Aaron Asher brought him a radio with a CD player and a collection of classical music, mostly Bach, to listen to while he soaked in a hot bath to relieve his aching back. Indeed, it was Roth’s physical misery that received the most urgent attention: a doctor prescribed an anti-inflammatory (Voltaren) that wouldn’t hurt his stomach, and made sure he got at least four weekly sessions of physical therapy—this along with psychiatric group meetings (both coed and men-only), a “coping strategies” session after lunch, and an elective “practicum” (swimming in Roth’s case). Twice weekly he met one-on-one with Bloch, who spared him the “Freudian shit,” as Roth was happy to note; mainly it was a matter of finding the right mix of medications—Klonopin for anxiety, Prozac for depression, and a bit of lithium as an activator.

  Perhaps the most therapeutic aspect of Silver Hill, for Roth, was an almost cozy sense of communal malaise. At the end of the day, he liked chatting on the porch with four or five women patients, who discussed their terrible marriages and whatnot, every so often sighing, “It’s hopeless.” Nobody looked at him funny; they nodded with serene comprehension when he spoke of his wish for oblivion—a wish mitigated somewhat by visits from Inga, who always brought a little gift (sweater, socks, a toilet kit) and, after a jolly dinner, would return to Roth’s room and do her best to bring him to climax despite lurking nurses and anorgasmic Prozac. “You know, you say terrible things about your wife,” one of the women patients remarked, “but I see you having dinner with her and you seem to enjoy each other.” Roth smiled: “That wasn’t my wife.”

  Bloom was in London, and he grew angrier with her almost by the hour. Inga, for one, couldn’t help feeling sorry for the poor woman—a friend, after all. By then Bloom could do no right in Roth’s eyes. At one point she’d suggested they go to a spa together, and ever after Roth would grumble, “A spa?! What the fuck does she think a spa’s gonna do . . .?” That first Friday at Silver Hill he got a call from his wife, who’d just returned to New York and proposed a visit; Roth (“angry, remote”) vetoed the idea, refusing to see her except in the presence of Dr. Bloch, who wasn’t on duty until Sunday. Roth hung up, then called back and asked her to bring him a few changes of underwear (“So maybe I am his wife after all,” she wrote in her journal).

  Bloom would always claim to be flummoxed by her husband’s sudden disaffection, wistfully surmising with interviewers like Charlie Rose that it was due to “some kind of a breakdown.” When Bloch asked her, before Roth arrived for their three-way meeting on August 8, whether she understood why he was so mad at her, she answered (doubtless in all sincerity) that she “hadn’t the faintest idea.” According to Doll’s House and Roth’s own account, he spent two hours (“hardly pausing for breath”) coldly trying to enlighten her. Among other grievances, he mentioned her tendency to panic during his illnesses; she replied that she’d “taken good care of him” during his knee operation, bypass, and two breakdowns. “I am sorry to disillusion you on that point,” he said. “You were no help to me whatever.” Finally he came to the crux: if Anna still planned to study in New York for six weeks (or three months, as the case may be), Roth wanted to terminate the marriage. “Look at her!” he said to Bloch, when she bolted from the room. “She’s always running away.”

  After a few more unsatisfactory meetings at Silver Hill, Bloom flew to Toronto and on to Salzburg, where her daughter had a singing engagement. Mother and daughter then traveled to a movie shoot in Dublin, where Dr. Bloch got hold of Bloom almost the moment she checked into her hotel. His patient had requested the sole use of their New York apartment for six months after his discharge; he didn’t want to be alone in the country (nor with Bloom in either place), and proposed to give her five thousand dollars a month to stay at the Wyndham or find a furnished apartment. Next Inga called, begging Bloom to accede to Roth’s wishes lest he end up killing himself while alone in Connecticut. “I think Philip is using [Inga] to manipulate me,” Bloom wrote in her journal, “but I have to take what she says on good faith—maybe Philip is in danger.”

  Roth, meanwhile, was released from Silver Hill on August 20, and at first seemed fine. Judith Thurman stayed with him in Connecticut for a week, joining him for swims and long walks, while Roth spent mornings in his studio going over a few sketchy pages of what would become Sabbath’s Theater. He awoke without dread, and was even his old antic self at a dinner party chez Inga, where he regaled guests with the lighter side of life at Silver Hill. A little more than two weeks passed before he “went nuts” again: By then Joanna Clark was keeping him company, and one night she stood watching while he wandered outside and began screaming “WHERE IS SHE? WHERE IS SHE . . .?!” “You have to go back to the hospital,” Clark told him when he came back inside, and so he did.

  When Roth returned to Silver Hill on September 8, he asked for Bloch’s assurance that he wouldn’t put Roth in the locked ward, but Bloch regretfully did so anyway. “That’s when I talked to myself,” Roth remembered, “and I said, ‘You are gonna do everything they tell you to do, and you are gonna get out of here whole. But the party’s over. You’re getting rid of this woman.’ ” On a list of twelve “Goals after Discharge,” Roth wrote “YOU BET” next to the ninth: “Change the environment you are returning to, to less stressful.” When Thurman came to visit, Roth asked her to see Bloom in New York and calmly repeat his proposal for separate living quarters during the first six months following his discharge. What he didn’t know—until Bloom’s letter to him dated October 25—was that Bloom was then in the midst of selling her London town house (“Who in her right mind would do such a thing at such a moment?” he wondered), which might help to explain her extreme reaction to Thurman’s turn as emissary. For a few minutes the women sipped tea and chatted, then Thurman repeated Roth’s request; Bloom sat primly twitching for a moment, then (“literally like zero to sixty”) burst into tears and began screaming, “What about me? What about me?” “I sort of backed out toward the door,” Thurman recalled.

  A few days later Roth enlisted yet another woman friend, Janet Malcolm, to phone his wife and plead his case. Bloom responded with a faxed letter, gently imploring Roth simply to tell her what he wanted in his own words; she would love him in any case, she wrote, but she was in a miserable predicament and needed “protection.” “My dearest friend of seventeen years,” Roth replied, quoting the same endearment she’d used for him, “the most loving thing you can do right now is to give me the time and the space that I require to put this terrible suicidal depression behind me and to find my [way] back to my life. . . .

  I am not ready to resume our domestic life now—I need time and psychiatric help to prepare me for that. In the meantime you of course need protection. That is why I gave you my offer [i.e., $5,000 a month], which I hope you will accept so that I can come down to New York in October and begin my recovery.

  I too find it difficult not to be able to talk to you on the telephone but I’m not at all sure that I feel strong enough yet.

  Relieved by the sweet if rather passive-aggressive implication that Roth would be ready, possibly, at some point, to resume their life together, Bloom replied that she would start looking for an apartment immediately. Six months didn’t seem so long, she wrote, when there was something “so wonderful” to look forward to.

  By the time she arrived at Silver Hill, however, on the eve of Roth’s departure (he’d shown immediate improvement on learning of her acquiescence), Bloom had changed her mind. The two were in his room about to go down for dinner, when Bloom sat opposite him and announced that she intended to stay “home” on West Seventy-seventh—or so Roth remembered; in Doll’s House and (more convincingly) in a letter she wrote around this time, Bloom claimed to have simply, wretchedly begged to be allowed to come back in two months rather than six. In either case Roth was struck dumb with anger. After glaring at her for “at least fifteen minutes,” said Bloom, they went to dinner and ate in silence. Then, back in his room, Roth sternly forbade her to renege on their agreement, and perhaps also said something about her poisoning him (according to Bloom) or at any rate his life. “At this she made a grotesque face,” Roth noted, “—as a child might make at Halloween to scare her little friends—wiggled her fingers at the sides of her ears, and began to scream.” (Many years later, Thurman made “the same Halloween face” for Roth while trying to describe how Bloom had reacted to her proposal about the six-month separation.) In Doll’s House, Bloom recounted how she’d fled the room and cried out for someone to help Philip, whereupon she was sedated by the nurse on duty; since Bloom had said something about wanting to die, the nurse (after a quick phone conference with Bloch) gave her pajamas and took her to the locked ward—the first visitor in Silver Hill history, or so Roth claimed, to be retained as a patient overnight (“Only Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain has a similar experience”). As for Roth, the nurse found him sitting calmly in his room; his blood pressure was extremely high, but it was better the next day—Yom Kippur—and he departed as planned. Inga’s husband drove him back to Warren, where Roth packed his things and went on to New York.

  * “Death is good for some people,” said Roth (quoting Bellow) of Leonard’s death in 2008.

  † Or The Winter’s Tale or A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Roth—hardly at his retentive best that summer—mentioned one or the other at various times.

  ‡ “Six weeks” according to a 1997 interview with Roth; in Doll’s House, Bloom quotes Roth’s baleful reference to a three-month stay.

  § I borrow Bloom’s pseudonym for this man from Doll’s House.

  CHAPTER

  Thirty-Eight

  OPENING THE DOOR TO HIS EMPTY APARTMENT ON West Seventy-seventh, Roth was struck by the sight of sunlight gleaming on his highly polished parquet floor—so like the parlor floor of his childhood apartment on Summit Avenue. “You’re gonna be all right,” he thought. An hour or so later, he was back in his studio working on Sabbath’s Theater.

  He also wrote an encouraging note to his wife. He was glad to know, he said, that she’d had a nice long chat with Dr. Bloch the morning after their contretemps: “He really is the person to listen to. I am living proof!” After her night at Silver Hill, Bloom took a room at the Cosmopolitan Club, and in gratitude Roth asked her to join him for dinner, with the caveat that he tired easily and would have to leave early. The meeting, for Bloom, was “strained and miserable.” Roth brought Conarroe along as a buffer, and made a point of directing most of his conversation to him. Still, when bemoaning her fate to friends, Bloom would generally insist it was Roth’s welfare that foremost concerned her. “Please keep telling me he’s all right!” she said to Alfred Kazin’s wife, Judith Dunford, who endeavored to reassure her. “How dare you constantly stress to me how happy he is!” Bloom reproached the woman.

  Meanwhile she was pointedly magnanimous in her notes to Roth; after taking a room at the Wyndham, she assured him that it didn’t matter where she lived, but rather whom she loved. Again with Conarroe in tow, Roth attended her program (“Women in Love”) of the Shakespeare speeches they’d rehearsed together that summer, and shared a cab with Bloom after the three had endured a “reasonably pleasant” dinner. “Never better,” said Roth, when Bloom asked him how he felt; watching him cross the street to his apartment building, she reflected that he’d chosen the life of “a bitter, lonely, aging ascetic with no human ties.” Roth—who liked to say “Art is life too”—responded coldly to this observation: “As for my ‘human ties,’ I will not list them but merely say that Bloom’s description of me, here as everywhere, is drawn from an imagination distorted by melodramatic hyperbole, not to mention psychological cliché, and hardly from one whose investigation is grounded in any serious fidelity to observed reality.”

  Roth sent Bloom a bouquet of tulips after her Shakespeare show, followed a day later by a brief agreement drawn up by his new matrimonial lawyer, William Beslow, that confirmed the basic terms of their temporary separation—mainly that Bloom must obtain Roth’s consent to visit their apartment and collect personal items, whereas Roth in turn was obliged to pay Bloom five thousand dollars on the first day of each month. In Doll’s House Bloom described the legal papers as a “body blow,” to which she responded with an angry message on Roth’s answering machine. Roth listened to the message, took notes, then called back and affected to be puzzled. The fact was, Beslow had warned him that he might render the prenup null and void if he paid Bloom a monthly allowance, unless she agreed in writing beforehand that her acceptance of the money did not alter the terms of their agreement. Roth tried to explain this in so many words, but was interrupted by his furious wife: “I am not signing any agreement! How dare you. . . .” In the background Roth heard familiar voices—Anna and her friend Felicity, he surmised. “That’s how I understood that Bloom was at once out of control and showing off for the girls how very tough she could be with me.” When he tried a second time to explain, she resumed berating him, and he hung up on her.*

  Vexed, Roth went directly to his lawyer and explained what had happened. “This isn’t working,” said Beslow: Bloom could not have her five-thousand-dollar allowance if she refused to sign, simple as that, so he advised Roth to go ahead and serve her with divorce papers—that is, in New York; while Roth could get a no-fault divorce in Connecticut without Bloom’s assent, the prenup was more likely to be overturned there. Meanwhile Bloom was consulting her own lawyer, Sidney Liebowitz, who looked over the temporary separation agreement and saw nothing amiss; he advised her to sign it so she could start collecting her money. When she inquired whether she should just divorce Roth, the man sagely replied that that was precisely what Roth wanted, as it would preclude any hope of a settlement under the terms of the prenup.

  Instead of divorcing him, then, Bloom wrote him a testy but mollifying letter. Naturally she’d been “shocked and dismayed” to receive legal papers “out of the blue,” she wrote, since Roth had mentioned nothing of the sort over dinner the other night. Be that as it may, there was no chance of her violating an oral agreement “made in the best of faith,” and moreover (as he well knew) she was soon to leave for London and thence to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for three months (to appear in a production of The Cherry Orchard), and had arranged to rent her own small Manhattan apartment for the sixth and final month of their separation, March. A few days later she phoned Roth to reiterate her willingness to sign; he “listened and politely hung up,” as he recalled. Soon after, the Wyndham concierge rang Bloom in her room and said that a man named Frederick was waiting downstairs with a message he could deliver only in person—i.e., divorce papers, charging her with “the cruel and inhuman treatment” of her husband, Philip Roth.

  IN DOLL’S HOUSE, Bloom suggested that Inga Larsen’s decision to divorce her husband of twenty-five years was due to her total commitment to her “new relationship” with Roth (an affair of some eighteen years’ duration). In truth, Roth was perfectly happy with things as they were, though he certainly encouraged Inga to follow her own inclination, now that her children were grown, to release herself from a moribund marriage. “You can do it, Fallika,” he liked to say,† and later Inga wrote to thank him—even after their decidedly acrimonious breakup—for helping her change her life for the better.

  “I moved out and Erda [Inga] moved in,” Bloom wrote in Doll’s House—with less than perfect accuracy, or so Roth claimed. He acknowledged that Inga had stayed in the back bedroom of his Connecticut studio for “two weeks, if that long,” during the summer of 1994, amid leaving her husband and furnishing her new condo in a nearby town (Roth had given her $20,000 toward the down payment). However, Roth’s cleaning woman and friend, Kathy Meetz, remembered that Inga had actually stayed in “Heartbreak Hotel” (as they called Roth’s studio, since Ross Miller had also camped there after his recent divorce) the entire summer; Meetz had seen the two eating breakfast together, but suspected nothing since she considered them simply old friends and neighbors. According to Roth, the couple had mutually decided to keep things secret awhile: “There would be time enough later for us to go about in public together, without our having precipitously revealed that we had been lovers all along.” Whatever their relative furtiveness in the meantime, Inga insisted she moved into Roth’s studio as early as spring 1994, and moved out only when her condo was ready in late August; after that, she said, “We lived like a couple and I cooked dinner every night” at her place. Finally, once her divorce went through in October, she tended to spend weekends with Roth at his apartment in New York.

  Even then he was busily incorporating aspects of Inga’s personality into characters such as Sabbath’s alcoholic second wife, Roseanna, and especially his immortal mistress, Drenka Balich. “Every book has a million sources,” said Roth, “but Drenka had only one.” For Inga’s benefit he frankly described his heroine as an all but exact portrait, calling the novel “a love poem” to her. And Sabbath, too, was a fairly exact version of his real-life model, or at least certain salient traits—“the nearest I’ve come in all my fiction to drawing a realistic self-portrait,” as Roth freely admitted. Sabbath and Drenka build their “church” on “the rock of sexual excess,” and Drenka lovingly calls Sabbath her “secret American boyfriend,” which was Inga’s way of greeting Roth during a sylvan rendezvous. In matters of sex, she was his “sidekicker”—one of her many malapropisms that delighted Roth, who gave them to Drenka as well.

  Roseanna was a more dubious tribute, to put it mildly. “ ‘You’re as sick as your secrets,’ ” she parrots to Sabbath. “It was not the first time that he was hearing this pointless, shallow, idiotic maxim. ‘Wrong,’ he told her . . . ‘you’re as adventurous as your secrets, as abhorrent as your secrets, as lonely as your secrets, as alluring as your secrets, as courageous as your secrets, as vacuous as your secrets, as lost as your secrets.’ ” The “deadliest” side to Inga’s sobriety, as Roth would have it, was her tendency to impart AA wisdom and to examine her own feelings a mite too conspicuously. Inga herself was aware of these aversions, but her impulse to be supportive tended to override any misgivings. “As you said: we create our own reality,” she reminded him. “Of course I have learned this from AA but it really has helped me so I am sharing it with you, even risking your cynisism [sic].” Roth’s other great AA friend, Joanna Clark, was likewise apt to recite her favorite recovery slogans for Roth—“Yesterday’s history, tomorrow’s a mystery”; “No pain, no gain”—because she liked to make him laugh, not because she expected him to find them enlightening (“Do they all have to rhyme, Joanna?”). To his gratification she declared Roseanna, his consummate AA bore, “hilarious.”