by Philip Roth
In Lydia’s case, professorial discretion was helped along some, or I should have thought it would be, by that rolling, mannish gait of hers. Tire first time she entered my class I actually wondered if she could be some kind of gymnast or acrobat, perhaps a member of a women’s track and field association; I was reminded of those photographs in the popular magazines of the strong blue-eyed women athletes who win medals at the Olympic games for the Soviet Union. Yet her shoulders were as touchingly narrow as a child’s, and her skin pale and almost luminously soft. Only from the waist to the floor did she seem to be moving on the body of my sex rather than her own.
Within the month I had seduced her, as much against her inclination and principles as my own. It was standard enough procedure, pretty much what Mrs. Slater must have had in mind: a conference alone together in my office, a train ride side by side on the IC back to Hyde Park, an invitation to a beer at my local tavern, the flirtatious walk to her apartment, the request by me for coffee, if she would make me some. She begged me to think twice about what I was doing, even after she had returned from the bathroom where she had inserted her diaphragm and I had removed her underpants for the second time and was hunched, unclothed, over her small, ill-proportioned body, preparatory to entering her. She was distressed, she was amused, she was frightened, she was mystified.
“There are so many beautiful young girls around, why pick on me? Why choose me, when you could have the cream of the crop?
I didn’t bother to answer. As though she were the one being coy or foolish, I smiled.
She said: “Look, look at me.”
“I’m doing that.”
“Are you? I’m five years older than you. My breasts sag, not that they ever amounted to much to begin with. Look, I have stretch marks. My behind’s too big, I’m hamstrung—’Professor,’ listen to me, I don’t have orgasms. I want you to know that beforehand. I never have.”
When we later sat down for the coffee, Lydia, wrapped in a robe, said this: “I’ll never know why you wanted to do that. Why not Mrs. Slater, who’s begging you for it? Why should anyone like you want me?”
Of course I didn’t “want” her, not then or ever. We lived together for almost six years, the first eighteen months as lovers, and the four years following, until her suicide, as husband and wife, and in all that time her flesh was never any less distasteful to me than she had insistently advertised it to be. Utterly without lust, I seduced her on that first night, the next morning, and hundreds of times thereafter. As for Mrs. Slater, I seduced her probably no more than ten times in all, and never anywhere but in my imagination.
It was another month before I met Monica, Lydia’s ten-year-old daughter, so it will not do to say that, like Nabokov’s designing rogue, I endured the uninviting mother in order to have access to the seductive and seducible young daughter. That came later. In the beginning Monica was without any attraction whatsoever, repellent to me in character as well as appearance: lanky, stringy-haired, undernourished, doltish, without a trace of curiosity or charm, and so illiterate that at ten she was still unable to tell the time. In her dungarees and faded polo shirts she had the look of some mountain child, the offspring of poverty and deprivation. Worse, when she was dressed to kill in her white dress and round white hat, wearing her little Mary Jane shoes and carrying a white handbag and a Bible (white too), she seemed to me a replica of those over-dressed little Gentile children who used to pass our house every Sunday on their way to church, and toward whom I used to feel an emotion almost as strong as my own grandparents’ aversion. Secretly, and despite myself, I came close to despising the stupid and stubborn child when she would appear in that little white churchgoing outfit— and so too did Lydia, who was reminded by Monica’s costume of the clothes in which she had had to array herself each Sunday in Skokie, before being led off to Lutheran services with her aunts Helda and Jessie. (As the story had it: “It did a growing body good to sit once a week in a nice starched dress, and without squirming.”)
I was drawn to Lydia, not out of a passion for Monica—not yet—but because she had suffered so and because she was so brave. Not only that she had survived, but what she had survived, gave her enormous moral stature, or glamor, in my eyes: on the one hand, the puritan austerity, the prudery, the bland-ness, the xenophobia of the women of her clan; on the other, the criminality of the men. Of course, I did not equate being raped by one’s father with being raised on the wisdom of the Chicago Tribune; what made her seem to me so valiant was that she had been subjected to every brand of barbarity, from the banal to the wicked, had been exploited, beaten, and betrayed by every last one of her keepers, had finally been driven crazy— and in the end had proved indestructible: she lived now in a neat little apartment within earshot of the bell in the clock tower of the university whose atheists, Communists, and Jews her people had loathed, and at the kitchen table of that apartment wrote ten pages for me every week in which she managed, heroically I thought, to recall the details of that brutal life in the style of one a very long way from rage and madness. When I told the class that what I admired most in Mrs. Ketterer’s fiction was her “control,” I meant something more than those strangers could know.
Given all there was to move me about her character, it seemed to me curious that I should be so repelled by her flesh as I was that first night. I was able myself to achieve an orgasm, but afterward felt terrible for the “achievement” it had had to be. Earlier, caressing her body, I had been made uneasy by the unexpected texture of her genitals. To the touch, the fold of skin between her legs felt abnormally thick, and when I looked, as though to take pleasure in the sight of her nakedness, the vaginal lips appeared withered and discolored in a way that was alarming to me. I could even imagine myself to be staring down at the sexual parts of one of Lydia’s maiden aunts, rather than at a physically healthy young woman not yet into her thirties. I was tempted to imagine some connection here to the childhood victimization by her father, but of course that was too literary, too poetic an idea to swallow—this was no stigma, however apprehensive it might make me.
The reader may by now be able to imagine for himself how the twenty-four-year-old I was responded to his alarm: in the morning, without very much ado, I performed cunnilingus upon her.
“Don’t,” said Lydia. “Don’t do that.”
“Why not?” I expected the answer: Because I’m so ugly there.
“I told you. I won’t reach a climax. It doesn’t matter what you do.”
Like a sage who’d seen everything and been everywhere, I said, “You make too much of that.”
Her thighs were not as long as my forearm (about the length, I thought, of one of Mrs. Slater’s Pappagallos) and her legs were open only so far as I had been able to spread them with my two hands. But where she was dry, brownish, weatherworn, I pressed my open mouth. I took no pleasure in the act, she gave no sign that she did; but at least I had done what I had been frightened of doing, put my tongue to where she had been brutalized, as though—it was tempting to put it this way—that would redeem us both.
As though that would redeem us both. A notion as inflated as it was shallow, growing, I am certain, out of “serious literary studies.” Where Emma Bovary had read too many romances of her period, it would seem that I had read too much of the criticism of mine. That I was, by “eating” her, taking some sort of sacrament was a most attractive idea—though one that I rejected after the initial momentary infatuation. Yes, I continued to resist as best I could all these high-flown, prestigious interpretations, whether of my migraines or my sexual relations with Lydia; and yet it surely did seem to me that my life was coming to resemble one of those texts upon which certain literary critics of that era used to enjoy venting their ingenuity. I could have done a clever job on it myself for my senior honors thesis in college: “Christian Temptations in a Jewish Life: A Study in the Ironies of ‘Courting Disaster.’”
So: as often during a week as I could manage it, I “took the sacrament,” con
quering neither my fearful repugnance nor the shame I felt at being repelled, and neither believing nor disbelieving the somber reverberations.
During the first months of my love affair with Lydia, I continued to receive letters and, on occasion, telephone calls from Sharon Shatzky, the junior at Pembroke with whom I had concluded a passionate romance prior to my return to Chicago. Sharon was a tall, handsome, auburn-haired girl, studious, enthusiastic, and lively, an honor student in literature, and the daughter of a successful zipper manufacturer with country-club affiliations and a hundred-thousand-dollar suburban home who had been impressed with my credentials and entirely hospitable to me, until I began to suffer from migraines. Then Mr. Shatzky grew fearful that if he did not intervene, his daughter might one day find herself married to a man she would have to nurse and support for the rest of her life. Sharon was enraged by her father’s “lack of compassion.” “He thinks of my life,” she said, angrily, “as a business investment.” It enraged her even more when I came to her father’s defense. I said that it was as much his paternal duty to make clear to a young daughter what might be the long-range consequences of my ailment as it had been years before to see that she was inoculated against smallpox; he did not want her to suffer for no reason. “But I love you,” Sharon said, “that’s my ‘reason.’ I want to be with you if you’re ill. I don’t want to run out on you then, I want to take care of you.” “But he’s saying that you don’t know all that ‘taking care of could entail.” “But I’m telling you—I love you.”
Had I wanted to marry Sharon (or her family’s money) as much as her father assumed I did, I might not have been so tolerant of his opposition. But as I was just into my twenties then, the prospect of marriage, even to a lovely young woman toward whom I had so strong an erotic attachment, did not speak to the range of my ambitions. I should say, particularly because of this strong erotic attachment was I suspicious of an enduring union. For without that admittedly powerful bond, what was there of consequence, of importance, between Sharon and myself? Only three years my junior, Sharon seemed to me vastly younger, and to stand too much in my shadow, with few attitudes or interests that were her own; she read the books I recommended to her, devouring them by the dozen the summer we met, and repeated to her friends and teachers, as hers, judgments she had borrowed from me; she had even switched from a government to a literature major under my influence, a satisfaction to me at first, in the fatherly stage of my infatuation, but afterward a sign, among others, of what seemed to me an excess of submissiveness and malleability.
It did not, at that time, occur to me to find evidence of character, intelligence, and imagination in the bounteousness of her sexuality or in the balance she managed to maintain between a bold and vivacious animality and a tender, compliant nature. Nor did I begin to understand that it was in that tension, rather than in the sexuality alone, that her appeal resided. Rather, I would think, with something like despair, “That’s all we really have,” as though unselfconsciously fervent lovemaking, sustained over a period of several years, was a commonplace phenomenon.
One night, when Lydia and I were already asleep in my apartment, Sharon telephoned to speak with me. She was in tears and didn’t try to hide it. She could not bear any longer the stupidity of my decision. Surely I could not hold her accountable for her father’s cold-blooded behavior, if that was the explanation for what I was doing. What was I doing anyway? And how was I doing? Was I well? Was I ill? How was my writing, my teaching —I had to let her fly to Chicago…But I told her she must stay where she was. I remained throughout calm and firm. No, I did not hold her accountable for anybody’s behavior but her own, which was exemplary. I reminded her that it was not I who had judged her father “cold-blooded.” When she continued to appeal to me to come to “my senses,” I said that it was she who had better face facts, especially as they were not so unpleasant as she was making them out to be: she was a beautiful, intelligent, passionate young woman, and if she would stop this theatrical grieving and make herself available to life once again—
“But if I’m all those things, then why are you throwing me away like this? Please, I don’t understand—make it clear to me! If I’m so exemplary, why don’t you want me? Oh, Nathan,” she said, now openly weeping again, “you know what I think? That underneath all that scrupulousness and fairness and reasonableness, you’re a madman! Sometimes I think that underneath all that ‘maturity’ you’re just a crazy little boy!”
When I returned from the kitchen phone to the living room, Lydia was sitting up in my sofa bed. “It was that girl, wasn’t it?” But without a trace of jealousy, though I knew she hated her, if only abstractly. “You want to go back to her, don’t you?”
“No.”
“But you know you’re sorry you ever started up with me. 1 know it. Only now you can’t figure how to get out of it. You’re afraid you’ll disappoint me, or hurt me, and so you let the weeks go by—and I can’t stand the suspense, Nathan, or the confusion. If you’re going to leave me, please do it now, tonight, this minute. Send me packing, please, I beg you—because I don’t want to be endured, or pitied, or rescued, or whatever it is that’s going on here! What are you doing with me—what am I doing with someone like you! You’ve got success written all over—it’s in every breath you take! So what is this all about? You know you’d rather sleep with that girl than with me—so stop pretending otherwise, and go back to her, and do it!”
Now she cried, as hopeless and bewildered as Sharon. I kissed her, I tried to comfort her. I told her that nothing she was saying was so, when of course it was true in every detail: I loathed making love to her, I wished to be rid of her, I couldn’t bear the thought of hurting her, and following the phone call, I did indeed want more than ever to go back to the one Lydia referred to always as “that girl.” Yet I refused to confess to such feelings or act upon them.
“She’s sexy, young, Jewish, rich—“
“Lydia, you’re only torturing yourself—“
“But I’m so hideous. I have nothing.”
No, if anyone was “hideous,” it was I, yearning for Sharon’s sweet lewdness, her playful and brazen sensuality, for what I used to think of as her perfect pitch, that unfailingly precise responsiveness to whatever our erotic mood—wanting, remembering, envisioning all this, even as I labored over Lydia’s flesh, with its contrasting memories of physical misery. What was “hideous” was to be so queasy and finicky about the imperfections of a woman’s body, to find oneself an adherent of the most Hollywoodish, cold-blooded notions of what is desirable and what is not; what was “hideous”—alarming, shameful, astonishing—was the significance that a young man of my pretensions should attach to his lust.
And there was more which, if it did not cause me to feel so peculiarly desolated as I did by what I took to be my callow sexual reflexes, gave me still other good reasons to distrust myself. There were, for instance, Monica’s Sunday visits—how brutal they were! And how I recoiled from what I saw! Especially when I remembered—with the luxurious sense of having been blessed— the Sundays of my own childhood, the daylong round of visits, first to my two widowed grandmothers in the slum where my parents had been born, and then around Camden to the households of half a dozen aunts and uncles. During the war, when gasoline was rationed, we would have to walk to visit the grandmothers, traversing on foot five miles of city streets in all—a fair measure of our devotion to those two queenly and prideful workhorses, who lived very similarly in small apartments redolent of freshly ironed linen and stale coal gas, amid an accumulation of antimacassars, bar mitzvah photos, and potted plants, most of them taller and sturdier than I ever was. Peeling wallpaper, cracked linoleum, ancient faded curtains, this nonetheless was my Araby, and I their little sultan…what is more, a sickly sultan whose need was all the greater for his Sunday sweets and sauces. Oh how I was fed and comforted, washerwoman breasts for my pillows, deep grandmotherly laps, my throne!
Of course, when I was ill or the weather
was bad, I would have to stay at home, looked after by my sister, while my father and mother made the devotional safari alone, in galoshes and under umbrellas. But that was not so unpleasant either, for Sonia would read aloud to me, in a very actressy way, from a book she owned entitled Two Hundred Opera Plots; intermittently she would break into song. “ “The action takes place in India,’” she read, “ ‘and opens in the sacred grounds of the Hindoo priest, Nilakantha, who has an inveterate hatred for the English. During his absence, however, a party of English officers and ladies enter, out of curiosity, and are charmed with the lovely garden. They soon depart, with the exception of the officer, Gerald, who remains to make a sketch, in spite of the warning of his friend, Frederick. Presently the priest’s lovely daughter, Lakme, enters, having come by the river…’” The phrase “having come by the river,” the spelling of Hindu in Sunny’s book with those final twin o’s (like a pair of astonished eyes; like the middle vowels in “hoot” and “moon” and “poor”; like a distillation of everything and anything I found mysterious), appealed strongly to this invalid child, as did her performing so wholeheartedly for an audience of one…Lakme is taken by her father, both of them disguised as beggars, to the city market: “‘He forces Lakme to sing, hoping thus to attract the attention of her lover, should he be amongst the party of English who are buying in the bazaars.’” I am still barely recovered from the word “bazaars” and its pair of as (the sound of “odd,” the sound of a sigh), when Sunny introduces “The Bell Song,” the aria “De la fille du faria,” says my sister in Bresslenstein’s French accent: the ballad of the pariah’s daughter who saves a stranger in the forest from the wild beasts by the enchantment of her magic bell. After struggling with the soaring aria, my sister, flushed and winded from the effort, returns to her highly dramatic reading of the plot: “‘And this cunning plan succeeds, for Gerald instantly recognizes the thrilling voice of the fair Hindoo maiden—’” And is stabbed in the back by Lakme’s father; and is nursed back to health by her “‘in a beautiful jungle’”; only there the fellow “ ‘remembers with remorse the fair English girl to whom he is betrothed’”; and so decides to leave my sister, who kills herself with poisonous herbs, “‘the deadly juices of which she drinks.’” I could not decide whom to hate more, Gerald, with his remorse for “the fair English girl,” or Lakme’s crazy father, who would not let his daughter love a white man. Had I been “in India” instead of at home on a rainy Sunday, and had I weighed something more than sixty pounds, I would have saved her from them both, I thought.