Letting Go

by Philip Roth

  My watch showed one minute after one; then two after. I had a fevered fantasy of the hands on my watch advancing toward morning, and the temperature plummeting down and down, until by daybreak Chicago would simply have cracked in two, one half to tumble in the lake, the other to be blown westward, across endless prairies and mountains, until it dropped over into the Pacific and melted away to nothing. I was dying for spring, for warmth; the weather and my pleasures were out of joint.

  Three after one. Still no Martha. Mr. Spicer, the manager of the Hawaiian House, appeared in his overcoat and hat, carrying his moneybags. The police, who waited each night to take him to the deposit box, opened the door to the squad car and Spicer stepped in. A chill ran over me; I sneezed once, and then again. My head rolled down and I half slept. Mrs. Silberman was knitting a gigantic sweater for me. A workman in overalls and tennis shoes was building a box with black windows; he was my father; the box was for me to sit in.

  “Hey, open up.”

  On the sidewalk was Martha, and someone else—a girl bundled in a coat and hat, whose face I couldn’t see. “Let us in,” Martha called. The air that rushed in with them penetrated my coat and moved right down to the bone.

  Martha inclined her face toward me and we brushed cheeks. “Can you give Theresa a ride? Theresa, come on, this is Gabe. Can we drive her to the El, she’s not feeling too fit. Theresa, close the door.”

  “Thank yuh.”

  “Don’t worry about those books,” I said, turning to get a look at her, “just push everything aside.”

  “I hardly need …” She blew her nose. Halfway to the El, she began to sob. Martha touched my leg, but she needn’t have, for I was in no mood anyway to ask questions.

  When we got to the train, Martha turned on her knees and faced the back seat. “Everything will be all right. Just try to get some sleep.”

  “I knew it,” the girl wept. “I just knew it.”

  We waited until Theresa had walked up the stairway to the train and disappeared, and then I drove off.

  “Poor dumb cluck,” Martha said.

  “Martha, I’m going to take you home. I’m going home myself—” She wasn’t listening, however, and I didn’t feel I had the strength to repeat myself.

  “The poor jerk got herself pregnant.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, but I’m going to collapse of exhaustion myself. I’m taking you home, then I’m going back to my place.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “I’m a dying man, sweetheart. Honestly, I’m dead.” She didn’t answer. “You come tomorrow,” I said, “to my place. Doesn’t Annie LaSmith come tomorrow?”

  “I promised Markie I’d take him to buy a Christmas tree tomorrow.”

  “Let Annie stay with him—you can come—”

  “I promised him.”

  “Okay. I’m just too dead tonight.”

  In front of her building I did not even turn off the motor.

  “All day I’ve been saying to myself: tonight I am going to have illicit relations with Gabriel Wallach.”

  “That makes me very proud,” I said, “but my throat feels as though it’s been ripped open.”

  “I had Abercrombie’s deliver a new set of whips and thumbscrews.”

  “Martha, every night you roll over and go to sleep. Every night I have to go out into this weather and drive home and try to get a few hours sleep—”

  She was whistling; nothing like eight hours of work to pep her up.

  “I’ve got two classes to teach in the morning,” I said. “I just haven’t the strength.”

  “I’m not asking you to lift weights, poor baby.”

  I kissed her, and she said, “Come up for just an hour.”

  “But my body fails me …”

  She took my hand and touched it to her cheek. “Why don’t you just leave everything to me,” she said.

  “Oh sweet Martha—”

  “Why don’t you just come with me, all right?”

  “You sound like a tart, baby.”

  “See? Already you’re stimulating your imagination. Come.”

  So I followed her up the stairs; before she placed the key in the lock, she turned and put her hand on me.

  “Oh,” she said, “that’s so nice and sweet.”

  “Martha, I’ve got to tell you that it’s got no more wind in it than a choir boy’s. It’s spiritless, it’s humbled and limp—”

  “It’s sweet humbled and limp.”

  I went into her bedroom and she continued down the hall to the children’s room, where she turned off the night lamp. I heard her close the door leading to Sissy’s room. Sitting on the blanket in the dark, the feel of the quilt and the sheets and the mattress under my hands filled me with awe. I waited, and then I was sinking, and then, I suppose, I was out.

  When my eyes opened, it took me several minutes to see who was moving in the dark. Beneath me and above me I felt the clean white sheets I had so desired; someone had even been kind enough to remove my clothes. I raised my head a little and saw Martha by the window; she had one foot on a stool, and was bending forward, pulling down her stockings; the way in which her breasts hung from her body sent through my mind thoughts of flowers, mermaids, cows, things female. But I did not want to possess Martha or a nasturtium or a Guernsey; I wanted only sleep.

  Martha’s hands were on the flesh of her hips; they ran down over her stomach and were touching her thighs. She was looking toward me in the bed, and it was as though I were waiting for some decision of hers. Even the furniture in the bedroom seemed altered, because between us something seemed to be being altered. Since Thanksgiving I had done the wooing, I had done the undressing, the caressing, and on the hard and serious work we had both pitched in. We had been dogged and conventional, we had proceeded step by step, until we had both clutched, and hung on, and then fallen away into sleep. To please one another we had had to do nothing at the expense of our own separate pleasures; we had been uncompromising and we had been lucky.

  But now Martha stood by the window looking toward me for what seemed a very long time, pronouncing words I could not make out, and I was overcome with exhaustion; though I reached up to her, saying I would have to go, I don’t think my head ever left the bed. I dropped away, beyond hallucination or dream, and when I did rise up, it was never to regain power or lucidity; I was simply there, and Martha’s hair was down across my legs. I raised my head—such a feather, such a weight—and I saw her hands, saw her face, possessing me miles and miles away.

  “Oh Gabe,” she said, “my Gabe—”

  I left her there alone, just lips, just hands, and was consumed not in sensation, but in a limpness so total and blinding, that I was no more than a wire of consciousness stretched across a void. Martha’s hair came raking up over me; she moved over my chest, my face, and I saw her now, her jaw set, her eyes demanding, and beneath my numb exterior, I was tickled by something slatternly, some slovenliness in the heavy form that pinned me down. I reached out for it, to touch the slovenliness—

  “Just lie still,” I heard her say, “don’t touch, just still—”

  She showed neither mercy then, nor tenderness, nor softness, nothing she had ever shown before; and yet, dull as I was, cut off in my tent of fever and fatigue, I felt a strange and separate pleasure. I felt cared for, labored over; I felt used. Above, she was me now, and below I was her, and however I fell away from consciousness, or floated up toward light, always, beating on me, was Martha. Beating, beating, and then rising up and away, and wordlessly calling back of her delight.

  Everything is right.

  What I remember of that night are those three words. Out of proportion sometimes, sometimes not in sequence, but those three words bubbling through me; what I remember is my sense that a rhythm in my life was being realized, and a rhythm in Martha’s too. I remember—as night went on and morning came—a greed of hers that went beyond pleasure, and on my part what I remember is the abdication of all will. For a while perhaps she was me
and I her, but at some point that morning all distinctions belonged to another world. We were sexless as any tree or rock, liquid and unencumbered as a stream or a spring—and yet so connected one to the other that when I pumped within her, plunging into a final dizzying exhaustion, I might have been some inner organ of her own. Man woman mother child—all distinction melted away.

  Later a bell rang. When I opened my eyes, Martha was at the side of the bed, wrapping herself in a robe. Outside the darkness was just beginning to lift. I knew I had to leave, that it was time again; but it was Martha who left the room, and I let myself float backwards.

  Martha was pushing at me. “Gabe, Gabe—”

  But I couldn’t, I simply couldn’t pull myself up. Martha moved into bed beside me. “Gabe,” she said softly.

  And then there was a knock at the bedroom door. Martha jumped up in bed, and the door opened. Limp as I was, I went even limper.

  But the face in the doorway was not a child’s. It was the battered face of an old Negro woman, and she was moving into the room with a cup and a saucer. “Here’s your coffee, darlin’—” she began.

  Then she saw me. “Oh,” she said. I had been edging the sheet up around my chin, and now I lowered it an inch and, infirmly, smiled. The woman took three big strides forward and placed the cup down on the night table. When she turned and left, I tried to push out of bed, but it was as though I’d been worked on by a carpenter during the night; hammers, chisels, planes, and screwdrivers all seemed to have had a go at my body.

  “I’m sick as a dog,” I said.

  She was sitting beside me; I couldn’t see her face, for it was resting in her hands. “Are you?” she asked drily.

  I leaned up on one elbow. “I’ll go,” I volunteered, and then my body just gave out, and I was flat on my back. “I can’t seem to do it, Martha. I feel rotten. I can’t move.”

  I listened to the snow hitting the window, and then someone knocked again on our door. “Cynthia—” Martha hissed; following a traditional impulse, I dove for the covers.

  But it wasn’t Cynthia at all. Annie LaSmith was in the doorway again. She came directly into the room and set a second cup of coffee down on the table beside Martha’s. “Here,” she said. “For him.”

  Martha chose not to reply; I was feigning sleep, and Annie slipped out, closing the door behind her.

  “I think—” Martha began, as I crawled up from the sheet “—I really think—” but she couldn’t speak for laughing.

  Nor could I; tears were running down my face as I said, “I—better—go—”

  “No,” she said; she held my head between her hands and we looked one another right in the eye. “You’re burning up—”

  “I better—”

  “We have to please shhhh! We have to stop making—please, make me stop—laughing—”

  “I—didn’t even thank her—” I said, and Martha pushed her face into my chest and kept it there until, at last, she seemed able to control herself.

  “You can’t go,” she whispered. “You’re practically on fire.”

  “Martha—”

  “Please”—she began to giggle again—“go to sleep.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Seven—quarter to seven. Do you think Annie put something in your coffee? Oh, God, I can’t stop—just go to sleep—”

  I wanted to ask some questions about Annie LaSmith—What the hell was she doing here in the middle of the night?—but I never had the chance. Martha was holding me and sporadically giggling, and then she was holding me and I was asleep.

  Martha was gone when I awoke again, and so was her pillow. The clock said eight thirty-five—I had a class to teach in less than an hour. I made a move, but the bedroom door slowly opened, and I closed my eyes.

  “He’s sleeping,” Markie said.

  “Shhhh.”

  “Is he going to stay all the time?” Mark asked.

  “Just till he’s better.”

  The next voice was that of Cynthia, the skeptic. “What’s the matter with him?”

  “He’s sick. He was visiting, and he got very sick, so I let him stay here and sleep.”

  “What’s he sick with?” the little girl asked.

  “He’s sick,” Markie explained.

  “I don’t know,” Martha said. “We’ll have to call the doctor.”

  “He doesn’t look sick,” Cynthia said.

  “But he is, sweetheart.”

  “He doesn’t look it.”

  “Does he have a temperature?” Mark asked.

  “I don’t know, love-dove. We’ll have to call the doctor and find out.”

  “I’ll bet he doesn’t,” Cynthia said.

  “I’ll bet he does,” said Martha. “You have to go to school, Cyn. Let’s go.”

  “I’ll bet he doesn’t have a temperature though.”

  “Cynthia, what’s eating you? Go put your galoshes on.”

  “It’s a waste of money to have the doctor if you don’t even have a temperature,” Cynthia said.

  “He’ll pay for his own doctor. You don’t have to worry about money.”

  “Well,” said Cynthia, “he doesn’t look like he has a temperature.”

  “Don’t you believe he’s sick, Cynthia? Do you think I’m telling you a lie?”

  No answer.

  “Is he, Mommie?” Mark asked.

  A moment followed in which I could not tell what was happening. To open my eyes, I felt, would have made Martha look like a liar. “Shhhh,” I heard Martha whisper; then I heard feet moving across the floor.

  A small hand was on my forehead.

  Then another, even smaller.

  The footsteps retreated, and once again I slept.

  The rest of that day is bits and pieces.

  Dr. Slimmer hovers over me. Temperature of 103. He leers. He gives me a shot. Martha pays. “Here’s for your wife’s mink, here’s for your kids’ summer camp, here’s for gas for your Thunderbird—” “If you had a bad experience with doctors as a child, Martha, don’t take it out on me.” “—living off widows and children, you’re a living argument for socialized medicine, Dr. Slimmer.” “I have to run, I’m double-parked—”

  Beyond my door, sometime during the afternoon: “You’re a woman of the world, Annie—you understand. Okay?” “What you and Mr. Reganhart do is your business, darlin’.” “That a girl, Annie.”

  Later. “Sissy—lower that damn thing! Somebody’s sick!” Later. “No, honey, you can’t see him sleep. He has a communicable disease. You can see him tomorrow.” “What disease?” asks Markie. “A bad bad cold.” “Oh,” moans Cynthia, “is that all? A cold?” “It’s serious, Cynthia—” “Did Daddy call this morning?” “Cynthia, it was the plumber, the man to fix the washing machine. I swear to you it was the plumber! Daddy’s back in New Mexico, sweetheart, Arizona.” “He’s in New York.” “Oh Cynthia, why are you so obstinate! We haven’t seen your Daddy for years—what’s this Daddy business? Oh baby, don’t cry, oh sweet baby, I’m so sorry—” “And keep your dirty hands off my doll!” the child wails, running off.

  Later. A small hand on my forehead.

  “You better not get caught in here, Markie,” I say, opening my eyes. “I’ve got a communicable disease.”

  “Who?”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, Mark.”

  “Okay.”

  Later still.

  “How do you feel?”

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s four-thirty. I’m going to work. Are you hungry?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Look, take these pills. Try to take them every four hours.”

  “Martha, is everything all right? Is everything, you know, okay?”

  “You’ve slept through one hell of a day.”

  “I’m sorry I’ve been—”

  “Shhhh. Be sorry when you get better.” She smoothed back my hair. “I just told my roomer to clear out. So I’m feeling a hundred percent better.”
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  “Martha …”

  “It’s all right. It’s not just you. I’ve got claims on a private life. I’m twenty-six years old. I don’t like other people’s moldy old sausages stinking up my refrigerator. I don’t need anyone peeking over my shoulder, that’s all. Good night, sick baby.”

  “Good night. Thank you.”

  “Here’s a radio. Cynthia can make bouillon. I told her you might want some.”

  “Good night.”

  And then, when it was dark outside, Cynthia. One of the frilly shoulder straps on her yellow nightgown had slipped down, but she seemed unaware of it. She was staring at me, which led me to believe she had been in the doorway some time.

  “Good evening,” I said. “It’s snowing again, isn’t it?”

  “Do you need any bouillon? I’m going to sleep.”

  “As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t mind some.”

  She turned and left; in only a few seconds she was back. “I don’t know how I’m going to get it over there. I’m not supposed to come near you.”

  “Tie a handkerchief around your mouth and hold your breath, and sort of slip it onto the night table, all right?”

  Cynthia went off to the kitchen, and I sat up in bed. There was a murky cup of coffee on the night table; after testing it with a finger and finding it cold, I remembered how it had gotten there. I took one of my pills, and then stuck the thermometer in my mouth and settled back onto the pillows. From the bed I could look directly at the huge circus picture that Cynthia had drawn in school, and which Martha, only a week before, had had framed. It was a gay picture—although a little painstakingly crayoned—of clowns and cages and balloons and pink-faced children holding their fathers’ hands; every child was connected to every other child by a parent. It made me feel that I had just lived through a very happy day. All that had happened seemed to have followed inevitably from the night before. Our lovemaking and my illness, Martha’s passion and her calling the doctor—it all seemed like one event.

  Cynthia appeared in the doorway; one of her mother’s fancy handkerchiefs was folded in a triangle and tied bandit-fashion around her face, an eighth of an inch below her eyes. To get the cup of bouillon from the doorway to the night table took a full minute of breathless balancing.