Letting Go

by Philip Roth

  “I’m sorry,” I said, without any display of sorrow, “but you know what I’m talking about.”

  Her eyes were suddenly full of tears. “You didn’t have to make a silly jerk out of me in front of him! Our kids play together—his daughter gives my daughter measles! Couldn’t you at least have shaved?” she cried. “Oh you looked like such a bum!”

  “I was looking for a razor blade! I was trying to shave in this pigsty! Oh this is impossible—this is ridiculous! I don’t need this kind of agony, really!”

  “Then go. Lower your voice, damn it, and go.”

  “You don’t want me to be here anyway, that’s pretty clear to anybody.”

  “Look, you don’t want to be here, so don’t pull that stuff.”

  “Maybe that’s so—”

  “If maybe that’s so, then maybe you ought to take your leftover pills and shove off.” She painted a smile on her face and inclined toward me. “If maybe that’s so, all right?”

  “That’s fine. I don’t need this kind of crap, no sir.”

  There was some rhythmic lapse in that last sentence, an absence of thunder, that left me feeling like something less than Winston Churchill on the floor of Parliament. I was dying to make some final crack about her slacks, but it wasn’t really necessary. Everything we had set out to accomplish, we had accomplished. Henceforth and forever after, last night did not exist.

  In the bedroom I had to hunt through the dresser to find some of the clothes I had been wearing three days before. It was a pleasure for me to have to open all her drawers: evidence, piles and piles of evidence in every one. My jacket and trousers were hanging in the closet, there with tennis rackets, snowboots, back issues of Art News, rolled-up rugs, stockpiles of red bricks, and, of course, all of Martha’s clothes, which were hung from the rack, or piled on the floor, or shoved in on the overhead shelf. Naked, I stood there and allowed the sight to flood me with a deep sense of righteousness.

  After I dressed, I looked at myself a moment in the mirror; my eyes were as expressive as two marbles, and my beard hid the angles of my face. It was a streaky orange color, as though tea had been strained through it. Looking at that face, it was difficult to think that I had been in the right. But I was glad I was leaving, I told myself, and before I left I wanted that fact registered upon the consciousness of this house.

  This time I did not turn away from the threshold of the kitchen, but entered and stood firm. Markie had a milk mustache, and Cynthia, in her red jacket with the hood up and wearing her leggings, was ready for school—though the act was that she was casually lingering over her last drop of Ovaltine. She was about as casual, of course, as us two adults.

  Martha was looking out the window, drinking coffee from a mug. On the back porch was a snowless gray ring where the garbage pail had stood; the sun was shining onto the white railing of the porch and the white window frames, and it lit up the walls of the kitchen with a fine, healthy glare.

  “I think I’ll be going now,” I said.

  She did not turn. Markie was leaning out toward me from his seat; Cynthia moved not a muscle.

  “Okay,” Martha said.

  Everything that had happened, including this final eloquent exchange, seemed all at once rather shabby. I felt, with a touch of desperation, the desire to leave on good terms. Slowly, so that neither Cynthia nor Markie would miss a word, I said, “Thank you for letting me stay while I was sick.” The little speech would not have fooled me, but then I was not a child; at least the sounds had been made, and they would live in the history of this family.

  Martha turned; she made a movement with her mouth—wry, I suppose you would call it—which indicated to me that she found me incredibly predictable. I was disappointed that she did not at least understand what I had tried to do; but her understanding was only for her own troubles. I thought back to how she had made love on the night I had fallen ill, and I thought back on all she had said to me the evening before, and I did not care very much for her.

  “So long, Cynthia,” I said. “Goodbye, Mark.” I started back down the hallway, feeling suddenly fevered and weak. But I was strong enough—I told myself—to make it down the stairs and into my car, and home.

  When I was almost into the small dark foyer that led to the street, I heard the door of Martha’s apartment open above me. There was Cynthia, her head within her hood, stretched over the bannister. In her red jacket, with her blue eyes, she looked as innocent and pretty as I had ever seen her.

  She extended a hand over the railing. “Here,” she said. “Mommy says these are the keys to your car.”

  I would have asked that she simply drop them down to me had I not thought there was a certain forlorn quality in her voice. I went back up the stairs, but when I took the keys she merely looked away.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  I hurried back down, and when, from the first floor landing, I took a quick look up, the child was still there. Her face rested sideways on her wrists, which were flat on the bannister. She may have had her father’s dark hair, but the eyes were Martha’s—inquisitive, lively, and not at all sure what they were after.

  “Goodbye, Cynthia,” I said.

  “Goodbye.”

  I went a step further, and she called, “Aren’t you coming back?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

  She seemed, then, utterly confused. She raised her head from her hands, but then, flatly, she said, “Okay. Goodbye,” and turned and went back into her house.

  I had two pieces of mail waiting for me at my apartment. One was an invitation from the Spiglianos for cocktails late on Christmas afternoon. I contemplated the affair: John’s Abruzzi dance, Pat’s Liverwurst Delight, dinner afterwards with some madman like Bill Lake … But I would be sick anyway, I thought; I would never be rid of this fever and so didn’t have to begin suffering over a Spigliano get-together.

  There was also a picture post card in color from Grossinger’s. I went around the apartment letting shades fly up, and prying windows open to allow passage out for the musty unused odor that hung over the place. With my joints feeling heavier than the limbs they joined, I cautiously laid myself down on my unmade bed. “Hello! This is the life!” was written on the card in a large scrawl, and it was signed, “Fay and Dad.” A P.S. squeezed in at the bottom drifted over into the address. “We’re here thru N. Yrs. Day so you can stay in Chi have gd. time Dad.” That was it—no reference made to anything that had happened in his life, or mine, prior to the day before yesterday. I couldn’t believe he had forgotten, but apparently he had. It was a great day for separations.

  2

  Perhaps it is the watering-down of some racial guilt that causes the trouble, but Christmas has always been a day I don’t enjoy. As unpracticed in the faith of my fathers as I am—which is about as unpracticed as my own particular father is—I am nevertheless not at peace with the culture when most of my countrymen, in the warmth and privacy of their homes, are celebrating the birth of their Saviour. The radio stations are all bells and organ music, the streets are empty, the frames of my neighbors’ homes blink with colored light bulbs, and in snowy mangers on church lawns are assembled miniatures of figures in whose reality, or suprareality, I have never for a moment been able to believe. I realize the fun the Gentiles are having, and I wish them well, but for me it is as though all the long, shapeless Sundays of the year have fallen on one day, and I tap my fingers, a superfluous man, waiting for nightfall and December twenty-sixth, when I can come back into the world.

  But nightfall seemed never to be coming—not even late afternoon. I marked dozens of freshman essays, and then I made myself a snack and carried it from the kitchen into the small living room. Sections of the Sunday Times that I had been intending to read for weeks were scattered around the apartment, whose furnishings seemed today to be exuding a special jumbo-sized portion of ugliness. The decor of the place might be designated as 1930s Modern; there was a chair
of bent laminated wood that was upholstered in imitation alligator skin; several other chairs made of tubular steel, a chest of drawers of curved metal, and other icy-looking ornaments, none of them smacking much of hearth and home. It was a little like living in a supper club. The shades on the windows were still the blackout shades from the war.

  I drank a little whiskey and ate my snack and lit the cigar that my colleagues Bill Lake and Mona Meyerling had given me when they had stopped by to visit a few days before. I settled down in earnest to smoke it—-dragging on the wet end, then holding it off to look at as I exhaled. The good bachelor life. I tried to think of a girl I could invite over to share my dinner, but gave it up as a bad idea; I would end up overstimulated, undersatisfied, and a total alien from the day. Just relax, said I, and have a good time by yourself.

  I went to the window. Since ten in the morning it had been looking like four in the afternoon, and it still did at half past two. I took a long gaze at myself in the mirror: old sweater, baggy trousers, hair uncombed, beard coming in orange again. To complete the picture, I jammed the cigar between my teeth and wondered about the future. It occurred to me that I would never marry; at about the same time I realized that I hated cigars.

  The day crept on. Boredom soon began to teeter on the edge of something worse, and I put on my coat and went out to take a walk. When I returned, I tried to get back to marking papers, but at five I said the hell with it and went into the bathroom to shave. I changed my mind three times over, finished shaving, dressed, and walked over to John Spigliano’s.

  The door to the Spigliano apartment opened, and in the entryway stood two red-headed children, each with a pink party dress, black patent-leather shoes, and a stern expression.

  “Hello,” I said to the two of them.

  Only their starched dresses creaked.

  “Ooohh,” came a voice from around the corner—which was followed by a tray full of hors d’oeuvres and a vast contraption of green. Pat Spigliano stepped into the doorway, and her dress, with a quantity of stiff green netting encircling the green skirt, momentarily displaced the little girls.

  “Gabe!” Saying my name somehow caused Pat to swing the hoop a little exuberantly—and out of sight went the children. “I thought you wouldn’t be coming. We heard you were sick. John will be so happy.”

  “I’m feeling better, thanks,” I said. “I thought I’d come for—”

  I was talking to myself. Pat was looking from one of her children to the other. “Stop hiding, girls—come on now, come on—”

  The girls battled gamely against their mother’s dress, while Pat looked back to me. “And these are the twins,” she announced. “This is Michelle Spigliano and this is Stella Spigliano. And this is Doctor Wallach, girls, one of Daddy’s teachers.”

  In loud hoarse voices, Michelle and Stella exclaimed: “Merry Christmas, Mr. Wallach!”

  “Doctor,” their mother corrected them.

  “That’s all right—”

  But Stella erupted, as though one were needed in the house, “Doctor!” while her partner took the whole thing, as they say, from the top.

  When they had both settled their heels back onto the floor, I said, “Merry Christmas to you, girls.”

  Pat winked at me, then went back to the business of shaping destinies. “Now take Doctor Wallach’s things, young ladies—”

  “No—it’s not—” But one child was dragging at my sleeves while the other jumped up toward my chest, after either my hat or my tie. With a sense of hopelessness about the whole afternoon, I gave up all the garments asked for and came into the apartment.

  Pat immediately pushed her hors d’oeuvres my way, and waited for my comment.

  “They’re very well-behaved,” I said.

  “We think so,” she replied. “They’re going to Radcliffe.”

  I refrained from asking whether they were just home now on vacation. As we came into the living room, Pat said, “Have some pâté?”

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  “Well then, have a good time—have fun—” she instructed me.

  “It was liverwurst before he rose into the hierarchy, and it’ll be liverwurst till he dies, the symbol-hunting son of a bitch.” It was Bill Lake who spoke, his wiry carcass twined around the back and arms of a chair in which Mona Meyerling was stiffly seated.

  “Or becomes president,” I said.

  “Or bats fourth for the White Sox—who knows? The nice, frank, beastly opportunism in those two absolutely compels admiration,” said Bill, neither raising nor lowering his voice, despite Mona’s attempts to make him pipe down. “Which I don’t want confused with affection,” Bill added. “You ought to stop feeling sorry for yourself, Wallach. How would you like to be Associate Professor Spigliano and have to perform coitus on the hostess?”

  “What makes you think I’m sorry for myself, Willie?”

  “Mona,” he said, lapsing into his W. C. Fields voice, “get the boy a drink. The boy needs a drink. Have you noticed Charleen’s boy friend, with the liquidy eyes—over there, with the damp lips? Also, Wallach, self-concerned. A big dumb beautiful girl like Charleen, married to an introspective dermatologist—”

  Mona was standing now; she was dressed up, and because I like her so much I’d rather not describe her outfit. “How are you feeling?” she asked. “Better?”

  “I think I’m fine,” I said.

  “—all the ills and perversions of the world,” Lake was saying, “sloth, usura—”

  “What do you want?” Mona asked. “A bourbon?”

  “Look, I’ll get it.”

  “—sodomy, pseudohermaphroditism—my God, the olisbos itself was no mystery to the Greeks—”

  “Sit down,” Mona said, “and keep him quiet.”

  She took the distance between the chair and the liquor table in six graceless shambles. Bill Lake babbled on, “—and what about the French? In 1750 two lowly little pederasts burned in the Place de Grève—” and I looked over the Spigliano’s new apartment, which, surprisingly, turned out to be quite charming. On the top floor of an old red brick house on Woodlawn, it had white walls, slanting ceilings, leaded windows, and lots of room. Fifty or sixty people were standing in little knots around the Christmas tree and the fireplace and the liquor supply. Mixing one of his elaborate cocktails for Walker Friedland and his wife was the master of the place, John Spigliano. With his round dark face and shiny eyes, and a big smile to honor one of Walker’s stories, he looked like an amiable, friendly, harmless, helpful little man—and yet I knew that, like his mate, he could not speak that you did not see a knife slipping between the shoulders of someone you liked—of someone you had thought John liked. Of course it is a mistake to expect academics to behave better than other people; but whether it is that I am a snob or a romantic or a naïf, or whether I was too idolatrous of the people who educated me, I always expect that John is going to walk over to me one day and say that he has made up his mind and wants to join up with the human members of our race. Though I like to think of Spigliano emotions and Spigliano aspirations and rewards as having little to do with myself or anybody I care about, it is true nevertheless that he is a grand source of irritation to many of us who must work alongside him. Perhaps it’s that we envy him the simple decision he has made to be a bastard.

  Standing alongside John and facing Walker was Walker’s wife, a stunning blonde with long legs, a high hairdo, A-plus posture, and a somewhat mannered approach to a cigarette that toppled her chic over into self-consciousness and produced in Bill Lake (so he said, tapping my shoulder) a desire to go over and offer her a laxative. She was, of course, only a sophomore in the College and was doing the best she could; if she had only known how Cyril Houghton—who was ostensibly talking to Swanson, the Swede—was casting glances at her rear end, she might have been able to relax a little. She had certainly as much influence as any of us, and more than most.

  Mona was marching back with my drink in her hand, when directly beside me I h
eard Peggy Moberly speaking.

  “She’s absolutely marvelous,” Peggy was saying to someone. “She’s just the most charming person. We’re going to have lunch together on Wednesday.”

  “Fine,” a man answered.

  “Really, she’s lovely—”

  “Thank you.”

  “And so gay. I’m simply crazy about her.”

  “Yes”—I now recognized the male voice—“she’s a very sweet girl.”

  Suddenly Peggy had turned and put her hand on my hair. “I thought you were sitting there. What are you being a wallflower about? How are you feeling? I called your place—I was going to come over and make you a decent meal—and you didn’t even answer. I thought, oh God, poor Gabe is dying—”

  I stood up. “I just wasn’t answering the phone, Peg. Hello, Paul.”

  Paul was wearing the nipped-in double-breasted sharkskin suit he’d worn the day of his arrival in Chicago. He looked severe and lean, and he held himself erect not so much to get the edge on the rest of the party, as to be removed from it—not haughty, just separate. “How are you feeling?” he asked me.

  “I’m much better,” I said. “Just some virus, I suppose.”

  It was our first exchange since the night in Libby’s office three weeks before. We had managed to see each other only at staff meetings, and there even to find seats out of each other’s line of vision. It was a hard task at a round table.

  “This man’s wife,” Peggy said, and without the aid of her glasses she squinted across the room, “is the loveliest-looking person. The most spirited girl—”

  “We’re old friends,” I said.

  “Oh yes, of course. Gabe brought Paul!” she announced, girlishly, to herself. “Oh Peggy, what are you saying,” this also to herself. I took her hand and squeezed it. Peggy Moberly was one of those people who expect everything of a party; and if everything doesn’t show up soon enough, they start dragging it in by the heels. She seemed now nearly worn out with good intentions: the curl was gone from her hair, the straps of her slip were visible, and her ankles looked to be giving out too. In the end she reached into her purse for her glasses and put them on—the final capitulation to reality. Resigned about herself, she raised both our hands toward the other side of the room and said, “She’s quite the hit, that girl.”