Letting Go

by Philip Roth

  “You look in the eyes,” Asher said, “like you’ve been having some of life’s more classical experiences.”

  Having brought a bite of egg to his mouth, Paul set it down; he waited out the nausea that reached up from his stomach. “I didn’t get much sleep on the train,” he said.

  “Oh, sure, well”—Asher moved out of his chair and pulled up on the high stool beside his drawing board—“that explains everything.”

  “But you’re the same, Asher,” said Paul wryly, and tried once again to eat. He told himself he had nothing to worry about. He had found a neutral bed in which to sleep; he could proceed as planned.

  “Oh I manage to maintain a nice lofty attitude,” said Asher.

  “You’ve seen my father?”

  Those wrinkled lids of Asher’s, magnified behind his glasses, came down over his eyes, telling all. “From the hallway.”

  “And my mother?”

  “You want me to give you a little chronicle of hysteria, or you want to go on past performances?”

  “She mentions me?”

  “Paul, there’s nothing she won’t mention. She’s a dredger of polluted waters. She was never too sharp at sorting out forests from trees.”

  But he might as well hear it all; that too could give strength. “What does she say about me?”

  “I thought you had an imaginative spirit.”

  He took another mouthful, and saw no reason not to confide in his uncle, not when the man wanted to be helpful. “I’m not going to see him, Asher. I can’t do it. It doesn’t make sense, given my life. I came all the way here to New York because … I don’t know precisely.” That much he could keep to himself. “I went over to Brooklyn this morning.”

  “I figured.”

  “It cost me a round trip from Chicago that I can’t even afford. Asher, I ask you, do I owe them anything?”

  Asher wasn’t even willing to take the question seriously. “Nobody owes nobody nothing.”

  “Not when they ate my guts out,” Paul said, and found appetite for his breakfast.

  Asher was tapping his forehead with his fingers. “You think too much in conditions. Same old story, you miss the point.”

  “And I’m leaving my wife,” said Paul, because he had to finally, because that was the corollary: He would not see his father. He would leave Libby. Though two sentences were needed to convey the information, he saw it as only one act, arising out of some new direction of the will. He was moving instinctively toward an unburdening. Even deciding—instinctively again—to come to Asher’s seemed somehow a part of it. “It’s beyond choice,” he said, and felt better than at any moment in the last twenty-four hours.

  Asher blinked several times, as though watching Paul’s words fall into the proper slots. “No kidding,” he said.

  Nausea reached up a quick hand for the freshly ingested egg. Paul swallowed. “That’s what it looks like,” he said.

  “She sleeps around?” Asher asked. “She doesn’t keep the place straightened up nice?”

  “You’re just the same, Asher.”

  “You went away a few years, you think everybody went all over the place taking courses in tact, awaiting your homecoming?”

  “Well, I’m not after sympathy, Asher. So never mind. I just ran into several bad breaks. The marriage hasn’t worked out. Let’s leave it at that.”

  “But the girl is still ideal, huh?”

  “I’m getting out, Asher, but I’m not kidding myself where the blame lies. I was young. Things came up. I made some terrible errors of judgment that threw a pall on the thing. I didn’t know a hell of a lot. And then there’s the matter of one’s constitution. I mean what you are; the facts about oneself.”

  “I don’t like to tell a man over his breakfast coffee, Paul, but it’s your whole philosophy that stinks bad.”

  “Please do me a favor, don’t feel you have to spend time cheering me up. I’ve arrived at my decision and I’ll take the consequence. This is the consequence,” he said, with a slight sense of discovery. “It hasn’t been very pleasant, believe me it hasn’t.”

  Asher was no longer giving him all his attention; he had picked up Paul’s plate and was walking toward the kitchen, a frazzled outline in the sunlight. His hair needed cutting, his trousers a good pressing. “Love,” he said over his shoulder, “is unnatural. Most of the guilt in the world is from cockeyed thinking.” He disappeared around the flowered screen that cut off the sink from Paul’s sight.

  “Asher, we see life as two different things. As I remember”—and he did, which compromised his position, and smothered him in gloom—“we went over this ground a long time ago. We disagree.”

  “Paulie,” came back a voice, “I’m going to save you a couple thousand dollars and give you a fast college education, plus a psychoanalysis thrown in.” He stepped back into the light and began flicking a dish towel at the leaves of his plants.

  There was the same old lack of seriousness in his uncle. He did not know if he was up to it. “You gave it to me already.”

  “What can I do?” Asher asked. “You don’t listen.”

  Paul rose from the couch, which was to have been his bed. What was there left for him to do but sweat it out in some cheap hotel? But in some cheap hotel, under a bare bulb, would he survive? Better to take all the money they had left in the bank, the money they would no longer be needing for a baby, and go uptown and get a nice room that looked out on Central Park. A little class, a little comfort, might get him through. However, one does not learn to spend money overnight … And suppose Libby should want the baby anyway? He sat down again, as though he had only been taking a stretch to aid digestion. “Is that a condition of staying here?” he asked with a smile on his face. “Paying attention?”

  “Kiddo,” said Asher, “no conditions. That’s what I’m telling you. I don’t go in for conditions. I’m at one with life. Only guy I know.”

  Paul couldn’t understand his uncle now any better than he had years ago. “And that little girl you had here, years and years ago—”

  Asher looked up from across the room where he was watering his plants. Wasn’t there water shining in his eyes as well? “My little Patricia Ann?”

  “She made you happy? That’s an example of oneness with life? Please, Asher, let’s not make light of each other’s problems.”

  “Ah you, you don’t understand loss.”

  “I thought you’ve been telling me you’re happy?”

  “Putz, I’m miserable. What kind of issue is that? I thought we’re going to have a little talk about first principles.”

  His suitcase wasn’t far from the door. Right downstairs, Third Avenue was lined with hotels—but none of them, he knew, would be too pleasant. Then spend a dollar, he told himself, you deserve it … However, on that last point there must have been some inner debate; immediately he was back to thinking of himself holed up in some sleazy hotel. It seemed appropriate, yet he knew he didn’t have the strength. He could get through, though, with just an ounce of companionship, someone to take a meal with and sit next to in a movie. Then, free! “Maybe later, Asher.”

  Asher was unhooking his sports jacket from the back of the door. “Paul, I got a new girl friend who is right up your alley. A very nifty little number with a nice pair of sloe-eyes—Washington Park is stocked with them—but gradually I’m draining out of her head all the cotton candy. See, this is a new thing for me. I don’t go in for education. I prefer the thing in the pure state. You know what I’ve been up to for years, Paulie?” He had taken a tie from his inside pocket and was working it around his neck. “Can you take a guess? Getting the thing in its pure state. You follow me? I want to feel the precise quality of the shit against my skin. Do you get the picture? Your Uncle Asher is the child of the age. Ecce Asher!” His tie in place, he raised his arms. Behold! His shirt inched up out of his trousers. Realizing he was beltless, he went off toward the kitchen.

  He likes being a slob, he prefers life outside the ordered
world, Paul thought. One more attitude he did not share with his uncle. When he was sloppy it was because his mind was elsewhere. Then what did the two of them share? It was Asher he had chosen to seek out, after all; he had not even thought of Uncle Jerry and his big air-conditioned apartment. “Anyway,” Asher called back, “what troubles her is her interpersonal relationships. These are actual quotations I’m giving you: she is incapable of love. She is a destructive personality. She has never really communicated with another human being. I ask her, whatsa matter, you never lift up the phone when it rings? But she doesn’t get the truth in what I’m saying. She tells me nobody can love anybody because we are all of us living in the shadow of The Bomb, and also God is dead. I want you to meet this girl, Paulie, she’s got a very involved case of what you got, only you’re smarter.”

  “I never worry about The Bomb, Asher.”

  “I’m talking about the disgusting load you’re placing on the heart. Overworked. Misunderstood. Terrible.”

  He was fully dressed now, standing over Paul. “I take it, Asher, that you’re in favor of emotional anarchy, separation, a withdrawal of people from people. A kind of moral isolationism.”

  “Very inventive,” said Asher. “But what I’m in favor of is getting back in tune a little bit with nature. All this emphasis on charity and fucking. Disgusting.”

  “But you’ve always had women, Asher. You told me that too, remember? A Chinese woman and so on. That’s all you talked about last time we met. You made it sound as though I was leaving a harem for marriage. Let’s be serious, if we’re going to have discussions.”

  “You misunderstood. Ass is no panacea. Not even the highest quality.”

  “Then why do you pursue it?”

  “One, I got needs and prefer ladies to queers. Number two, I told you, I’m the child of the age. I want to understand what all the movies and billboards are about. Three, you still haven’t got what I’m talking about. I’m talking about taking a nice Oriental attitude for yourself. Pre-Chiang Kai-shek. Ungrasping. Undesperate. Tragic. Private. Proportioned. So on down the line. I only want to leave you with one thought, Paulie, because I’ve got to get out of here and I don’t want to find you dead when I get back. Nobody owes nobody nothing. That’s the slogan over the Garden of Eden. That’s what’s stamped on all our cells. Body cells, what makes us. There’s your nature of man. The first principle you should never forget.”

  “To be irresponsible.”

  “Don’t hand me that crap. I’m talking about rocks, about flowers—” He pointed across the room. “Potted plants.”

  “Flowers are flowers, Asher. Men are men.”

  “What you need is a real high enema to knock all that stuff out of you. You are the victim, my friend, of circumstantial thinking. Look at life, please, in universals. Try it. And don’t commit suicide, Paul. I have to see some teamster who wants me to paint him into a beautiful picture. You think its hypocritical? It’s no difference, either way. You won’t commit any suicide now, okay? That also is against nature. We’re on earth to take it. Hang around, you’re only in your twenties. You just got your first shock from yourself. Hang around, Paulie, and I’ll come back this afternoon and give you a definition of man.” He whisked a canvas from beside the door. “You want to sleep here a couple months,” he said, “that’s okay too.”

  After Asher left, it was unclear to Paul exactly what he should do. He was where he wanted to be; he was, at any rate, in none of those places that he did not want to be. Therefore, he told himself, he should relax. But questions arose, forbidding ease. Was Asher’s place to be his hideout indefinitely? Could he stand the conversation? The surroundings? He was used to less than luxury, of course, but something about Asher’s kind of squalor—even sunlight couldn’t elevate it out of the genus warehouse into the genus home—something in Asher’s embracing of it, made him uneasy. His uncle lived with two metal chairs, a luncheonette stool, a drawing board, and various professional pieces of equipment; there was his sofa for comfort, a mattress and spring across the way for rest, a discouraging toilet, an assortment of pots and pans, and Asher’s mother’s old potted plants, which threw shadows all the way up the dingy walls. And around such objects Asher had built a life. What was unnerving to his nephew was the amount of self-understanding there seemed to be in the decor. Even the portion of serenity: the domicile of a man who knew what he was and was not after.

  In surroundings not dissimilar, Paul was himself less at home. For all the bravado he remembered displaying at Catholic Salvage, all the plunking down on musty mattresses in order to brace up Libby, he could not say that he had ever noticed any particular metaphysical flow between himself and his furniture. Neither his home nor his condition was an expression of his self. But even if pushed, he did not think he could really tell what it was he might begin to feel at one with. And could that be, a man without satisfactions? Without serious and conscious goals? Surely there must be for him, as for others, an end in life—but if so, he could no longer with any certainty put his finger on it. Once it had been simple and clear: to lead a good life. Good in the highest sense, the oldest sense. However, it did not always seem that he had had opportunities for goodness, in the old sense—perhaps he hadn’t always recognized them as they went whizzing by. Circumstances had not only been unusual, they had been fast. You went to sleep one night, woke up the next morning, and, lo and behold, you had a past. There had been circumstances, and there had been the business of maturation, the successive shock of coming face to face with one’s own fallibilities. But whether it was strength he lacked, or imagination, or patience or wisdom or heart, at twenty-seven it almost looked as though the force and unexpectedness of circumstance had done him in.

  Not that he had been inflexible and bullheaded. He had tried. Sometimes he had made up his mind to fight; other times he had let himself be dragged along with the tide. He had tried courage and he had tried reason; to Libby (the circumstance) he had been everything at different times—submissive, tyrannical, gentle, harsh, dutiful, detached, and so on. If he was no longer passionate, if that had been the first real force of his to desert him, it was because immediately following the abortion and its incumbent horrors, when the time had come to express in bed again their feeling for one another, a certain solemnity had seized them both. And though Libby, at the top of her pleasure, seemed able to fall backwards into innocence, to sever herself from their disappointments and mistakes, he found his own pleasure somewhat limited by the facts. The playfulness wasn’t there any more, the agility, the carelessness—there was something didactic about the whole thing. And there was also the fear that Libby would turn up pregnant again.

  If any sense at all was to be made out of the anguish they had gone through in Detroit, it was that they had been able to stave off what they had not been ready for. In the face of another pregnancy (and if there’d been one, what was to stop a second?) he did not know what they would do. So he had found himself less willing, even with all their precautions, to ejaculate. In fact, the care and attention lavished upon the precaution itself, the emotional intensity surrounding the ritual of its insertion, soon began to render the subsequent act anticlimactic. That he did, despite all his fears, continue to have orgasms, could be credited in part to the fact that Libby wanted him to; he also thought he had them coming to him. More than most young men, Paul had had some acquaintance with sacrifice, and even some power to deal with it; still, it had not really occurred to him that along with the giving up of money, security, family, and ease, he might also be called upon to give up that which was so universally awarded first place in the contest of pleasures.

  Nevertheless, though he continued to believe in his rights—unable yet to relinquish the idea that there is some foundation of justice upon which this world is built—he looked forward to his own pleasure less and less. At last, even that moment toward which they both aimed (Libby particularly, with a kind of holy obsession, a marriage counselor’s faith in “coming together”), t
hat moment in which Libby showed her teeth and whimpered—her sound of ecstasy—became for him the most disheartening of all. He was afflicted with a deeper and deeper sense of consequence; at any time their life might be swallowed up by disaster and chaos.

  Then, of course, Libby became sick, and out of what seemed on the surface a sheer lack of energy, her own ecstatic moments were less frequent; she seemed to pin all her hopes on him, and so he had on more than one occasion to reach a climax for two. And it was just then that his body had chosen to go into partnership with his will; what he had earlier tried to hold off, or thought to try to hold off, he no longer had to try so hard at. He had, in fact, to work and work and work until his belly ached and his wrists were locked in pain, while Libby, pale and motionless, and tiring too, would ask if he was almost there, if he would soon be there, if now he was there … And when at long long last, his pulses knocking, his body flooded with despair, he was able to tell her yes, yes, as misery itself seemed to be running through him and out of him, he would find her eyes riveted to the muscles of his face, measuring the joy and comfort she was able to give to her husband despite her incapacity. It was as though she had relinquished her own pleasure out of choice, so as to add hers to his and thereby overwhelm his mind’s preoccupation with his body’s joy. With the feverish girl already disappointed enough, he would begin the posturing: the ecstatic groan, the passionate sigh, the final collapse (I am sated!) onto her bosom, which was covered generally with a flannel nightdress to prevent her catching a chill and collapsing still further into illness.

  It is a short journey from posturing to total unhappiness, shorter than one might imagine when the posturing begins, as it often does, as a stop-gap measure. And from there to a change in character—or in appearance—is not so very long either. A silence came over Paul Herz, a desire not to speak. Rather, at first, not to be heard. He found himself in the presence of others with nothing whatsoever to say. In the beginning the change troubled him—that is, when he noticed it as a change. After all, he was only a few years out of college, where he had always had a sense of himself as an energetic and frank conversationalist—hadn’t he virtually talked Libby into a new girl? Perhaps so, but soon enough it was in silence that he began to find his only relief; eventually he even began to derive a kind of strength from thinking of himself as a silent person. It was his only power … until Chicago, where some of Libby’s unconquerable belief in change (and who had inspired that in her?) rubbed off on him.