The Anatomy Lesson Read Free Page B

d harvested before the frost; she told h i m about France and her adventures there with men and women. Coming from the bathroom at bedtime, he caught her by the desk looking into his dat e book. “ Oddly furtive, ” he said, “ for someone so open. ” She merely laughed and said, “ You couldn ’ t write if you didn ’ t do worse. Who ’ s ‘ D ’ ? Who ’ s ‘ G ’ ? How many do we come to all together? ” “ Why? Like to meet some of the others? ” “ No thanks. I don ’ t think I want to get into that. That ’ s what I thought I was phasing myself out of up on my mountaintop. ” On the last morning of that first visit he wanted to give her something—something other than a book. He ’ d been giving women books (and the lectures that went with them) ail his life. He gave Jenny ten $100 bills. “ What ’ s this for? ” she said. “ You just to l d me that you couldn ’ t stand coming down here looking like a yokel. Then there ’ s the curiosity about extravagance . Van Gogh had his brother, you have me. Take it. ” She returned three hours later with a scarlet cashmere cloak, burgundy boots, and a big bottle of Bal à Versailles . “ I went to Bergdorf ’ s, ” she said rather shyly, but proudly — “ here ’ s your change, ” and handed him two quarters, a dime, and three pennies. She took off all her yokel clothes and put on just the cloak and the boots. “ Know what? ” she said, looking in the mirror. “ I feel like I ’ m pretty. ” “ You are pretty. ” She opened the bottle and dabbed at herself with the stopper: she perfumed the tip of her tongue. Then again to the mirror. A long look. “ I fe el tall. ” That she wasn ’ t and wouldn ’ t be. She phoned from the country that evening to tell him about her mother ’ s reaction when she stopped by the house, wearing the cloak and smelling of Ba l à Versailles , and explained it was a gift from a man. “ She said, ’ ! wonder what your grandmother will say about that coat. ” “ Well, a harem ’ s a harem, Zuckerman thought. “ Ask your grandmother ’ s size and I ’ ll get her one too. ”
    The two weeks of hospital traction began with Jenny reading to him in the afternoons from The Magic Mountain, then back at his apartment at night drawing pictures in her sketchbook of his desk, his chair, his bookshelves, and his clothes, pictures that she taped to the wall of his room the next time she came to visit. Each day she made a drawing of an old American sampler with an uplifting adage stitched in the center, and this too she taped to the wall he could see. “ To deepen your outlook. ” she told him.
    The only antidote 10 mental suffering is physical pain.
    KARL MARX
    One does not love a place the less f or having suffered in it.
    J ANE AUSTEN
    If one is st rong enough to resist certain shocks, to solve more or less complicated physical difficulties, then from forty to fifty one is again in a new relatively normal tideway.
    V. VAN GOGH

 
     
     
    She devised a chart to trace the progress of the treatment on his outlook. At the end of seven days it looked like this:

    On the eighth afternoon, when she arrived with her d ra wing pad at room 611, Zuckerman was gone; she found him at home, on the playmat. half drunk. “ Too much inlook for the outlook, ” he told her. “ That all-encompassing. Too isolating. Broke down. ”
    “ Oh, ” she said lightly, “ I don ’ t think this constitutes much of a breakdown. I couldn ’ t have tasted an hour. ”
    “ Life smaller and smaller and smaller. Wake up thinking about my neck. Go to sleep thinking about my neck. Only thought, which doctors to turn to when this doesn ’ t help the neck. There to get well and knew I was getting worse. Hans Castorp better at all this than I am. Jennifer. Nothing in that bed but me. Nothing but a neck thinking neck-thoughts. No Settembrini, no Naphta, no snow. No glamorous intellectual voyage. Trying to find my way out and I only work