Letting Go

by Philip Roth

“None of my business.”

  “Look, did she leave a forwarding address?”

  “Look, yourself,” he said, “we don’t give out that kind of personal information on the phone. Who is this?”

  After I hung up I searched the apartment again, but found nothing that would serve as a clue to Marge’s whereabouts. Had she run away? What was she up to? I fished the note out of the garbage can. I don’t know what I’ll do. I had dismissed the statement earlier as a generalized expression of her frustration; it had not been for exactness that I had valued her. Now I tried to tell myself just exactly what Marge was and was not capable of, and thereby regain my composure. But could she have done something stupid, like kill herself? I thought to call the rooming house again and if possible get Mrs. Trumbull from the TV set to ask her some questions. I even thought for a second about calling Kenosha, or the police. Then I remembered that Marge had had coffee with Paul Herz. I hung back from involving him in what might turn out to be a very complicated personal matter; yet my anxiety was by this time a little greater than my shame, and so I looked up the Herz number and dialed it. The phone rang so long that I was ready to hang up when Libby Herz said hello.

  “Libby? This is Gabe Wallach.”

  “My goodness, how are you?”

  “I’m fine. How are you?”

  “Oh, I’m okay.”

  “I heard you were in the hospital. Are you all right now?”

  “I’m convalescing.” Her tone informed me just how boring that could be. “How—how did you know?”

  “Oh, a friend of Paul’s. Is Paul around?”

  “He’s in the bathroom. He’s taking a bath. I’m not even supposed to be out of bed,” she whispered.

  “Never mind then. You go back to bed.”

  “No, no, it’s all right. The phone ringing is the most exciting thing that’s happened here in a month. I’m all right.”

  “It’s not important,” I said.

  “Paul will be out soon. Should I give him a message?”

  “Would you—Look, I’ll see him tomorrow. It’s not important.”

  “Why don’t you come over?” she asked. “Are you busy? Come over and tell us about New York.”

  “I’m not busy. But if you’re resting …”

  “That’s just it. All I do is rest. Paul will be out of his bath in a few minutes. Uh-uh, he’s getting out. I’d better hang up—I’m not supposed to be out of bed even for the toilet. It’s awful. Hey, do come over!”

  Driving through the storm, I realized how groundless were my fears about Marge. She had probably taken a room in the graduate dormitory. Perhaps she was skiing in Colorado, or had moved in with a friend. I realized as I crossed the bridge over the river that it is the futureless who are found buried under two feet of snow or twenty feet of icy water, not girls who put their underwear on the radiator at night so that it will be warm for them in the morning. By the time I had reached the Herzes’ my motive for visiting had nearly disappeared. Nevertheless, while I waited for the front door to open, the wind blew a handful of snow down my coat collar: I closed my eyes and prayed that wherever Margie had decided to take her broken heart, it was warm and safe.

  Paul Herz opened the front door wearing his beggar’s overcoat and holding his briefcase.

  “Libby’s in the bedroom,” he said.

  “Are you going somewhere?”

  “You’re letting in the cold,” he said, giving me an agreeable look that only mystified me more. “Come in.”

  I stepped in, asking, “Are you going out?”

  He held up his briefcase. “I’m afraid I’ve got some work.” He stepped around me and was out the door. “Good night,” he said, “nice to see you.” His head went into his collar, and the overcoat was swinging down the path like a bell.

  “Can I drive you anywhere?” I called after him.

  Herz turned, but continued walking backwards; the snow had caked instantly on his shoulders. “You better close the door,” he said.

  “Gabe?” Libby’s voice called out to me from the other end of the little apartment.

  “Yes?”

  “Could you close the door? There’s a draft.”

  I was still looking out after her husband, however. I wanted to shout for him to come back: I wanted to demand a reason for his leaving.

  “I’m in the bedroom,” Libby said, directing me.

  Herz walked further into the white mist, until at last I couldn’t see him any more.

  Libby was sitting in bed, propped up by two pillows, her knees bent girlishly under the blankets. The bed was made of iron and painted silver and had an institutional air. There was not much more furniture in the room. A floor lamp threw a saucer of light up on the water-damaged ceiling; poor for reading, it was at first generous to the sick. From the doorway Libby looked, in that dim light, no more ravaged than she had in the supermarket early in December; the man’s woolen muffler thrown over her greenish shetland sweater even gave her somewhat of a rakish air. Only after I pulled up to the bed a cracking wicker chair, the room’s only chair, could I see where the fever had turned against her. The fine polished edge of her complexion had been altered; the hollows, the curves, the distinctive shape of her face had been consumed by fatigue. And when she spoke, it was with her voice as with her features: no vigor. There were spurts of pep, as there had been on the phone, but nothing sustaining, nothing to signal a strong will and solid feelings. She was without energy, and that almost made her seem without sweetness. But perhaps she was simply nervous—I know I was. What kind of joke, after all, was Herz’s departure? I remembered the day he had turned down my car, and after all these weeks I was disliking him again. I saw myself being made a pawn in another domestic argument.

  “I wish Paul could have stayed a few minutes,” I said.

  “I told him you wanted to ask him something. He said he’ll be back. Your coming gave him a chance to get out. I went into the hospital Christmas Eve. He’s been up twenty-four hours a day since.”

  “Where did he have to go? It’s storming out.”

  “To do some work. To his office.”

  “Can’t he work in the living room?”

  “We’d be talking. He’d be distracted. He hasn’t written in weeks, you see. He—well, I’ve been sick, and time—oh his time is just all fouled up. He’ll be back soon.” She blushed at this point and looked away.

  By no means did I find this a satisfactory explanation of Herz’s behavior—or my reaction to it—but I nodded my head.

  Libby said, “It hasn’t been easy for him.”

  “It’s probably not been easy for you,” I replied.

  “I don’t know. I think maybe it’s easier sometimes being sick.”

  “Easier than what?”

  Clearly, she was sorry now for having made the distinction in the first place. Most of what Libby was sorry for or about, one saw just that way—clearly. “Oh—being well.” She took a deep breath and pushed her back into the pillows. “I complain too much. I must have had my development arrested somewhere. I’m twenty-two; I should know enough not to go around having expectations all the time. I should be able to get used to things.” She appeared to be making her resolves right in front of me. “Paul’s the one who should be complaining,” she said.

  “Oh, doesn’t he?”

  She looked at me with real surprise. Immediately I regretted having been so openly skeptical about her husband’s character; it only increased her uneasiness.

  Vaguely she said, “His attitude toward life is better, I think. In the situation.”

  “Well,” I said, smiling, “I suppose you have some right to complain,” and tried to end it with that.

  She shook her head, defending her husband by annihilating herself.

  I said, “Well,” again, and looked over her head, where there hung a rather pedestrian Utrillo print. I examined it while she organized her thoughts. The picture encouraged me to reorganize my own, for it managed to make me overwhelming
ly aware that Libby Herz and Paul Herz were married. In all that institutional and cast-off furniture (the wicker chair must surely have been bought off some Iowan’s back porch) it alone looked to have been really chosen. Together they had hung it over the bed they shared.

  “What’s Paul working on?” I asked, trying to appear more kindly disposed toward the pursuits of the man who was her husband.

  “A novel. He does one for a degree. Instead of a dissertation.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Fine, wonderful,” she said. “It’s just, well, as I said—time. I mean that’s why I went to work, to give him a little time. Now I haven’t been in that damn office for almost three weeks.”

  “You’ll be better soon. The flu has been going around.”

  “Oh yes, I know.” The rapidity with which she answered indicated that she didn’t want me to think that she felt she didn’t deserve to get the flu. What made talking to her almost impossible for me was this incredible pendulum action of hers, the swiftness with which she swung back and forth between valuing herself too much and then valuing herself not at all. I realized now that, having had no questions for Herz, I should have turned around and gone home. One did not idly enter the door of this house.

  “It’s actually ironic,” Libby was telling me. “When I was a student I could have gone into the hospital free, under student health. But I quit so we could get the tuition back, and then I got sick, and already it’s cost even more than the tuition we got back. You see, it’s not the flu,” she corrected me. “They don’t know what it is, but I don’t think it’s flu or grippe. It’s just—it’s just ironic was all I meant to point out. At least I call it ironic. Paul doesn’t call it anything.” She spoke her next words with some disbelief. “He calls it life.”

  “Well,” I said, while she waited to hear what I would say, “I suppose people have to expect a little trouble.”

  “Oh I know that,” she interrupted. “I’m not that underdeveloped. I know people get sick. It’s better to have to struggle when you’re young, I think, than when you’re older,” she platitudinized. “I expect trouble, of course, but … but this is such a funny sickness, you know? What do I have? Maybe it’s something psychosomatic—I mean that’s always a possibility. God, everything enters your mind when they can’t diagnose the thing. You think about it, and you think that here Paul wants to write—so I get sick. Do you think maybe I don’t want him to write? Does that make any sense?”

  “No. Does it make any sense to you?”

  “Well if it’s my unconscious, how can I know? Does it look to you as though I’m giving up? Because I’m not giving up. At least I don’t think I’m giving up. Not consciously, at least. But then I’ve got this thing and they can’t diagnose it. I left all that blood there and all that pee—you’d think they could find something. It’s not a joke either; I just give in to myself, damn it.”

  “Maybe you’re anemic. Maybe you’re not eating right. Maybe it’s Iowa. Everybody gets sick some time without their knowing why. I’d worry about my psyche last of all.”

  “You’re trying to make me feel better.”

  “You try to make yourself feel worse.”

  “You’ve really been very kind to us,” she said. “Paul appreciates it—”

  I don’t believe I could have done anything to keep my face from again registering my skepticism.

  “—probably more than you think,” she finished.

  “Yes.” Though I went on to ask none of the obvious questions, she started in answering them anyway.

  “You see,” she said, “if he acted grateful—well, he just can’t. Not now.”

  I said that I understood.

  “He doesn’t want to look needy. He doesn’t think he is needy. You see, I’ve had it so easy. I never had to pay for anything in my life. And I had lots of brothers and sisters, and everybody looking after me—and Paul, well, Paul had to work for everything. It’s not so bad really if you had things and then you have to give them up. It’s better than sacrificing at the beginning and then still sacrificing later on. The worst thing about poverty is it’s so boring. He—he has to give up so many things.” She paused here to fix her blankets; when she went on, the sacrifice of Paul’s which she chose to speak about did not strike me as the specific one she’d had in mind. “He was an only child and very attached to his family, and now they’ve really been hideous. Do you know what a mikvah is? A ritual bath? Well, I had one. The rabbi in Ann Arbor took me to the swimming pool at the Y, and in my old blue Jantzen I had this mikvah. And his parents still won’t lift the phone when he calls. We call and they hang up. I could just kill them for that. Really take a knife and drive it right in them.”

  “It doesn’t sound very pleasant.”

  “It isn’t.”

  For her sake, I generalized again. “Everybody has some kind of trouble with their family,” I said.

  “I know. It’s just that sometimes the accident of things gets you. If Paul had had another set of parents … Oh this is silly.”

  But only a little later she rode on in the same direction. “When—” she said, “when I read your mother’s letter— Is this rude?” she asked, and answered herself with a surge of blood to the forehead. “But I did read the letter, Gabe, and I saw she was intelligent, and I thought, Oh what a relief if Paul’s parents could just be a little like that. I didn’t think anybody was going to act the way they did. I thought it would be exciting to have Jewish in-laws. I was all ready to be—well, Christ, I had that mikvah in my Jantzen, what else could I do? But not them. They don’t want to be happy. They want to be miserable, that makes them happy. Well, it doesn’t make anybody else happy.”

  “My mother,” I said, taking a final stab at cheering her up, “might not have been much of a help, you know. She was a very willful woman.”

  “She was intelligent.”

  “All I’m saying is that she was no less firm in her opinions than the Herzes apparently are.”

  “Yes?” Libby said. “But suppose you had married a Gentile. You’re Jewish, aren’t you?”

  “I am, but I don’t think that particular thing would have made any difference to her.”

  “Ah, you see …”

  What I saw I did not like. I pretended to be straightening her out about my mother while I worked to squelch a regret she seemed momentarily to have developed over marrying Paul and not me! “Libby, look, you read the letter. My mother was a woman of strong likes and dislikes. She liked her way. There were plenty of things she wouldn’t put up with. That Gentile business just wasn’t one of them.”

  “Well, it’s one of them with the Herzes all right.”

  I did not like her for the remark. I experienced my first real fellow-feeling for Paul Herz since that night out on the highway when Libby had behaved so badly. “What about the DeWitts?” I asked.

  “I don’t care about them any more. Not a single one of them!”

  It was a fierce remark, and courageous mostly because it was so clearly a lie. Libby leaned over toward the wicker table—also porch furniture—and took a pill. When she turned back to me she was almost pleading. “Paul’s my husband,” she said. “I prefer him to them. I have to. But Paul—” I had to wait a long time for her to decide whether to finish what she had begun to say, or perhaps to decide how to finish it. “Paul,” she said finally, “was very attached to his family. I mean he wants us all—he’d like us all. Together.”

  There was no sense in my saying anything but, “It’s too bad he can’t have that.”

  She looked up at me gratefully. “It is.”

  “Maybe you should begin to have a family of your own.”

  “Oh no!”

  Apparently I had gone too far, but I simply didn’t care. What was intimacy for this girl and what wasn’t? I was close to exasperation when, looking down and fingering the binding of the blanket, Libby said, “I had a miscarriage in Detroit.”

  I couldn’t believe her. No well was
so bottomless, no storm so unrelenting; even the worst rocks have a little greenery sticking to the bottom, not just bugs. I was convinced now that she was a liar and a nut.

  I said that I was sorry to hear it.

  “We weren’t,” she answered icily. “We—we don’t want any children now. We didn’t want that one actually. I had to go to the hospital—but truly it made me happy. It was a mistake, you see—we … I—oh I don’t know what I want!”

  She covered her tears with the tips of her fingers. “I worked myself into this,” she said. “I think I’ve been trying for this.” She dried her face with her muffler and then reached under the pillow for a handkerchief. “We just don’t want any children now, that’s all. How can we afford children? We can’t even really risk having any …”

  Her white hands and her handkerchief flitted about her face, and just when I was hoping she was at the edge of self-control, having only to step across, she fell back the other way. The lower half of her face became just mouth, and her body shook and shook.

  I did not leave my seat or lean forward. Yet all my impulses were directing me toward movement, one way or another. The girl was not a nut and she was not a liar, and that knowledge produced in me a feeling of helplessness that was almost a presence in my limbs. I just couldn’t sit there, being witness to Libby Herz’s troubles. “Please,” I said, “please, Lib … Please, try to relax. Libby, you’re sick, you’re a little upset … Libby, you were in school,” I said, “you were busy, you didn’t want children then. There’ll always—”

  “I don’t want them now! I just want him to sleep with me! Oh, Christ, that’s all!” She twisted herself away from me and toward the wall, carrying the blanket with her up over her head.

  When she spoke next it was in a voice so breathless with humiliation I could hardly hear her. “I’ve overstated things. We just feel … we feel we have to be extra careful. We—could you get me another glass of water?”

  I took her old full glass and poured it out in the kitchen sink, and then I let the faucet run a very long time. The little kitchen was really nothing more than the end of the living room. Over the sink was a small window, and outside I could see that the storm had lost most of its strength; it was simply snowing now. Down the street someone starved for exercise had already begun to scrape the sidewalks with a shovel, and the rasping of the metal hitting the concrete floated all the way up to the Herz barrack.