by Philip Roth
HE
(Not quite believing her) Is this true?
SHE
It is true. (Laughing again) "Why would I lie about it?
HE
What did your friends make of it when you did it?
SHE
People were ... no one was shocked. People were happy. But I was the first to do it. Daring to settle in. I like being a first.
HE
Yet you haven't any children.
SHE
No, not yet. Not now, anyway. I think we both want to establish ourselves a bit more before that happens.
HE
As writers.
SHE
Yes. Yes. That's part of the idea of going up there. We'll just work and work.
HE
As opposed to?
SHE
As opposed to working and being here and being confined in a city apartment, and running up against each other all the time, and seeing our friends all the time. I've been so nervous recently, I can't sit still. I can't work. I can't do anything. So I think if we can deal with that, I'll have a better shot at getting something done.
HE
But why did you choose this young man to marry? Is he the most exciting person you could find? You say you wanted an adventure. I've met him. I like him, he's been extremely considerate toward me in just these last twenty-four hours, but I would have thought Kliman would be more of an adventure. He was your lover in college—correct?
SHE
It would be impossible being married to Richard Kliman. He's a live wire. He's better in other capacities. Why Billy? He's smart, he was interesting, we could talk for hours, he didn't bore me. He's nice, and there seems to be an idea that a nice person can't be interesting. Of course I know all that he's not: he's not intense, he's not a fireball. But who wants a fireball? He can be gentle, he can be charming, and he adores me. He absolutely adores me.
HE
Do you adore him?
SHE
I love him very much. But he adores me in another way. He's moving to Massachusetts for a year because I want to. He doesn't want to. I probably wouldn't do that for him.
HE
But you have the money. Of course he does it for you. You two are living on your money, aren't you?
SHE
(She looks startled by his bluntness.) What makes you think that?
HE
Well, you've published one story in The New Yorker, and as yet he's published nothing in a commercial magazine. Who's paying the rent? Your family is.
SHE
Well, it's my money now. It comes from my family but it's my money now.
HE
So he's living off your money.
SHE
You're saying that's why he's going off with me to Massachusetts?
HE
No, no. I'm saying that in an important way he is beholden to you.
SHE
I suppose.
HE
Don't you feel a certain advantage because you have the money and he doesn't?
SHE
I suppose, yes. A lot of men would be very uncomfortable with that.
HE
And a lot of them would be very comfortable with it.
SHE
Yes, a lot of them would love it. (Laughing) And he's not either of those.
HE
Is there a lot of money?
SHE
Money's not a problem.
HE
Lucky girl.
SHE
(Almost with wonderment, as though she is amazed whenever she remembers) Yes. Very.
HE
Is this oil money?
SHE
Yes.
HE
Is your father a friend of George Bush's father?
SHE
Not friends. The elder Bush is somewhat older. There's business to be done. (Emphatically) They're not friends.
HE
They voted for them.
SHE
(Laughing) If Bush's friends were the only ones who voted for him, we'd be much better off. Wouldn't we? It's that world. It's the same world. My father—and (she confesses) I suppose I—have the same financial interests as Bush and his father. But they're not friends—I wouldn't say that.
HE
They don't socialize?
SHE
There are parties both go to.
HE
The country club?
SHE
Yeah. Houston Country Club.
HE
Is that the club for the bluebloods?
SHE
Yes. For the nineteenth-century bluebloods. The older Houstonians. A lot of debutante balls take place there. They're put on parade. There's a swirl of white. And the rest is dancing and drinking and puking.
HE
Did you go swimming at that country club when you were a girl?
SHE
I spent every day of the summer there swimming and playing tennis, except on Mondays, when it was closed. My friend and I helped the Australian pro pick up balls when he was giving a lesson. I was fourteen. My friend was two years older and far sassier, and she slept with him. The assistant pro was the cute son of one of the club members. He was captain of the tennis team at Tulane. I didn't sleep with him, but we did all the other stuff. A cold fish. I didn't enjoy it. Adolescent sex is awful. You don't understand it, and mostly you're trying to see if you can even do it, and it's not enjoyable at all. Once I threw up, fortunately all over him, when he kept thrusting himself too far down my throat.
HE
And you were still only a girl.
SHE
Girls weren't like this in the 1940s?
HE
Nothing like this. Louisa May Alcott would have been at home in my high school. Did you come out? Were you a debutante?
SHE
Oh, you're getting into my dirty secrets. (Laughing heartily) Yes, yes, yes. I did. It was awful. I hated every second of it. My mom was so bent on it. We fought through the entire thing. We fought through high school. But I did it for her. (Laughs more gently now—the range of her laughter is considerable, yet another indication of how at ease she is in her skin.) And she appreciated it. She did. It was probably the right thing. When I went off to college the first year, my Savannah-born mother told me, "Be nice to the eastern girls, Jamie Hallie."
HE
And did you fall in with the other debutantes at Harvard?
SHE
People hide their debutante luster at Harvard.
HE
Yes?
SHE
Yes. One doesn't talk about that. You keep your sordid secret to yourself. (Both laugh)
HE
So you fell in with the other rich girls at Harvard.
SHE
Some of them.
HE
And? What was that like?
SHE
What do you want to know?
HE
I don't know anything. I went to another school in another era.
SHE
Honestly, I don't know what to say. They were my friends.
HE
Were they like Billy—interesting and never boring?
SHE
No. They were pretty, very well dressed, very superior. So they—we—thought.
HE
Superior to whom?
SHE
To the stringy-haired, not terribly well-dressed girls from Wisconsin who were great at science. (Laughs)
HE
What were you great at? Where did you get the idea that you wanted to be a writer?
SHE
Early. I think I knew that back in high school. Plugged away at it.
HE
Are you any good?
SHE
I hope so. I always thought I was. I haven't had all that much luck.
HE
The New Yorker story.
SHE
That was great. I thought I'd jumped on, an
d then—(trajectory gesture with one hand) phooo...
HE
How long ago was that?
SHE
That was five years ago. A time of delight. I got married. I got my first story published in The New Yorker. But I've lost confidence, and I can't concentrate anymore. As you know, concentration is everything, or a large part of it. And that has made me feel desperate, which makes me less able to concentrate and gives me less confidence. I feel I've moved away from being a person who could do something.
HE
That's why you're talking to me.
SHE
How do you put the two together?
HE
Maybe you haven't lost as much confidence as you think. You don't appear to be without confidence.
SHE
I'm not without confidence with men. I'm not without confidence with people in general. I have less and less confidence with my computer.
HE
And when you're in my house, across from the swamp, with only the tall reeds and the heron for company out the window...
SHE
That's part of the idea. Then I won't have men, I won't have people, I won't have parties, I won't be able to gather what I need from any of those sources, and I won't be so worked up, hopefully, and I won't be so frayed, hopefully, and I won't be in such a state, hopefully, and I figure—
HE
You misuse "hopefully."
SHE
(She laughs. Shyly—to his surprise—she asks) Am I? Do I?
HE
"I hope" would do. You could try "with any luck." In the old days, before well-brought-up adolescent girls had their faces fucked forcefully, you never heard "hopefully" misused like that. The vulgate "in hopes of" was sometimes substituted for "in the hope of," but that was as bad as things got when I was your age and wanted to be a writer.
SHE
Don't do that. You did it yesterday. Don't do it again.
HE
I was only correcting a little English usage.
SHE
I know. Don't do that. If you want to talk, we should talk. If I ever were to give you something that I wrote, that I would want you to read, then please correct my English. But if we're speaking—it's not an exam. If I start to think it's an exam, then I won't speak as freely. So please don't do that. (Pause) But yes, the thought is that if I can't draw my confidence from my social life, then I'll return the effort to my work, and hopefully the confidence will follow that. Stop laughing at me.
HE
I'm laughing because you, who were so superior to the stringy-haired girls from Wisconsin, haven't corrected yourself. Won't correct yourself.
SHE
Because I got interested in my thought and wasn't thinking about whether you'd approve of me or whether you'd approve of my wording or not.
HE
Why am I doing this to you, do you think?
SHE
To assert your superiority?
HE
With "hopefully"? How stupid of me.
SHE
Yes, (laughs) how stupid of you.
HE
I guess I'm afraid of you.
SHE
(Long pause) I'm a little afraid of you.
HE
Did it ever occur to you that I might be afraid of you?
SHE
No, I didn't think you'd be afraid of me. It occurred to me that you might enjoy me, that you might like to be in my presence, but it didn't occur to me that you might be afraid of me.
HE
I am.
SHE
Why?
HE
Why do you think? You're the writer. Hopefully.
SHE
(Laughs) So are you. (Pause) The only thing I can think is that I'm young and I'm female and I'm good-looking. But I won't be young forever, and then the female part won't matter so much, and the good looks—what does that have to do with anything? But maybe there are other reasons that I don't know about. Why do you think?
HE
I haven't had a chance to figure it out.
SHE
If you think of any other reasons, I'd love to know them. If you come up with just those three, you don't need to tell me. But if you think of anything else, you might help me out a lot by telling me, so please do.
HE
You exude confidence. The way you sit with your arms crossed over your head like that and holding your hair up with your hands like that so that I can see that you're no less beautiful that way too. All of you is in that pose. You exude confidence when you smile. You exude confidence with your shape, with your body. That must give you confidence.
SHE
It does. But it won't give me confidence with the swamp and the heron. Then I'll have to find my confidence here. (She tilts her head.)
HE
In your brain rather than in your breasts.
SHE
Yes.
HE
Do your breasts give you confidence?
SHE
Yes.
HE
Tell me about that.
SHE
About my breasts giving me confidence? I know I have something people will like, people will be jealous of, people will want. To have the confidence that you will be wanted—that's what confidence is. Confidence that you will be approved of, thought well of, desired. If you know that, then you're confident. I know that anything that has to do with these—
HE
Your breasts.
SHE
My breasts. I can do well.
HE
You're an original, Jamie. There aren't a million copies of you.
SHE
You figure out what people want, you figure out what will impress people, and you give them what will impress them, and you get what you want.
HE
So, what will impress me? What will I want? Or do you not care to impress me?
SHE
Oh, I'd like very much to impress you. I look up to you. You're a great mystery, you know. You're a source of great fascination.
HE
Why of fascination?
SHE
Because except for that heron out your window, nobody knows anything about you. Anyone who's famous, everyone knows everything about them—so they think. But with you, you've written these things that make you famous among a certain group of people. You're no Tom Cruise. (Laughs)
HE
Who's Tom Cruise?
SHE
He's somebody so famous that you don't even know who he is. That's who Tom Cruise is. If you read all the star magazine stuff about someone day in and day out, of course you don't know anything about them, but you can imagine that you do. But no one can imagine they know anything about you.
HE
They think they know everything each time I publish a book.
SHE
Those are the idiots. You're a mystery.
HE
You want to impress a mystery.
SHE
Yes. Yes, I want to impress you. So what will impress you?
HE
Your breasts impress me.
SHE
Tell me something I don't know.
HE
All of you impresses me.
SHE
What else?
HE
Your brain. I know I'm supposed to say that under the rules of 2004, but I don't live by those rules.
SHE
So is it or isn't it true that my brain impresses you?
HE
So far so good.
SHE
Anything else?
HE
Your beauty. Your charm. Your gracefulness. Your candor.
SHE
Well, there you have it.
HE
Billy has it.
SHE
He does.
HE
What do you mean when you say Billy adores you? What's the adoration like?
SHE
When we go to Texas he wants to see where I played as a child. He wants to sit on the swing where my nanny would swing me and the seesaw where she sat on one end and I on the other when I was four. He has me take him out to my school, Kinkaid, so he can see the third-grade classroom where we churned butter and the fourth-grade classroom where we did a science experiment with a petri dish. I took him to the library because I'd belonged to the Library Club, a special club for the best students, and at the window, he gazed out at the lush grounds of the school like the romantic poet beholding his rainbow. He had to see the big playing field where I was in the stilt race on Field Day in the fourth grade, and it was so like a medieval pageant, with purple and gold flags fluttering everywhere, that I got so excited I fell, fell on my face ten feet from the starting line, though I was the speedy one slated to win. We had to drive from our house in River Oaks and follow exactly my route to school so he could see the lawns and the trees and the shrubs and the houses that the chauffeur had to drive by to get me the five miles out to Kinkaid. In Houston he'll only jog along the path I used when I was fifteen. It's unending with Billy. My me-ness is his magnetic pole. When I have dreams that I'm having sex, the sort of dreams that everyone has, male or female, he's jealous of my dreams. When I go to the bathroom, he's jealous of the bathroom. He's jealous of my toothbrush. He's jealous of my barrette. He's jealous of my underwear. Pieces of my underwear are in all of his pants pockets. I find them when I take his clothes to the cleaner. More, or will that suffice?
HE
So adoration means he's in love not merely with you—he's in love with your life.
SHE
Yes, my biography's a wonder to him. Rhapsodic words of love are all I hear. When I dress or I undress it's like being just behind a window that his face is pressed against.
HE
The curves no less hypnotic than the seesaw.
SHE
His praise for my silhouette is unstinting when I'm back-lit in the bedroom. When I'm in my underpants in the kitchen making the morning coffee and he comes up behind me to hold my breasts and lick my ears, he recites Keats: "There's a sigh for yes, and a sigh for no, / And a sigh for I can't bear it! / O what can be done, shall we stay or run? / O cut the sweet apple and share it!"
HE
Well, quoting from memory a love poem by Keats makes Billy a rare member of his generation.
SHE
It does. He is. He quotes me reams of Keats.
HE
Does he quote the letters? Has he quoted from Keats's last letter? He wrote it when he was five years younger than you and gravely ill. Only months later he was dead. "I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past," he said, "and that I am leading a posthumous existence."