by Philip Roth
“Where’s Ron going?” I asked, dropping the cherries into my pocket, among my keys and change.
“Milwaukee.”
“For long?”
“To see Harriet. They’re in love.”
We looked at each other for longer than I could bear. “Harriet?” I asked. “Yes.”
Julie was looking at me as though she were trying to look behind me, and then I realized that I was standing with my hands out of sight. I brought them around to the front, and, I swear it, she did peek to see if they were empty.
We confronted one another again; she seemed to have a threat in her face.
Then she spoke. “Want to play ping-pong?”
“God, yes,” I said, and made for the table with two long, bounding steps. “You can serve.”
Julie smiled and we began to play.
I have no excuses to offer for what happened next. I began to win and I liked it.
“Can I take that one over?” Julie said. “I hurt my finger yesterday and it just hurt when I served.”
“No.”
I continued to win.
“That wasn’t fair, Neil. My shoelace came untied. Can I take it—”
“No.”
We played, I ferociously.
“Neil, you leaned over the table. That’s illegal—”
“I didn’t lean and it’s not illegal.”
I felt the cherries hopping among my nickels and pennies.
“Neil, you gypped me out of a point. You have nineteen and I have eleven—”
“Twenty and ten,” I said. “Serve!”
She did and I smashed my return past her—it zoomed off the table and skittered into the refrigerator room.
“You’re a cheater!” she screamed at me. “You cheat!” Her jaw was trembling as though she carried a weight on top of her pretty head. “I hate you!” And she threw her racket across the room and it clanged off the bar, just as, outside, I heard the Chrysler crushing gravel in the driveway.
“The game isn’t over,” I said to her.
“You cheat! And you were stealing fruit!” she said, and ran away before I had my chance to win.
Later that night, Brenda and I made love, our first time. We were sitting on the sofa in the television room and for some ten minutes had not spoken a word to each other. Julie had long since gone to a weepy bed, and though no one had said anything to me about her crying, I did not know if the child had mentioned my fistful of cherries, which, some time before, I had flushed down the toilet.
The television set was on and though the sound was off and the house quiet, the gray pictures still wiggled at the far end of the room. Brenda was quiet and her dress circled her legs, which were tucked back beneath her. We sat there for some while and did not speak. Then she went into the kitchen and when she came back she said that it sounded as though everyone was asleep. We sat a while longer, watching the soundless bodies on the screen eating a silent dinner in someone’s silent restaurant. When I began to unbutton her dress she resisted me, and I like to think it was because she knew how lovely she looked in it. But she looked lovely, my Brenda, anyway, and we folded it carefully and held each other close and soon there we were, Brenda falling, slowly but with a smile, and me rising.
How can I describe loving Brenda? It was so sweet, as though I’d finally scored that twenty-first point.
When I got home I dialed Brenda’s number, but not before my aunt heard and rose from her bed.
“Who are you calling at this hour? The doctor?”
“No.”
“What kind phone calls, one o’clock at night?”
“Shhh!” I said.
“He tells me shhh. Phone calls one o’clock at night, we haven’t got a big enough bill,” and then she dragged herself back into the bed, where with a martyr’s heart and bleary eyes she had resisted the downward tug of sleep until she’d heard my key in the door.
Brenda answered the phone.
“Neil?” she said.
“Yes,” I whispered. “You didn’t get out of bed, did you?”
“No,” she said, “the phone is next to the bed.”
“Good. How is it in bed?”
“Good. Are you in bed?”
“Yes,” I lied, and tried to right myself by dragging the phone by its cord as close as I could to my bedroom.
“I’m in bed with you,” she said.
“That’s right,” I said, “and I’m with you.”
“I have the shades down, so it’s dark and I don’t see you.”
“I don’t see you either.”
“That was so nice, Neil.”
“Yes. Go to sleep, sweet, I’m here,” and we hung up without goodbyes. In the morning, as planned, I called again, but I could hardly hear Brenda or myself for that matter, for Aunt Gladys and Uncle Max were going on a Workmen’s Circle picnic in the afternoon, and there was some trouble about grape juice that had dripped all night from a jug in the refrigerator and by morning had leaked out onto the floor. Brenda was still in bed and so could play our game with some success, but I had to pull down all the shades of my senses to imagine myself beside her. I could only pray our nights and mornings would come, and soon enough they did.
4
Over the next week and a half there seemed to be only two people in my life: Brenda and the little colored kid who liked Gauguin. Every morning before the library opened, the boy was waiting; sometimes he seated himself on the lion’s back, sometimes under his belly, sometimes he just stood around throwing pebbles at his mane. Then he would come inside, tap around the main floor until Otto stared him up on tiptoes, and finally headed up the long marble stairs that led to Tahiti. He did not always stay to lunch time, but one very hot day he was there when I arrived in the morning and went through the door behind me when I left at night. The next morning, it was, that he did not show up, and as though in his place, a very old man appeared, white, smelling of Life Savers, his nose and jowls showing erupted veins beneath them. “Could you tell me where I’d find the art section?”
“Stack Three,” I said.
In a few minutes, he returned with a big brown-covered book in his hand. He placed it on my desk, withdrew his card from a long moneyless billfold and waited for me to stamp out the book.
“Do you want to take this book out?” I said.
He smiled.
I took his card and jammed the metal edge into the machine; but I did not stamp down. “Just a minute,” I said. I took a clipboard from under the desk and flipped through a few pages, upon which were games of battleship and tick-tack-toe that I’d been playing through the week with myself. “I’m afraid there’s a hold on this book.”
“A what?”
“A hold. Someone’s called up and asked that we hold it for them. Can I take your name and address and drop a card when it’s free …”
And so I was able, not without flushing once or twice, to get the book back in the stacks. When the colored kid showed up later in the day, it was just where he’d left it the afternoon before.
As for Brenda, I saw her every evening and when there was not a night game that kept Mr. Patimkin awake and in the TV room, or a Hadassah card party that sent Mrs. Patimkin out of the house and brought her in at unpredictable hours, we made love before the silent screen. One muggy, low-skied night Brenda took me swimming at the club. We were the only ones in the pool, and all the chairs, the cabanas, the lights, the diving boards, the very water seemed to exist only for our pleasure. She wore a blue suit that looked purple in the lights and down beneath the water it flashed sometimes green, sometimes black. Late in the evening a breeze came up off the golf course and we wrapped ourselves in one huge towel, pulled two chaise longues together, and despite the bartender, who was doing considerable pacing back and forth by the bar window, which overlooked the pool, we rested side by side on the chairs. Finally the bar light itself flipped off, and then, in a snap, the lights around the pool went down and out. My heart must have beat faster, or something, for Brenda seemed
to guess my sudden doubt—we should go, I thought.
She said: “That’s okay.”
It was very dark, the sky was low and starless, and it took a while for me to see, once again, the diving board a shade lighter than the night, and to distinguish the water from the chairs that surrounded the far side of the pool.
I pushed the straps of her bathing suit down but she said no and rolled an inch away from me, and for the first time in the two weeks I’d known her she asked me a question about me.
“Where are your parents?” she said.
“Tucson,” I said. “Why?”
“My mother asked me.”
I could see the life guard’s chair now, white almost.
“Why are you still here? Why aren’t you with them?” she asked.
“I’m not a child any more, Brenda,” I said, more sharply than I’d intended. “I just can’t go wherever my parents are.”
“But then why do you stay with your aunt and uncle?”
“They’re not my parents.”
“They’re better?”
“No. Worse. I don’t know why I stay with them.”
“Why?” she said. “Why don’t I know?”
“Why do you stay? You do know, don’t you?”
“My job, I suppose. It’s convenient from there, and it’s cheap, and it pleases my parents. My aunt’s all right really … Do I really have to explain to your mother why I live where I do?”
“It’s not for my mother. I want to know. I wondered why you weren’t with your parents, that’s all.”
“Are you cold?” I asked.
“No.”
“Do you want to go home?”
“No, not unless you do. Don’t you feel well, Neil?”
“I feel all right,” and to let her know that I was still me, I held her to me, though that moment I was without desire.
“Neil?”
“What?”
“What about the library?”
“Who wants to know that?”
“My father,” she laughed.
“And you?”
She did not answer a moment. “And me,” she said finally.
“Well what about it? Do I like it? It’s okay. I sold shoes once and like the library better. After the Army they tried me for a couple months at Uncle Aaron’s real estate company—Doris’ father—and I like the library better than that …”
“How did you get a job there?”
“I worked there for a little while when I was in college, then when I quit Uncle Aaron’s, oh, I don’t know …”
“What did you take in college?”
“At Newark Colleges of Rutgers University I majored in philosophy. I am twenty-three years old. I—”
“Why do you sound nasty again?”
“Do I?”
“Yes.”
I didn’t say I was sorry.
“Are you planning on making a career of the library?”
“Bren, I’m not planning anything. I haven’t planned a thing in three years. At least for the year I’ve been out of the Army. In the Army I used to plan to go away weekends. I’m—I’m not a planner.” After all the truth I’d suddenly given her, I shouldn’t have ruined it for myself with that final lie. I added, “I’m a liver.”
“I’m a pancreas,” she said.
“I’m a—”
And she Kissed the absurd game away; she wanted to be serious.
Do you love me, Neil?
I did not answer.
“I’ll sleep with you whether you do or not, so tell me the truth.”
“That was pretty crude.”
“Don’t be prissy,” she said.
“No, I mean a crude thing to say about me.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, and she didn’t, and that she didn’t pained me; I allowed myself the minor subterfuge, however, of forgiving Brenda her obtuseness. “Do you?” she said.
“No.”
“I want you to.”
“What about the library?”
“What about it?” she said.
Was it obtuseness again? I thought not—and it wasn’t, for Brenda said, “When you love me, there’ll be nothing to worry about.”
“Then of course I’ll love you.” I smiled.
“I know you will,” she said. “Why don’t you go in the water, and I’ll wait for you and close my eyes, and when you come back you’ll surprise me with the wet. Go ahead.”
“You like games, don’t you?”
“Go ahead. I’ll close my eyes.”
I walked down to the edge of the pool and dove in. The water felt colder than it had earlier, and when I broke through and was headed blindly down I felt a touch of panic. At the top again, I started to swim the length of the pool and then turned at the end and started back, but suddenly I was sure that when I left the water Brenda would be gone. I’d be alone in this damn place. I started for the side and pulled myself up and ran to the chairs and Brenda was there and I kissed her.
“God,” she shivered, “You didn’t stay long.”
“I know.”
“My turn,” she said, and then she was up and a second later I heard a little crack of water and then nothing. Nothing for quite a while.
“Bren,” I called softly, “are you all right?” but no one answered.
I found her glasses on the chair beside me and held them in my hands. “Brenda?”
Nothing.
“Brenda?”
“No fair calling,” she said and gave me her drenched self. “Your turn,” she said.
This time I stayed below the water for a long while and when I surfaced again my lungs were ready to pop. I threw my head back for air and above me saw the sky, low like a hand pushing down, and I began to swim as though to move out from under its pressure. I wanted to get back to Brenda, for I worried once again—and there was no evidence, was there?—that if I stayed away too long she would not be there when I returned. I wished that I had carried her glasses away with me, so she would have to wait for me to lead her back home. I was having crazy thoughts, I knew, and yet they did not seem uncalled for in the darkness and strangeness of that place. Oh how I wanted to call out to her from the pool, but I knew she would not answer and I forced myself to swim the length a third time, and then a fourth, but midway through the fifth I felt a weird fright again, had momentary thoughts of my own extinction, and that time when I came back I held her tighter than either of us expected.
“Let go, let go,” she laughed, “my turn—”
“But Brenda—”
But Brenda was gone and this time it seemed as though she’d never come back. I settled back and waited for the sun to dawn over the ninth hole, prayed it would if only for the comfort of its light, and when Brenda finally returned to me I would not let her go, and her cold wetness crept into me somehow and made me shiver. “That’s it, Brenda. Please, no more games,” I said, and then when I spoke again I held her so tightly I almost dug my body into hers, “I love you,” I said, “I do.”
So the summer went on. I saw Brenda every evening: we went swimming, we went for walks, we went for rides, up through the mountains so far and so long that by the time we started back the fog had begun to emerge from the trees and push out into the road, and I would tighten my hands on the wheel and Brenda would put on her glasses and watch the white line for me. And we would eat—a few nights after my discovery of the fruit refrigerator Brenda led me to it herself. We would fill huge soup bowls with cherries, and in serving dishes for roast beef we would heaD slices of watermelon Then we would eo up and out the back doorway of the basement and onto the back lawn and sit under the sporting-goods tree, the light from the TV room the only brightness we had out there. All we would hear for while were just the two of us spitting pits. “I wish they would take root overnight and in the morning there’d just be watermelons and cherries.”
“If they took root in this yard, sweetie, they’d grow refrigerators and Westinghouse Preferred. I’m not being nas
ty,” I’d add quickly, and Brenda would laugh, and say she felt like a greengage plum, and I would disappear down into the basement and the cherry bowl would now be a greengage plum bowl, and then a nectarine bowl, and then a peach bowl, until, I have to admit it, I cracked my frail bowel, and would have to spend the following night, sadly, on the wagon. And then too we went out for corned beef sandwiches, pizza, beer and shrimp ice cream sodas and hamburgers. We went to the Lions Club Fair one night and Brenda won a Lions Club ashtray by shooting three baskets in a row. And when Ron came home from Milwaukee we went from time to time to see him play basketball in the semi-pro summer league, and it was those evenings that I felt a stranger with Brenda, for she knew all the players’ names, and though for the most part they were gawky-limbed and dull, there was one named Luther Ferrari who was neither, and whom Brenda had dated for a whole year in high school. He was Ron’s closest friend and I remembered his name from the Newark News: he was one of the great Ferrari brothers, All State all of them in at least two sports. It was Ferrari who called Brenda Buck, a nickname which apparently went back to her ribbon-winning days Like Ron Ferrari was exceedinriy polite as though it were some affliction of those over six feet three; he was gentlemanly towards me and gentle towards Brenda, and after a while I balked when the suggestion was made that we go to see Ron play. And then one nightwe discovered that at eleven o’clock the cashier of the Hilltop Theatre went home and the manager disappeared into his office and so that summer we saw the last quarter of at least fifteen movies and then when we were driving home—driving Brenda home, that is—we would try to reconstruct the beginnings of the films. Our favorite last quarter of a movie was Ma and Pa Kettle in the City, our favorite fruit, greengage plums, and our favorite, our only, people, each other. Of course we ran into others from time to time, some of Brenda’s friends, and occasionally, one or two of mine. One night in August we even went to a bar out on Route 6 with Laura Simpson Stolowitch and her fiancé, but it was a dreary evening. Brenda and I seemed untrained in talking to others, and so we danced a great deal, which we realized was one thing we’d never done before. Laura’s boyfriend drank stingers pompously and Simp—Brenda wanted me to call her Stolo but I didn’t—Simp drank a tepid combination of something like ginger ale and soda. Whenever we returned to the table, Simp would be talking about “the dance” and her fiancé about “the film,” until finally Brenda asked him “Which film?” and then we danced till closing time. And when we went back to Brenda’s we filled a bowl with cherries which we carried into the TV room and ate sloppily for a while; and later, on the sofa, we loved each other and when I moved from the darkened room to the bathroom I could always feel cherry pits against my bare soles. At home, undressing for the second time that night, I would find red marks on the undersides of my feet.