by Philip Roth
Swede had once taken to be a mark of her superiority. Now he thought, “Icy
bitch. Why?” Once she had said to him, “The influence you allow others to have
on you, it’s absolute. Nothing so captivates you as another person’s needs.” And
he had said, “I think you are describing Sheila Salzman,” and, as always, he was
wrong.
He thought she was omniscient and all she was was cold.
Whirling about inside him now was a frenzied distrust of everyone. The excision
of certain assurances, the last assurances, made him feel as though he had gone
in one day from being five to being one hundred. It would give him comfort, he
thought, it would help him right then if, of all things, he knew that resting
out in the pasture beyond their dinner table was Dawn’s herd, with Count, the
big bull, protecting them. If Dawn still had Count, if only Count. … A relief-
filled, realityless moment passed before he realized that of course it would be
a comfort to have Count roaming the dark pasture among the cows, because then
Merry would be roaming among the guests, here, Merry, in her circus pajamas,
leaning up against the back of her father’s chair, whispering into her father’s
ear. Mrs. Orcutt drinks whiskey. Mrs. Umanoffhas BO. Dr. Salzman is bald. A
mischievous intelligence that was utterly harmless—back then unanarchic and
childish and well within bounds.
Meanwhile he heard himself saying, “Dad, take some more steak,” in what he knew
was a hopeless effort—a good son’s ef-
357
* * *
fort—to get his self-abandoned father to be, if not tranquil, less insistently
chagrined over the inadequacies of the non-Jewish human race.
“I’ll tell you who I’ll take some steak for—for this young lady.” Spearing a
slice from the platter that one of the serving girls was holding beside him, he
dumped it onto Jessie’s plate; he had taken Jessie on as a full-scale project.
“Now pick up your knife and fork and eat,” he told her, “you could use some red
meat. Sit up straight,” and, as though she believed he could well resort to
violence if she did otherwise, Jessie Orcutt drunkenly mumbled, “I was going
to,” but began to fiddle with the meat in such a clumsy way that the Swede
feared his father was going to start cutting her food for her. All that crude
energy that, try as it might, could not remake the troubled world.
“But this is serious business, this children business.” Having gotten Jessie
taking nourishment, he was in a state again about Deep Throat. “If that isn’t
serious, what is anymore?”
“Dad,” said the Swede, “what Shelly is saying is not that it’s not serious. He
agrees it’s serious. He’s saying that once you’ve made your case to an
adolescent child, you’ve made your case and you can’t then take these kids and
lock them up in their rooms and throw away the key.”
His daughter was an insane murderer hiding on the floor of a room in Newark, his
wife had a lover who dry-humped her over the sink in their family kitchen, his
ex-mistress had knowingly brought disaster upon his house, and he was trying to
propitiate his father with on-the-one-hand-this and on-the-other-hand-that.
“You’d be surprised,” Shelly told the old man, “how much the kids today have
learned to take in their stride.”
“But degrading things should not be taken in their stride! I say lock them in
their rooms if they take this in their stride! I remember when kids used to be
at home doing their homework and not out seeing movies like this. This is the
morality of a country that we’re talking about. Well, isn’t it? Am I nuts? It is
an affront to decency and to decent people.”
· 358 ·
“And what,” Marcia asked him, “is so inexhaustibly interesting about decency?”
The question so surprised him that it left him looking a little frantically
around the table for somebody with an opinion learned enough to subdue this
woman.
It turned out to be Orcutt, that great friend of the family. Bill Orcutt was
coming to Lou Levov’s aid. “And what is wrong with decency?” Orcutt asked,
smiling broadly at Marcia.
The Swede could not look at him. On top of all the things he could not think
about there were two people—Sheila and Orcutt— he could not look at. Did Dawn
consider Bill Orcutt handsome? He never thought so. Round face, snout nose,
puckering lower lip … piggy-looking bastard. Must be something else that drove
her to that frenzy over the kitchen sink. What? The easy assurance? Was that
what got her going? The comfort taken by Bill Orcutt in being Bill Orcutt, his
contentment in being Bill Orcutt? Was it because he wouldn’t dream of slighting
you even if both you and he knew that you weren’t up to snuff? Was it his
appropriateness that got her going like that, the flawless appropriateness, how
very appropriately he played his role as steward of the Morris County past? Was
it the sense he exuded of never having had to grub for anything or take shit
from anyone or be at a loss as to how to behave even when the wife on his arm
was a hopeless drunk? Was it because he’d entered the world expecting things not
* * *
even a Weequahic three-letterman begins to expect, that none of us begin to
expect, that the rest of us, if we even get those things by working our asses
off for them, still never feel entitled to? Was that why she was in heat over
the sink—because of his inbred sense of entitlement? Or was it the laudable
environmentalism? Or was it the great art? Or was it simply his cock? Is that
it, Dawn dear? I want an answer! I want it tonight! Is it just his cock?
The Swede could not stop imagining the particulars of Orcutt fucking his wife
any more than he could stop imagining the particulars of the rapists fucking his
daughter. Tonight the imagining would not let him be.
359
“Decency?” Marcia said to Orcutt, foxily smiling back at him. “Much overvalued,
wouldn’t you say, the seductions of decency and civility and convention? Not the
richest response to life I can think of.”
“So what do you recommend for ‘richness’?” Orcutt asked her. “The high road of
transgression?”
The patrician architect was amused by the literature professor and the menacing
figure she tried to cut in order to appall the squares. Amused he was. Amused!
But the Swede could not turn the dinner party into a battle for his wife. Things
were bad enough without colliding with Orcutt in front of his parents. All he
had to do was to not listen to him. Yet each time that Orcutt spoke, every word
antagonized him, convulsed him with spite and hatred and sinister thoughts; and
when Orcutt wasn’t speaking, the Swede was constantly looking down the table to
see what in God’s name there was in that face that could so excite his wife.
“Well,” Marcia was saying, “without transgression there isn’t very much
knowledge, is there?”
“My God,” cried Lou Levov, “that’s one I never heard before. Excuse me,
Professor, but where the hell do you get that idea?”
“The Bible,” said Marcia, deliciou
sly, “for a start.”
“The Bible? Which Bible?”
“The one that begins with Adam and Eve. Isn’t that what they tell us in Genesis?
Isn’t that what the Garden of Eden story is telling us?”
“What? Telling us what?”
“Without transgression there is no knowledge.”
“Well, that ain’t what they taught me,” he replied, “about the Garden of Eden.
But then I never got past eighth grade.”
“What did they teach you, Lou?”
“That when God above tells you not to do something, you damn well don’t do it—
that’s what. Do it and you pay the piper. Do it and you will suffer from it for
the rest of your days.”
“Obey the good Lord above,” said Marcia, “and all the terrible things will
vanish.”
· 360 ·
* * *
“Well … yes,” he replied, though without conviction, realizing that he was
being mocked. “Look, we are way off the subject—we are not talking about the
Bible. Forget the Bible. This is no place to talk about the Bible. We are
talking about a movie where a grown woman, from all reports, goes in front of a
movie camera, and for money, openly, for millions and millions of people to see,
children, everyone, does everything she can think of that is degrading. That’s
what we’re talking about.”
“Degrading to whom?” Marcia asked him.
“To her, for God’s sake. Number one, her. She has made herself into the scum of
the earth. You can’t tell me you are in favor of that”
“Oh, she hasn’t made herself into the scum of anything, Lou.”
“To the contrary,” said Orcutt, laughing. “She has eaten of the Tree of
Knowledge.”
“And,” announced Marcia, “made herself into a superstar. The highest of the
high. I think Miss Lovelace is having the time of her life.”
“Adolf Hitler had the time of his life, Professor, shoveling Jews into the
furnace. That does not make it right. This is a woman who is poisoning young
minds, poisoning the country, and in the bargain she is making herself the scum
of the earth—period!”
There was nothing inactive in Lou Levov when he argued, and it looked as though
just observing the phenomenon of an opinionated old man, fettered still to his
fantasy of the world, was all that was prompting Marcia to persist. To bait and
bite and draw blood. Her sport. The Swede wanted to kill her. Leave him alone!
Leave him alone and he’ll shut up! It’s no big deal getting him to say more and
more and more—so stop it!
But this problem that he had long ago learned to circumnavigate, in part by
subduing his own personality, seemingly subjugating it to his father’s while
maneuvering around Lou where he could—this problem of the father, of maintaining
filial love against the onslaught of an unrelenting father—was not a problem
that she’d had decades of experience integrating into her life. Jerry just
· 361 ·
told their father to fuck off; Dawn was driven almost crazy by him; and Sylvia
Levov stoically and impatiently endured him, her only successful form of
resistance being to freeze him out and live with the isolation—and see more of
herself evaporating year by year. But Marcia took him on as the fool that he was
for still believing in the power of his indignation to convert the corruptions
of the present into the corruptions of the past.
“So what would you want her to be instead, Lou? A cocktail waitress?” Marcia
asked.
“Why not? That’s a job.”
“Not much of one,” Marcia replied. “Not one that would interest anyone here.”
“Oh?” said Lou Levov. “They’d prefer what she does instead?”
* * *
“I don’t know,” said Marcia. “We’ll have to poll the girls. Which would you
prefer,” she said to Sheila, “cocktail waitress or porn star?”
But Sheila was not about to be engulfed in Marcia’s mockery, and with eyes that
seemed to stare past it and right on through to the egotism, she gave her
unequivocal reply. The Swede remembered that after Sheila had first met Marcia
and Barry Umanoff here, at the Old Rimrock house, he had asked her, “How can he
love this person?” and instead of answering him as Dawn did, “Because he’s a
ball-less wonder,” Sheila had replied, “By the end of a dinner party, everybody
is probably thinking that about somebody. Sometimes everybody is thinking that
about everybody.” “Do you?” he’d asked her. “I think that about couples all the
time,” she’d said.
The wise woman. And yet this wise woman had harbored a murderer.
“What about Dawn?” Marcia asked. “Cocktail waitress or porno actress?”
Smiling sweetly, exhibiting her best Catholic schoolgirl posture—the girl who
makes the nuns happy by sitting at her desk without slouching—Dawn said, “Up
yours, Marcia.”
“What kind of conversation is this?” Lou Levov asked.
“A dinner conversation,” Sylvia Levov replied.
· 362 ·
“And what makes you so blase?” he asked her.
“I’m not blase I’m listening.”
Now Bill Orcutt said, “Nobody’s polled you, Marcia. Which would you prefer,
assuming you had the choice?”
She laughed merrily at the slighting innuendo. “Oh, they’ve got big fat mamas in
dirty movies. They, too, appear in the dreams of men. And not only for comic
relief. Listen, you folks are too hard on Linda. Why is it that if a girl takes
off her clothes in Atlantic City it’s for a scholarship and makes her an
American goddess, but if she takes off her clothes in a sex flick it’s for
filthy money and makes her a whore? Why is that? Why? All right—nobody knows.
But seriously, folks, I love this word ‘scholarship.’ A hooker comes to a hotel
room. The guy asks her how much she gets. She says, ‘Well, if you want blank I
get a three-hundred-dollar scholarship. And if you want blank-blank I get a
five-hundred-dollar scholarship. And if you want blank-blank-blank—’”
“Marcia,” said Dawn, “try as you will, you can’t get under my skin tonight.”
“Can’t I?”
“Not tonight.”
There was a beautiful floral arrangement at the center of the table. “From
Dawn’s garden,” Lou Levov had told them all proudly as they were sitting down to
eat. There were also large platters of the beefsteak tomatoes, sliced thickly,
dressed in oil and vinegar, and encircled by slices of red onion fresh from the
garden. And there were two wooden buckets—old feed buckets that they’d picked up
at a junk shop in Clinton for a dollar apiece—each lined gaily with a red
bandanna and brimming with the ears of corn that Orcutt had helped her shuck.
Cradled in wicker baskets near either end of the table were freshly baked loaves
of French bread, those new baguettes from McPherson’s, reheated in the oven and
pleasant to tear apart with your hands. And there was good strong Burgundy wine,
* * *
half a dozen bottles of the Swede’s best Pommard, four of them open on the
table, bottles that five years back he had laid down for drinking in 1973—
according to his wine register,
Pom-
· 363 ·
mards laid down in his cellar just one month to the day before Merry killed Dr.
Conlon. Yes, earlier in the evening he had found 1/3/68 inscribed, in his
handwriting, in the spiral notebook he used for recording the details of each
new purchase …”1/3/68” he had written, with no idea that on 2/3/68 his
daughter would go ahead and outrage all of America, except perhaps for Professor
Marcia Umanoff.
The two high school kids who were doing the serving emerged from the kitchen
every few minutes, silently offering around the steaks he’d cooked, arranged on
pewter platters, all carved up and running with blood. The Swede’s set of
carving knives were from Hoffritz, the best German stainless steel. He’d gone
over to New York to buy the set and the big carving block for their first
Thanksgiving in the Old Rimrock house. He once had cared about all that stuff.
Loved to hone the blade on the long conical file before he went after the bird.
Loved the sound of it. The sad inventory of his domestic bounty. Wanted his
family to have the best. Wanted his family to have everything.
“Please,” said Lou Levov, “can I get an answer about the effect of this on the
children? You are all way, way off the topic. Haven’t we seen enough tragedy
