Letting Go

by Philip Roth

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re not happy with me.”

  “Don’t you think eight dollars is a lot to spend on hair?”

  “… Yes.”

  “Do you really, or is that to please me?”

  “Both.”

  “And don’t charm me, will you? I’m not Jerry.”

  “Paul, what’s the matter? I did talk too much.”

  “No.”

  “Then what? Because I went to Carita? Because I talked about it with Claire? Please tell me.” She was a self-improver, and that strain in her character (which once he had loved and now suddenly it seemed he loathed) showed through her request. “Please, Paul, tell me,” she said.

  “I didn’t know you had such extravagant tastes. My haircuts cost me a buck.”

  “It was a special occasion.” She began to cry. “I’m sorry I did it. I am …”

  “I can’t afford stuff like that, Libby. We’re going to have to live a frugal life. A sensible life. I’m beginning to wonder if we’re in agreement. I begin to wonder if you understand—”

  “Oh honey,” she said, and put her head into his shoulder. “I’m stupid.” And she reached up for her mound of hair and pulled it down.

  His heart lurched, but he kept his mouth shut; some pins clattered to the floor of the subway car, and she became the old Libby, hair to her shoulders.

  “I’m sorry, Paul. Oh truly—I was putting on a performance to please everybody,” she moaned. “I feel like a windmill. I feel running and pursued and just like I’m bouncing all over the place. I’m just exhausted, and this cold won’t go away, and all I tasted all night were nose drops. Everybody said the wine was excellent and so I said so too.” She had buried her head in his chest and he was stroking her hair. He did it to comfort her; he got no pleasure from the spongy resilient quality of that black hair whose crowy smoothness had always expressed something to him about the simple desires, the solid yearnings of the girl he had discovered, and who had so quickly and so passionately become dedicated to him.

  After a while she took his hand and held it in her lap. “Paul?”

  “Yes.”

  “—I don’t think I can wait until May, or June. If I’m going to marry you I think it better be now. We’ll move into your room and we’ll be married and all this will be over. I can’t stand it any more. Oh sweetheart, I’m sorry about my hair.” She kissed his five fingers to prove it. “I knew you were upset about it. I knew it was that.”

  A Puerto Rican at the end of the car was reading a newspaper. He had looked up to watch the girl cry; now that she had pulled herself together he looked back into the paper again.

  “Your uncle,” she was saying, “is so nice and everybody else is so awful, and he’s so unhappy.”

  “And so are you.”

  “And so am I, and so are you, and we’re perfectly nice people too. He hasn’t got anybody—”

  “He’s got Claire.”

  “Oh she’s a phoney!” Libby cried, softly. “And so am I,” she said. “I saw it in your eyes. Oh, you phoney, you were saying, why don’t you cut it out. And I couldn’t, Paul. I tried but I couldn’t. I hate your Uncle Asher!” she announced. “I hate him! He’s a disgusting man!”

  “All right, Lib, calm down. Nobody’s paying any attention to him at all.”

  She might have been hesitating, or she might have been calculating, but finally she whispered into his scarf, “You are.”

  “I am what?” he demanded.

  “I can’t talk without you getting some sour little look on your face. You’re not you.”

  “You’re imagining it.” He sat up very straight, so that it became necessary for her to pull her face away. “You’re just upset.”

  She was willing to be convinced. “Am I?”

  “I think so.”

  “Because he doesn’t even know me! Paul, Paul—what’s wrong with me? What does everybody have against me!”

  “I shouldn’t have told you about him. Everything is all right.”

  “Paul, let’s get married and go back to school tomorrow … Let’s go back married. Please.”

  His immediate vision was of the two of them trying to live in his tiny room. Libby’s father would cut off next semester’s tuition; his own family would refuse to be present at graduation … But more pleasant visions followed. For it would only continue to be as it had been before: they would study together in the library and sleep together in his room. Only now Libby could move in the rest of her clothes and stay clear through till morning. They wouldn’t have to meet for breakfast; they would already be there, together. As for the families, they had obligations that they would finally admit to. And next year he would get some sort of graduate fellowship for himself; he had already sent off applications to Columbia, Penn, Michigan, and Chicago, well in advance of the closing date. Probably Libby’s father would continue to pay her tuition through her senior year—

  Or would he?

  It was not the first time the question had occurred to him. To whom would the registrar address Mrs. Herz’s bills? But even if it was to himself, they had already figured out on a blank page at the back of Libby’s American Literature notebook that, what with summer jobs, fellowships, and part-time work, they would have enough to pay their bills, and maybe even some left over to buy an old car. They had worked out a budget in the library one idyllic night before the vacation, when the gorges and the trees were heavy with snow, and the moon was nearly full. Now on the empty subway, the overhead bulbs went black a moment, and he wondered if their estimates could have been right. They had figured up food, rent, tuition, laundry, amusements … He could think of no item they had overlooked; there was actually no reason he could think of not to marry tomorrow instead of in May. But it was with a distinct sensation of being torn apart that he agreed.

  “Oh Paul …” She wept now in a different key.

  “We’ll get a license tomorrow and the blood business, and then we’ll get married at City Hall. Only a few days.” He kissed her hand. “Cheer up,” he instructed them both.

  But she didn’t cheer up. By the time they left the subway there was a scattering of Kleenex around her shoes; she gave an especially heartrending sob as they emerged into the raw, slushy night. He steered her across the street into a coffee shop, and not until she had drunk half a cup did he attempt conversation; he waited until her chest and throat noises had subsided, and only an occasional tear made an appearance beneath her murky eyes.

  “What is it?” he asked. “What now?”

  “Paul … I don’t think—this may sound silly … I don’t think I could survive City Hall.” She even amused herself by the sheer torpor of the remark. But her smile, curling around two fresh tears, lifted him little.

  “It takes five minutes,” he said, closing his eyes.

  “But I’m no orphan! I’m no culprit!” she said vehemently. “People get married at City Hall when they want to hide something. When they’re running somewhere. When girls are pregnant they get married at City Hall. I’m not pregnant—I was spared that particular tragedy—why must I act like I wasn’t! I’m not pregnant, damn it!” She dragged some grains of mascara across her nose with her Kleenex. Moral outrage was now sweeping hysteria away: she expelled a powerful breath, having thought probably of five more things she wasn’t and wouldn’t be compromised into being. “I’m not letting people—parents—force me to—to act as though I’m ashamed. To take away my dignity,” she said, his student—his own words. “I’m not, Paul. You know we shouldn’t allow them …”

  He heard the conviction rush out of her like wind; she had looked up to see that he was holding his forehead in his hands.

  “Paul? What do you think?”

  “I don’t know.” He did not show her his eyes. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know …”

  “That’s too bad,” he said. “I’ve run out of suggestions.”

  “How about,” Libby said, after a moment, “w
hat do you think—of a rabbi?”

  “Why?”

  “Oh Paul, wouldn’t he be more official, more everything we want? Wouldn’t it show them something if we decided to be married by a rabbi? I’m not being defiant, I just won’t cower in some corner when I get married! What kind of thing is that? You get married once. I think it should have some weight to it.”

  When he looked up it was because he had regained his control. “It should have weight. We give it the weight. You’re not Jewish, Libby.”

  “But you are!”

  He said nothing.

  She blew her nose. “But … but we are basically religious people. Our values—oh stop giving me that sour look!”

  “Well stop talking like that. I’m not Jerry.”

  “Why do you think I’m so stupid!”

  “Libby, I don’t. Don’t cry, please. Lib, I’m sorry. It’s just”—he tried it slowly—“we’re not, honey, basically Jewish people.”

  “Paul, they’re not going to make me into a nothing. I refuse to let them force me to be married in City Hall! I’ll go to a priest then. Anything!”

  “I couldn’t go to a priest. I couldn’t be married by a priest, that’s all there is to it.”

  “Because you are Jewish finally! Sweetie, just be a little Jewish, will you? Just till we’re married? After that—oh I don’t want to sound so silly. I only want this one thing—”

  And then never my own way again.

  He heard these last words like an echo. At nineteen she had already given him whatever she had; now she would promise him the rest forever. All she wanted satisfied was her sense of decency, which was what he had cared for and nurtured in her. She had a knowledge, this frail girl, of what her rights were in love, and for that too he was thankful and proud. They need not crawl along the ground because others wanted them to.

  But they were married in Yonkers by a Justice of the Peace they found in the Yellow Pages. No rabbi would handle their case, which came as a surprise to both of them. Their astonishment did not, however, keep them above having dirty feelings about themselves for very long. In the study of the third rabbi they visited, Paul rose up out of his seat and cursed him.

  “Isn’t there a hot rabbi who performs marriages on kitchen tables? In all of this city is there no man low enough to unite two people who want to be united?”

  “Try City Hall,” the rabbi said, a heavy dark-jowled man who hadn’t liked him from the start. “Get united civilly.”

  “We can try City Hall without your advice!”

  “Paul,” Libby pleaded, stretching out a hand to him. But he didn’t even want to see her face. Was he to compromise himself forever, honoring this girl’s weaknesses? Attending to her wishes, did he not dissolve into a spineless ass! A hypocrite! A softie!

  “I marry Jew and Jew,” scowled Lichtman, the rabbi. “That’s all.”

  “We’re Jew and Gentile.”

  “The ceremony doesn’t fit such occasions.”

  “God damn you!” Paul shouted.

  “Don’t raise your voice in this office! This isn’t the street! Next, you don’t know anything! A twenty-year-old snotnose! You should be as wise as you are loud, then come around here! If you believe, believe; if no, turn your back! Otherwise look other places! Go be religious your own way! Don’t run here to make it all right with Mama! I’m no moral out for you. I’m not here to be amiable. That’s a disgusting thought!”

  “I’m not asking for my mama, Lichtman, I’m asking for my wife.”

  “Some improvement! You should be ashamed! Are you Catholic?” he demanded of Libby, a kind of agony suddenly in his face.

  “Yes.”

  “So why not ask a priest? Why not ask him to unite you and this Jew? They have City Hall for mixtures like this.”

  “You don’t have to be so nasty to her!”

  “Shut up! You’re a secular, be secular! Don’t come tramping your muddy feet in my synagogue for sentimental reasons! I wouldn’t marry you if you were two Jews! Now get out! You’re stupid and you curse and you’re a coward! Get out!”

  The Justice of the Peace displayed no such force; for one thing, he had the gout. It was necessary for him to remain seated while he married them, though he compensated for his posture with a clear, loud, nondenominational voice. It was a Sunday afternoon and when Paul and Libby entered, they found the JP pulled up close to an old cabinet-model radio, a large scrolly piece with WEAF WJZ WOR WABC marked on the yellowed station selector. The JP’s wife turned off the radio during the ceremony. She was an elderly lady who wore glasses and a print dress that was a little longer in back than in front; below were nurse’s white oxfords. She touched the bride ten times at least, then removed some artificial flowers from the closet and put them in a blue vase behind her husband, whose bandage was in need of a change. She called him “the Judge,” and she called his gout “the Judge’s difficulty.” “I hope you won’t mind the Judge’s difficulty,” she whispered, and then raised his bandaged foot up onto a cushioned chair. It stared at them throughout the proceedings.

  When it was all over the Judge’s wife put the flowers back in the closet and turned on the radio. The couple from next door, who had been called in to serve as witnesses, hugged the newlyweds; the woman hugged Paul, the man Libby. The Judge’s wife looked from Libby’s ring to Paul’s ring and said all there actually was to say about them; she managed more excitement than one really even had the right to expect from the wife of an old sick Yonkers JP. “They match,” she said. The Judge said, “Elizabeth, Paul, will you step up here, please?” After a quick glance at each other, they approached and stood on either side of his difficulty, expecting his blessing. He said, “Now you know how to get back into the city, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” they said.

  “That’ll be ten,” said the Judge.

  He preferred not to take a check on Paul’s Ithaca bank. “We’re dealing with strangers all the time,” the Judge’s wife reminded the young couple. Libby had to give them the cash.

  Two buses and a subway carried them back to New York in an hour and a half; Libby got out before Paul in order to change trains for Queens—husband and wife would meet at Grand Central with their suitcases at six that night. When they parted, so preoccupied were they, that they forgot to embrace. Paul traveled the rest of the way alone, back to Brooklyn to tell his family what he had done.

  He got off the subway at Atlantic Avenue, where he was struck with how familiar he was with every trash can, every last signpost and pillar. On the way up the street to his family’s apartment he slipped the ring off his finger and into his coat pocket. He would begin his accounting slowly, give them a chance to … But then he saw before him the grave, ironic, savage face of Lichtman; he remembered the insults and the pain, and he put the ring that matched his wife’s back on his finger and entered with his news.

  And his father threw him out of the house. Mr. Herz had not summoned up so much courage since he had invested his life’s savings in frozen foods and gone under for the fourth time. But he wouldn’t go under again! In one life, how many times can a man fail?

  On the train back to Ithaca, Paul wept.

  “We don’t need them,” Libby said, cradling his head in the dark car. “We don’t need anybody.”

  “That isn’t it,” her husband replied. “That isn’t it …” And it was and it wasn’t.

  2

  “How?”

  “Paul, I don’t know how. Maybe it’s not even so.”

  “Well, it is so, isn’t it? If it’s not, what are we getting upset about?”

  “Well—I think it is so, then.”

  “You haven’t gone to a doctor, have you? By yourself?”

  “Paul, I’m just always very regular—you could set your watch by me.”

  “Maybe you’re upset. Maybe it’s working at that place, all the running around you have to do. Maybe you should take a day off.”

  “I practically just started.”

  �
��That’s all right. That’s why you’re upset.”

  “I’ve been upset before. I get a tight colon or a runny nose—but never this.”

  “But how?”

  “I don’t know how.”

  “You don’t use that thing right.”

  “I do use it right.”

  “On the little booklet that comes with the grease it shows how you should lie down when you put it in. I’ve told you a hundred times, lie down the way it shows in the booklet. No—you’ve got to stand up. You’ve got to do it like you’re putting on your shoes!”

  “Either way—”

  “Why can’t you do it the way it says to do it? Why do we have to take chances?”

  “Paul, that’s not a chance. A doctor showed me how, standing up. It’s perfectly all right.”

  “If it’s so all right why are you ten days late?”

  “That hasn’t anything to do with it.”

  “What does?”

  “I don’t know what does. Please, let’s not fight about it.”

  “What are we going to do if you’re pregnant, Libby? What are we going to do with a baby now?”

  “I’ll menstruate. I’ve had pains—I had some this morning.”

  “I thought you didn’t get pains.”

  “Maybe I will this time. Maybe that’s why I’m irregular.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know! Leave me alone. I’ll menstruate for you. Just leave me be!”

  “Don’t menstruate for me, Libby. Oh, don’t start any crap like that. You came running to me, didn’t you? ‘Paul, I think I’m pregnant—oh what’ll we do!’ ”

  “I was upset. We quit school, we came here to make money, we got jobs, and now suddenly this!”

  “All right, Libby, all right.”

  “All right what?”

  “Arguing is stupid.”

  “Honey, I’ll go to the bathroom. I’ll check.”

  “You know how? That first day, right after your last period—”

  “But it’s safe then.”

  “No time is safe. I said use the damn thing. Take a minute out and use it.”