Letting Go

by Philip Roth

  “Rabbi who?”

  He was facing her, fastening buttons. “Bernie Kuvin. He’s the rabbi over in the new synagogue. Down by the lake.”

  She urged up into her face what she hoped was an untroubled look. “No. We don’t.”

  Rosen put on his hat. “I thought you might know him.” He looked down and over himself, as though he had something more important on his mind anyway, like whether he was wearing his shoes or not.

  She understood. “No, no, we don’t go around here to the synagogue. We’re New Yorkers, originally that is—we go when we’re in New York. We have a rabbi in New York. Rabbi Lichtman. You’re right, though,” she said, her voice beginning to reflect the quantity and quality of her hopelessness. “You’re perfectly right”—her eyes were teary now—“religion is very important—”

  “I don’t know. I suppose it’s up to the individual couple—”

  “Oh no, oh no,” Libby said, and now she was practically pushing the door shut in his face, and she was weeping. “Oh no, you’re perfectly right, you’re a hundred percent right, religion is very important to a child. But”—she shook and shook her tired head—“but my husband and I don’t believe a God damn bit of it!”

  And the door was closed, only by inches failing to chop off Rosen’s coattails. She did not move away. She merely slid down, right in the draft, right on the cold floor, and oh the hell with it. She sat there with her legs outstretched and her head in her hands. She was crying again. What had she done? Why? How could she possibly tell Paul? Why did she cry all the time? It was all wrong—she was all wrong. If only the bed had been made, if only it hadn’t been for that stupid poetry-writing— She had really ruined things now.

  As far as she could see there was only one thing left to do.

  Rushing up Michigan Boulevard in the unseasonable sunlight—unseasonable for this frostbound city—she realized that she was going to be late. She had gone into Saks with no intention of buying anything; she had with her only her ten-dollar bill (accumulated with pennies and nickels and hidden away for just such a crisis), and besides she knew better. She had simply not wanted to arrive at the office with fifteen minutes to spare. She did not intend to sit there, perspiring and flushing, her body’s victim. If you show up so very early, it’s probably not too unfair of them to assume that you are weak and needy and pathetically anxious. And she happened to know she wasn’t. She had been coping with her problems for some time now, and would, if she had to, continue to cope with them in the future, until they just resolved themselves. She was by no means the most unhappy person in the world.

  As a result, she had taken her time looking at sweaters. She had spent several minutes holding up in a mirror a lovely white cashmere with a little tie at the neck. She had even taken off her coat so as to have her waist measured by a salesgirl in Skirts. She had left the store (stopping for only half a minute to look at a pair of black velveteen slacks) with the clock showing that it still wasn’t one o’clock. And even if it had been, she would prefer not to arrive precisely on the hour. Then they would assume you were a compulsive—which was another thing no one was simply going to assume about her.

  But it was twelve minutes past the hour now, and even if she wasn’t a compulsive, she was experiencing some of the more characteristic emotions of one. She clutched at her hat—which she had worn not to be warm, but attractive—and raced up the street. Having seriously misjudged the distance, she was still some fifty numbers south of her destination. And it was no good to be this late, no good at all; in a way it was so aggressive of her (or defensive?) and God, she wasn’t either! She was … what?

  She passed a jewelry store; a clock in the window said fourteen after. She would miss her appointment. Where would she ever find the courage to make another? Oh she was pathetically anxious—why hadn’t she just gone ahead and been it! Why shopping? Clothes! Life was falling apart and she had to worry about velveteen slacks—and without even the money to buy them! She would miss her appointment. Then what? She could leave Paul. It was a mistake to think that he would ever take it upon himself to leave her. It must be she who says goodbye to him. Go away. To where?

  She ran as fast as she could.

  The only beard in the room was on a picture of Freud that hung on the wall beside the doctor’s desk. Dr. Lumin was clean-shaven and accentless. What he had were steamrolled Midwestern vowels, hefty south-Chicago consonants, and a decidedly urban thickness in his speech; nothing, however, that was European. Not that she had hung all her hopes on something as inconsequential as a bushy beard or a foreign intonation; nevertheless neither would have shaken her confidence in his wisdom. If anything at all could have made her comfortable it might have been a little bit of an accent.

  Dr. Lumin leaned across his desk and took her hand. He was a short wide man with oversized head and hands. She had imagined before she met him that he would be tall; though momentarily disappointed, she was no less intimidated. He could have been a pygmy, and her hand when it touched his would have been no warmer. He gave her a nice meaty handshake and she thought he looked like a butcher. Under his slicked-down brownish hair, his complexion was frost-bitten red, as though he spent most of the day lugging sides of beef in and out of refrigerated compartments. She knew he wouldn’t take any nonsense.

  “I’m sorry I’m late.” There were so many explanations that she didn’t give any.

  “That’s all right.” He settled back into his chair. “I have someone coming in at two, so we won’t have a full hour. Why don’t you sit down?”

  There was a straight-backed red leather chair facing his desk and a brownish leather couch along the wall. She did not know whether she was supposed to know enough to just go over and lie down on the couch and start right in telling him her problems … Who had problems anyway? She could not think of one—except, if she lay down on the couch, should she step out of her shoes first.

  Her shoulders drooped. “Where?” she asked finally.

  “Wherever you like,” he said.

  “You won’t mind,” she said in a thin voice, “if I just sit for today.”

  He extended one of his hands and said with a mild kind of force, “Why don’t you sit.” Oh, he was nice. A little crabby, but nice. She kept her shoes on and sat down in the straight chair.

  And then her heart took up a very sturdy, martial rhythm. She looked directly across the desk into a pair of gray and inpenetrable eyes. She had had no intention of becoming evasive in his presence; not when she had suffered so in making the appointment. But the room was a good deal brighter than she had thought it would be, and on top of her fear there settled a thin icing of shyness. She was alarmed at having all her preconceptions disappointed; and she was alarmed to think she had had so many preconceptions. She could not remember having actually thought about Dr. Lumin’s height, or the decor of his office; nevertheless there was a series of small shocks for her in his white walls, his built-in bookshelves, his gold-colored carpet, and particularly in the wide window behind his desk, through which one could see past the boulevard and down to the lake. She had not been expecting to find him with his shade raised. The room was virtually ablaze with light. But of course—it was only one o’clock. One-twenty.

  “I stopped off at Saks on the way up. I didn’t mean to keep you.”

  With one of those meat-cutter’s hands, he waved her apology aside. “I’m interested—look, how did you get my name? For the record.” It was the second time that day that she found herself settled down across from a perfect stranger who felt it necessary to be casual with her. Dr. Lumin leaned back in his swivel chair, so that for a moment it looked as though he’d just keep on going, and fall backwards, sailing clear through the window. Go ahead, she thought, fall. There goes Lumin … “How did you find out about me?” he asked.

  With no lessening of her heartbeat, she blushed. It was like living with an idiot whose behavior was unpredictable from one moment to the next: what would this body of hers do ten seconds f
rom now? “I heard your name at a party,” she said. “You see, we’ve just come to Chicago. A few months ago. So I didn’t know anyone. I heard it at a party at the University of Chicago.” She thought the last would make it all more dignified, less accidental. Otherwise he might take her coming to him so arbitrarily as an insult. “My husband teaches at the University of Chicago,” she said.

  “It says here”—the doctor was looking at a card—“Victor Honingfeld.” His eyes were two nailheads. Would he turn out to be stupid? Did he read those books on the wall or were they just for public relations? She wished she could get up and go.

  “Your secretary asked on the phone,” she explained, “and I gave Victor’s name. He’s a colleague of my husband’s. I—he mentioned your name in passing, and I remembered it, and when I thought I might like to—try something, I only knew you, so I called. I didn’t mean to say that Victor had recommended you. It was just that I heard it—”

  Why go on? Why bother? Now she had insulted him professionally, she was sure. He would start off disliking her.

  “I think,” she said quickly, “I’m becoming very selfish.”

  Swinging back in his chair, his head framed in the silver light, he didn’t answer. “That’s really my only big problem, I suppose,” said Libby. “Perhaps it’s not even a problem. I suppose you could call it a foible or something along that line. But I thought, if I am too selfish, I’d like to talk to somebody. If I’m not, if it turns out it is just some sort of passing thing, circumstances you know, not me, well then I won’t worry about it any more. Do you see?”

  “Sure,” he said, fluttering his eyelashes. He tugged undaintily at one of his fleshy ears and looked down in his lap, waiting. All day people had been waiting on her words. She wished she had been born self-reliant.

  “It’s been very confusing,” she told him. “I suppose moving, a new environment … It’s probably a matter of getting used to things. And I’m just being impatient—” Her voiced stopped, though not the rhythmic thudding in her breast. She didn’t believe she had Lumin’s attention. She was boring him; he seemed more interested in his necktie then in her. “Do you want me to lie down?” she asked, her voice quivering with surrender.

  His big raw face—the sharp bony wedge of nose, the purplish overdefined lips, those ears, the whole huge impressive red thing—tilted up in a patient, skeptical smile. “Look, come on, stop worrying about me. Worry about yourself,” he said, almost harshly. “So how long have you been in Chicago, you two?”

  She was no longer simply nervous; she was frightened. You two. If Paul were to know what she was doing, it would be his final disappointment. “October we came.”

  “And your husband’s a teacher?”

  “He teaches English at the University. He also writes.”

  “What? Books, articles, plays?”

  “He’s writing a novel now. He’s still only a young man.”

  “And you, what about yourself?”

  “I don’t write,” she said firmly. She was not going to pull her punches this second time. “I don’t do anything.”

  He did not seem astonished. How could he, with that unexpressive butcher’s face? He was dumb. Of course—it was always a mistake to take your troubles outside your house. You had to figure things out for yourself. How? “I was working,” she said, “I was secretary to the Dean, and I was going to school, taking some courses at night downtown. But I’ve had a serious kidney condition.”

  “Which kind?”

  “Nephritis.” She spoke next as a historian, not a sympathy-monger; she did not want his sympathy. “I almost died,” she said.

  Lumin moved his head as though he were a clock ticking; sympathy, whether she wanted it or not. “Oh nasty, a nasty thing …”

  “Yes,” she said. “I think it weakened my condition. Because I get colds, and every stray virus, and since it is really dangerous once you’ve had a kidney infection, Paul said I should quit my job. And the doctor, the medical doctor”—she regretted instantly having made such a distinction—“said perhaps I shouldn’t take classes downtown at night, because of the winter. I suppose I started thinking about myself when I started being sick all the time. I was in bed, and I began to think of myself. Of course, I’m sure everyone thinks of himself eighty percent of the time. But truly, I was up to about eighty-five.”

  She looked to see if he had smiled. Wasn’t anybody going to be charmed today? Were people simply going to listen? She wondered if he found her dull—not only dull, but stupid. They tried to mask their responses, one expected that; but perhaps she was no longer the delightful, bubbly girl she knew she once had been. Well, that’s partly why she was here: to somehow get back to what she was. She wanted now to tell him only the truth. “I did become self-concerned, I think,” she said. “Was I happy? was I this? was I that? and so forth, until I was totally self-absorbed. And it’s hung on, in a way. Though I suppose what I need is an interest really, something to take my mind off myself. You simply can’t go around all day saying I just had an orange, did that make me happy; I just typed a stencil, did that make me happy; because you only make yourself miserable.”

  The doctor rocked in his chair; he placed his hands on his belly, where it disappeared into his trousers like half a tent. “I don’t know,” he mumbled. “What, what does your husband think about all this?”

  Her glands and pores worked faster even than her mind; in a moment her body was encased in perspiration. “I don’t understand.”

  “About your going around all day eating oranges and asking yourself if they make you happy.”

  “I eat,” she said, smiling, lying, “the oranges privately.”

  “Ah-hah.” He nodded.

  She found herself laughing, just a little. “Yes.”

  “So—go ahead. How privately? What privately?” He seemed suddenly to be having a good time.

  “It’s very involved,” Libby said. “Complicated.”

  “I would imagine,” Lumin said, a pleasant light in his eye. “You’ve got all those pits to worry about.” Then he was shooting toward her—he nearly sprang from his chair. Their faces might as well have been touching, his voice some string she herself had plucked. “Come on, Libby,” Lumin said, “what’s the trouble?”

  For the second time that day, the fiftieth that week, she was at the mercy of her tears. “Everything,” she cried. “Every rotten thing. Every rotten despicable thing. Paul’s the trouble—he’s just a terrible terrible trouble to me.”

  She covered her face and for a full five minutes her forehead shook in the palms of her hands. Secretly she was waiting, but she did not hear Lumin’s gruff voice nor feel upon her shoulders anyone’s hands. When she finally looked up he was still there, a thick fleshy reality, nothing to be charmed, wheedled, begged, tempted, or flirted with. Not Gabe; not Paul; not an extension of herself.

  She pleaded, “Please just psychoanalyze me and straighten me out. I cry so much.”

  He nodded and he said, “What about Paul?”

  She almost rose from her seat. “He never makes love to me! I get laid once a month!” Some muscle in her—it was her heart—suddenly relaxed. Though by no means restored to health, she felt somehow unsprung.

  “Well,” said Lumin, with authority, “everybody’s entitled to get laid more than that. Is this light in your eyes?” He raised an arm and tapped his nail on the bright pane of glass behind him.

  “No, no,” she said, and for no apparent reason what she was to say next made her sob. “You can see the lake.” She tried, however, to put some real effort into pulling herself together. She wanted to stop crying and make sense, but it was the crying that seemed finally to be more to the point than the explanations she began to offer him in the best of faith. “You see, I think I’ve been in love with somebody else for a very long time. And it isn’t Paul’s fault. Don’t think that. It couldn’t be. He’s the most honest man, Paul—he’s always been terribly good to me. I was a silly college girl, self-con
cerned and frivolous and unimportant, and brutally typical, and he was the first person I ever wanted to listen to. I used to go on dates, years ago this is, and never listen—just talk. But Paul gave me books to read and he told me thousands of things, and he was—well, he saved me really from being like all those other girls. And he’s had the toughest life. His parents have been bastards, perfect bastards. That’s true—miserable cruel bastards!” Though her eyes seemed hardly able to deliver up any more tears, they somehow managed. “Oh honestly,” she said, “my eyeballs are going to fall out of my skull, just roll right on out. Between this and being sick … I never imagined everything was going to be like this, believe me …”

  After a while she wiped her face with her fingers. “Is it time?” she asked. “Is it two?”

  Lumin seemed not to hear. “What else?”

  “I don’t know.” She sniffed to clear her nose. “Paul—” Medical degrees and other official papers hung on either side of Freud’s picture. Lumin’s first name was Arnold. That little bit of information made her not want to go on. But he was waiting. “I’m not really in love with this old friend,” she told him. “He’s an old friend, we’ve known him since graduate school. And he’s—he’s very nice, he’s carefree, he’s full of sympathy—”

  “Isn’t Paul?”

  “Oh yes,” she said, in what came out like a whine. “Oh so sympathetic. Dr. Lumin, I don’t know what I want. I don’t love Gabe. I really can’t stand him if you want to know the truth. He’s not for me, he’s not Paul—he never could be. Now he’s living with some woman and her two kids. Two of the most charming little children you ever saw, and those two are living together, right in front of them. She’s so vulgar, I don’t know what’s gotten into him. We had dinner there—nobody said anything, and there was Gabe with that bitch.”

  “Why is she such a bitch?”

  “Oh”—Libby wilted—“she’s not that either. Do you want to know the bitch? Me. I was. But I knew it would be awful even before we got there. So, God, that didn’t make it any easier.”