The Humbling

by Philip Roth

  After that day, nature’s little caricature of him came to an end. He never saw the possum again— either it disappeared or perished—though the snow cave with the six sticks remained intact until the next thaw.

  THEN PEGEEN stopped by. She phoned from the little house she’d rented a few miles from Prescott, a small, progressive women’s college in western Vermont, where she’d recently taken a teaching job. He lived an hour west, across the state line in rural New York. It was twenty years or more since he’d seen her as a cheerful undergraduate traveling during her vacation with her mother and father. They’d be in his vicinity and stop off for a couple of hours to say hello. Every few years they all got together like that. Asa ran a regional theater in Lansing, Michigan, the town where he’d been born and raised, and Carol acted in the repertory company and taught an acting class at the state university. He’d seen Pegeen on another visit once before, a smiling, shy, sweet-faced kid of ten who’d climbed his trees and swum rapid laps in his pool, a skinny, athletic tomboy who laughed helplessly at all her father’s jokes. And before that he’d seen her suckling on the maternity floor of St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York.

  Now he saw a lithe, full-breasted woman of forty, though with something of the child still in her smile—a smile in which she automatically raised her upper lip to reveal her prominent front teeth—and a lot of the tomboy still in her rocking gait. She was dressed for the countryside, in well-worn work boots and a red zippered jacket, and her hair, which he had incorrectly remembered as blond, like her mother’s, was a deep brown and cut close to her skull, so short at the back as to appear clipped by a barber’s trimmer. She had the invulnerable air of a happy person, and though her prototype was Rough Gamine, she spoke in an appealingly modulated voice, as if imitating her actress mother’s diction.

  As he would eventually learn, it had been some time since she’d had what she wanted rather than its grotesque inversion. She’d spent the last two years of a six-year affair suffering in a painfully lonely household in Bozeman, Montana. “The first four years,” she told him one night after they’d become lovers, “Priscilla and I had this wonderfully cozy companionship. We used to go camping and hiking all the time, even when it snowed. In the summers we’d go off to places like Alaska and hike and camp up there. It was exciting. We went to New Zealand, we went to Malaysia. There was something childlike about us adventurously roaming around the world together that I loved. We were like two runaways. Then, starting around year five, she slowly drifted away into the computer, and I was left with no one to talk to except the cats. Until then we had done everything side by side. We’d be tucked up in bed, reading—reading to ourselves, reading passages aloud to each other; for such a long time there was the rapturous rapport. Priscilla would never tell people, ‘I liked that book,’ but rather, ‘We liked that book,’ or about some place, ‘We liked going there,’ or about our plans, ‘That’s what we’re going to do this summer.’ We. We. We. And then ‘we’ weren’t we—we was over. We was she and her Mac. We was she and her festering secret that blotted out everything else—that she was going to mutilate the body I loved.”

  The two of them taught at the university in

  Bozeman, and during their final two years as a couple, when Priscilla got home from work, she sat in front of her computer until it was time for bed. She spent her weekends in front of the computer. She ate and drank in front of the computer. There was no more talk, no more sex; even hiking and camping in the mountains Pegeen had to undertake on her own or with people other than Priscilla whom she rounded up for companionship. Then one day, six years after they’d met in Montana and pooled their resources and set themselves up as a couple, Priscilla announced that she had begun taking hormonal injections to promote facial hair growth and deepen her voice. Her plan was to have her breasts surgically removed and become a man. Alone, Priscilla admitted, she had been dreaming this up for a long time, and she would not turn back however much Pegeen pleaded. The very next morning Pegeen moved out of the house they jointly owned, taking with her one of the two cats—”Not so great for the cats,” said Pegeen, “but that was the least of it”—and she settled into a room at a local motel. She could barely gather enough composure to meet with her classes. Lonely as it had become living with Priscilla, the wound of the betrayal, the nature of the betrayal, was far worse. She cried all the time and began to write letters to colleges hundreds of miles from Montana looking for a new job. She went to a conference where colleges were interviewing people in environmental science and found a position in the East after sleeping with the dean, who became smitten by her and subsequently hired her. The dean was still Pegeen’s devoted protector and paramour when Pegeen drove over to pay Axler a visit and determined that after seventeen years as a lesbian she wanted a man—this man, this actor twenty-five years her senior and her family’s friend from decades back. If Priscilla could become a heterosexual male, Pegeen could become a heterosexual female.

  THAT FIRST AFTERNOON, Axler tripped and fell hard on the wide stone step as he led Pegeen into the house, gashing the meaty side of the hand with which he broke the fall. “Where’s your first-aid stuff?” she asked. He told her and she went inside to get it and came back out and cleaned his wound with cotton and peroxide and covered it with a couple of Band-Aids. She’d also brought him a glass of water to drink. Nobody had brought him a glass of water for a long time.

  He invited her to stay for dinner. She wound up making it. Nobody had made him dinner for a long time either. She finished off a bottle of beer while he sat at the kitchen table and watched her prepare the meal. There was a chunk of Parmesan cheese in the refrigerator, there were eggs, there was some bacon, there was half a container of cream, and with that and a pound of pasta she made them spaghetti carbonara. He was remembering the sight of her as an infant at her mother’s breast while observing her as she worked in his kitchen, behaving as though the place were hers. She was a vibrant presence, solid, fit, brimming with energy, and soon enough he was no longer feeling that he was alone on earth without his talent. He was happy—an unexpected feeling. Usually at the dinner hour he had the worst blues of the day. While she cooked he went into the living room and put on Brendel playing Schubert. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d bothered listening to music, and back in the best days of his marriage, it was playing all the time.

  “What happened to your wife?” she asked, after they’d eaten the spaghetti and shared a bottle of wine.

  “Doesn’t matter. Too tedious to discuss.”

  “How long have you been out here without anyone else?”

  “Long enough to be lonelier than I ever thought I could be. It’s sometimes astonishing, sitting here month after month, season after season, to think that it’s all going on without you. Just as it will when you die.”

  “What happened to acting?” she asked.

  “I don’t act anymore.”

  “That can’t be,” she said. “What happened?”

  “Also too tedious to go into.”

  “Have you retired or did something happen?”

  He stood up and came around the table and she stood and he kissed her.

  She smiled with surprise. Laughing, she said, “I’m a sexual anomaly. I sleep with women.”

  “That wasn’t hard to figure out.”

  Here he kissed her a second time.

  “So what are you doing?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I can’t say that I know. You’ve never been with a man?” he asked her.

  “When I was in college.”

  “Are you with a woman now?”

  “More or less,” she replied. “Are you?”

  “No.”

  He felt the strength in her well-muscled arms, he fumbled with her heavy breasts, he cupped her hard behind in his hands and drew her toward him so that they kissed again. Then he led her to the sofa in the living room, where, blushing furiously as he watched her, she undid her jeans and was with a man for the first t
ime since college. He was with a lesbian for the first time in his life.

  Months later he’d say to her, “How come you drove over that afternoon?” “I wanted to see if anybody was with you.” “And when you saw?” “I thought, Why not me?” “You calculate like that all the time?” “It isn’t calculation. It’s pursuing what you want. And,” she added, “not pursuing what you no longer want.”

  THE DEAN who’d hired her and brought her to Prescott was furious when Pegeen told her their affair was over. She was eight years older than Pegeen, earned more than twice as much as Pegeen, had been an important dean for over a decade, and so she refused to believe it or to allow it. She phoned Pegeen to scold her first thing every morning and called her numerous times during the night to shout at her and insult her and demand an explanation. Once she phoned from a local cemetery, where, she announced, she was “stomping around in a fury” because of the way Pegeen had treated her. She accused Pegeen of exploiting her to get the job and then opportunistically dropping her within only weeks of taking it. When Pegeen went to the pool to work out with the swim team twice a week in the late afternoon, the dean turned up to swim at that hour and arranged to take the locker next to Pegeen’s. The dean called to invite her to a movie, to a lecture, to a concert and dinner. She called every other day to tell Pegeen that she wanted to see her that coming weekend. Pegeen had already made it clear that she was busy on weekends and didn’t want to resume seeing her again. The dean pleaded, she shouted—sometimes she cried. Pegeen was the person she could not live without. A strong, successful, competent woman of forty-eight, a dynamic woman touted to be Prescott’s next president, and how easily she could be derailed!

  One Sunday afternoon she called his house and asked to speak to Pegeen Stapleford. Axler put down the phone and went into the living room to tell Pegeen the call was for her. “Who is it?” he asked her. Without hesitation, she replied, “Who else could it be? Louise. How does she know where I am? How did she get your number?” He returned to the phone and said, “There’s no Pegeen Stapleford here.” “Thank you,” the caller said and hung up. The next week Pegeen ran into Louise on the campus. Louise told her that she was going away for ten days and that when she came back, Pegeen had “better do something for her” like “make her dinner.” Afterward Pegeen was frightened, first because Louise wouldn’t leave her alone even after she once again clarified that the affair was over, and second because of the threat Louise’s anger embodied. “What’s threatened?” he asked. “What? My job. There’s no limit to the harm she can do me if she sets her mind to it.” “Well, you have me, don’t you?” he said. “What does that mean?” “You have me to fall back on. I’m right here.”

  He was here. She was here. Everyone’s possibilities had changed dramatically.

  *

  THE FIRST ARTICLE of clothing he bought her was a tan close-fitting waist-length leather jacket with a shearling lining that he saw in the window of a shop in the upscale village that lay ten miles through the woods from his house. He went in and purchased what he guessed correctly to be her size. The jacket cost a thousand dollars. She’d never owned anything that expensive before, and she’d never looked so good in anything before. He told her it was for her birthday, whenever that fell. For the next few days, she didn’t take it off her back. Then they drove to New York, ostensibly to have some good meals and go to the movies and get away for the weekend together, and he bought her more clothes—by the time the weekend was over, more than five thousand dollars’ worth of skirts, blouses, belts, jackets, shoes, and sweaters, outfits in which she looked very different from the way she looked in the clothes she’d brought east with her from Montana. When she’d first showed up at his house, she owned little that couldn’t be worn by a sixteen-year-old boy—only now had she begun to give up walking like a sixteen-year-old boy. In the New York stores, after trying on something new in the dressing room, she’d come out to where he was waiting for her to show him how it looked and to hear what he thought. She was paralyzingly self-conscious for only the first few hours; after that she let it happen, eventually emerging coquettishly from the dressing room smiling with delight.

  He bought her necklaces, bracelets, and earrings. He bought her luxurious lingerie to replace the sport bras and the gray briefs. He bought her little satin babydolls to replace her flannel pajamas. He bought her calf-high boots, a brown pair and a black pair. The only coat she owned she’d inherited from Priscilla’s late mother. It was way too large for her and shaped like a box, and so over the next few months he bought her flattering new coats—five of them. He could have bought her a hundred. He couldn’t stop. Living as he did, he rarely spent anything on himself, and nothing made him happier than making her look like she’d never looked before. And in time nothing seemed to make her happier. It was an orgy of spoiling and spending that suited them both just fine.

  Still, she didn’t want her parents to learn about the affair. It would cause them too much pain. He thought, More pain than when you told them you were a lesbian? She’d explained to him what had happened on that day back when she was twenty-three. Her mother had cried and said, “I can’t imagine anything worse,” and her father feigned acceptance but didn’t smile again for months. There was a lot of trauma in that home for a long time after Pegeen told them what she was. “Why would learning about me cause them so much pain?” he asked her. “Because they’ve known you so long. Because you’re all the same age.” “As you wish,” he said. But he couldn’t stop pondering her motive. Perhaps she was acting out of the habit of keeping her life in different compartments, the sexual life strictly separated from her life as a daughter; maybe she didn’t want the sex contaminated or domesticated by filial concerns. Maybe there was some embarrassment about her turning from sleeping with women to sleeping with a man, and an uncertainty as to whether the switch was going to be permanent. But regardless of what was prompting her, he felt he had made a mistake in allowing her to keep their connection a secret from her family. He was too old not to feel compromised by having to be kept a secret. Nor did he see why a forty-year-old woman should be so concerned about what her parents thought, especially a forty-year-old woman who’d done all sorts of things that her parents disapproved of and whose opposition she weathered. He did not like that she was showing herself to be less than her age, but he didn’t push it, not for now, and so her family continued to think she was going along leading her regular life while, with the passing months, she seemed to him, slowly but naturally, to shed the last visible signs of what she now referred to as “my seventeen-year mistake.”

  Nonetheless, one morning at breakfast, as much to his own surprise as hers, Axler said, “Is this something you really want, Pegeen? Though we’ve enjoyed each other so far, and the novelty has been strong, and the feeling has been strong, and the pleasure has been strong, I wonder if you know what you’re doing.”

  “Yes, I do. I love this,” she said, “and I don’t want it to stop.”

  “But you understand what I’m referring to?”

  “Yes. Matters of age. Matters of sexual history.

  Your old connection to my parents. Probably twenty things besides. And none of them bother me. Do any of them bother you?”

  “Would it perhaps be a good idea,” he replied, “before hearts get broken, for us to back off?”

  “Aren’t you happy?” she asked.

  “My life has been very precarious over the past few years. I don’t feel the strength that it would take having my hopes dashed. I’ve had my share of marital misery, and before that my share of breakups with women. It’s always painful, it’s always harsh, and I don’t want to court it at this stage of life.”

  “Simon, we both have been dropped,” she said. “You were at the bottom of a breakdown and your wife picked up and left you to fend for yourself. I was betrayed by Priscilla. Not only did she leave me, she left the body that I’d once loved to become a man with a mustache named Jack. If we do fail let it be because of
us, not because of them, not because of your past or mine. I don’t want to encourage you in a risk, and I know it is a risk. For both of us, by the way. I feel the risk too. It’s of a different sort than yours, of course. But the worst outcome possible is for you to take yourself away from me. I could not bear to lose you now. I will if I have to, but as for the risk—the risk has been taken. We’ve already done it. It’s too late for protection by withdrawing.”

  “You’re saying you don’t want to get out of this thing while the getting is good?”

  “Absolutely. I want you, you see. I’ve come to trust that I have you. Don’t pull away from me. I love this, and I don’t want it to stop. There’s nothing else I can say. All I can say is that I’ll try if you will. This is no longer just a fling.”

  “We took the risk,” he said, echoing her.

  “We took the risk,” she replied.

  Four words meaning that it would be the worst possible time for her to be dropped by him. She will say whatever she needs to say, he thought, even if the dialogue verges on soap opera, to keep it going because she’s still aching, all these months later, from the Priscilla shock and the Louise ultimatums. It’s not deception her taking this line—it’s the way we are instinctively strategic. But eventually a day will come, Axler thought, when circumstances render her in a much stronger position for it to end, whereas I will have wound up in a weaker position merely from having been too indecisive to cut it off now. And when she is strong and I am weak, the blow that’s dealt will be unbearable.

  He believed he was seeing clearly into their future, yet he could do nothing to alter the prospect. He was too happy to alter it.

  OVER THE MONTHS she had let her hair grow nearly to her shoulders, thick brown hair with a natural sheen that she began to think about having cut in a style unlike the cropped mannish one she’d favored throughout her adult life. One weekend she arrived with a couple of magazines full of photos of different hairstyles, magazines of a kind he’d never seen before. “Where’d you get these?” he asked her. “One of my students,” she said. They sat side by side on the sofa in the living room while she turned pages and bent back corners where there was a style pictured that might suit her. Finally they narrowed their preferences down to two, and she tore out those pages and he phoned an actress friend in Manhattan to ask her where Pegeen should go to get her hair cut, the same friend who’d told him where to take Pegeen shopping for clothes and where to go to buy her jewelry. “Wish I had a sugar daddy,” the friend said. But he hadn’t understood it that way. All he was doing was helping Pegeen to be a woman he would want instead of a woman another woman would want. Together they were absorbed in making this happen.