American Pastoral

by Philip Roth

  “The aim? Sure. To introduce you to reality. That’s the aim.”

  “And how much ruthlessness is necessary?”

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  “To introduce you to reality? To get you to admire reality? To get you to

  partake of reality? To get you out there on the frontiers of reality? It ain’t

  gonna be no picnic, jocko.”

  He had braced himself not to become entangled in her loathing for him, not to be

  affronted by anything she said. He was prepared for the verbal violence and

  prepared, this time, not to react. She was not unintelligent and she was not

  afraid to say anything—he knew that much. But what he had not counted on was

  lust, an urge— he had not counted on being assailed by something other than the

  verbal violence. Despite the repugnance inspired by the sickly whiteness of her

  flesh, by the comically childish makeup and the cheap cotton clothes, half

  reclining on the bed was a young woman half reclining on a bed, and the Swede

  himself, the superman of certainties, was one of the people whom he could not

  deal with.

  “Poor thing,” she said scornfully. “Little Rimrock rich boy. All locked up like

  that. Let’s fuck, D-d-d-daddy. I’ll take you to see your daughter. We’ll wash

  your prick and zip up your fly and I’ll take you to where she is.”

  “Do I know you will? How do I know you will?”

  “Wait. See how things turn out. The worst is you get yourself some twenty-two-

  year-old gash. Come on, Dad. Come on over to the bed, D-d-d—”

  * * *

  “Stop this! My daughter has nothing to do with any of this! My daughter has

  nothing to do with you! You little shit—you’re not fit to wipe my daughter’s

  shoes! My daughter had nothing to do with that bombing. You know that!”

  “Calm down, Swede. Calm down, lover boy. If you want to see your daughter as

  much as you say, you’ll just calm down and come on over here and give Rita Cohen

  a nice big fuck. First the fuck, then the dough.”

  She had raised her knees toward her chest and now, with either foot planted on

  the bed, she let her legs fall open. The floral skirt was gathered up by her

  hips and she wore no underwear.

  “There,” she said softly. “Put it right there. Attack there. It’s all

  permissible, baby.”

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  “Miss Cohen …” He did not know what to reach for in his estimable strongbox

  of reactions—this boiling up of something so visceral in with the rhetorical was

  not the attack he had prepared himself for. She’d brought to the hotel a stick

  of dynamite to throw. This was it. To blow him up.

  “What is it, dear?” she replied. “You must speak up like a big boy if you wish

  to be heard.”

  “What does this display have to do with what has happened?”

  “Everything,” she said. “You’ll be surprised by what a very clear picture of

  things you’re going to get from this display.” She edged her two hands down onto

  her pubic hair. “Look at it,” she told him and, by rolling the labia lips

  outward with her fingers, exposed to him the membranous tissue veined and

  mottled and waxy with the moist tulip sheen of flayed flesh. He looked away.

  “It’s a jungle down there,” she said. “Nothing in its place. Nothing on the left

  side like anything on the right side. How many extras are there? Nobody knows.

  Too many to count. There are glands down there. There’s another hole. There are

  flaps. Don’t you see what this has to do with what happened? Take a look. Take a

  good long look.”

  “Miss Cohen,” he said, fixing on her eyes, the one mark of beauty she was

  blessed with—a child’s eyes, he discovered, a good child’s eyes that had nothing

  in common with what she was up to, “my daughter is missing. Someone is dead.”

  “You don’t get the point. You don’t get the point about anything. Look at it.

  Describe it to me. Have I got it wrong? What do you see? Do you see anything?

  No, you don’t see anything. You don’t see anything because you don’t look at

  anything.”

  “This makes no sense,” he said. “You are subjugating no one by this. Only

  yourself.”

  “You know what size it is? Let’s see what kind of guesser you are. It’s small.

  I’m guessing that it’s a size four. In a ladies’ size that’s as small as cunts

  come. Anything smaller is a child’s. Let’s see how you’ll fit into a teeny size

  four. Let’s see if a size four doesn’t provide just the nicest, warmest,

  snuggest fuck you’ve ever dreamed of

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  * * *

  fucking. You love good leather, you love fine gloves—stick it in. But slowly,

  slowly. Always the first time stick it in slowly.”

  “Why don’t you stop right now?”

  “Okay, if that’s your decision, that you’re such a brave man you won’t even look

  at it, shut your eyes and step right up and smell it. Step right up and take a

  whiff. The swamp. It sucks you in. Smell it, Swede. You know what a glove smells

  like. It smells like the inside of a new car. Well, this is what life smells

  like. Smell this. Smell the inside of a brand-new pussy.”

  Her dark child’s eyes. Full of excitement and fun. Full of audacity. Full of

  unreasonableness. Full of oddness. Full of Rita. And only half of it was

  performance. To agitate. To infuriate. To arouse. She was in an altered state.

  The imp of upheaval. The genie of disaster. As though in being his tormentor and

  wrecking his family she had found the malicious meaning for her own existence.

  Kid Mayhem.

  “Your physical restraint is amazing,” she said. “Isn’t there anything that can

  get you off dead center? I didn’t believe there were any left like you. Any

  other man would have been overcome by his hard-on hours ago. You are a

  throwback. Taste it.”

  “You’re not a woman. This does not make you a woman in any way. This makes you a

  travesty of a woman. This is loathsome.” Rapidly firing back at her like a

  soldier under attack.

  “And a man who won’t look, what’s he a travesty of?” she asked him. “Isn’t it

  just human nature to look? What about a man always averting his eyes because

  it’s all too steeped in reality for him? Because nothing is in harmony with the

  world as he knows it? Thinks he knows it. Taste it! Of course it’s loathsome,

  you great big Boy Scout—I’m depraved!” and merrily laughing off his refusal to

  lower his gaze by so much as an inch, she cried, “Here!”

  She must have reached inside herself with her hand, her hand must have

  disappeared inside her, because a moment later it was the whole of her hand that

  she was extending upward to him. The tips of her fingers bore the smell of her

  right up to him. That he could not shut out, the fecund smell released from

  within.

  · 146 ·

  1 III

  “This’U unlock the mystery. You want to know what this has to do with what

  happened?” she said. “This’ll tell you.”

  There was so much emotion in him, so much uncertainty, so much inclination and

  counterinclination, he was bursting so with impulse and counterimpulse that he

  could no longer tell which of them had drawn the line that he would
not pass

  over. All his thinking seemed to be taking place in a foreign language, but

  still he knew enough not to pass over the line. He would not pick her up and

  hurl her against the window. He would not pick her up and throw her onto the

  floor. He would not pick her up for any reason. All the strength left in him

  would be marshaled to keep him paralyzed at the foot of the bed. He would not go

  near her.

  The hand she’d offered him she now carried slowly up to her face, making loony,

  comical little circles in the air as she approached her mouth. Then, one by one,

  * * *

  she slipped each finger between her lips to cleanse it. “You know what it tastes

  like? Want me to tell you? It tastes like your d-d-d-daughter.”

  Here he bolted the room. With all his strength.

  That was it. Ten, twelve minutes and it was over. By the time the FBI responded

  to his phone call and got to the hotel, she was gone, as was the briefcase he

  had abandoned. He’d bolted not from the childlike cruelty and meanness, not even

  from the vicious provocation, but from something that he could no longer name.

  Faced with something he could not name, he had done everything wrong.

  Five years pass. In vain, the Rimrock Bomber’s father waits for Rita to reappear

  at his office. He did not take her photograph, did not save her fingerprints—no,

  whenever they met, for those few minutes, she, a child, was boss. And now she’s

  disappeared. With an agent and a sketch artist to assist him, he is asked to

  construct a picture of Rita for the FBI, while alone he studies the daily paper

  and the weekly newsmagazines, searching for the real thing. He waits for Rita’s

  picture to turn up. She is bound to be there. Bombs are going off everywhere. In

  Boulder, Colorado, bombs destroy a

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  Selective Service office and the ROTC headquarters at the University of

  Colorado. In Michigan there are explosions at the university and dynamite

  attacks on a police headquarters and the draft board. In Wisconsin a bomb

  destroys a National Guard armory; a small plane flies over and drops two jars

  filled with gunpowder on an ammunition plant. College buildings are attacked

  with bombs at the University of Wisconsin. In Chicago a bomb destroys the

  memorial statue to the policemen killed in the Haymarket riots. In New Haven

  someone firebombs the home of the judge in the trial of nineteen Black Panthers

  accused of planning to destroy department stores, the police station, and the

  New Haven Railroad. Buildings are bombed at universities in Oregon, Missouri,

  and Texas. A Pittsburgh shopping mall, a Washington nightclub, a Maryland

  courtroom—all bombed. In New York there are a series of explosions—at the United

  Fruit Line pier, at the Marine Midland Bank, at Manufacturers Trust, at General

  Motors, at the Manhattan headquarters of Mobil Oil, IBM, and General Telephone

  and Electronics. A downtown Manhattan Selective Service center is bombed. The

  criminal courts building is bombed. Three Molotov cocktails go off in a

  Manhattan high school. Bombs explode in safe-deposit boxes in banks in eight

  cities. She has to have set off one of them. They’ll find Rita, catch her red-

  handed—catch the whole bunch of them—and she will lead them to Merry.

  In his pajamas, in their kitchen, he sits watching every night for her soot-

  covered face at the window. He sits alone in the kitchen, waiting for his enemy,

  Rita Cohen, to return.

  A TWA jet is bombed in Las Vegas. A bomb goes off on the Queen Elizabeth. A bomb

  goes off in the Pentagon—in a women’s restroom on the fourth floor of an air

  force area of the Pentagon! The bomber leaves a note: “Today we attacked the

  Pentagon, the center of the American military command. We are reacting at a time

  when growing U.S. air and naval shelling are being carried out against the

  Vietnamese; while U.S. mines and warships are used to block the harbors of the

  Democratic Republic of Vietnam; while plans for even more escalation are being

  made in Washington.” The

  · 148 ·

  * * *

  Democratic Republic of Vietnam—if I hear that from her once again, Seymour, I

  swear, I’ll go out of my mind. It’s their daughter! Merry has bombed the

  Pentagon.

  “D-d-dad!” Above the noise of the sewing machines he hears her crying for him in

  his office. “D-d-d-daddy!”

  Two years after her disappearance, there is a bomb blast in the most elegant

  Greek Revival house on the most peaceful residential street in Greenwich

  Village—three explosions and a fire destroy the old four-story brick townhouse.

  The house is owned by a prosperous New York couple who are on vacation in the

  Caribbean. After the explosion, two dazed young women stumble, bruised and

  lacerated, out of the building. One of them, who is naked, is described as being

  between sixteen and eighteen. The two are sheltered by a neighbor. She gives

  them clothes to wear, but while the neighbor rushes off to the bombed-out

  building to see what more she can do, the two young women disappear. One is the

  twenty-five-year-old daughter of the owners of the townhouse, a member of a

  violent revolutionary faction of the Students for a Democratic Society called

  the Weathermen. The other is unidentified. The other is Rita. The other is

  Merry. They’ve roped her into this too!

  He waits all night in the kitchen for his daughter and the girl Weatherman. It

  is safe now—the surveillance of the house, of the factory, the monitoring of the

  phones, were dropped more than a year before. It’s okay now to show up. He

  defrosts some soup to feed them. He thinks back to when she had begun to lean

  toward the sciences. Because of Dawn’s cattle, she thought she’d be a vet. It

  was the stuttering, too, that sent her into the sciences, because when she was

  focused and concentrated on one of her science projects, doing close work, the

  stuttering always abated a little. No parent in the world could have seen the

  connection to a bomb. Everyone would have missed it, not just him. Her interest

  in science was totally innocent. Everything was.

  The body of a young man found in the rubble of the burned-out house is

  identified the next day as that of a one-time Columbia student, a veteran of

  violent antiwar demonstrations, the founder

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  of a radical SDS splinter group, the Mad Dogs. The following day the second

  young woman who fled the bomb scene is identified: another radical activist but

  not Merry—the twenty-six-year-old daughter of a left-wing New York lawyer. Even

  worse is news of another corpse discovered in the rubble at the Village

  townhouse: the torso of a young woman. “The body of the second victim of the

  blast was not immediately identified and Dr. Elliott Gross, associate medical

  examiner, said, ‘It will take some time before we have any idea who she is.’”

  Alone at the kitchen table, her father knows who she is. Sixty sticks of

  dynamite, thirty blasting caps, a cache of homemade bombs—twelve-inch pipes

  packed with dynamite—are found only twenty feet from the body. It was a pipe

  packed with dynamite that blew up Hamlin’s. She was putting the components o
f a

  new bomb together, did something wrong, and blew up the townhouse. First

  Hamlin’s, now herself. She did do it, gave the quaint town its big surprise—and

  this is the result. “Dr. Gross confirmed that the torso had a number of puncture

  wounds, caused by nails, giving credence to the report from the police source

  that the bombs were apparently being wrapped to act more as antipersonnel

  weapons than just as explosive devices.”

  The next day more explosions are reported in Manhattan: three midtown buildings

  bombed simultaneously at about one-forty a.m. The torso’s not hers! Merry is

  alive! Hers is not the body skewered by nails and blown apart! “As a result of

  the telephoned warning police arrived at the building at 1:20 and evacuated 24

  * * *

  janitors and other workers before the explosion occurred.” The midtown bomber

  and the Rimrock Bomber must be one and the same. Had she known enough to

  telephone before her first bomb was set to go off, no one would have been killed

  and she would not be wanted for murder. So at least she has learned something,

  at least she is alive and there is reason to be sitting every night in the

  kitchen waiting to see her at the window with Rita.

  He reads about the parents of the two young women who are missing and wanted for

  questioning in the townhouse explosion.

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