by Philip Roth
After he leaves, Helen says, “Well, there’s no need to ask what you thought of him, is there?” “It’s as you said: he adores you.” “Really, just what has empowered you to sit in judgment of other people’s passions? Haven’t you heard? It’s a wide, wide world; room for everybody to do whatever he likes. Even you once did what you liked, David. Or so the legend goes.” “I sit in judgment of nothing. What I sit in judgment of, you wouldn’t believe.” “Ah, yourself. Hardest on yourself. Momentarily I forgot.” “I sat, Helen, and I listened and I don’t remember saying anything about the passions or preferences or private parts of anybody from here to Nepal.” “Donald Garland is probably the kindest man alive.” “Fine with me.” “He was always there when I needed someone. There were weeks when I went to live in his house. He protected me from some terrible people.” Why didn’t you just protect yourself by staying away from them? “Good,” I say; “you were lucky and that was great.” “He likes to gossip and to tell tales, and of course he got a little maudlin tonight—look what he’s just been through. But he happens to know what people are, just how much and just how little—and he is devoted to his friends, even the fools. The loyalty of those kind of men is quite wonderful, and not to be disparaged by anyone. And don’t you be misled. When he is feeling himself he can be like iron. He can be unmovable, and marvelous.” “I am sure he was a wonderful friend to you.” “He still is!” “Look, what are you trying to tell me? I don’t always get the gist of things these days. Rumor has it my students are going to give me the final exam, to see if they’ve been able to get anything through my skull. What are we talking about now?” “About the fact that I am still a person of consequence to quite a few people, even if to you and the learned professors and their peppy, dowdy little wives I am beneath contempt. It’s true I’m not clever enough to bake banana bread and carrot bread and raise my own bean sprouts and ‘audit’ seminars and ‘head up’ committees to outlaw war for all time, but people still look at me, David, wherever I go. I could have married the kind of men who run the world! I wouldn’t have had to look far, either. I hate to have to say such a vulgar, trashy thing about myself, but it’s what you’re reduced to saying to someone who finds you repulsive.” “I don’t find you repulsive. I’m still awestruck that you chose me over the president of ITT. How can someone unable even to finish a little pamphlet on Anton Chekhov feel anything but gratitude to be living with the runner-up for Queen of Tibet? I’m honored to have been chosen to be your hair shirt.” “It’s debatable who is the hair shirt around here. I am repugnant to you, Donald is repugnant to you—” “Helen, I neither liked the man nor disliked the man. I did my level fucking best. Look, my best friend as long ago as college was practically the only queer there. I had a queer for a friend in 1950—before they even existed! I didn’t know what one was, but I had one. I don’t care who wears whose dress—oh, fuck it, forget it, I quit.”
Then on a Saturday morning late in the spring, just as I have sat down at my desk to begin marking exams, I hear the front door of our apartment open and shut—and finally the dissolution of this hopeless misalliance has begun. Helen is gone. Several days pass—hideous days, involving two visits to the San Francisco morgue, one with Helen’s demure, bewildered mother, who insists on flying up from Pasadena and bravely coming along with me to look at the broken body of a drowned “Caucasian” woman, age thirty to thirty-five—before I learn her whereabouts.
The first telephone call—informing me that my mate is in a Hong Kong jail—is from the State Department. The second call is from Garland, who adds certain lurid and clarifying details: she had gone from the Hong Kong airport directly by taxi to the well-known ex-lover’s mansion in Kowloon. He is the English Onassis, I am told, son and heir of the founder of the MacDonald-Metcalf Line, and king of the cargo routes from the Cape of Good Hope to Manila Bay. At Jimmy Metcalf’s home, she had not even been allowed past the servant posted at the door, not after her name had been announced to Metcalf’s wife. And when, some hours later, she left her hotel to tell the police of the plan made some years earlier by the president of MacDonald-Metcalf to have this wife run down by a car, the officer on duty at the police station made a telephone call and subsequently a packet of cocaine was found in her purse.
“What happens now?” I ask him. “My God, Donald, now what?”
“I get her out,” says Garland.
“Can that be done?”
“It can.”
“How?”
“How would you think?”
Money? Blackmail? Girls? Boys? I don’t know, I don’t care, I won’t ask again. Whatever works, do it.
“The question is,” says Garland, “what happens when Helen is free? I can, of course, make her quite comfortable right here. I can provide her with all she needs to pull herself together again, and to go on. I want to know what you think is for the best. She cannot afford to be caught in between again.”
“In between what? Donald, this is all a little confusing. I have no idea what’s best, frankly. Tell me, please, why didn’t she go to you when she got there?”
“Because she got it in her head to see Jimmy. She knew that if she’d come first to me I would never have let her go anywhere near him. I know the man, better than she does.”
“And you knew she was coming?”
“Yes, of course.”
“The night you were here for dinner.”
“No, no, my dear boy. Only a week ago. But she was to have cabled. I would have been at the airport to meet her. But she did it Helen’s way.”
“She shouldn’t have,” I say dumbly.
“The question is, does she come back to you or stay with me? I’d like you to tell me which you think is best.”
“You’re sure she’s getting out of jail, you’re sure the charges will be dropped—”
“I wouldn’t have phoned to say what I’m saying otherwise.”
“What happens then … well, it’s up to Helen, isn’t it? That is, I’d have to talk to her.”
“But you can’t. I’m lucky I could. We’re lucky she isn’t in irons already and halfway to Malaysia. Our police chief is not the most charitable of men, except on his own behalf. And your rival is not Albert Schweitzer.”
“That is apparent.”
“She used to tell me, ‘It’s so difficult to go shopping with Jimmy. If I see something I like, he buys me twelve.’ She used to say to him, ‘But, Jimmy, I can only wear one at a time.’ But Jimmy never understood, Mr. Kepesh. He does everything by twelves.”
“Okay, I believe that.”
“I don’t want anything further to go wrong for Helen—ever,” says Garland. “I want to know exactly where Helen stands, and I want to know now. She has been through years of hell. She was a marvelous, dazzling creature, and life has treated her hideously. I won’t allow either one of you to torture her again.”
But I can’t tell him where she stands—I don’t know where I stand. First, I say, I must reach Helen’s family and calm their fears. He will hear from me.
Will he? Why?
As though I have just reported that her daughter has been detained by a club meeting after school, Helen’s mother says, politely, “And when will she be home?”
“I don’t know.”
But this does not appear to faze the adventuress’s mother. “I do hope you’ll keep me informed,” she says, brightly.
“I will.”
“Well, thank you for calling, David.”
What else can the mother of an adventuress do but thank people for calling and keeping her informed?
And what does the husband of an adventuress do while his wife is in jail in the Far East? Well, at dinnertime I prepare an omelette, make it very carefully, at just the right heat, and serve it to myself with a little chopped parsley, a glass of wine, and a slice of buttered toast. Then I take a long hot shower. He doesn’t want me to torture her; all right, I won’t torture her—but best of all, I won’t torture myself. After the showe
r I decide to get into my pajamas and to do my night’s reading in bed, all by myself. No girls, not yet. That will come in its own sweet time. Everything will. Can it be? I am back where I was six years ago, the night before I ditched my sensible date and took Hong Kong Helen home from that party. Except that now I have my job, I have my book to complete, and I seem to have this comfortable apartment, so charmingly and tastefully decorated, all to myself. What is Mauriac’s phrase? “To revel in the pleasures of the unshared bed.”
For some hours my happiness is complete. Have I ever heard or read of something like this happening, of a person being catapulted out of his misery directly into bliss? The common wisdom has it that it works the other way around. Well, I am here to say that on rare occasions it seems to work this way too. My God, I do feel good. I will not torture her, or myself, ever again. Fine with me.
Two hundred and forty minutes of this, more or less.
With a loan from Arthur Schonbrunn, a colleague who had been my thesis adviser, I buy a round-trip ticket and fly off to Asia the next day. (At the bank I discover that the entire balance in our savings account had been withdrawn by Helen the week before, for her one-way air ticket, and to start her new life.) On the plane there is time to think—and to think and to think and to think. It must be that I want her back, that I can’t give her up, that I am in love with her whether I’ve known it or not, that she is my destiny—
Not one word of this stuff convinces me. Most are words I despise: Helen’s kind of words, Helen’s kind of thinking. I can’t live without this, he can’t live without that, my woman, my man, my destiny … Kid stuff! Movie stuff! Screen Romance!
Yet if this woman is not my woman, what am I doing here? If she is not my destiny, why was I on the phone from 2 to 5 a.m.? Is it just that pride won’t permit me to abdicate in favor of her homosexual protector? No, that’s not what’s done it. Nor am I Acting Responsibly, or out of shame, or masochism, or vindictive glee …
Then that leaves love. Love! At this late date! Love! After all that’s been done to destroy it! More love, suddenly, than there was anywhere along the way!
I spend the rest of my waking hours on that flight remembering every single charming, sweet, beguiling word she has ever spoken.
Accompanied by Garland—grim, courteous, impeccably now the banker and businessman—a Hong Kong police detective, and the clean-cut young man from the American consulate who is also there to meet my airplane, I am taken to a jail to see my wife. As we leave the terminal for the car, I say to Garland, “I thought she was to be out by now.” “The negotiations,” he says, “seem to involve more interests than we had imagined.” “Hong Kong,” the young consulate officer informs me wryly, “is the birthplace of collective bargaining.” Everybody in the car seems to know the score, except me.
I am searched and then allowed to sit with her in a tiny room whose door is dramatically locked behind us. The sound of the lock catching makes her reach wildly for my hand. Her face is blotchy, her lips are blistered, her eyes … her eyes I cannot look into without my innards crumbling. And Helen smells. And as for all that I felt for her up in the air, well, I simply cannot bring myself to love her like that down here on the ground. I have never loved her quite like that down on the ground before, and I’m not going to start in a jail. I am not that kind of an idiot. Which maybe makes me some other kind of idiot … but that I will have to determine later.
“They planted cocaine on me.” “I know.” “He can’t get away with that,” she says. “He won’t. Donald is going to get you out of here.” “He has to!” “He is, he’s doing it. So you don’t have to worry. You’ll be out very soon now.” “I have to tell you something terrible. All our cash is gone. The police stole it. He told them what to do to me—and they did it. They laughed at me. They touched me.” “Helen, tell me the truth now. I have to know. We all have to know. When you get out of here, do you want to stay on with Donald in his house? He says he will look after you, he—” “But I can’t! No! Oh, don’t leave me here, please! Jimmy will kill me!”
On the return flight Helen drinks until the stewardess says she cannot serve her another. “I’ll bet you were even faithful to me,” she says, oddly “chatty” suddenly. “Yes, I’ll bet you were,” she says, serene in a dopey sort of way now that the whiskey has somewhat dimmed the horrors of incarceration and she is beyond the nightmare of Jimmy Metcalf’s revenge. I don’t bother to answer one way or the other. Of the two meaningless copulations of the last year there is nothing to say; she would only laugh if I were to tell her who her rivals had been. Nor could I expect much sympathy were I to try to explain to her how unsatisfying it had been to deceive her with women who hadn’t a hundredth of her appeal to me—who hadn’t a hundredth of her character, let alone her loveliness—and whose faces I could have spit into when I realized how much of their satisfaction derived from putting Helen Kepesh in her place. Quickly enough—almost quickly enough—I had seen that deceiving a wife as disliked as Helen was by other women just wasn’t going to be possible without humiliating myself in the process. I hadn’t a Jimmy Metcalf’s gift for coldly rearing back and delivering the grand and fatal blow to my opponent; no, vengeance was his style and contentious melancholia was mine … Helen’s speech is badly slurred by liquor and fatigue, but now that she has had a bath, and a meal, and a change of clothes, and a chance to make up her face, she intends to have a conversation, her first in days and days. She intends now to resume her place in the world, and not as the vanquished, but as herself. “Well,” she says, “you didn’t have to be such a good boy, you know. You could have had your affairs, if that would have made you any happier. I could have taken it.” “Good to know that,” I say. “It’s you, David, who wouldn’t have survived in one piece. You see, I’ve been faithful to you, whether you believe it or not. The only man I’ve been faithful to in my life.” Do I believe that? Can I? And if I should? Where does that leave me? I say nothing. “You don’t know yet where I used to go sometimes after my exercise class.” “No, I don’t.” “You don’t know why I went out in the morning wearing my favorite dress.” “I had my ideas.” “Well, they were wrong. I had no lover. Never, never with you. Because it would have been too hideous. You couldn’t have taken it—and so I didn’t do it. You would have been crushed, you would have forgiven me, and you would never have been yourself again. You would have gone around bleeding forever.” “I went around bleeding anyway. We both went around bleeding. Where did you go all dressed up?” “I went out to the airport.” “And?” “And I sat in the Pan Am waiting room. I had my passport in my handbag. And my jewelry. I sat there reading the paper until somebody asked if I wanted to have a drink in the first-class lounge.” “And I’ll bet somebody always did.” “Always—that’s right. And I’d go there and have a drink. We would talk … and then they would ask me to go away with them. To South America, to Africa, everywhere. A man even asked me to come with him on a business trip to Hong Kong. But I never did it. Never. Instead, I came back home and you started in on me about the checkbook stubs.” “You did this how often?” “Often enough,” she replies. “Enough for what—to see if you still had the power?” “No, you idiot, to see if you still had the power.” She begins to sob. “Will it startle you,” she asks, “to hear that I think we should have had that baby?” “I wouldn’t have risked it, not with you.” My words knock the wind out of her, what wind is left. “Oh, you shit, that was unnecessary, there are less cruel ways…” she says. “Oh, why didn’t I let Jimmy kill her when he wanted to!” she cries. “Quiet down. Helen.” “You should see her now—she stood there, ten feet inside the hallway, glaring out at me. You should see her—she looks like a whale! That beautiful man goes to bed with a whale.” “I said quiet down.” “He told them to plant cocaine on me—on me, the person he loves! He let them take my purse and steal my money! And how I loved that man! I only left him to save him from committing a murder! And now he hates me for being too decent, and you despise me for be
ing indecent, and the truth of it is that I’m better and stronger and braver than both of you. At least I was—and I was when I was only twenty years old! You wouldn’t risk a baby with me? What about someone like you? Did it ever occur to you that about a baby it may have been the other way around? No? Yes? Answer me! Oh, I can’t wait to see the little sparrow you do take the risk with. If only you had taken it into your hands long ago, years ago—at the beginning! I should have had nothing to say about it!” “Helen, you’re exhausted and you’re loaded and you don’t know what you’re saying. A lot you cared about having a baby.” “A lot I did, you fool, you dope! Oh, why did I come on this airplane with you! I could have stayed with Donald! He needs someone as much as I do. I should have stayed with him in his house, and told you to go on home. Oh, why did I lose my nerve in that jail!” “You lost it because of your Jimmy. You thought when you got out he’d kill you.” “But he wouldn’t—that was crazy! He only did what he did because he loves me so, and I loved him! Oh, I waited and I waited and I waited—I’ve waited for you for six years! Why didn’t you take me into your world like a man!” “Maybe you mean why didn’t I take you out of yours. I couldn’t. The only kind to take you out is the kind who took you in. Sure, I know about my terrible tone, and the scornful looks I can give, but I never went and got a hit-man in about the toast, you know. Next time you want to be saved from a tyrant, find another tyrant to do the job. I admit defeat.” “Oh, God, oh, Jesus God, why must they be either brutes or choirboys? Stewardess,” she says, grabbing the girl’s arm as she passes in the aisle, “I don’t want a drink, I’ve had enough. I only want to ask a question of you. Don’t be frightened. Why are they either brutes or choirboys, do you know?” “Who, madam?” “Don’t you find that in your travels from one continent to the other? They’re even afraid, you know, of a sweet little thing like you. That’s why you have to go around grinning like that. Just look the bastards right in the eye and they’re either at your knees or at your throat.”
