To be sure, it would probably help some if I were at least to mention in passing the pleasant Saturday strolls that Lydia and Nathan used to take together down by the lake, their picnics, their bicycle rides, their visits to the zoo, the aquarium, the Art Institute, to the theater when the Bristol Old Vic and Marcel Marceau came to town; I could write about the friendships they made with other university couples, the graduate-student parties they occasionally went to on weekends, the lectures by famous poets and critics they attended at Mandel Hall, the evenings they spent together reading by the fire in Lydia’s apartment. But to call up such memories in order to make the affair more credible would actually be to mislead the reader about the young man Nathan Zuckerman was; pleasures and comforts of the ordinary social variety were to him inconsequential, for they seemed without moral content. It wasn’t because they both enjoyed eating Chinese food on Sixty-third Street or even because both admired Chekhov’s short stories that he married Lydia; he could have married Sharon Shatzky for that, and for more. Incredible as it may seem to some-and I am one of them-it was precisely “the uniformly dismal situation” that did more for Lydia’s cause than all the companionable meals and walks and museum visits and the cozy fireside conversations in which he corrected her taste in books.
To the reader who “believes” in Zuckerman’s predicament as I describe it, but is unwilling to take such a person as seriously as I do, let me say that I am tempted to make fun of him myself. To treat this story as a species of comedy would not require more than a slight alteration in tone and attitude. In graduate school, for a course tided “Advanced Shakespeare,” I once wrote a paper on Othello proposing just such a shift in emphasis. I imagined, in detail, several unlikely productions, including one in which Othello and Iago addressed each other as “Mr. Interlocutor” and “Mr. Bones,” and another, somewhat more extreme, in which the racial situation was entirely reversed, with Othello acted by a white man and the rest of the cast portrayed by blacks, thus shedding another kind of light (I concluded) on the “motiveless malignity.”
In the story at hand, it would seem to me that from the perspective of this decade particularly, there is much that could be ridiculed having to do with the worship of ordeal and forbearance and the suppression of the sexual man. It would not require too much ingenuity on my part to convert the protagonist here into an insufferable prig to be laughed at, a character out of a farce. Or if not the protagonist, then the narrator. To some, the funniest thing of all, or perhaps the strangest, may not be how I conducted myself back then, but the literary mode in which I have chosen to narrate my story today: the decorousness, the orderliness, the underlying sobriety, that “responsible” manner that I continue to affect. For not only have literary manners changed drastically since all this happened ten years ago, back in the middle fifties, but I myself am hardly who I was or wanted to be: no longer am I a member in good standing of that eminently decent and humane university community, no longer am I the son my parents proudly used to address by mail as “professor.” By my own standards, my private life is a failure and a disgrace, neither decorous, nor sober, and surely not “responsible.”
Or so it seems to me: I am full of shame and believe myself to be a scandalous figure. I can’t imagine that I shall ever have the courage to return to live in Chicago, or anywhere in America. Presently we reside in one of the larger Italian cities; “we” are myself and Monica, or Moonie, as I eventually came to call her in our intimacy. The two of us have been alone together now since Lydia gouged open her wrists with the metal tip of a can opener and bled to death in the bathtub of our ground-floor apartment on Woodlawn, where the three of us were living as a family. Lydia was thirty-five when she died, I was just thirty, and Moonie sixteen. After Ketterer’s second divorce, I had gone to court, in Lydia’s behalf, and sued to regain custody of her daughter-and I won. How could I lose? I was a respectable academic and promising author whose stories appeared in serious literary quarterlies; Ketterer was a wife beater, two times over. That was how Moonie came to be living with us in Hyde Park-and how Lydia came to suffer her final torment. For she could not have been any more excluded from their lives by the aunts in Skokie, or more relegated to the position of an unloved Cinderella, than she was by what grew up between Moonie and myself and constituted during those years my only sexual yearning. Lydia used to awaken me in the middle of the night by pounding on my chest with her fists. And nodding Dr. Rutherford might do or say could stop her. “If you ever lay a finger on my daughter,” she would cry, “I’ll drive a knife into your heart!” But I never did sleep with Moonie, not so long as her mother was alive. Under the guise of father and daughter, we touched and fondled one another’s flesh; as the months went by we more and more frequently barged in upon one another-unknowingly, inadvertently-in the midst of dressing or unclothed in the bathtub; raking leaves in the yard or out swimming off the Point we were playful and high-spirited, as a man and his young mistress might be expected to be…but in the end, as though she were my own offspring or my own sister, I honored the incest taboo. It was not easy.
Then we found Lydia in the tub. Probably none of our friends or my colleagues assumed that Lydia had killed herself because I had been sleeping with her daughter-until I fled with Moonie to Italy. I did not know what else to do, after the night we finally did make love. She was sixteen years old-her mother a suicide, her father a sadistic ignoramus, and she herself, because of her reading difficulties, still only a freshman in high schooclass="underline" given all that, how could I desert her? But how ever could we be lovers together in Hyde Park?
So I at last got to make the trip to Europe that I had been planning when Lydia and I first met, only it wasn’t to see the cultural monuments and literary landmarks that I came here.
I do not think that Moonie is as unhappy in Italy as Anna Karenina was with Vronsky, nor, since our first year here, have I been anything like so bewildered and disabled as was Aschenbach because of his passion for Tadzio. I had expected more agony; with my self-dramatizing literary turn of mind, I had even thought that Moonie might go mad. But the fact is that to our Italian friends we are simply another American writer and his pretty young girl friend, a tall, quiet, somber kid, whose only distinction, outside of her good looks, appears to them to be her total devotion to me; they tell me they are unused to seeing such deference for her man in a long-legged American blonde. They rather like her for this. The only friend I have who is anything like an intimate says that whenever I go out of a room, leaving her behind, Moonie seems almost to cease to exist. He wonders why. It isn’t any longer because she doesn’t know the language; happily, she became fluent in Italian as quickly as I did and, with this language, suffers none of those reading difficulties that used to make her nightly homework assignments such hell for the three of us back in Chicago. She is no longer stupid; or stubborn; though she is too often morose.