Free The Counterlife by Philip Roth

when.”
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    Though Henry had been a slightly heavier, more muscular man than his older brother, they were still more or less the same size and build, and that perhaps explained why Carol held on to him so very long when he came downstairs to leave. It was, for both of them, such a strongly emotional moment that Zuckerman wondered if he wasn’t about to hear her say, “I know about her, Nathan. I’ve known all along. But he would have gone crazy if I told him. Years ago I found out about a patient. I couldn’t believe my ears—the kids were small, I was younger, and it mattered terribly to me then. When I told him that I knew, he went berserk. He had a hysterical fit. He wept for days, every time he came home from the office begging me to forgive him, begging me from down on his knees not to make him move out of the house—calling himself the most awful names and begging me not to throw him out. I never wanted to see him like that again. I’ve known about them all, every one, but I let him be, let him have what he wanted so long as at home he was a good father to the kids and a decent husband to me.”
    But in Zuckerman’s arms, pressing herself up against his chest, all she said, in a breaking voice, was “It helped me enormously, your being here.”
    Consequently he had no reason to reply, “So that’s why you made up that story,” but said nothing more than what was called for. “It helped me, being with you all.”
    Carol did not then respond, “Of course that’s why I said what I did. Those bitches all weeping their hearts out—sitting there weeping for their man. The hell with that!” Instead she said to him, “It meant a lot to the children to see you. They needed you today. You were lovely to Ruth.”
    Nathan did not ask, “And you let him go ahead with the surgery, knowing who it was for?” He said, “Ruth’s a terrific girl.”
    Carol replied, “She’s going to be all right—we all are,” and bravely kissed him goodbye, instead of saying, “If I had stopped him, he would never have forgiven me, it would have been a nightmare for the rest of our lives”; instead of, “If he wanted to risk his life for that stupid, slavish, skinny little slut, that was his business, not mine”; instead of, “It served him right, dying like that after what he put me through. Poetic justice. May he rot in hell for his nightly blow job!”
    Either what she’d told everyone from the altar was what she truly believed, either she was a good-hearted, courageous, blind, loyal mate whom Henry had fiendishly deceived to the last, or she was a more interesting woman than he’d ever thought, a subtle and persuasive writer of domestic fiction, who had cunningly reimagined a decent, ordinary, adulterous humanist as a heroic martyr to the connubial bed.
    He didn’t really know what to think until at home that evening, before sitting down at his desk to reread those three thousand words written in his notebook the night before—and to record his observations of the funeral—he again got out the journal from ten years back and turned the pages until he found his very last entry about Henry’s great thwarted passion. It was pages on in the notebook, buried amid notes about something else entirely; that’s why the evening before it had eluded his search.
    The entry was dated several months after Maria’s Christmas call from Basel, when Henry was beginning to think that if there was any satisfaction to be derived from his crushing sense of loss, it was that at least he had never been discovered—back when the inchoate, debilitating depression had at last begun to lift and to be replaced by the humbling realization of what the affair with Maria had so painfully exposed: the fact that he was somehow not quite coarse enough to bow to his desires, and yet