The Anatomy Lesson Read Free Page A

inert upon his narrow bed, Zuck erman grew increasingly irritated by Hans Castorp and the dynamic opportunities for growth provided him by TB. Nor could life in New York Hospital ’ s room 61 I be said to measure up to the deluxe splendors of a Swiss sanatorium before the First World War, not even at SI ,500 a week. “ Sounds to me, ” he told Jenny, “ like a cross between the Salzburg Seminars and the stately old Queen Mary. Five great meals a day and then tedious lectures by European intellectuals, complete with erudite jests. All that philosophy. All that snow. Reminds me of the University of Chicago. ”
    He ’ d first met Jenny while visiting the retreat of some friends on a wooded mountainside in a village up the Hudson called Bearsville. The daughter of a local schoolteacher, she ’ d been down to art school at Cooper Union and then three years on her own with a knapsack in Europe, and now. back where she ’ d begun, was living alone in a wood shack with a cat and her paints and a Franklin stove. She was twenty-eight, robust, lonely, blunt, pink-complexioned, with a healthy set of largish white teeth, baby-fine carrot-colored hair, and impressive muscles in her arms. No long temptress fingers like his secretary Diana — she had hands. “ Someday, if you like, ” she said to Zuckerman. “ I ’ ll tell you stories about my jobs— ’ My Biceps and How I Got Them. ’” Before leaving for Manhattan, he ’ d stopped off at her cabin unannounced, ostensibly to look at her landscapes. Skies. trees, hills, and roads just as blunt as she was. Van Gogh without the vibrating sun. Quotations from Van Gogh ’ s letters to his brother were tacked up beside the easel, and a scarred copy of the French edition of the letters, the one she ’ d lugged around Europe in her knapsack, lay in the pile of art books by the daybed. On the fiberboard walls were pencil drawings: cows, horses, pigs, nests, flowers, vegetables—all announcing with the same forthright charm, “ Here I am and I am real. ”
    They strolled through a ravaged orchard out behind the cabin. sampling the crop of gnarled fruit. Jenny asked him. “ Why does your hand keep stealing up to your shoulder? ” Zuckerman hadn ’ t even realized what he was doing: the pain, at this point, had only cornered about a quarter of his existence, and he still thought of it as something tike a spot on his coat that had only to be brushed away. Yet no matter how hard he brushed, nothing happened. “ Some sort of strain. ” he replied. “ From stiff-arming the critics? ’ I she asked. “ More likely stiff-arming myself. What ’ s it like alone up here? ” “ A lot of painting, a lot of gardening, a lot of masturbating. It must be nice to have money and buy things. What ’ s the most extravagant thing you ’ ve ever done? ” The most extravagant, the most foolish, the most vile, the most thrilling — he told her, then she told him. Hours of questions and answers, but for a while no further than that. “ Our great sexless rapport, ” she called it. when they spoke for long stretches on the phone at night. “ Tough luck for me, maybe, but I don ’ t want to be one of your girls. I ’ m better off with my hammer, building a new floor. ” “ How ’ d you learn to build a floor? ” “ It ’ s easy. ”
    One midnight she ’ d called to say she ’ d been out in the garden bringing in the vegetables by moonlight. “ The natives up here tell me it ’ s going to freeze in a few hours. I ’ m coming down to Lemnos to watch you lick your wounds. ” “ Lemnos? I don ’ t remember Lemnos. ” “ Where the Greeks put Phiioctetes and his foot. ”
    She ’ d stayed for three days on Lemnos. She squirted the base of his neck with anesthetizing ethyl chloride; she sat unclothed astride his knotted back and massaged between his shoulder blades; she cooked them di nner, coq au vin and cassoulet— dishes tasting strongly of bacon—and the vegetables she ’