Letting Go

by Philip Roth

  He chose not to reply. Instantly I imagined scenes in his home where my name was introduced as evidence of duplicity and crime. The little trust that had seemed to have sprung up between us disappeared, and I began to wonder just how disloyal Libby was to me. It was clearly time for me to be moving off, by myself.

  I said, “Well, I’m sorry about that.”

  “She can go back in the spring and summer, you see,” Paul was telling me. “It’ll be all right. When it’s warm again, she can start in again.” I felt as though I were a parent being given an explanation by a child; there was suddenly that in Paul Herz’s tone. “Right now, getting to the train, getting off the train, walking to the Downtown College—” he said. “The doctors—” he began, and the plural of the noun seemed to depress both of us. “The doctors think she should build up resistance first.”

  “Yes. That sounds like a sensible solution.”

  However there was an even better one. Doubtless it came to me as quickly as it did because it had been hiding all these years only a little way under the surface. It made me feel both old and giddy: they could borrow my car. Warmed by my heater, Libby could drive back and forth to her classes; I could park it near Goodspeed on the days she would be needing it; an extra key could easily—

  “Well,” I said to Paul, “I’ll be seeing you.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  The formal nature of our relationship immediately reasserted itself; more often than not, when Paul Herz and I came together or parted, we shook hands. It seemed to me always to combine a measure of distrust and a measure of hope. Now when we shook hands I felt a rush of words move up, and what I finally said had to stand for all that I had decided to keep to myself. “By the way, I was in a funk this morning. I dialed your number by mistake. I didn’t realize it until I hung up. I hope it didn’t ruin your day, the mystery of it.”

  Though I am twenty pounds heavier than Paul, we are the same height, and when he rose, suddenly, holding onto my hand, I found myself looking into his worried eyes. I couldn’t imagine precisely what it was he was going to say—though I thought for a moment that we had at last reached our particular crisis. I was instantly unnerved, and also, melancholy. Though I tell myself I value passion, I must admit that I do not value scenes of it; though I try to live an honest life, I do not like to see honesty stripped of civility and care. I was prepared, all at once, to be humiliated. But all Paul said, with a pained look of determination, was, “Why don’t we have that drink?”

  “Why don’t we,” I said.

  “We’ll go. Libby too,” he added.

  “If she’s tired, Paul—”

  “Libby would like to see the club,” he said. “Libby needs …” But that sentence was not finished either; just the simple subject and that simple verb. With gravity, with tenderness—all this in his dark eyes—he said, “It would be good for Libby.”

  I don’t think it would have shocked either of us then if we had embraced. It was the kind of emotional moment that one knows is being shared.

  We tramped together through the snow to Goodspeed, and we did not speak. I believed it was crucial for me to stay with him, even though my watch showed that I was going to be late for Martha Reganhart. I believed something was being settled.

  Paul stopped some fifteen feet from the entryway. A light from a second floor window spread around us where we stood in the snow. My companion made a megaphone of his hands and whistled two notes up toward the window. Then, softly, he called, “Lib-by … Lib-byyy.”

  He actually sang her name. As though he loved her. “Lib-byyyy.…” After a moment passed and no one had appeared, he called through his hands, “Hey, arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon!” But when nothing happened, he turned to me and said, “We better go in.”

  I walked behind him thinking only one thought. She is this man’s wife. I followed him up the stairs to the second floor and we turned down the corridor, by the water fountain, and then we stepped into the open doorway of Libby’s office. And there she was, smashing away at the typewriter. Neither Paul nor I moved any further, and neither of us could speak.

  Libby was hunched over the machine, wearing—for all that the radiator was bubbling and steaming away across the room—her polo coat and her red earmuffs; her face was scarlet and her hair was limp, and moving in and out of her mouth was the end of her kerchief, upon which she was chewing. Stencils were strewn over the desk and wadded on the floor, and from her throat came a noise so strange and eerie that it struck me as prehistoric, the noise of an adult who knows no words. Yearning and misery and impotence … She was like something in a cage or a cell—that was my first impression. It did not seem as though her own will or her own strength would be enough to remove her from this desk. I watched her fist come down upon the spacer—clump! A stencil was torn free of the carriage with a loud whining that could have come either from the typist or the machine. She threw it onto the floor and then looked up and saw the two of us.

  She gasped, she brushed her kerchief over her cheeks, she touched her fingers to her hair, and from behind a mass of clouds, she pretended to be that fair sun her husband had sung out to from beneath the window.

  “I’m”—she drew in through her nostrils—“just finishing.” She picked up a fresh stencil. “I’ll only be a minute … Hello,” she finally said.

  Paul moved into the office. “Libby—”

  But Libby was bending over now, sorting through the papers on the floor. Then, giving up, she raised her body, centered herself on her chair, centered the stencil, lifted her fingers, and her mouth began to widen across her face. Her eyes swam out of focus for a moment, as she turned to say, “I’m just having a little trouble. The typewriter”—she brought herself under control—“sticks.” She looked down and made the smallest of sounds: she whimpered. “Another minute.”

  I remained in the doorway, while Paul’s long figure inclined toward his wife. “Are you feeling all right? Are you feeling sick, you’re so flushed—”

  She picked her ratty, lifeless kerchief out of her lap, where it had dropped, and blew her nose into it. “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m not used to stencils, that’s all …”

  “Libby, we’re going to have a drink at the Quadrangle Club. Why don’t you save the stencil for tomorrow?”

  “I have to finish.”

  “You can finish tomorrow. You can’t sit in here with your coat on. Take off your earmuffs, Libby, and we’ll get the place in order and we’ll all go have—”

  She was shaking her head. “The Dean needs it. Paul, please, just sit down.”

  “Why do you have your coat on? Are you cold? It’s hot in here. Libby, come on now, please.”

  “I’m fine—one more—”

  “The Dean can wait,” he said. “You’re letting yourself get upset—it’s not important.”

  But she was shifting herself around in her chair until she was in the posture prescribed for efficient typists.

  “Please, Libby. It’s after six. You’re weak. You’ve been here since eight-thirty.”

  “I’m fine! I’m perfectly fine!” She looked over at me, and she exclaimed, as though I doubted the fact too: “I am!”

  “Yes,” I said, though not very forcefully.

  “Now.” She centered the stencil in the carriage once again, turned to the manuscript she was copying, and struck the first key. “Ooohhh,” she moaned.

  “What, honey? What is it?” Paul asked.

  “Why do I keep hitting the half? I keep wanting the p and getting the half! Oh Paulie—” she bawled, ripping the stencil violently from the machine, “I can’t even type!”

  He kneeled beside her and tried to quiet her the way a conductor quiets a symphony orchestra; raising and lowering his palms, he said, “Okay now, okay. You can type, you can type just as well as anybody. Come on now—try to hang on. You can hang on now.”

  “I am hanging on.”

  “I know. Just keep it up—”

  �
�Paul, I’ve made about—honestly, about thirty-five stencils. I just can’t do it! What’s the trouble with me? Haven’t I got any coordination either? Can’t I do anything?”

  “Did the Dean make you stay? Doesn’t he know you’ve been sick?”

  “I want to stay.” Her voice now was without passion. “I wanted to stay and finish. But I can’t even do a paragraph. I can’t type one lousy sentence through to the end.”

  “You can type,” he said. “You can type perfectly well.” Slowly he began to gather all the discarded papers and deposit them in the waste basket. “The machine sticks. It’s not your fault.”

  “It just sticks a little.”

  “All right, calm down now.” He rose and offered her his hands to help her from the chair. But Libby crossed her arms over the typewriter, lowered her head onto it, and wept.

  Till then I had remained because I knew it would only doubly embarrass Herz if I were to disappear; I was sure that he was as determined as I that we should go ahead with our plans—he too, I thought, had felt that something was being settled. Now I stepped out of the doorway and around into the corridor. I did not even consider how late I was going to be for my engagement. I leaned against the wall and shut my eyes, and I remember saying to myself: I don’t understand.

  “You don’t have to work in any office,” Paul was saying. “You just stay at home and rest.”

  “I don’t want to rest. I’m only twenty-five. I don’t want to rest all the time.”

  “Maybe you could take some classes during the day—”

  “It’s one horrible mess after another, isn’t it?” Her hysteria was almost completely run down now; she had simply asked a question. “I think”—I heard her taking deep breaths—“I think I need a glass of water, Paul, and a pill.”

  Without moving, I called into the room, “You stay, Paul. I’ll get it.” For when Libby had spoken, I had had the vision of Paul leaving the room, and Libby stepping to the window, and then Libby sailing, sweeping down through the air. I filled a cup at the water fountain and brought it back to the Dean’s office.

  Libby was by the window, it turned out, but she was using it as a mirror in which to comb her hair. Paul was twirling her earmuffs slowly around his fingers; he signaled for me to put the cup down on the desk.

  “Libby says she’d like to have that drink at the club,” he said.

  “Fine,” I answered.

  Libby turned from the window, her face no longer tinged scarlet, but a chalky white. She sighed and blinked ruefully. I was surprised to see that she had a reserve of strength in her, and grateful that the incident was over.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” she said. “I’ve been so damn silly. I’d like to go to the club, if you still want me. I’ve never been there before.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “Anybody who’s after the p and keeps getting the half …” I smiled.

  She pointed at the machine. “It’s a ridiculous business, but I felt like one of those old movies—tied to the railroad tracks with the train coming.”

  “I understand.”

  “It sticks,” Paul explained, picking up his briefcase. “It could frustrate anybody.”

  “Sure,” I put in. “You ought to have them fix it.”

  “I will,” Libby said. She blew her nose again into the kerchief and took a last look around the office.

  “Now,” Paul asked, “what are you going to put on your head?”

  She pointed to the earmuffs.

  “Your head,” he said. “Not your ears. Didn’t you have a handkerchief—did you have to use your kerchief?”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  “It’s snowing out, Libby. It’s freezing out.”

  “Wait a minute,” Libby said, ignoring him, and turned back to the typewriter to put the plastic cover over it.

  “Libby,” Herz said, practically begging, “don’t you have anything to put on your head?”

  Standing over the typewriter she began to cry. “You’d think,” she sobbed, “a snowflake would kill me.”

  Paul moved toward her, offering the handkerchief from his own pocket. “Here,” he whispered, “just till we get there. Just put this on your head, please. Look, Libby, if you don’t like office work, if it’s agony, do me a favor. Quit. We don’t need this job—”

  “Oh, I like office work. I love office work,” she said, weeping. “The Dean is a very sweet man.” She raised Paul’s handkerchief to her nose.

  “Please” he said, “blow it in the kerchief, will you, honey? Libby, don’t we have enough doctor bills? Please leave something to cover your head—”

  “Well, don’t be exasperated with me!”

  “Libby, maybe if you stayed home this winter you could shake—”

  “I don’t want to stay home.” She pulled the kerchief from her coat and ran it under her nose.

  “Maybe if you take that paper-marking job,” Paul said. “If you want to work, you can mark papers at home.”

  She bent over to buckle her galoshes. “I don’t want to stay at home. I’m too damn dumb to mark papers. I don’t even have a degree.”

  “Then just read. Cook. Keep house.”

  “I don’t want to stay at home! What’s at home? What’s at home but a lot of crappy furniture!”

  There was no answer to that. And after a second, Libby was clearly humiliated with herself. She tilted her head, and put her hands on her hips, and tears slid from her eyes. She was saying, “Oh but I don’t want to stay home though. I really don’t. Oh sweetheart, there’s nothing at home—”

  “Then,” said Paul in a flat voice, “do whatever you want, Libby. Whatever will make you happy.”

  “Whatever will make me happy.”

  She repeated his words with such utter hopelessness that Paul and I both moved toward her, as though she were on the very edge of collapse. He said, “Libby, what is it? What?”

  “Oh I want a baby or something,” she moaned. “I want a dog or a TV. Paulie, I can’t do anything.”

  “Yes you can. You can do anything.” His back was to me, and he was rocking her. “Yes you can, Libby.” Her chin hung on his shoulder. Her eyes were closed and she shook and shook her head—saying to herself no no no, even as Paul crooned to her yes yes yes. Then her dark eyes were open and I almost believed she was going to smile. She said, looking my way, “Oh Gabe …”

  “Yes,” I said, raising a hand as though to wave to her. “You’re all right, Lib.”

  “Oh yes, yes I am I know—” For a moment she seemed between laughter and tears. “I think I want a baby or something. I don’t want to be at home, just me. I think maybe I should have a baby—” She began to weep again.

  “Libby, Libby,” Paul was whispering into her ear.

  She rocked in her husband’s arms. “A baby or a dog or a TV,” she said. “Oh Paulie, what a mess, what a weary mess—”

  But he went on repeating her name, over and over, as though the sound of it would remove some of her woe. She babbled and he chanted and I watched—and then I was shaking. My hands were shaking. I could not control them, or myself.

  “Then give her a child! Have a child!”

  It was only when both their heads jerked up to look at me that I knew for sure that I had spoken. The savage voice, the fierce demand, had been mine. And my hands were motionless.

  Paul Herz turned and went to the window.

  When I spoke again it was in hardly more than a whisper. “Perhaps if there was a baby …” I stopped. I had the illusion that the two figures only a few feet away were actually way off in the distance. In miniature I saw Libby’s dark face and Paul’s hair and their two bodies. I said no more.

  But Libby did. “What are you talking about?” she demanded of me. “What are you even saying? Why don’t you just not say anything for a change? What are you even saying?” she shouted hysterically. “Do you even know?”

  I leaned forward to apologize. “I forgot myself,” I said. “I’m terribly sor
ry.”

  “Well, why don’t you not say anything! Why don’t you just shut up!”

  “Libby—” Paul said, but he was facing me, so that I could not even tell which one of us he was going to address.

  “Why don’t you mind your own business?” Libby interrupted him, looking right into my eyes.

  I did not reply.

  “Why don’t you leave him alone for a change?” she cried in a broken voice. “He can make babies! He can make any amount of babies he wants!”

  “I said I was sorry I had said anything.”

  “My lousy kidneys!” she cried. “I hate those kidneys. It’s my kidneys, you stupid dope!”

  I looked away; after a moment’s confusion I turned to her husband. “I didn’t know. I didn’t guess.”

  Libby was hammering her fists on her thighs. “Then why don’t you go away! Shut up, why don’t you! Mind your own business!”

  “I will,” I said. “Okay,” and I turned and went out the door.

  But weeping, she followed me into the corridor; I heard her voice moving after me as I headed down the stairs. “How much do you expect to be told, you dope! You dope, Gabe, you tease! Oh you terrible terrible tease—”

  Four

  Three Women

  1

  At daybreak it was always snowing, and very late in the night too. Inside, snow blows against her bedroom window; outside, snow falls on my bleary lids; as I make a stab at navigating my car through a black antarctica to Fifty-fifth Street, snow nearly sends me up trees and down sewers. At home it pings off my own window—time ticking, here comes dawn again—as in my underwear and socks I dive into the disheveled bed, gather about me my rumpled sheets, and go sailing off after sleep. How my body remembers that winter. It was always tired, poor soul, and outside—beyond what body can and cannot change, where body promises nothing, annihilates no one—it was always snowing.

  The motor thumped under me, the heater whirred; I shot nose drops up to my sinuses (I saw the cavities of my head thick with a kind of London fog), but they only burned their way down to my raw throat. The body has no loyalty—bank it with pleasure and draw out disease. Parked across from the Hawaiian House, waiting for Martha to finish work, I was getting the common cold.