by Philip Roth
All he could think to say, as an answer, a defense, was to tell her what had happened that afternoon in Gary. But of course that was no answer. He could say nothing. His hour with Bigoness—after all, what was he going to build it into? That puny little exchange—the humbling of a stupid man—was not enough to elevate his life. He lived a little life, an insignificant life. Puny … Nothing at this point seemed able to give him proportion or dignity. It was not even out of anything so weighty as jealousy that this woman’s intended had not mentioned to her his phone call. What he had done, what he had forced Jaffe to let him do, counted for nothing. He turned to leave, and then—because he was so unwilling, so incredulous—he turned back for a final instant. And what his eyes saw in her eyes—could it be? Uncertainty? She knows she is fooling herself. She is in pain! Now he must take her in his arms! But he could no longer deceive himself with what he wanted to believe were her feelings.
4
Puny?
Fury! Fury was what he was feeling! He had made plans of his own for the afternoon. The sun was high, the streets clear and brilliant. He had told himself to make plans and he had made them. He had seen a handsome quilt advertised in the Sunday papers—which took care of his present. He would buy it. He had a date for drinks in the Loop at five with the girl he had met at the Harnaps’. She had sounded pleasant and genuine on the phone, and not so assertive this time, he preferred to believe, as eager. He would have dinner with her too. She was assistant to the curator at the Art Institute. Fine. His humiliation was two nights past; it no longer was going to get him down. Nothing was going to get him down … Except that he was so damned angry. He was going to have to miss his penicillin shot too. He drove with no regard for the law—though he had justice on his mind—changing lanes, leaning on his horn, braking sharply, speeding, speeding down to Gary. There were still those applications to mail. He had rushed so, that he’d forgotten again to put them in his pocket. He couldn’t keep everything on his mind, with the result that he sometimes couldn’t keep anything on it.
Thirty minutes later he was threading his way in and out of monotonous, endless streets; the glare of the sun made them no less dreary. He saw only lusterless houses, insulated from light, life, the seasons. In the muddy little squares of front yard—snow-filled on his last visit—children sat and shivered, or hopelessly slid their tricycles through the soft earth. Some men were in the streets washing their cars, arms moving mechanically up and down, water ringing on hub caps, steam twirling off roofs. He peered at every street sign, while slowly the blue sky and white sun drew away, restoring a proper and wintery distance between heaven and earth. Even the stinking weather was against him. His anger and disgust burned steadily away. That he had not stopped to think of his other affairs—he had rushed down the stairs, into the car, and off—did not decrease his passion any; his fury had many causes. For one thing (this dawned slowly) he was lost.
A half-dozen men in faded field jackets and heavy shoes were congregated around the pumps of a gas station; he pulled off the road and up beside them. When he leaned toward them to speak, a whizzing sensation fanned out from his eye through the left half of his skull. Under the gaze of these idle men he grew conscious of his small bandage. The wound throbbed; leaving Martha’s, he should have driven directly home and washed the cut. He could not even remember the name of the movie he had gone to see instead; he had not really seen it.
He wasn’t thinking. He had to start to think. Yet he did not want to calm down, if that’s what thinking would accomplish. If he wasn’t being prudent, that was all right with him.
He asked directions—his foot all the while tapping the gas—and received a curt reply from a short man with a not very high opinion of him. But he had asked curtly in the first place. He listened, then drove off—some words having to do with his bandage following after him. While he was swinging away, a foot kicked the rear fender. Sons of bitches. As though nobody else had troubles.
But he had only gone off the curb. He felt himself not permitting himself to calm down.
Today? The nineteenth. Six days before he was to go East; four shopping days, sang the radio, till Christmas. Carefully he had planned this day. Lovingly. Resurrectingly! Looking himself over in the mirror as he was about to depart—for his shot first, then the Loop—he had only decided to phone on the chance that Theresa herself might be home, just to make certain, to check up. And the nerve of that dumb bastard! Who the hell did he think he was!
He pulled up behind a two-toned Plymouth, tan and white. Woolly tassels framed the rear window, and two tailpipes stuck out from the car’s underside. The machine had a high polish. He looked the automobile over, tried a door and found it locked. The urge he had was undefined, but destructive. Before starting up the stairs he thought of getting back in his car and driving around Gary, from one diner to another, until he found Theresa. He could deal with her, then she would deal with her husband.
Breezing out of the alley on a tricycle came the blue-eyed Bigoness girl. She looked flatly up at him, where he stood at the top of the stairs. He went into the house, working out in his mind the blood relationship between this child and Rachel. There was none. He rang the bell once, then leaned all his weight against it until he heard shoes galloping down the stairs.
“Vic? Yo, Vic?” Bigoness beat down one flight, then another, until he was confronted with the enemy. He came to a powerful halt, practically rearing backwards.
“You—”
“That’s right—”
Outrage: “Where were you! Around the corner?”
“I telephoned from Chicago. I think we’d better have a talk. Right now.”
“Right now I got other things.”
“Well, you’re going to have to have this thing too.”
“You don’t tell me what I got to have or don’t—”
He took an official tone. “It’s now three o’clock. I have to be back in Chicago—”
“Nobody told you to come down here in the first place.”
“I told myself. You told me.”
“The hell I—”
“We had better move our conversation upstairs. I take it your wife isn’t home?”
“Look, I told you—I spent it. Little Walter got sick as a dog. What do you expect, I’d let him die? Let a little kid run a hundred and four—”
“I think we should be talking in private.” A door had opened on the next landing. His eye released a small crack of pain. He should have gone first for his shot.
“—let the kid die?” Bigoness was shouting, dramatically. “You got a sick kid, man, you call a doctor, you buy medicines—”
“Nevertheless, I gave you the money for a purpose.”
“I didn’t sign anything, did I?”
“Just your word.”
His what? Bigoness gaped.
“A promise, Bigoness. An agreement.”
“I said I’d think about it. Don’t tell me I signed something!”
“You said you’d do it.”
“You’re thinking of some other customer, Jack. Something came up … Look, I’m waiting on a phone call, will you—” Bigoness reached for the door.
His eye gave him another ten seconds of pain. He would get blood poisoning. A movie? Why a movie? He was doing things backwards, today too. He should have gone first for the shot, then come here. “Let’s,” he said calmly, wedging his foot in the door, “talk a minute upstairs. Maybe we can still reach some sort of agreement.”
“I don’t think so.”
“We’d better try.” He would be out of here by four, meet the girl at five … His date now seemed even more crucial to his life than his shot. Dropping his head, he stepped through the door. He had an immediate and overwhelming sense of the vulnerability of his back. Why had he dropped his head—so Bigoness wouldn’t strike him on the chin, on the eye?
Upstairs he paused momentarily at Bigoness’s door; his heart struck, like a clock hitting the hour; he moved through.
> “Hey—”
The TV set was on; the place smelled of furniture polish. He pictured Bigoness rubbing down the living room suite and watching give-away shows all day. To his own astonishment, he stepped forward and turned off the sound.
“I’m busy—”
“I see your car’s been washed,” Gabe said. “You can’t be that busy.”
“Me washing my car is none of your business.”
“My business is that you have a car.”
“Oh man, everything is your business.”
“You have a car, yet you took money for train fare—”
“I never said I didn’t have a car. I like to take trains, that’s all.” He had no intention of being comic.
“You like to take money apparently.”
“God damn you, I never stole in my life!”
He saw with relief that Bigoness had not shut the door behind him; it became easier to get his words out. “I’m saying that you had no right to take all that money in the first place. In the second place, you had no right to spend it and then tell me you and your wife can’t come up to Chicago a week from Monday because you can’t afford to. That money was so you could afford to.”
“I said I had—”
“Just let me finish. Third—you see—you had no right to go back on your word.”
“You done now?”
“For the moment.”
“I ain’t signing any papers.”
So much weariness and so much rage rose within him that the one canceled out the other.
“I don’t want to get mixed up in anybody else’s troubles.” It was Bigoness who had spoken.
“You are mixed up in them.”
“No, sir,” said Bigoness, shaking his head.
“Your wife’s mixed up in them.”
“Uh-uh.”
“Bigoness, what is it you want?” But what he expected to hear, he did not. Bigoness’s finger slid in under his belt. The man had no grand schemes; he had no grand mind. It was victory enough for him to walk cockily to the window, slightly bowlegged, his fingers hooked in his trousers. It was enough for him to have suddenly become a cowboy. God! Gabe wished himself the owner of a pistol, a knife. But what did he have, outside of his will, and his intelligence, and whatever strength was in his body? And that strength was probably not as great as his opponent’s. He sat behind a desk all day. Still, he had ten or twelve pounds on the fellow, at least two inches … The vision he had was of himself leaping upon the man’s back and pummeling him until he agreed to show up a week from Monday. The back he saw himself pummeling was, in fact, turned to him now. If he was going to jump, this was his chance.
Of course he did not even begin to take it. “I think,” he said to the back, “you’re allowing the situation to run away with you. Perhaps I’ve made it sound like a larger issue than it really is.”
The back—at least it might just as well have been the back—spoke. “Man, you don’t go around laying out cash for small issues. I’m getting out while the getting’s good.”
“That cash was for train fare and expenses.”
“I got a right to change my mind.” He turned to show his face: stolid. Not till then did Gabe realize that he was himself sitting on the sofa, that he had sat down.
“Let’s forget the forty-five,” Gabe said.
Bigoness’s lashes fluttered; only half his eyes showed. “What do you mean, forget it?”
“Forget it. That’s all. You had a doctor bill—”
“You don’t believe me?”
“Whatever you had is okay with me. Let’s simply forget it.”
“Well,” said Bigoness, coming around to turn up the sound of the television, “all right, I’m willing.”
Bigoness was willing.
Gabe ignored everything he could possibly ignore. “Now we can start from scratch,” he said.
“We sure can.”
“I want to assure you”—repeating and repeating and repeating—“that neither of these papers that you sign will bind you to anything whatsoever. In fact, it’s precisely the opposite that you’re going to bring about. Signing these papers will free you from any responsibility where Theresa’s baby is concerned. Do you see that? Isn’t that clear yet?”
“I ain’t signing any papers.”
“But aren’t you listening to me?”
“I just told you, Mister,” said Bigoness, as though addressing one demented, “that I don’t want to get involved. Understand? Get it? You’re willing to forget the forty-five bucks, I’m willing to forget it. Why don’t we call it quits, before we get angry at each other.”
“Bigoness”—he was barely able to prevent his head from dropping into his hands—“there’s a child’s life involved here. A child can have a decent family and a good life and a good education, and all it takes from you is a short little trip into Chicago …”
“You hand me a laugh, you know?” He had not interrupted Gabe; he had only waited for exhaustion to overtake him. “You think you can come out here and just push people around because they’re having hard times, don’t you? Just tell people what to say and where to sign on the dotted line. You think nobody’s got anything to think about but you and your business. But I’ll tell you, buddy”—pointing—“people have been thinking they’re going to tell me what to do all my life. Now you’re working, now you ain’t; now you’re making a buck eighty an hour, now you’re making a buck eighty-five; now you’re a man, now you’re nothing but a nursemaid. And now you’re going to tell me I’m going to sign those papers, and I’m telling you”—tapping his chest—“I’m not. I make up my mind about things—nobody makes it up for me. Not you, not Tessie, not that bitch Wanda, not anybody but Harry Bigoness! And don’t you go telling me about decent families, you hear? What the hell you mean? I ain’t been out of this place for six weeks—I could’ve run out on those kids too, you understand? But I got guts, you understand that? I could say just like Wanda—screw ’em, and just take off too. But I’m no bum, Mister. Nobody’s ruining my life for me. I work in a factory and you walk around in a tie all day, but at least I earn an honest living. You think I’m some kind of lower kind of person, but I didn’t run out on those kids, did I? I got ’em a new mama, didn’t I? I always held a job, since I’m sixteen years old, and I read a couple books too, in case you want to know, and I didn’t make this recession—understand?—and don’t think you’re going to shove anybody around because of it!”
“You’re telling me then that you won’t do it?”
“Jesus, you’re a slow learner, ain’t you? I told you that on the phone. You could have saved yourself the gas.”
“What does your wife think of this?”
“She knows what’s good for her.”
“I’d like to see her.”
“Hey, I just asked you, who do you think you’re shoving around?”
Again the image of himself leaping upon Bigoness, dragging him down by the throat, crossed his mind, even as he was thinking that he should never have come. He was only matching pride against pride. Dumb pride against dumb pride.
“Then what do you propose to do about this child your wife brought into the world?”
“I don’t think I get you, Wallace.”
“As far as the law is concerned, it’s you who’s responsible for this child. Look, I told you all this last time.”
“And what is it you’re asking?”
“I’m asking what you propose to do about it.”
“—you take me for stupid—”
He rose; he could not bear one more minute of it. “I take you—”
There was a banging beneath him, a thumping, as though his heart was beating upwards in him. A broom handle whacked against the ceiling below, then a voice, “Phone!” Bigoness was darting past him, through the doorway—
“Right there!” he called, tearing down the stairs. “Hold it!”
Gabe stood where he was, each shoe planted on a dragon. Beneath him were the grotesqu
e designs; around, hemming him in, were the heavily oiled surfaces of the elaborate furnishings. When he finally made a move it was only mildly defiant; he switched off the television set. Then he looked around. Where was the phone? He was not sure whom he wanted to call; it was simply that there were other people whose business was more properly the Bigonesses than was his own.
In the dark corridor that led to the bedrooms, the phone sat on a small table. He picked it up to find it dead. Of course—he was not thinking. His eye throbbed, opportunely. He could leave because he needed his shot. He could leave because he had an appointment in the Loop at five. Instead he moved further in the apartment, at first aimlessly, then after some clue to Theresa’s whereabouts. The search began to seem rational.
He entered a room where the shades were drawn; the mattress was furled with sheets and the carpet littered with cups and saucers. He pulled at the tangle of bedding and a man’s pajama top slipped onto the floor. He groveled under the blankets with one hand, and pulled forth what turned out to be a thin blue nightgown. He rushed to the closet. Suits, trousers—a dress! Skirts! Hanging before him was Theresa’s gold skirt. She did live here! He turned a pocket inside out, heard a noise—and made a break for it.
The noise came from back of one of the doors leading off the hall. It was only the whine of a kitten or a puppy. He went into the kitchen and began to open all the drawers. He could leave because nothing was working out. Nothing was in these drawers but silverware, playing cards, and green stamps.
The noise again. A child, a little boy, somewhere in the apartment. And with him his mother, hiding? His stepmother? He followed after the sound, located the door, and opened it. He really should go; this was insane.