Letting Go

by Philip Roth

  “Maury”—she knocked on wood; that is, she looked for wood and found formica—“Maury always had a nice head of hair. With him it’s in the family.” She flushed again; even while she spoke, Mr. Herz lay in the hospital, a bald spot the size of a half dollar at the back of his skull. “You’d recognize him right off, Paul. You really would. Paul”—she turned serious all at once—“you know Heshy Lerner got killed in Korea. You know that?”

  “I knew that,” he said.

  “It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it? He was such a good dancer, remember? And he was always, you know—you remember the type of fella Heshy was. He was very much the life of the party.”

  “He was a very funny guy.”

  “Look,” she said, as though he had just disparaged himself, “so were you. You could really make very funny comments, Paul, when you wanted to. Paul, you were a very popular fella, and then you went away. For that matter,” she rushed to say, “everybody’s moving away and it’s just not the same. If you don’t live in the suburbs today, you don’t live anywhere. Maury and I believe, however, in being individualists.”

  “How’s my mother, Doris?”

  She closed her eyes to answer. “She had to get a shot to calm her, that’s how your mother is.” A grave statement, intended to have a humbling effect upon the prodigal son. “Now it’s a little better, but not much.”

  “When did it happen?” It! “His heart attack,” he added.

  “What’s today, Saturday? Tuesday night. We were at the show and when we got back there was an ambulance and a whole crowd, and they were carrying him out on a stretcher. Maury went in the ambulance with him, and then he came back, I think it was three in the morning, maybe later, and we put your mother to sleep in Jeffrey’s room, and we talked whether we should send you the telegram, and we sent it. I guess you got it, when—yesterday?”

  “I got it Wednesday morning. Three days ago.”

  Apparently she had been expecting him to lie, or wanting him to. All she could finally do was pour coffee into his cup, from which he had as yet taken only a small sip.

  “He’s going to die, is that right, Doris?”

  “Look, I don’t think so …” It was as though she wanted, by minimizing the crisis, to excuse Paul’s not running to his father’s bedside.

  “What do the doctors say?”

  “They don’t know.”

  “He’s in a coma?”

  “Since Tuesday night.”

  “Did he have any attacks before, recently?”

  “Well, he always had heart trouble; he was never a well man, Paul, let’s not kid ourselves.”

  “He never had heart trouble.”

  “He certainly did have heart trouble, I beg your pardon.”

  “He thought he had heart trouble, Doris.”

  “What do you call what he had then, a belly-ache?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She jumped up from the couch and began picking up toys from around the room and throwing them into the playpen. “You don’t have to hate him, Paul,” she said, “when he’s in the hospital!”

  “I don’t hate him.” And those few words seemed to render him helpless.

  Doris apparently sensed his condition, for she rose on her toes now when she spoke. “If a man had a heart attack, and three of the biggest heart men say he had a heart attack, then I don’t see how you can get here about a week later and say he didn’t have one.”

  “I was talking about six years ago, Doris, seven, eight years back.”

  “You can have premonitions, can’t you? You can have terrible troubles, believe me, that can bring things on.”

  “I suppose you can. I suppose you can sit around having premonitions all your life.”

  “You always had to believe different from everybody else. The whole world is wrong and you’re right!”

  It was the proper moment to get up and go. But the colorful airy apartment, Doris’s bad posture and pretty face, the playpen, the scattered toys, the pulley lamp, the French crescents that you warm and serve—all of them together took most of the starch out of their argument. Even Doris’s chastisements didn’t seem original. The simple truth was—and it was a simple truth both must have understood, for both calmed down at the same speed—that some nice affection still lived between these two old playmates. What did any of this have to do with all that heavy breathing back when they were seventeen? On this day particularly, he was not anxious to dismiss whatever little kindnesses came his way.

  Doris must have had a soft spot for kindness, for remembered affection, herself. She asked, “Another crescent?”

  They ate and drank, and then they heard the baby turn in his crib and the bottle clunk onto the floor. Doris put her finger to her mouth and they were both absolutely quiet; when the crisis was over, she smiled in a motherly way.

  “You’re still teaching?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “English?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, you used to read all the time, so I guess we should have guessed then … Oh it’s really funny, Paul, talking to you. It gives me the gooseflesh. Eleven o’clock in the morning, I’m dusting my house, and I’m married, and I’ve just given my little boy his bottle, and my husband’s just left, and I’m trying to think of shopping and a thousand things, and in walks Paul Herz. I’m sorry if I’m babbling, but that’s what happens to me. Maury and I were down in Miami in January and who should we run into on Lincoln Road, just window-shopping, but Peanuts Ackerman, from Ocean Avenue, who I used to go out with for a couple months in high school. And I’m telling you, he’s married, and he has this wife with him, a really terrific blonde—and three kids, and I don’t know, it just gives me such a feeling whenever I see a guy I used to date, and now I’m married and he’s married, and we got furniture and cars and kids. I just get this feeling—”

  Paul said, “I get it too.”

  “Are you being sarcastic again?”

  He shook his head. He was no longer the sharp-tongued backseat Don Juan. Hardly. He slumped a little in his chair, for he felt there was something in this room that he had expected for himself. Never—not in Detroit, Chicago, Ann Arbor, Iowa City, not even in Brooklyn as a boy—had he felt very permanent about himself. And that was sad and ironic, for he had married early for reasons that were not really so out of the ordinary.

  “I get it seeing you, Paul,” Doris was telling him. “I got it seeing Peanuts and those kids, and his wife, such a terrific-looking girl. And what makes it something is that some accident, something here or there, and you might even have married the other person. I don’t mean that kind of accident—I mean some quirk, anything. You think that’s dumb, don’t you?”

  “No—I’m just not sure about the last part.” He wasn’t very sure about any of it, but he was not unwilling to let the girl go on and on; it was nice having a little respite from life. He had married at twenty as though to bully his way into manhood; now a little vacation from manhood was a pleasure. Everybody deserves a few minutes off now and then anyway. One deep breath, then off to the hospital …

  “What last part?” Doris asked.

  He had to think. “Marrying people by accident.”

  “Paul, if you want to say that you couldn’t have married me because I’m not smaaht enough, look, go right ahead. I’ll admit I don’t read every book that comes out, and I’m not a bohemian or a beatnik, so if that’s what you think, you’re perfectly justified.”

  “You want to fight with me, Doris?”

  “You’re the one who’s fighting.”

  “All I meant was that there probably is some real chemistry between two people who decide to marry.”

  “Boy, you read too many novels,” she said. “It’s not all sex.”

  “All right.” If he could only think of a place to go, he would leave. Suddenly she filled him with the same weariness and boredom that she had in 1948. What was the name of the hospital? Where would he leave his suitcase
? Where would he sleep? Why, downstairs, in his old bed, where else?

  “Well, that’s what you meant,” she said.

  “I only meant some necessary connection. Some serious service one does for the other.”

  “How—” she asked, pouring him another cup of coffee. “How,” she asked very offhandedly, “would you explain that in terms of me and Maur?”

  “I don’t know you and Maury.”

  “You remember us.”

  “Hell, Doris”—his irritation was less with the conversation than with his own willingness to stay for yet another cup—“we’ve all changed.”

  “Well, so have you!”

  “That’s what I meant.”

  “You were a very excitable guy then, and now, I don’t know, I just don’t think you look so excitable any more. I suppose you matured.”

  “I struck you, did I, as young?”

  “Well, you think it’s a joke and that I’m stupid, but as a matter of fact, if you want to know the truth, at twenty Maury was much more of a man, I thought, than you. A much more settled fella, with real goals.”

  “Well,” Paul said, raising his hands, “he seems to have reached them.”

  “He’s doing very nicely, thank you. I can’t make out if you’re sarcastic or not.”

  “Not! Come on, Doris, ten years have gone by, what’s this sarcastic business!”

  “Well, I’m not ashamed of how Maury’s doing. He may not be a”—at the last second she seemed to swap one word for another—“Rockefeller, but he’s a very good husband to a girl. He makes a girl very happy. It’s very nice, believe me, to have somebody who’s very proud of you. I know plenty of girls whose husbands never really admire them dressed up, or don’t take pride in the way their wives fix their hair or in their wives’ taste—which is very important to a woman—and I’m not one of them.”

  “You look very happy.”

  “Well, you do too!”

  “I didn’t accuse you of anything, Doris.”

  “Well,” she rushed to say, blushing now, “you must love your wife very much to have given up everything for her.”

  Having stayed this long, having chosen to be unrealistic and indulgent, he should have expected it. “What did I give up?” he asked.

  “I’m not criticizing.”

  “I only wanted to know what you thought I had to give up.”

  “I only meant to say that you must love your wife very much.”

  He had no choice. “I do,” he said.

  “Well … then …” But she couldn’t lay off, this girl whom he had caressed and caressed. “That must make it all worth it.”

  “It does,” he heard himself saying.

  “I suppose she’s an intellectual too.”

  “Look, Doris, it’s hard to tell what you have in your mind when you say ‘intellectual.’ ”

  “Like you.”

  “Well, she is like me.”

  “Very serious,” Doris suggested.

  “She’s quite serious. That’s right.”

  “Well, maybe she is.”

  “What does that mean? She is. She’s a serious girl. She’s a very valuable person.”

  “Well,” Doris said, “it’s up to the individual. Personally I just don’t think you happen to have liked Jewish girls. I don’t think you respected them, to be frank, if you want the truth.”

  “My wife is Jewish.”

  “I meant,” said Doris, not flinching, “by birth.”

  “I don’t think that has much to do with it.” Get up! Go! Why punish yourself!

  “You might not think so,” Doris said, “but a lot of it is in your subconscious. It’s a reaction. It happens to a lot of Jewish guys. Especially smart ones.” After a second, she added, “The ones who think they’re smart.”

  “It’s possible, Doris,” he said, “that people choose mates for other reasons.” She didn’t seem to believe it; she closed her eyes once again. “Complicated reasons,” he said.

  “That’s complicated to me, all right. You take a fella, a normal fella, and you expect he’s going to first off be attracted to a girl of his own particular faith, right? Then he turns around and does the opposite. You couldn’t want anything more complicated if you wrote away for it.”

  “As a matter of fact, you could.”

  Defiantly, as though she had him chained to his chair, she asked, “For instance?”

  “Oh, for instance why did you marry Maury?”

  “Well,” she said, losing breath and coloring, “he’s Jewish at least.”

  “Never mind, Doris. Let’s forget all this.”

  “Why did you marry her?” Doris demanded. “I mean if it wasn’t just a reaction, why did you?”

  “Love.” After he had spoken he experienced a terrible moment of confusion. But he said again, “Love.”

  “So then why don’t you have any children?”

  The question startled him further. “We don’t want any children.”

  “I don’t believe it, a Jewish fella.”

  “You’ve got too much faith, Doris, in us poor Jewish fellas.”

  “You’re not the same fella, Paul, that’s the truth. If a man and his wife have a solid relationship then they have children.”

  He did not wish to tell anybody in Brooklyn of Libby’s kidney trouble; besides it did not seem to him that this was actually why they had no children. “Doris, that may not be so in all cases. Isn’t that a possibility?”

  “Listen, you make love to a girl different, if you want to know, when there are children involved. And I think I’ve had more experience than you! You’re just not the same fella, and that’s all I’m trying to say.”

  At last he pulled his weakened self up out of his chair. He felt he had heard just about everything that had been thought and said about him in the last five years. He set down his cup.

  “You were always a lively, affectionate fella, Paul, and you know it. You were the kind of fella who you could just see someday playing with his own kids, tossing them up in the air and taking them to Ebbets Field and the whole works. You were a very affectionate fella, Paul.”

  “Well,” he said, unable to remember where he had put his suitcase, and growing more furious by the moment, “maybe it turns out I’m a cold fish. Maybe that’s my story.”

  But Doris was shaking her head. “You were always kissing me, Paul,” she said. “That’s something that if you do it, you have it all your life. I’m still a very affectionate person, I can tell you that. Maury says I’m sometimes too demonstrative even.”

  Where was the suitcase? “Doris, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “And you,” she said, heartbroken, her hands on her hips, “you were the smartest of any of us.”

  It was time to go. Go, you coward. Your suitcase is right at your feet. Go.

  Where?

  “Where are you going—where?” she called after him as he started down the hall. “Paul?” she called, but he had no answer. As he opened the door to the elevator she shouted to him “Paul, you’re a fool. Oh Paul, you ruined your life!” It was only another voice in the chorus.

  At home, whenever eggs were served for breakfast, he served them. It was not that Libby couldn’t crack an egg properly, or even that she was unwilling to; it was simply that the way they had worked out their life together, he usually slipped from his side of the bed in the morning while she was asleep—at any rate, while her eyes were closed. Only occasionally, out of exhaustion or a lingering sense of the fitness of things, they lay side by side in bed, wide awake; and then he was compelled—still out of a fingering sense of the fitness of things, of what was only just and right—to make the ultimate expression of that connection which husbands and wives are said to have, and which he and his wife no longer had—perhaps never had—and which therefore made the expression of it a hypocrisy beyond any hypocrisy he could ever have imagined. It was not very pleasant to start the day caught somewhere between the betrayal of your marr
iage—the very convention of marriage itself—and the betrayal of your own flesh. Nor to end it that way; as a result they did not often go to bed at the same hour either.

  The butter melting, the eggshell splitting, the plop, the sizzle, all brought back to him (as though they ever left him) the realities of his home life.

  From the far end of the room, Asher called, “Up—over? Which?”

  “Up.”

  No longer was the El outside Asher’s window, and the sun, allowed access, cast a glow on the stiff curved leaves of the potted plants that circled the room. The floors, walls, and furniture, however, hadn’t gained much from the alteration in the city’s landscape. As for Asher, El or no El, light or half-light, he looked the same; nose, pores, hair, belly, aroma, everything was just six years older.

  “How is that weather in Chicago?” he called.

  “Now it’s spring,” Paul answered.

  “Hot, huh?”

  “Yes, hot.”

  “There’s a city that’s got a climate for you. Takes all that crap from Canada, all that ice and wind, and then whshsh, those summers. My hair dropped out of my head there, Paulie, from humidity alone.”

  “I forget you were a Chicagoan.”

  “All that clamminess and police corruption,” Asher called from the kitchen, “produces baldness early. Either you’re perspiring into your hatband or worrying to death.” He was crossing the room, the pan in one hand, the other hand drawing a bead on his nephew’s hairline. “Ah, but you’re not doing so bad yet yourself. In fact, you look nice, Paul. You got a nice grave expression in your face. Second violinist for the Krakow Philharmonic.” He slid the egg onto the plate Paul held out to him, then sat down, the pan dangling from his hand.

  Paul was feeling now the kind of relief he had felt at first at Doris’s. He was willing to accept the fact that he had made one false start this morning already. Now he understood things better; on the subway back from Brooklyn he had come to grips with the meaning of his trip. “Thanks,” he said to Asher. Asher smiled; even he was a help. He had opened the door, shaken hands, and when Paul asked if there was a bed he might use for a night or two, Asher had pointed over to the sofa, no questions asked—at least not right then.