If he hangs up, he will be alone in that hallway behind the man who is waiting
behind the man who is down on the stairs tearing at Merry, he will be seeing
everything he does not want to see, knowing everything he cannot stand to know.
He cannot sit there imag-
· 274 ·
ining the rest of that story. If he hangs up, he will never know what Jerry has
to say after he says all this stuff that he for some reason wants to say about
the beast. What beast? All his relations with people are like this—it isn’t an
attack on me, it is Jerry. Nobody can control him. He was born like this. I knew
that before I called him. I’ve known it all my life. We do not live the same
way. A brother who isn’t a brother. I panicked. I am in a panic. This is panic.
I called the worst person to call in the world. This is a guy who wields a knife
for a living. Remedies what is ailing with a knife. Cuts out what is rotting
with a knife. I am on the ropes, I am dealing with something that nobody can
deal with, and for him it’s business as usual—he just keeps coming at me with
his knife.
“I’m not the renegade,” the Swede says. “I’m not the renegade— you are.”
“No, you’re not the renegade. You’re the one who does everything right.”
* * *
“I don’t follow this. You say that like an insult.” Angrily he says, “What the
hell is wrong with doing things right?”
“Nothing. Nothing. Except that’s what your daughter has been blasting away at
all her life. You don’t reveal yourself to people, Seymour. You keep yourself a
secret. Nobody knows what you are. You certainly never let her know who you are.
That’s what she’s been blasting away at—that facade. All your fucking norms.
Take a good look at what she did to your norms.”
“I don’t know what you want from me. You’ve always been too smart for me. Is
this your response? Is this it?”
“You win the trophy. You always make the right move. You’re loved by everybody.
You marry Miss New Jersey, for God’s sake. There’s thinking for you. Why did you
marry her? For the appearance. Why do you do everything? For the appearance!”
“I loved her! I opposed my own father I loved her so much!”
Jerry is laughing. “Is that what you believe? You really think you stood up to
him? You married her because you couldn’t get out of it. Dad raked her over the
coals in his office and you sat there and didn’t say shit. Well, isn’t that
true?”
“My daughter is in that room, Jerry. What is this all about?”
But Jerry does not hear him. He hears only himself. Why is this Jerry’s grand
occasion to tell his brother the truth? Why does someone, in the midst of your
worst suffering, decide the time has come to drive home, disguised in the form
of character analysis, all the contempt they have been harboring for you for all
these years? What in your suffering makes their superiority so fulsome, so
capacious, makes the expression of it so enjoyable? Why this occasion for
launching his protest at living in the shadow of me? Why, if he had to tell me
all this, couldn’t he have told it to me when I was feeling my oats? Why does he
even believe he’s in my shadow? Miami’s biggest cardiac surgeon! The heart
victim’s savior, Dr. Levov!
“Dad? He fucking let you slide through—don’t you know that? If Dad had said,
‘Look, you’ll never get my approval for this, never, I am not having
grandchildren half this and half that,’ then you would have had to make a
choice. But you never had to make a choice. Never. Because he let you slide
through. Everybody has always let you slide through. And that is why, to this
day, nobody knows who you are. You are unrevealed—that is the story, Seymour,
unrevealed. That is why your own daughter decided to blow you away. You are
never straight about anything and she hated you for it. You keep yourself a
secret. You don’t choose ever.”
“Why are you saying this? What do you want me to choose? What are we talking
about?”
“You think you know what a man is? You have no idea what a man is. You think you
know what a daughter is? You have no idea what a daughter is. You think you know
what this country is? You have no idea what this country is. You have a false
image of everything. All you know is what a fucking glove is. This country is
frightening. Of course she was raped. What kind of company do you think she was
keeping? Of course out there she was going to get raped. This isn’t Old Rimrock,
old buddy—she’s out there, old buddy, in the USA. She enters that world, that
loopy world out there, with what’s going on out there—what do you expect? A kid
from Rimrock, New Jersey, of course she doesn’t know how to
276
* * *
behave out there, of course the shit hits the fan. What could she know? She’s
like a wild child out there in the world. She can’t get enough of it—she’s still
acting up. A room off McCarter Highway. And why not? Who wouldn’t? You prepare
her for life milking the cows? For what kind of life? Unnatural, all artificial,
all of it. Those assumptions you live with. You’re still in your old man’s
dreamworld, Seymour, still up there with Lou Levov in glove heaven. A household
tyrannized by gloves, bludgeoned by gloves, the only thing in life—ladies’
gloves! Does he still tell the great one about the woman who sells the gloves
washing her hands in a sink between each color? Oh where oh where is that
outmoded America, that decorous America where a woman had twenty-five pairs of
gloves? Your kid blows your norms to kingdom come, Seymour, and you still think
you know what life is!”
Life is just a short period of time in which we are alive. Meredith Levov, 1964.
“You wanted Miss America? Well, you’ve got her, with a vengeance—she’s your
daughter! You wanted to be a real American jock, a real American marine, a real
American hotshot with a beautiful Gentile babe on your arm? You longed to belong
like everybody else to the United States of America? Well, you do now, big boy,
thanks to your daughter. The reality of this place is right up in your kisser
now. With the help of your daughter you’re as deep in the shit as a man can get,
the real American crazy shit. America amok! America amuck! Goddamn it, Seymour,
goddamn you, if you were a father who loved his daughter,” thunders Jerry into
the phone—and the hell with the convalescent patients waiting in the corridor
for him to check out their new valves and new arteries, to tell how grateful
they are to him for their new lease on life, Jerry shouts away, shouts all he
wants if it’s shouting he wants to do, and the hell with the rules of the
hospital. He is one of the surgeons who shouts: if you disagree with him he
shouts, if you cross him he shouts, if you just stand there and do nothing he
shouts. He does not do what hospitals tell him to do or fathers expect him to do
or wives want him to do, he does what he wants to do, does as he
277
pleases, tells people just who and what he is every minute of the day so that
nothing about him is a secret, not hi
s opinions, his frustrations, his urges,
neither his appetite nor his hatred. In the sphere of the will, he is
unequivocating, uncompromising; he is king. He does not spend time regretting
what he has or has not done or justifying to others how loathsome he can be. The
message is simple: You will take me as I come—there is no choice. He cannot
endure swallowing anything. He just lets loose.
And these two are brothers, the same parents’ sons, one for whom the
aggression’s been bred out, the other for whom the aggression’s been bred in.
“If you were a father who loved his daughter,” Jerry shouts at the Swede, “you
would never have left her in that room! You would never have let her out of your
sight!”
The Swede is in tears at his desk. It is as though Jerry has been waiting all
his life for this phone call. That something’s grotesquely out of whack has made
him furious with his older brother, and now there is nothing he will not say.
All his life, thinks the Swede, waiting to lay into me with these terrible
things. People are infallible: they pick up on what you want and then they don’t
give it to you.
“I didn’t want to leave her,” says the Swede. “You don’t understand. You don’t
want to understand. That isn’t why I left her. It killed me to leave her! You
don’t understand me, you won’t. Why do you say I don’t love her? This is
* * *
terrible. Horrible.” He suddenly sees his vomit on her face and he cries out,
“Everything is horrible!”
“Now you’re getting it. Right! My brother is developing the beginning of a point
of view. A point of view of his own instead of everybody else’s point of view.
Taking something other than the party line. Good. Now we’re getting somewhere.
Thinking becoming just a little untranquilized. Everything is horrible. And so
what are you going to do about it? Nothing. Look, do you want me to come up
there and get her? Do you want me to get her, yes or no?”
“No.”
“Then why did you call me?”
· 278 ·
THE FALL
“I don’t know. To help me.”
“Nobody can help you.”
“You’re a hard man. You are a hard man with me.”
“Yeah, I don’t come off looking very good. I never do. Ask our father if I do.
You’re the one who always comes off looking good. And look where it’s got you.
Refusing to give offense. Blaming yourself. Tolerant respect for every position.
Sure, it’s ‘liberal’—I know, a liberal father. But what does that mean? What is
at the center of it? Always holding things together. And look where the fuck
it’s got you!”
“I didn’t make the war in Vietnam. I didn’t make the television war. I didn’t
make Lyndon Johnson Lyndon Johnson. You forget where this begins. Why she threw
the bomb. That fucking war.”
“No, you didn’t make the war. You made the angriest kid in America. Ever since
she was a kid, every word she spoke was a bomb.”
“I gave her all I could, everything, everything, I gave everything. I swear to
you I gave everything.” And now he is crying easily, there is no line between
him and his crying, and an amazing new experience it is—he is crying as though
crying like this has been the great aim of his life, as though all along crying
like this was his most deeply held ambition, and now he has achieved it, now
that he remembers everything he gave and everything she took, all the
spontaneous giving and taking that had filled their lives and that one day,
inexplicably (despite whatever Jerry might say, despite all the blame that it is
his pleasure now to heap upon the Swede), quite inexplicably, became repugnant
to her. “You talk about what I’m dealing with as though anybody could deal with
it. But nobody could deal with it. Nobody! Nobody has the weapons for this. You
think I’m inept? You think I’m inadequate? If I’m inadequate, where are you
going to get people who are adequate … if I’m… do you understand what I’m
saying? What am I supposed to be? What are other people if I am inadequate?”
“Oh, I understand you.”
Crying easily was always about as difficult for the Swede as losing
279
his balance when he walked or deliberately being a bad influence on somebody;
crying easily was something he sometimes almost envied in other people. But
* * *
whatever chunks and fragments remain of the big manly barrier against crying,
his brother’s response to his pain demolishes. “If what you are telling me is
what I was …” he begins, “… wasn’t, wasn’t enough, then, then … I’m
telling you— I’m telling you that what anybody is is not enough.”
“You got it! Exactly! We are not enough. We are none of us enough! Including
disgust, “going around in this world doing things right. Look, are you going to
break with appearances and pit your will against your daughter’s or aren’t you?
Out on the field you did it. That’s how you scored, remember? You pitted your
will against the other guy’s and you scored. Pretend it’s a game if that helps.
It doesn’t help. For the typical male activity you’re there, the man of action,
but this isn’t the typical male activity. Okay. Can’t see yourself doing that.
Can only see yourself playing ball and making gloves and marrying Miss America.
Out there with Miss America, dumbing down and dulling out. Out there playing at
being Wasps, a little Mick girl from the Elizabeth docks and a Jewboy from
Weequahic High. The cows. Cow society. Colonial old America. And you thought all
that facade was going to come without cost. Genteel and innocent. But that
costs, too, Seymour, /would have thrown a bomb. I would become a Jain and live
in Newark. That Wasp bullshit! I didn’t know just how entirely muffled you were
internally. But this is how muffled you are. Our old man really swaddled you but
good. What do you want, Seymour? You want to bail out? That’s all right too.
Anybody else would have bailed out a long time ago. Go ahead, bail out. Admit
her contempt for your life and bail out. Admit that there is something very
personal about you that she hates and bail the fuck out and never see the bitch
again. Admit that she’s a monster, Seymour. Even a monster has to be from
somewhere—even a monster needs parents. But parents don’t need monsters. Bail
out! But if you are not going to bail out, if that is what you are calling to
tell me, then for Christ’s
· 280 ·
sake go in there and get her. I’ll go in and get her. How about that? Last
chance. Last offer. You want me to come, I’ll clear out the office and get on a
plane and I’ll come. And I’ll go in there, and, I assure you, I’ll get her off
the McCarter Highway, the little shit, the selfish little fucking shit, playing
her fucking games with you! She won’t play them with me, I assure you. Do you
want that or not?”
“I don’t want that.” These things Jerry thinks he knows that he doesn’t know.
His idea that things are connected. But there is no connection.
How we lived and
what she did? Where she was raised and what she did? It’s as disconnected as
everything else—it’s all a part of the same mess! He is the one who knows
nothing. Jerry rants. Jerry thinks he can escape the bewilderment by ranting,
shouting, but everything he shouts is wrong. None of this is true. Causes, clear
answers, who there is to blame. Reasons. But there are no reasons. She is
obliged to be as she is. We all are. Reasons are in books. Could how we lived as
a family ever have come back as this bizarre horror? It couldn’t. It hasn’t.
Jerry tries to rationalize it but you can’t. This is all something else,
something he knows absolutely nothing about. No one does. It is not rational. It
is chaos. It is chaos from start to finish. “I don’t want that,” the Swede tells
him. “I can’t have that.”
“Too brutal for you. In this world, too brutal. The daughter’s a murderer but
this is too brutal. A drill instructor in the Marine Corps but this is too
brutal. Okay, Big Swede, gentle giant. I got a waiting room full of patients.
You’re on your own.”
281
Ill
* * *
Paradise Lost
? ? ?
7
I
t was the summer of the Watergate hearings. The Levovs had spent nearly every
night on the back porch watching the replay of the day’s session on Channel 13.