The Humbling

by Philip Roth

  AROUND MIDNIGHT they drove Tracy back to the lot beside the inn where she’d left her car.

  “You two do this often?” Tracy asked from the back seat, where she lay encircled by Pegeen’s arms.

  “No,” Pegeen said. “Do you?”

  “Never in my life.”

  “So what do you think?” asked Pegeen.

  “I can’t think. My head’s too crammed with everything to think. I feel tripped out. I feel like I’ve taken drugs.”

  “Where did you get the bravado for this?” Pegeen asked her. “The booze?”

  “Your clothes. The way you looked. I thought, I have nothing to fear. Tell me, is he that actor?”

  Tracy asked Pegeen, as though he weren’t in the car.

  “He is,” Pegeen said.

  “That’s what the bartender said. Are you an actress?” she asked Pegeen.

  “Off and on,” Pegeen said.

  “It was crazy,” Tracy said.

  “It was,” Pegeen replied, the wielder of the cato’-nine-tails and connoisseur of the dildo, who was herself no dabbler, who had indeed carried things to the limit.

  Tracy kissed Pegeen passionately when they said goodnight. Passionately Pegeen returned the kiss and stroked her hair and clutched her breasts, and in the parking lot beside the inn where they’d all met, the two momentarily clung together. Then Tracy got into her car, and before she drove off, he heard Pegeen tell her, “See you soon.”

  They drove home with Pegeen’s hand down in his pants. “The smell,” she said, “it’s on us,” while Axler thought, I miscalculated—I didn’t think it through. He was the god Pan no longer. Far from it.

  WHILE PEGEEN SHOWERED, he sat downstairs in the kitchen and had a cup of tea as if nothing had happened, as if another ordinary night had been passed at home. The tea, the cup, the saucer, the sugar, the cream—all answered a need for the matter-of-fact.

  “I want to have a child.” He imagined Pegeen speaking those words. He imagined her telling him when she came into the kitchen after the shower, “I want to have a child.” He was imagining the least likely thing that might happen, which was why he was imagining it; he was out to force his foolhardiness back into a domestic container.

  “With whom?” he imagined himself asking her.

  “With you. You are the choice of my life.”

  “As your family has duly warned you, I’m closing in on seventy. When the child is ten I’ll be seventy-five, seventy-six. By then I may not be your choice. I’ll be in a wheelchair with this spine of mine, if not already dead.”

  “Forget about my family,” he imagined her saying. “I want you to be the father of my child.”

  “Are you going to keep this a secret from Asa and Carol?”

  “No. All that’s over. You were right. Louise did me a favor with that phone call. No more secrecy. They’ll have to live with things as they are.”

  “And where did this desire come from to mother a child?”

  “From becoming what I’ve become for you.”

  He imagined himself saying, “Who could have foreseen this evening taking this turn?”

  “Not at all,” he imagined Pegeen replying. “It’s the next step. If we’re to continue, I want three things. I want you to have back surgery. I want you to resume your career. I want you to impregnate me.”

  “You want a lot.”

  “Who taught me to want a lot?” he imagined her saying. “That’s my proposal for a real life. What more can I offer?”

  “Back surgery is very tricky. The doctors I’ve seen say it would do no good in my case.”

  “You can’t go on locked up with that pain. You can’t go on hobbling around forever.”

  “And my career is trickier still.”

  “No,” he imagined her saying, “it’s a matter of adopting a plan to end the uncertainty. A bold long-term plan.”

  “That’s all that’s required,” he imagined himself answering.

  “Yes. It’s time to be bold with yourself.”

  “If anything, it sounds like it’s time to be cautious.”

  But because in her company he had begun to be rejuvenated, because he had done everything in his power to get himself to believe that she who’d begun by offering him a glass of water—only to go from there to pulling off the feat of feats, the sex-change act—could indeed make contentment real with him, he thought the most hopeful thoughts he could. In this kitchen reverie of the rectified life he imagined himself seeing an orthopedist who sent him for an MRI and after that for a presurgical myelogram and after that for surgery. Meanwhile he would have contacted Jerry Oppenheim and told him that if anyone wanted to offer him a role, he was available to work again. Then, still at the kitchen table exciting himself by elaborating these thoughts while Pegeen finished showering upstairs, he imagined Pegeen having a healthy baby the very month that he opened at the Guthrie Theater in the role of James Tyrone. He would have found Vincent Daniels’s card where he had left it as a bookmark in the copy of Long Day’s Journey. He would have gone to see Vincent Daniels with the script and they would have worked together every day until they found the way to get him to stop distrusting himself, so that when he went onstage at the Guthrie on opening night, the lost magic returned, and he knew while the words were flying so naturally, so effortlessly out of his mouth that he was in the midst of a performance as good as any he had ever given and that maybe being incapacitated for so long, however painful, hadn’t been the worst thing that could have happened. Now the audience believed him anew in every moment. Where, previously, confronting the scariest part of acting—the line, saying something, saying something spontaneously with freedom and ease—he had felt himself naked, without the protection of any approach, now everything was once again emanating from instinct and he needed no other means of approach. The stretch of bad luck was over. The self-inflicted torment was over. He had recovered his confidence, the grief was displaced, the abominable fear was dispelled, and everything that had fled him was back where it belonged. The reconstruction of a life had to begin somewhere, and for him it had started with falling for Pegeen Stapleford, amazingly just the woman to have recruited for the job.

  It seemed to him now that the kitchen scenario was no longer the aery tale with which he’d begun but that he was imagining a new possibility, a reclamation of exuberance that it was his intention to fight for and to implement and to enjoy. Axler felt the determination that was originally his when he came to New York to audition at the age of twenty-two.

  THE NEXT MORNING, as soon as Pegeen had left to drive back to Vermont, he called a hospital in New York and asked for a doctor with whom he could consult about the genetic hazards of fathering a child at sixty-five. He was referred to the office of a specialist and given an appointment for the following week. He said nothing about any of this to Pegeen.

  The hospital was far uptown, and after parking the car in a garage, he made his way with mounting excitement to the doctor’s office. He was given the usual medical forms to fill out and then greeted by a Filipino man of about thirty-five who said he was Dr. Wan’s assistant. There was a windowed room off the waiting area, and the assistant led him there so that they could be alone. It seemed a room designed to be used by children, with low tables and small chairs scattered about and children’s drawings pinned to one wall. The two of them sat at one of the tables and the assistant began to ask him about himself and his family and the diseases they had suffered from and the diseases they had died of. The doctor’s assistant recorded the answers on a sheet of paper printed with the skeleton of a family tree. Axler told him as much as he knew from as far back as his knowledge of the family extended. Then the assistant took a second sheet and asked about the family of the prospective mother. Axler could tell him only that Pegeen’s parents were both living; he knew nothing about their medical histories or those of Pegeen’s aunts, uncles, grandparents, and great-grandparents. The assistant asked for her family’s country of origin, as he had asked for A
xler’s, and, having recorded the information, told Axler that he would give all the data to Dr. Wan and that after he and the doctor had conferred, she would come out to talk to Axler.

  Alone in the room, Axler felt ecstatic with the return of his force and his naturalness and the abandonment of his humiliation and the end of his disappearance from the world. This wasn’t reverie any longer; the revitalization of Simon Axler was truly under way. And under way in this room full of children’s furniture, of all places. The scale of the furniture reminded him of the art therapy session at Hammerton, when he and Sybil Van Buren had been given crayons and paper in order to draw pictures for their therapist. He remembered how he had obediently set to coloring with the crayons like the child he’d once been in kindergarten class. He remembered the mortifying consequences of having ended up in Hammerton, how every trace of assuredness had vanished; he remembered how all he found to deliver him from a pervasive sense of defeat and dread was the conversation that he listened to in the rec room after dinner, the stories of those among the hospitalized infatuated still with how they had tried to kill themselves. Now, however, a huge man sitting awkwardly amid these little tables and chairs, he was at one with the actor, conscious of the achievement behind him and convinced that life could begin again.

  DR. WAN was a small, slender young woman who said that she would, of course, need Pegeen’s history too, but that she could begin at least to address his fears about birth defects in the offspring of aging fathers. She told him that although the ideal age for men to father children is their twenties, and although the risk of passing on genetic vulnerability or developmental disorders like autism is significantly increased after forty, and although older men had more sperm with damaged DNA than younger men, the odds of fathering normal offspring without birth defects were not necessarily dire for a man of his age and health, especially as some, though not all, birth defects could be detected during pregnancy. “The testicular cells that give rise to sperm divide every sixteen days,” Dr. Wan explained to him while they sat across from each other at the little table. “This means that the cells have split about eight hundred times by age fifty. And with each cell division, the chance increases for errors in the sperm’s DNA.” Once Pegeen had provided her with the other half of the story, she could more fully evaluate their situation and work with them together should they wish to proceed further. She gave him her card along with a pamphlet that spelled out in detail the nature and risk of birth defects. She also explained that there might be decreased fertility at his age, and so, at his request, she provided him with a referral to a laboratory to have a sperm analysis. That way they could determine if there was likely to be any difficulty with conception. “There can be a problem,” she told him, “of sperm count, of motility, or morphology.” “I understand,” he said and, to express an uncontrollable sense of gratitude, reached out to clutch her hand. The doctor smiled at him as if she were the older of the two and said, “Call me if you have questions.”

  Back at home, he had an enormous urge to phone Pegeen and tell her of the great idea that had taken hold of him and what he had done about it. But that conversation would have to wait until they were together the following weekend and had hours and hours to talk. Alone in bed that night, he read the pamphlet Dr. Wan had given him. “It takes healthy sperm to make a healthy baby . . . About 2 to 3 percent of all babies are born with a major birth defect . . . More than 20 rare but devastating genetic disorders have been linked to aging fathers . . . The older a man is when he conceives a child, the more likely his partner is to miscarry . . . Older fathers are more likely to have children with autism, schizophrenia, and Down syndrome . . .” He went through the pamphlet once and then again, and sobering as he found the information, mindful as he now was of the risks, he would not be dissuaded from his plans by what he read. Instead, too excited to sleep, thinking something wonderful was happening, he found himself down in the living room, further enlivened by listening to music, and, along with feelings of fearlessness such as he had not known for years, experiencing the deep biological longing for a child that is more commonly associated with a woman than with a man. Nothing about their being together seemed improbable any longer. She had to go with him to see Dr. Wan. Once everyone had the whole story, the two of them would soberly assess what should come next.

  He had planned to begin the conversation after dinner on Friday evening. But when Pegeen arrived for the weekend late Friday afternoon, she went off to her study with a slew of student exams to mark and left it to him to make dinner. And after dinner she withdrew again to the study to grade more exams. He thought, Let her get everything done now. Then we’ll have the weekend to talk.

  In bed in the dark—two weeks to the day after the tryst with Tracy—when he began to kiss and to fondle Pegeen, she pulled away and said, “My heart’s not in it tonight.” “All right,” he said and, unable to arouse her, rolled over to his side but without relinquishing her hand, which he held on to with his own hand—the hand that still wanted to touch everything—until she’d fallen asleep. When he awakened in the middle of the night, he wondered, What did it mean that her heart wasn’t in it, why had she been so unwilling to be near him from the moment she’d arrived?

  He found out first thing the next morning, before he even had a chance to begin to tell her about his meeting with Dr. Wan and all that lay behind that meeting and all that potentially lay ahead of them; he found out that in going to see Dr. Wan he hadn’t so much educated himself in order to avoid doing something rash as to dig himself deeper into an unreal world.

  “This is the end,” she said to Axler at the breakfast table. Each was seated across from the other in the very chairs as when she had told him in months gone by that they had already taken the risk.

  “End of what?” he asked.

  “Of this.”

  “But why?”

  “It’s not what I want. I made a mistake.”

  So began the end, as abruptly as that, and it concluded some thirty minutes later with Pegeen at the front door clutching her full duffle bag and Axler in tears. This was the very antithesis of his expectations that night in the kitchen two weeks back. The very antithesis of his expectations when he’d gone to see Dr. Wan. Everything he wanted, she was preventing him from having!

  And she was crying now as well; it was not as easy to pull off as it had seemed in the first moment at the kitchen table. But still she would not be budged, and however much he wept, she remained silent. The picture she made at the front door, back in her boy’s zippered red jacket and holding her duffle bag, expressed it all: this form of hardship she could endure. She was not about to sit down over a cup of coffee and have a heart-to-heart talk that would lead to a rapprochement. She wanted only to be free of him and to satisfy the common enough human wish to move on and try something else.

  “You cannot nullify everything!” he shouted angrily, and with that Pegeen, the mightier of the two, opened the door.

  At last she spoke, sobbing. “I tried to be perfect for you.”

  “What the hell does that mean? Was it ever a matter of being perfect? ‘Don’t pull away from me. I love this, and I don’t want it to stop.’ I was idiot enough to believe what you said. I was idiot enough to think you were doing what you wanted to do.”

  “It was what I wanted to do. I wanted so much to see if I could do it.”

  “So it was an experiment, right down to the end. Another adventure for Pegeen Mike—like picking up a pitcher on a softball team.”

  “I can’t be a substitute for your acting anymore.”

  “Oh, don’t pull that! That’s disgusting!”

  “But it’s true! I’m what you have instead of that! I’m supposed to make up for that!”

  “That’s the most ludicrous bullshit I’ve ever heard. And you know it. Go, Pegeen! If that’s your vindication, go! ‘We took the risk.’ I took the risk! You just said whatever you thought I wanted to hear so that you could get what you wanted as long as
you wanted it.”

  “I did no such thing!” she cried.

  “It’s Tracy, isn’t it?”

  “What is?”

  “You’re dumping me for Tracy!”

  “I’m not, Simon! No!”

  “You’re not leaving me because I don’t have a job! You’re leaving me for that girl! You’re going to that girl!”

  “Where I go is my business. Oh, just let me go!”

  “Who’s holding you back? Not me! Never!” He pointed at the duffle bag into which she had crammed all the new clothes of hers that had been hanging in his closets and folded in his bureau drawers. “Pack your sex toys?” he asked. “Remember your harness?”

  She did not answer, but the emotion flashing through her was hatred, or so he understood the look in her eyes.

  “Yes,” he said, “take the tools of your trade and go. Now your parents can sleep at night—you’re no longer with an old man. Now there’s no interloper between you and your father. You’re unburdened of your impediment. No more admonitions from home. Safely returned to your original position. Good. Go on to the next one. I never had the strength for you anyway.”

  A man’s way is laid with a multitude of traps, and Pegeen had been the last. He’d stepped hungrily into it and taken the bait like the most craven captive on earth. There was no other way for it to wind up, and yet he was the last to find out. Improbable? No, predictable. Abandoned after so long? Clearly not so long for her as for him. Everything enchanting about her was gone, and in the time it had taken her to say “This is the end,” he was condemned to his hole with the six sticks, alone and emptied of the desire to live.

  She left in her car, and the process of collapse took less than five minutes, a collapse from a fall brought on himself and from which there was now no recovery.