Letting Go

by Philip Roth

  “I think I’m going to go out this afternoon,” Libby said, picking at her orange.

  “Just dress warmly.”

  “Don’t you want to know where I’m going?”

  “Out. For a walk …” he said. “I thought you said you were going out.”

  “If you’re not interested …”

  “Libby, don’t be petulant first thing in the morning.”

  “Well, don’t be angry at me for last night.”

  “Who said anything about last night?”

  “That’s the whole thing—you won’t even bring it up. Well, I didn’t behave so badly, and don’t think I did.”

  “That’s over and done with. You were provoked. That’s all right. That’s finished.”

  She did not then ask him who had provoked her; she just began cloudily to accept that she had been.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “When?” Now she was petulant, perhaps because she no longer considered it necessary for her to feel guilty about last night.

  She saw Paul losing patience. “This afternoon. You said you were going out, and then I didn’t ask you where, you remember … so now where is it you’re going?”

  “Just out. For a walk.”

  Paul closed his eyes, and touched his palms together, as though he were praying. “Look”—his eyes opened—“you can’t allow yourself to get too upset. We’re doing all we can.”

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  “That adoption business is what I’m talking about. It seems confused now and a little hopeless. But it won’t be. Things will get sorted out. We’ve only just begun—you can’t allow it to get to you so soon.”

  “I wasn’t even talking about that,” she said, thinking: I wasn’t even talking about that!

  “No,” Paul said, “but anyway, try to relax. I’m going to call that Greek orphan place today.”

  “Paul, I don’t mean to be hopeless, but that particular setup sounds so—”

  “We’ll just look into it,” he said sharply.

  Adopting a baby had been her idea in the first place, hadn’t it? She could no longer keep perfectly straight in her mind who had said and done what. “Okay,” she said.

  “And the Jewish agency is going to send somebody next week.”

  “What good will that do?”

  “Libby, it’s an interview. It’s part of adopting a baby.”

  “Other people just get pregnant—”

  “Forget other people!”

  “Don’t shout at me.”

  “I don’t shout at you.”

  “Not outside you don’t,” she said bitterly. “If I made you angry last night, why didn’t you shout at me there? Why do you only quarrel with me at home?”

  “You’re not making any sense.”

  “Well …” she said, trying to think of something sensible to say, some simple fact. “Well, that Jewish agency, I don’t see what good it is anyway. They have a three-year waiting list. Who can wait three years? I could have had a baby a long time ago—”

  “That’s enough.”

  “Well, I could have.”

  “So you could have,” he said, raising his hands, then dropping them.

  And how bald he had become, she thought, since that time I could have had my baby. How old. She felt suddenly as though they had been married a hundred years. A harsh laugh rang in her ears, and it was only herself laughing to think that it had not even been the abortion that had knocked out her reproductive powers—just her own two kidneys. How much easier for her if it had been something Paul had put his hands to, or that doctor, or her parents. Anyone. But it was only what had always lived inside her. How can he bear me? she thought. I deserve sick kidneys. Why doesn’t he just leave me?

  But he, unlike her, had no illusions; she knew him to be too good and too patient. She was the nut in the family, and he was the one with his hands full. She let that serve as an accurate description of their life.

  “Paul, I won’t be falsely pessimistic if you won’t be falsely optimistic.”

  “It’s not being falsely optimistic to say that we’ll work something out. Besides, the waiting list is only two years.”

  “No,” she said, nodding, “that’s not falsely optimistic. People adopt babies …”

  “Why don’t you go downtown, Libby? Why don’t you go to the Art Institute today? It’s a beautiful day. Get out. Just put on that little tan hat—”

  “It’s a beautiful day, I don’t need a hat.”

  He set down his coffee cup as though suddenly it weighed too much. “I only thought you looked pretty in that hat.” He left it at that.

  She was crushed for having crushed him, especially when he had only been suggesting that she was pretty. Still, if he found her so damned attractive … Everything between them was hopelessly confused.

  “I thought I would go downtown.”

  He rose. “Fine.”

  “So I probably won’t be here when you get back.”

  He only leaned down and finished the last of his coffee.

  “Don’t you want to talk about last night?” she said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  What she wanted to ask him was who had provoked her. Often when she tried to puzzle out the circumstances of her life, her mind was a blank. Last night seemed beyond understanding, and yet it was probably so simple. “I behaved rudely—” she began.

  “Everybody behaved badly. Shouldn’t we leave it at that?”

  “I guess so.”

  After Paul left she put the breakfast dishes in the sink, on top of the lunch dishes from the day before. In the bedroom she decided once again to save the bedmaking until later. Her appointment was not until one, so there was plenty of time.

  She sat down gingerly upon the sofa in the living room. She still had trouble easing her head back onto the pillows, though she had brushed and brushed them with a whisk broom and been over them many times with a damp sponge. The trouble with their furniture was that it had all been bought one afternoon at Catholic Salvage, a place she could not forget. How Paul had discovered it she still did not know, but one day after they had found the apartment, a bleak but moderately priced four rooms on Drexel, they had taken a bus, and then changed to another bus, to the brick warehouse on South Michigan. They had been the only two white people there—except in the first floor clothing section, where two spinsters, with skin the color and texture of pie crust, stood around a table full of secondhand underwear, fingering and discarding numerous foundation garments. They had already started up the metal stairs to the furniture section when Paul had turned and gone back down to a pipe rack he had spotted in men’s wear; it was then Libby had seen the two pathetic old ladies holding up faded corset after faded corset, and then dropping them from crippled fingers back onto the heap. She turned away from them, tears already in her eyes, to see Paul picking out a blue pin-striped suit from amongst a half dozen limp garments strung along the rack. When she saw that the jacket fitted—with a little give and take here and there—she drew in her breath. Though she knew it didn’t matter, that it was what a person was and not what he wore that counted, she nevertheless had begun to pray: “Mary, Mother of God, please don’t let him buy that thing.” And her prayer had been answered. He came clanging up the stairs in his Army-Navy Store shoes to tell her that the two suits he already had were plenty.

  They then proceeded up one more flight and around the vast cement floor, where they picked out a kitchen table, four chairs, a desk, a sofa, a bedstead, springs, a mattress, a chest of drawers, a dresser, a mirror, three lamps, and a rug. Marching up another flight, they chose their dishes and pots and pans. And Paul walked right up and touched everything. In his coat and shoes he had stretched out on half a dozen second-hand mattresses until he had found one with enough life left in it.

  “Watch out you don’t fall asleep now, son,” said a Negro man who walked by carrying an old console-model radio.

&
nbsp; Paul looked up and smiled; Libby smiled too. She was full of admiration for her husband, not to mention wonder: How can he put his head down there? Ever since grade school she had defended the rights of all men, regardless of race; she had willingly (deliberately?) married a Jew; she had always spoken up for the underprivileged (and this even before she had become one herself). Yet she stood looking down at her husband and thinking: These mattresses have belonged to colored people. I don’t want any … She had only sympathy and tenderness for the sick (and this, too, dating from before she had joined the ranks), but she thought: They have been slept upon by sick people, dying people—I DON’T WANT ANY! To her husband, however, she said nothing; all the while that Paul went around rapping, knocking, testing, she kept her hands in the pockets of her raincoat. She managed to get away without having had to touch anything.

  “What do you think?” Paul had asked. “Do we need something else?”

  There were blankets and sheets, but she did not choose to mention either until they were home. “That seems like everything to me,” she said.

  “Whatever else we need then, we can pick up along the way.”

  “Yes—if anything turns up …”

  All together what they bought had cost $103, including the rug, which they never unrolled. “I just don’t like the pattern,” Libby said.

  “Then why didn’t you say so when we were there?”

  “Maybe later I’ll get used to it. Can’t we keep it rolled up a little longer? I don’t mind the floors, really, if you don’t.”

  He had let her have her way, though she did not forget that the rug had cost them eight dollars—two of her visits to a doctor.

  So with all of this behind her (the knowledge she had of her weaknesses, the decision to overcome the weaknesses), she took the bull by the horns and put her head all the way back onto the sofa. One could come to grips with life if only one used a little reason and a little will power. That was what she admired in Paul: his will.

  In her blue flannel robe, with her head held rigidly back (she was not going to give in to her worst side), she watched the sun on the bare floor. What to do until one o’clock? She could, of course, decide the hell with one o’clock and then go ahead and do anything. But she could go ahead and do anything anyway. She could paint the kitchen chairs. However, still unfinished was the dresser, which she had begun to paint a bright yellow some six weeks ago. It seemed now to have been a mistaken bit of economy to have bought such cheap paint, for instead of being bright and gay—brightness and gaiety was what she had told Paul the apartment lacked when she had pleaded with him for money for the paint—the piece was coming out a mean, mustardy color because of the stain beneath. Well, she could go ahead and make the bed then … No, she would save their bed for last. And not out of laziness; she suddenly had a motive: she wanted those sheets and blankets firmly in her mind when she went downtown. What could she do now?

  She could read. But the trouble with her reading was that it was too casual; it did not satisfy. She had already decided that to remedy the situation she would have to try to read the works of one writer straight through, in chronological order. Then all of another writer, and so on. She planned to start with Faulkner but she did not have the books yet. So this was no morning then to begin that project—and to start another book would not make sense, since that would delay her entry into Faulkner when she did get a chance to go over to the library. She could do something practical then. She could make out the grocery list; she could—

  She could write a poem.

  The idea pleased her. She would write a poem. Why not? If she could write a poem about the night before—

  She grabbed a yellow pad that was on the floor beside the books and ran off with it to the kitchen; she sat down so excited with her project, that she simply swept her hand across the table, brushing away the breakfast crumbs. She would attend to them later—they were unimportant. She had never written a poem before (though sick and in bed in Reading she had tried a story), but the idea of poetry had always stirred her. Toward certain poems she had particularly tender feelings. She liked “To His Coy Mistress” and she loved “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode to Melancholy,” too. She liked all of Keats, in fact; at least the ones that were anthologized.

  She wrote on the pad:

  Already with thee! Tender is the night

  She liked Tender Is the Night, which, of course, wasn’t a poem. She identified with Nicole; in college she had identified with Rosemary. She would have to read it over again. After Faulkner she would read all of Fitzgerald, even the books she had read before. But poetry … What other poems did she like?

  She wrote:

  Come live with me and be my love,

  And we will all the pleasures prove.

  Then directly below:

  The expense of spirit in a waste of shame

  Is lust in action—and till action, lust

  Is perjured, murderous …

  She could not remember the rest. Those few lines had always filled her with a headlong passion, even though she had to admit never having come precisely to grips with the meaning. Still, the sound …

  She wrote, with recollections of her three years of college, with her heart heaving and sighing appropriately.

  Sabrina fair

  Listen where thou art sitting

  Under the glassy wave—

  And I am black but o my soul is white

  How sweetly flows

  The liquefaction of her clothes

  At last he rose, and twitch’d his mantle blue

  Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.

  I am! Yet what I am none cares or knows,

  My friends forsake me like a memory lost,

  I am the self-consumer of my woes.

  And who had written those last lines? Keats again? What was the difference who had written them? She hadn’t.

  If she could sculpt, if she could paint, if she could write something! Anything—

  The door bell rang.

  A friend! She ran to the door, pulling her belt tight around her. All I need is a friend to take my mind off myself and tell me how silly I’m being. A girl friend with whom I can go shopping and have coffee, in whom I can confide. Why didn’t Gabe take up with someone I could befriend? Why did he choose her!

  She opened the door. It was not a friend; she had had little opportunity, what with her job, her night classes, and generally watching out for herself, to make any friends since coming to Chicago. In the doorway was a pleasant-looking fellow of thirty or thirty-five—and simply from the thinness of his hair, the fragile swelling of his brown eyes, the narrowness of his body, the neatness of his clothes, she knew he would have a kind and modest manner. One was supposed to be leery of opening the door all the way in this neighborhood; Paul cautioned her to peer out over the latch first, but she was not sorry now that she had forgotten. You just couldn’t distrust everybody and remain human.

  His hat in one hand, a briefcase in the other, the fellow asked, “Are you Mrs. Herz?”

  “Yes.” All at once she was feeling solid and necessary; perhaps it was simply his having called her “Mrs. Herz.” She had, of course, a great talent for spiritual resurrection; when her fortunes finally changed, she knew they would change overnight. She did not really believe in unhappiness and privation and never would; it was an opinion, unfortunately, that did not make life any easier for her.

  “I’m Marty Rosen,” the young man said. “I wonder if I can come in. I’m from the Jewish Children’s League.”

  Her moods came and went in flashes; now elation faded. Rosen smiled in what seemed to Libby both an easygoing and powerful way; clearly he was not on his first mission for a nonprofit organization. Intimidated, she stepped back and let him in, thinking: One should look over the latch first. Not only was she in her bathrobe (which hadn’t been dry-cleaned for two years), but she was barefoot. “We didn’t think you were coming,” Libby said, “until next week. My husband isn’
t here. I’m sorry—didn’t we get the date right? We’ve been busy, I didn’t check the calendar—”

  “That’s all right,” Rosen said. He looked down a moment, and there was nowhere she could possibly stick her feet. Oh they should at least have laid the rug. So what if it was somebody else’s! Now the floor stretched, bare and cold, clear to the walls. “I will be coming around again next week,” Rosen said. “I thought I’d drop in this morning for a few minutes, just to say hello.”

  “If you’d have called, my husband might have been able to be here.”

  “If we can work it out,” Rosen was saying, “we do like to have sort of an informal session anyway, before the formal scheduled meeting—”

  “Oh yes,” said Libby, and her thoughts turned to her bedroom.

  “—see the prospective parents”—he smiled—“in their natural habitat.”

  “Definitely, yes.” The whole world was in conspiracy, even against her pettiest plans. “Let’s sit down. Here.” She pointed to the sofa. “Let me take your things.”

  “I hope I didn’t wake you,” he said.

  “God, no,” she said, realizing it was almost ten. “I’ve been up for hours.” After these words were out, they didn’t seem right either.

  With his coat over her arm, she went off to the bedroom by way of the sofa, where she slid into her slippers as glidingly as she could manage. She walked down the hall, shut the bedroom door, and then, having flung Mr. Rosen’s stuff across a chair, she frantically set about whipping the sheets and blankets into some kind of shape. The clock on the half-painted dresser said not ten o’clock but quarter to eleven. Up for hours! Still in her nightclothes! She yanked the sheets, hoisted the mattress (which seemed to outweigh her), and caught her fingernail in the springs. She ran to the other side, tugged on the blankets, but alas, too hard—they came slithering over at her and landed on the floor. Oh Christ! She threw them back on the bed and raced around again—but five whole minutes had elapsed. At the dresser she pulled a comb through her hair and came back into the living room, having slammed shut the bedroom door behind her. Mr. Rosen was standing before the Utrillo print; beside him their books were piled on the floor. “We’re getting some bricks and boards for the books.” He did not answer. “That’s Utrillo,” she said.