehow got himself a wonderful woman, an out-and-out saint with a wonderful heart whose selfless life had gone monstrously wrong.

“He was afraid,” she said. “He wept and wept. It was so awful. He was going to lose me to some other man, a man who could still do it. He was going to lose me, he said. I would leave him all alone to die in agony with the cancer — and how could I say no? How can Wanda Jane say no when someone is suffering like that? How can a nurse who has seen all I’ve seen say no to a penile implant if that is going to give him the strength to fight on? Sometimes I think that I am the only one who follows the teachings of our Lord. That’s what I sometimes think when I feel him pushing that thing inside me.”

“And who is he? Tell me who he is.”

“Another fucked-up Jewish boy. The fucked-up shiksa’s fucked-up Jewish boyfriend, a wild, hysterical animal, that’s who he is. That’s who I am. That’s who we are. Everything’s about his mother.”

“Not really.”

“His mother didn’t love him enough.”

“But that’s out of my book, isn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“I wrote a book, a hundred years ago.”

“I know that . But I don’t read. He gave it to me but I didn’t read it. I have to hear the words. That was the hardest part of school, the reading. I have a lot of trouble with my d’ s and b’ s.”

“As in ‘double.’”

“I’m dyslexic.”

“You’ve had a lot to overcome, haven’t you?”

“You can say that again.”

“Tell me about his mother.”

“She used to lock him out of the house. On the landing outside their apartment. He was all of five years old. ‘You don’t live here anymore.’ That’s what she would tell him. ‘You are not our little boy. You belong to somebody else.’”

“Where was this? In what city? Where was the father in all this?”

“Don’t know, he doesn’t say anything about the father. All he ever says is that he was always locked out by the mother.”

“But what had he done?”

“Who knows? Assault. Armed robbery. Murder. Crimes beyond description. I guess the mother knew. He used to set his jaw and wait on the landing for her to open up. But she was as stubborn as he was and wouldn’t give in. A little five-year-old boy was not going to be in charge of her . A sad story, isn’t it? Then it got dark. That’s when he folded. He’d start to whimper like a dog and beg for his dinner. She’d say, ‘Get dinner from the people you belong to.’ Then he’d beg to be forgiven six or seven times more and she would figure he was broken enough and open up the door. Philip’s whole childhood is about that door.”

“So this is what made the outlaw.”

“Is it? I thought it’s what made the detective.”

“Might be what made both. The angry boy outside the door, overcome by helplessness. Unjust persecution. What a rage must have boiled up in that five-year-old child. What defiance must have been born in him out there on that landing. The thing excluded. Cast out. Banished. The family monster. I am alone and despicable. No, that’s not my book, I don’t go anywhere like that far. I believe he got that from another book. The infant put out by his parents to perish. Ever hear of Oedipus Rex?”

Can I help it if I felt tickled with adoration for this beguiling woman on my bed when she said to me, gaily, with the Mae West slyness in her voice of the woman rich with amorous surprises, “Honey, even us dyslexies know about Oedipus Rex.”

“I don’t know what to make of you,” I said, truthfully.

“It’s not easy to know what to make of you, either.”

A pause followed, filled with fantasies of our future together. A long, long pause and a long, long look, from the chair to the bed and back.

“So. How did he settle on me?” I asked.

“How?” She laughed. “You’re joking.”

“Yes, how?” I was laughing now too.

“Look in the mirror someday. Who else was he going to settle on, Michael Jackson? I can’t believe you two. I see you guys coming and going. Look, don’t think this has been easy for me. It’s totally weird. I think I’m dreaming.”

“Well, not totally. It took some doing on his part.”

“Well, not much.” And that’s when I got that particular smile again, that slow curling upward at the corner of the mouth that was to me the epitome of sexual magic, as I’ve said. It has to be clear even to a small child reading this confession that from the moment I’d pushed back the bureau and let her slip into my room in that dress, I had been struggling to neutralize her erotic attraction and to eradicate the carnal thoughts aroused in me by the desperate, disheveled look of her recumbent on my bed. Don’t think it’d been easy for me, honey, when she’d moaned in a whisper, “Put me in your bag and take me with you.” But while drinking in the roman-fleuve of her baffled quest for guardianship (among the Protestants, the Catholics, and the Jews), I had maintained as best I could the maximum skepticism. Charm there was, admittedly, but her verbal authority was really not great, and I told myself that, in any circumstance less drastic than this (if, say, I’d sidled up to her at one of those Chicago singles bars when she was a nurse hanging out), after five minutes of listening I would have been hard put not to try my luck with someone who wasn’t being endlessly reborn. Yet, all this said, the effect of her smile was to make me tumescent.

I didn’t know what to make of her. A woman forged by the commonplace at its most cruelly ridiculous smiles up from a hotel bed at a man who has every reason in the world to be nowhere near her, a man to whom she is the mate in no way whatsoever, and the man is underground with Persephone. You are in awe of eros’s mythological depths when something like that happens to you. What Jung calls “the uncontrollability of real things,” what a registered nurse just calls “life.”

“We aren’t indistinguishable, you know.”

“That word. That’s the word. He uses it a hundred times a day. ‘We’re indistinguishable.’ He’s looking in the mirror and that’s what he says — ‘We’re indistinguishable.’”

“Well, we’re not,” I informed her, “not by a long shot.”

“No? What is it then, you’ve got a different Life line? I do palmistry. I learned it once, hitchhiking. I read palms instead of books.”

And I did next the stupidest thing I’d yet done in Jerusalem and perhaps in my entire life. I got up from the chair by the window and stepped across to the bed and took hold of the hand that she was extending. I placed my hand in hers, in the nurse’s hand that had been everywhere, the nurse’s tabooless, transgressive hand, and she ran her thumb lightly along my palm and then palpated in turn each of its cushioned corners. For at least a full minute she said only, “Ummm … ummm …,” all the while carefully studying my hand. “It’s not surprising,” she finally told me very, very quietly, as though not to awaken a third person in the bed, “that the Head line is surprisingly long and deep. Your Head line is the strongest line in the hand. It’s a Head line dominated by imagination rather than by money or heart or reason or intellect. There’s a strong warlike component to your Fate line. Your Fate line sort of rises in the Mount of Mars. You actually have three Fate lines. Which is very unusual. Most people don’t have any.”