by Philip Roth
I wondered, for an instant only, if I would see the colored kid from the library on the streets here. I didn’t, of course, though I was sure he lived in one of the scabby, peeling buildings out of which dogs, children, and aproned women moved continually. On the top floors, windows were open, and the very old, who could no longer creak down the long stairs to the street, sat where they had been put, in the screenless windows, their elbows resting on fluffless pillows, and their heads tipping forward on their necks, watching the push of the young and the pregnant and the unemployed. Who would come after the Negroes? Who was left? No one, I thought, and someday these streets, where my grandmother drank hot tea from an old jahrzeit glass, would be empty and we would all of us have moved to the crest of the Orange Mountains, and wouldn’t the dead stop kicking at the slats in their coffins then?
I pulled the Volkswagen up in front of a huge garage door that said across the front of it:
PATIMKIN KITCHEN AND BATHROOM SINKS
“Any Size—Any Shape”
Inside I could see a glass-enclosed office; it was in the center of an immense warehouse. Two trucks were being loaded in the rear, and Mr. Patimkin, when I saw him, had a cigar in his mouth and was shouting at someone. It was Ron, who was wearing a white T-shirt that said Ohio State Athletic Association across the front. Though he was taller than Mr. Patimkin, and almost as stout, his hands hung weakly at his sides like a small boy’s; Mr. Patimkin’s cigar locomoted in his mouth. Six Negroes were loading one of the trucks feverishly, tossing—my stomach dropped—sink bowls at one another.
Ron left Mr. Patimkin’s side and went back to directing the men. He thrashed his arms about a good deal, and though on the whole he seemed rather confused, he didn’t appear to be at all concerned about anybody dropping a sink. Suddenly I could see myself directing the Negroes—I would have an ulcer in an hour. I could almost hear the enamel surfaces shattering on the floor. And I could hear myself: “Watch it, you guys. Be careful, will you? Whoops! Oh, please be—watch itl Watch! Oh!” Suppose Mr. Patimkin should come up to me and say, “Okay, boy, you want to marry my daughter, let’s see what you can do.” Well, he would see: in a moment that floor would be a shattered mosaic, a crunchy path of enamel. “Klugman, what kind of worker are you? You work like you eat!”’ “That’s right that’s right, I’m a sparrow, let me go.” “Don’t you even know how to load and unload?” “Mr Patimkin, even breathing gives me trouble, sleep tires me out, let me go, let me go…”
Mr. Patimkin was headed back to the” fish bowl to answer a ringing phone, and I wrenched myself free of my reverie and headed towards the office too. When I entered, Mr. Patimkin looked up from the phone with his eyes; the sticky cigar was in his free hand—he moved it at me, a greeting. From outside I heard Ron call in a high voice, “You can’t all go to lunch at the same time. We haven’t got all day!”
“Sit down,” Mr. Patimkin shot at me, though when he went back to his conversation I saw there was only one chair in the office, his. People did not sit at Patimkin Sink—here you earned your money the hard way, standing up. I busied myself looking at the several calendars that hung from filing cabinets; they showed illustrations of women so dreamy, so fantastically thighed and uddered that one could not think of them as pornographic. Thé artist who had drawn the calendar girls for “Lewis Construction Company,” and “Earl’s Track and Auto Repair” and “Grossman and Son Paper Box” had been painting some third sex I had never seen.
“Sure, sure, sure,” Mr. Patimkin said into the phone “Tomorrow, don’t tell me tomorrow. Tomorrow the world could blow up.”
At the other end someone spoke. Who was it? Lewis from the construction company? Earl from track repair?
“I’m running a business, Grossman, not a charity.”
So it was Grossman being browbeaten at the other end.
“Shit on that,” Mr. Patimkin said. “You’re not the only one in town, my good friend,” and he winked at me.
Ah-ha, a conspiracy against Grossman. Me and Mr. Patimkin. I smiled as collusively as I knew how.
“All right then, we’re here till five … No later.”
He wrote something on a piece of paper. It was only a big X.
“My kid’ll be here,” he said. “Yea, he’s in the business.”
Whatever Grossman said on the other end, it made Mr. Patimkin laugh. Mr. Patimkin hung up without a goodbye.
He looked out the back to see how Ron was doing. “Four years in college he can’t unload a truck.”
I didn’t know what to say but finally chose the truth. “I guess I couldn’t either.”
“You could learn. What am I, a genius? I learned. Hard work never killed anybody.”
To that I agreed.
Mr. Patimkin looked at his cigar. “A man works hard he’s got something. You don’t get anywhere sitting on your behind, you know … The biggest men in the country worked hard, believe me. Even Rockefeller. Success don’t come easy…” He did not say this so much as he mused it out while he surveyed his dominion. He was not a man enamored of words, and I had the feeling that what had tempted him into this barrage of universals was probably the combination of Ron’s performance and my presence—me, the outsider who might one day be an insider. But did Mr. Patimkin even consider that possibility? I did not know; I only knew that these few words he did speak could hardly transmit all the satisfaction and surprise he felt about the life he had managed to build for himself and his family.
He looked out at Ron again. “Look at him, if he played basketball like that they’d throw him the hell off the court.” But he was smiling when he said it.
He walked over to the door. “Ronald, let them go to lunch.”
Ron shouted back, “I thought I’d let some go now, and some later.”
“Why?”
“Then somebody’ll always be—”
“No fancy deals here,” Mr. Patimkin shouted. “We all go to lunch at once.”
Ron turned back. “All right, boys, lunch!”
His father smiled at me. “Smart boy? Huh?” He tapped his head. “That took brains, huh? He ain’t got the stomach for business. He’s an idealist,” and then I think Mr. Patimkin suddenly realized who I was, and eagerly corrected himself so as not to offend. “That’s all right, you know, if you’re a schoolteacher, or like you, you know, a student or something like that. Here you need a little of the gonif in you. You know what that means? Gonif?”
“Thief,” I said.
“You know more than my own kids. They’re goyim, my kids, that’s how much they understand.” He watched the Negro loading gang walk past the office and shouted out to them, “You guys know how long an hour is? All right, you’ll be back in an hour!”
Ron came into the office and of course shook my hand.
“Do you have that stuff for Mrs. Patimkin?” I asked.
“Ronald, get him the silver patterns.” Ron turned away and Mr. Patimkin said, “When I got married we had forks and knives from the five and ten. This kid needs gold to eat off,” but there was no anger; far from it.
I drove to the mountains in my own car that afternoon, and stood for a while at the wire fence watching the deer lightly prance, coyly feed, under the protection of signs that read, Do Not Feed the Deer, By Order of South Mountain Reservation. Alongside me at the fence were dozens of kids; they giggled and screamed when the deer licked the popcorn from their hands, and then were sad when their own excitement sent the young loping away towards the far end of the field where their tawny-skinned mothers stood regally watching the traffic curl up the mountain road. Young white-skinned mothers, hardly older than I, and in many instances younger, chatted in their convertibles behind me, and looked down from time to time to see what their children were about. I had seen them before, when Brenda and I had gone out for a bite in the afternoon, or had driven up here for lunch: in clotches of three and four they sat in the rustic hamburger joints that dotted the Reservation area while their children gobbled hamburgers
and malteds and were given dimes to feed the jukebox. Though none of the little ones were old enough to read the song titles, almost all of them could holler out the words, and they did, while the mothers, a few of whom I recognized as high school mates of mine, compared suntans, supermarkets, and vacations. They looked immortal sitting there. Their hair would always stay the color they desired, their clothes the right texture and shade; in their homes they would have simple Swedish modem when that was fashionable, and if huge, ugly baroque ever came back, out would go the long, midget-legged marble coffee table and in would come Louis Quatorze. These were the goddesses, and if I were Paris I could not have been able to choose among them, so microscopic were the differences. Their fates had collapsed them into one. Only Brenda shone. Money and comfort would not erase her singleness—they hadn’t yet or had they? What was I loving, I wondered, and since I am not one to stick scalpels into myself I wiggled my hand in the fence and allowed a tiny-nosed’bui to lick my thoughts away.
When I returned to the Patimkin house, Brenda was in the living room looking more beautiful than I had ever seen her. She was modeling her new dress for Harriet and her mother. Even Mrs. Patimkin seemed softened by the sight of her; it looked as though some sedative had been injected into her, and so relaxed the Brenda-hating muscles around her eyes and mouth.
Brenda, without glasses, modeled in place; when she looked at me it was a kind of groggy, half-waking look I got, and though others might have interpreted it as sleepiness it sounded in my veins as lust. Mrs. Patimkin told her finally that she’d bought a very nice dress and I told her she looked lovely and Harriet told her she was very beautiful and that she ought to be the bride, and then there was an uncomfortable silence while all of us wondered who ought to be the groom.
Then when Mrs. Patimkin had led Harriet out to the kitchen, Brenda came up to me and said, “I ought to be the bride.”
“You ought, sweetheart.” I kissed her, and suddenly she was crying.
“What is it, honey?” I said.
“Let’s go outside.”
On the lawn, Brenda was no longer crying but her voice sounded very tired.
“Neil, I called Margaret Sanger Clinic,” she said. “When I was in New York.”
I didn’t answer.
“Neil, they did ask if I was married. God, the woman sounded like my mother…”
“What did you say?”
“I said no.”
“What did she say?”
“I don’t know. I hung up.” She walked away and around the oak tree. When she appeared again she’d stepped out of her shoes and held one hand on the tree, as though it were a Maypole she were circling.
“You can call them back,” I said.
She shook her head. “No, I can’t. I don’t even know why I called in the first place. We were shopping and I just walked away, looked up the number, and called.”
“Then you can go to a doctor.”
She shook again.
“Look, Bren,” I said, rushing to her, “we’ll go together, to a doctor. In New York—”
“I don’t want to go to some dirty little office—”
“We won’t. We’ll go to the most posh gynecologist in New York. One who gets Harper’s Bazaar for the reception room. How does that sound?”
She bit her lower lip.
“You’ll come with me?” she asked.
“I’ll come with you.”
“To the office?”
“Sweetie, your husband wouldn’t come to the office.”
“No?”
“He’d be working.”
“But you’re not,” she said.
“I’m on vacation,” I said, but I had answered the wrong question. “Bren, I’ll wait and when you’re all done we’ll buy a drink. We’ll go out to dinner.”
“Neil, I shouldn’t have called Margaret Sanger—it’s not right.”
“It is, Brenda. It’s the most right thing we can do.” She walked away and I was exhausted from pleading. Somehow I felt I could have convinced her had I been a bit more crafty; and yet I did not want it to be craftiness that changed her mind. I was silent when she came back, and perhaps it was just that, my not saying anything, that prompted her finally to say, “I’ll ask Mother Patimkin if she wants us to take Harriet too…”
7
I shall never forget the heat and mugginess of that afternoon we drove into New York. It was four days after the day she’d called Margaret Sanger—she put it off and put it off, but finally on Friday, three days before Ron’s wedding and four before her departure, we were heading through the Lincoln Tunnel, which seemed longer and fumier than ever, like Hell with tiled walls. Finally we were in New York and smothered again by the thick day. I pulled around the policeman who directed traffic in his shirt sleeves and up onto the Port Authority roof to park the car.
“Do you have cab fare?” I said.
“Aren’t you going to come with me?”
“I thought I’d wait in the bar. Here, downstairs.”
“You can wait in Central Park. His office is right across the street.”
“Bren, what’s the diff—” But when I saw the look that invaded her eyes I gave up the air-conditioned bar to accompany her across the city. There was a sudden shower while our cab went crosstown, and when the rain stopped the streets were sticky and shiny, and below the pavement was the rumble of the subways, and in all it was like entering the ear of a lion.
The doctor’s office was in the Squibb Building, which is across from Bergdorf Goodman’s and so was a perfect place for Brenda to add to her wardrobe. For some reason we had never once considered her going to a doctor in Newark, perhaps because it was too close to home and might allow for possibilities of discovery. When Brenda got to the revolving door she looked back at me; her eyes were very watery, even with her glasses, and I did not say a word, afraid what a word, any word, might do. I kissed her hair and motioned that I would be across the street by the Plaza fountain, and then I watched her revolve through the doors. Out on the street the traffic moved slowly as though the humidity were a wall holding everything back. Even the fountain seemed to be bubbling boiling water on the people who sat at its edge, and in an instant I decided against crossing the street, and turned south on Fifth and began to walk the steaming pavement towards St. Patrick’s. On the north steps a crowd was gathered; everyone was watching a model being photographed. She was wearing a lemon-colored dress and had her feet pointed like a ballerina, and as I passed into the church I heard some lady say, “If I ate cottage cheese ten times a day, I couldn’t be that skinny.”
It wasn’t much cooler inside the church, though the stillness and the flicker of the candles made me think it was. I took a seat at the rear and while I couldn’t bring myself to kneel, I did lean forward onto the back of the bench before me, and held my hands together and closed my eyes. I wondered if I looked like a Catholic, and in my wonderment I began to make a little speech to myself. Can I call the self-conscious words I spoke prayer? At any rate, I called my audience God. God, I said, I am twenty-three years old I want to make the best of things. Now the doctor is about to wed Brenda to me, and I am not entirely certain this is all for the best. What is it I love, Lord? Why have I chosen? Who is Brenda? The race is to the swift. Should I have stopped to think?
I was getting no answers, but I went on. If we meet You at all, God, it’s that we’re carnal, and acquisitive, and thereby partake of You. I am carnal, and I know You approve, I just know it. But how carnal can I get? I am acquisitive. Where do I turn now in my acquisitiveness? Where do we meet? Which prize is You?
It was an ingenious meditation, and suddenly I felt ashamed. I got up and walked outside, and the noise of Fifth Avenue met me with an answer:
Which prize do you think, schmuck? Gold dinnerware, sporting-goods trees, nectarines, garbage disposals, bumpless noses, Patimkin Sink, Bonwit Teller—
But damn it, God, that is You!
And God only laughed, that clown.
<
br /> On the steps around the fountain I sat in a small arc of a rainbow that the sun had shot through the spray of the water. And then I saw Brenda coming out of the Squibb Building. She carried nothing with her, like a woman who’s only been window shopping, and for a moment I was glad that in the end she had disobeyed my desire.
As she crossed the street, though, that little levity passed, and then I was myself again.
She walked up before me and looked down at where 1 sat; when she inhaled she filled her entire body, and then let her breath out with a “Whew!”
“Where is it?” I said.
My answer, at first, was merely that victorious look of hers, the one she’d given Simp the night she’d beaten her, the one I’d gotten the morning I finished the third lap alone. At last she said, “I’m wearing it.”
“Oh, Bren.”
“He said shall I wrap it or will you take it with you?”
“Oh Brenda, I love you.”
We slept together that night, and so nervous were we about our new toy that we performed like kindergartners, or (in the language of that country) like a lousy double-play combination. And then the next day we hardly saw one another at all, for with the last-minute wedding preparations came scurrying, telegramming, shouting, crying, rushing—in short, lunacy. Even the meals lost their Patimkin fullness, and were tortured out of Kraft cheese, stale onion rolls, dry salami, a little chopped liver, and fruit cocktail. It was hectic all weekend, and I tried as best I could to keep clear of the storm, at whose eye, Ron, clumsy and smiling, and Harriet, flittering and courteous, were being pulled closer and closer together. By Sunday night fatigue had arrested hysteria and all of the Patimkins, Brenda included, had gone off to an early sleep. When Ron went into the bathroom to brush his teeth I decided to go in and brush mine. While I stood over the sink he checked his supports for dampness; then he hung them on the shower knobs and asked me if I would like to listen to his records for a while. It was not out of boredom and loneliness that I accepted; rather a brief spark of lockerroom comradery had been struck there among the soap and the water and the tile, and I thought that perhaps Ron’s invitation was prompted by a desire to spend his last moments as a Single Man with another Single Man. If I was right, then it was the first real attestation he’d given to my masculinity. How could I refuse?