by Philip Roth
Asher had begun life a genius, having begun to play Mozart at just about the same age Mozart had begun to play Mozart. At sixteen he had received free tuition to pose life models at the Art Students League; he was allowed to touch and arrange their bare limbs, so advanced for his years was his sense of grace. When he brought home his charcoal drawings they were tacked up in the living room. “You don’t even think dirty when you look at such pictures,” Asher’s mother had reassured the neighbors. “Look how artistic he makes those fat girls.” A piano was brought into the house for Asher; later a violin and a cello. He spent a summer in the Louvre, copying; he did his first commissioned portrait at eighteen—the captain of the Mauritania! But that captain was long dead, and other captains had come and gone, and in the meantime no girl had married Asher. Didn’t he know girls were soft? asked Paul’s father. Didn’t he know they were nice to hold? Had he never kissed one? Was he a— Absolutely not! He wasn’t a good mixer, that’s all. He was just a little scholarly.
What his sister and brother-in-law decided was that it was necessary to put a young lady in Asher’s path. They invited him to dinner, and they invited a secretary from Mr. Herz’s office; they invited school teachers, colleagues of Mrs. Herz. Once they tried a distant cousin who was in town, and once even—for who knows what goes on in the head of an artist—once they even tried (all the dead should rest in peace!) a shikse, but a girl who hung around with Jews. They turned on the radio but Asher wouldn’t dance. They brought out the cards but Asher wouldn’t play. How could you put a girl in this fellow’s path—he had no path! Though it brought tears to his sister’s eyes and even a kind of tsk-tsk compassion to his brother-in-law’s tongue, Asher’s ruination was nevertheless of his own doing.
The other flop was Uncle Jerry. He had married, but only for twenty-five years. A quarter of a century with a woman and then he divorces her. So who could feel sorry for him? A beautiful twelve-room house in Mt. Kisco with grass all around and a pine-paneled basement; four beautiful daughters with beautiful builds—one married, two in college, and the fourth, Claire, the little shaifele, still in high school; and for a wife, a wonderful woman, a princess, a queen. What if she weighed 180 pounds? Did he expect that to change? Could he roll her out twenty-five years after the wedding night because she was still making the same dent in the mattress now as then? Who could feel any sorrow for him! Why, why did he do it? Did he have some tootsie on the side? No, no—it was his what-do-you-call-it, his psychonanalysis! His psychoanalyst made him do it. That son of a bitch. What did that guy think life was, easy? A bowl of cherries? You love your wife, you don’t love her; you fondle her, you can’t stand to touch her—that happens! Does that mean you destroy a family? When a father dies it’s a catastrophe. Here’s a man who walks out!
Two years after he had walked out, Jerry married a twenty-seven-year-old, just the type everybody had been looking for for Asher for years. “What’s he doing? Another big woman—what’s the matter with him? A twenty-seven-year-old—what’s he thinking about? When she’s forty, when she’s thirty-five even … What kind of business is this!”
“Then call him, Leonard. Stop getting upset and call him. Talk to him. He’s your brother.”
“It’s his life. Let him ruin it. Would he call me? If I had a seizure tomorrow, would he so much as lift the phone off the hook?”
“Your heart is perfectly all right. The doctor listened to it. He checked everything. They have graphs, Leonard, that show. You’ve got a nice even line. Don’t get overexcited because you’ll give yourself trouble.”
“I’m not overexcited. I’m practically lying down. He could marry a ten-year-old and I wouldn’t turn a pinky. I told him when he married Selma, didn’t I? Jerry, you’re wet behind the ears. Jerry, you never even had a woman yet. Jerry, give yourself a chance. Jerry this, Jerry that, Jerry, she’s a very big girl, Jerry—is that what you want? And now this one, also a horse. Why doesn’t he at least call me, ask my advice. Say to me, Lenny, what do you think—Lenny, does this seem to you like I’m doing a sensible thing? No, him, he’s smarter than the rest of the world.”
Three weeks later (“to the day” as it later came to be reported) the girl telephoned. “He left! Your brother left! He walked out! What did I do? What will I do? All this new silverware,” she cried. “Please come somebody. Help me!”
“Leonard, where are you going in your slippers?”
“I’m going! What—is he crazy? Is he a crackpot?”
“Leonard, don’t get involved now.”
“I am involved. The telephone rings, this girl is hysterical, I’m involved. She’s a baby—she’ll do something insane. How do I know?”
When Mr. Herz went out the door his wife grew hysterical herself. She knelt beside the BarcaLounger and wept into the still-warm leather. Who knew best whether a man’s heart is weak, the doctor or the man himself? How could a machine tell a man he didn’t have pains? In the night he couldn’t even roll over, his ribs were so sore. And one morning she would wake up and he wouldn’t. Oh God! God! He would get overexcited, involved, wrought up—and die! She wept and wept and finally she pulled herself to the telephone and looked up the analyst’s name. She dialed, and when she had him on the phone, she cried, “You son of a bitch! My sister-in-law, you ruined her life, you son of a bitch! She had everything and you ruined it! What kind of ideas do you put in people’s heads? What is he—a boy? A man fifty-two years old and he marries girls, children! You quack, you fraud—”
Yet when their son came down one Christmas from Cornell to drop the name Libby DeWitt into their lap, it was to Asher and Jerry that they referred him. Tears flowed from his parents for two reasons: there was grief over his marital decision, and grief too at their own impotence. They had somehow reared a boy whom they could not bludgeon or make hysterical. By way of ruination, selfishness and stupidity, Jerry and Asher seemed better equipped than themselves to deal with the disaster. There even seemed to the parents to be some affinity between the boy and his uncles, which was yet a third reason for tears. “I let him down,” wept the father in bed, both hands over his ribs. “He won’t listen to me. In my own house my voice don’t carry from the kitchen to the toilet. All his life the boy has been filling in applications. You lift up a piece of paper in this house and underneath’s an application. When did I ever see him? When did he learn to listen to a father? He was always running out to get somebody to recommend him for something. A waiter in the mountains, a stock boy, a scholarship student. Once he should listen to me. Just once.”
Paul’s mother was crying too, but at least—to her credit—she tried to change the subject. “A scholarship is an honor,” she sobbed, touching her husband’s wet face. “We should be proud—”
“It’s an honor for the son, not for me. Just once, once … Five years later and frozen foods was already a craze. This man Birdseye is coining it, and my son, my son … A Catholic the girl is, practically an invalid, nineteen years old and she ain’t had a healthy day in her life—”
“My baby,” his mother wept. “He could read the mileage off the speedometer before other kids could even talk. What’s happening to my baby?”
When Asher called to invite Paul for a walk, Paul saw no need to be rude to someone essentially an outsider in the whole affair. He went with Asher because he knew his parents had asked Asher to phone; he went to make it easier on Asher, who like himself must have felt obliged to comply with whatever sad maneuverings these two helpless people could devise; he went for the sake of everybody’s dignity. It happened also that he knew that Asher would be sympathetic, or at the least noncommittal. The values of a man who had studied art in New York, in Chicago, in Europe, who had composed music, who chose to live in a loft over a Third Avenue bar—these were not the values of a washed-out bourgeois and his wife. Asher was a free man; an eccentric perhaps, but free.
The day they met was windless and cold. They walked side by side, two scrawny bareheaded men, one bald, the other with k
inky black ridges beginning only two fingers above his eyebrows. One rounded his shoulders to stay warm; the other had had round shoulders for years. Though this posture gave Asher a thoughtful mien, the drop that formed and reformed at the end of his spiritless nose was not nearly so pensive-looking; it had the air of an oversight, as had his clothes and his features. His misshapen lobes, for example, made his ears look like accidents; on top of that, hair grew out of them. Asher did not seem to believe that outside the skin there were things to be taken care of. A full day of barbers, tailors, shoemakers, cleaners, and opticians would just about begin to put him in order. His spectacles were a little storage bin of paper clips and Scotch tape.
None of this run-downness depressed Paul, however. He leaned closer to catch the soft, whispery words his uncle spoke, while overhead the El trains broke metallically through the cold steely air. He managed to hear “… oh … not … people … parents—yes?” Asher turned his head in the raised collar of his overcoat and peered questioningly at his nephew.
“I’m sorry,” Paul said. “I didn’t—”
“Not bad people, do you think?” Asher swung his head, freeing his nose of its burden.
“No. I know, Asher.”
“They have your interests in mind. That’s so, isn’t it?”
“Their interests.” What with the noise overhead, Asher must not have understood what he’d been saying. “It would be in my interest to make me happy. It would be in my interest to give me a blessing.”
“They’d love to give you a blessing. They’re dying to give you a blessing,” said Asher, raising his ungloved hands from his pockets.
“Let them go ahead then,” Paul said.
Asher was peeling paint from under his nails. “They’d like to give me a blessing, they’d like to give everybody a blessing. How old are you, Paulie?”
“Twenty-one.”
Asher made a face, as though he’d eaten something unpalatable. “So what’s your hurry?”
“What hurry? Hurry for what?”
“You have a nice sweet life ahead of you, isn’t that a fact?”
Where was this conversation drifting? “But I’m in love,” said Paul, shrugging.
“Let’s get out from this noise, and talk,” Asher said, taking Paul by the elbow. As they crossed the street, he pulled his nephew close to him and with a sleepy closing of his swollen lids back of the tortured glasses, said, “I’m in love myself.”
“Yes?”
“Absolutely.”
“I didn’t know that,” Paul said, trying to remain composed.
“Sure. She comes to my studio every Wednesday afternoon. Today, this afternoon. It gets dark and she goes home. A girl twenty-five.” He spoke as if each fact had to be remembered from the dim past. Though he did not want to, Paul suspected his uncle of lying.
“Is she married?” Paul asked.
“I know her four years, and every Wednesday … the most valuable thing in my life … She’s married, sure. She has a baby.” Asher took a frayed billfold from his coat and handed Paul a picture of a little girl. “A darling,” Asher said.
“She’s very nice.”
“A darling child,” Asher said. He stuffed the billfold back inside his coat. “Look, Paulie, I’ve loved a lot of women. Six years I lived with a Chinese woman, for example. Many different types and personalities. I’ve screwed all kinds, every imaginable variety of cunt, I’ve had it. I’m no amateur at this business.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“What? What didn’t you know?”
“For instance, the Chinese.”
“Oh sure—well, I didn’t make a point of it with your mother. I think she has a prejudice against non-Occidentals.”
“That’s giving her a break, but that’s true.”
“Is she pregnant?” Asher suddenly asked. “This girl? I’m trying to get to your motivation.”
“Are we talking about me now?”
“About your girl friends,” Asher said. “What’s the story, Paulie?”
“My father told you she must be pregnant, is that it? Don’t you think that shows how he doesn’t begin to understand?”
“Don’t worry about his understanding. Of course he’s a dope. You didn’t knock her up?”
He felt moved to deny even sleeping with Libby; the conversation had turned in a way he could not have imagined. But he had reasons stronger than pride for not wanting Asher to confuse himself about his experience. He had not come out on a below-freezing day for bad advice. “She’s not intact, but she’s not pregnant either.”
“She’s not intact by you or before you?”
“By me.”
“Oh it clears up. And for that you’re throwing out all your opportunities? For that small puncture you’ll tie yourself down? How will you support this girl you ruined?”
“Asher, what are you talking about?”
“Money. Life.”
“You sound like my old man.”
“You haven’t got good ears—I’m at the other end of the globe. I understand she’s a little sickly.”
“She gets colds, Asher. They met her twice and both times she had colds. It’s winter. She’s human—”
“Even nose drops cost money,” Asher was explaining. “Kleenex can run you into a fortune, I mean paupers like you and me. You want to tie a stone around your neck?” Asher asked. “You’ll fall in love all your life, in and out all your life. You can even find a lady with a wooden leg, I don’t care. It isn’t the colds, Paulie, it’s the principle. You’re twenty-one, you drew a little blood from her, so you think there’s only one girl in the world for you. But you’ve got no obligations according to the date of entry, you understand me? If it wasn’t you, it would be another smart fellow. Don’t bind yourself round for having a little fun. Is it you who wants to marry or is it this girl?”
“We both want to. We arrived at the decision mutually.” He made no effort to hide his anger.
“Which more mutually than the other?”
“Mutually mutually!”
“And how old is she that she’s so in tune with you and life?”
“Nineteen.”
“Nineteen and a Catholic. Splendid.”
“Asher, I didn’t expect this from you.”
“So what am I supposed to do? Tell lies? You only take walks with right-minded people?”
“You can disagree, but why on this level?” Paul demanded.
“What level? You tell me you like shikse pussy, you’re telling me something I don’t know? I’m you, Paulie, I’m you. Jewish girls devour you. Haven’t I seen my friends go under? The wives can’t walk upstairs. They need maids. They need vacations—once in August, then in January all over again. They’re sorry they laid anybody before they married you. They stop sanctioning looseness, bang, all of a sudden. One Friday you come in the door and they got the candles going, and then you’re really home. I’m not saying I blame you, Paul. I’m only trying to get to the bottom.”
“Getting to the bottom doesn’t mean digging into sewers. How can you talk like this? You don’t even know the girl. You never even saw her.”
“I never even saw that baby I carry a picture of either. But I know what a baby is, so I can appreciate this one. This girl’s got a background on her you don’t even begin to understand. She’s got a family that probably this minute is churning gall over you. True?”
“Like mine over her. Just as smart and sensible.”
“You think happiness comes out of gall? You think that’ll be nice, earning all those enemies? You think it’s enough to squirm around in bed with her, to wake up with her hand on your vitals? What do you think that solves, Paulie, after the wad is popped?”
“Christ, Asher, you’re a dunghole, a toilet!”
“We’re talking man to man, right? Don’t start crying. I’m not a charming man.”
“All right, Asher, man to man. If you’re a man, a human being, then why don’t you talk about love? I love Libby.
I’m giving it to you straight now, though not so flowery as you. I love Libby. She’s alive, she’s sweet, she has deep and generous instincts. She has feelings. She, unlike you, is charming.”
“You like that?”
“Yes.”
“Charm is shit.”
“She’s a woman, Asher, listen to me! She behaves like a woman. I want to stick with her, to live with her.”
“Go ahead.”
“I am. I’m marrying her.”
“You’re a circular reasoner,” said Asher, “and I’m a cynic, but you’re worse. Marriage kills love. Do me a favor, look around at all the loving happy couples. You count them for me, all right? I’ll close my eyes, you tell me how many you come up with.” He took off his glasses, blew into them, then wiped away the steam on a piece of cloth he extracted from his coat pocket. His lower lids were jeweled with tears from the cold. Hooking the rims back over his elaborate ears, he said, “How many? Once you get past the Duke and Duchess of Windsor it’s slim pickings, no? Paulie, kiss the girl, caress her, stick it right up in her, but for Christ’s sake do me a favor and wait a year. You’re an artistic type, a serious observer of life, why kill your talent? You’ll sap yourself with worry, you’ll die of a hard-on in the streets. Other women will tantalize you some day and you and your conscience will wrestle till you choke. Artists and artistic types must go it alone. If a year elapses and the urge remains, then go ahead, hang yourself, there’s nothing anybody can do. Is a year too much to ask?”
“I’m graduating, Asher,” Paul said, speaking with the patience of a wronged man. “She has a year to go, this girl you have so little regard for. When I leave Ithaca she’ll stay. Because I am so hard up, you see, so controlled by my hot pants and this guilt I feel at having deflowered her, I feel I want to marry her. It’s as simple as that.”
“Precisely.”
“Asher! Asher! When I leave, you shmuck, I lose her. That’ll be that.”
“I wouldn’t myself, if I were you, stand in the way of an ending.”
“But the plain and simple fact is, Asher, I don’t want it to end! Does that mean nothing?”