by Philip Roth
A few months later he flew to Paris to see her. She had been working in Europe for six weeks, and though they spoke secretly on the phone as often as three times a day, that wasn't sufficient to satisfy the longing in either of them. A week before the Saturday when he and Phoebe were to drive to New Hampshire to bring Nancy home from summer camp, he told Phoebe that he would have to fly to Paris for a shoot that weekend. He'd leave on Thursday night and be home by Monday morning. Ezra Pollock, the account executive, would be going with him and they would meet up with a European crew over there. He knew that Ez was with his family until after Labor Day, unreachable on a tiny phoneless island several miles out to sea from South Freeport, Maine, so far from everything that seals could be seen socializing on the ledges of the rocky island nearby. He gave Phoebe the name and number of the Paris hotel and then reconsidered ten times a day his risking the chance of being discovered by her just so he and Merete could spend a long weekend together in the lovers' capital of the world. But Phoebe remained unsuspicious and seemed to be looking forward to picking up Nancy by herself. She was eager to have her home after a summer away, just as he was dying to see Merete after a month and a half apart, and so he flew off on Thursday night, his mind on that little hole and what she liked him to do with it. Yes, fixed dreamily on no more than that all the way across the Atlantic on Air France.
What went wrong was the weather. High winds and blustery storms swept through Europe, and no planes were able to take off all day Sunday and into Monday. Both days he sat at the airport with Merete, who had come along to cling to him until the last possible moment, but when it was clear that there would be no departures from de Gaulle until Tuesday at the earliest, they took a taxi back to the Rue des Beaux Arts, to Merete's favorite swank little Left Bank hotel, where they were able to rebook their room, the room mirrored with smoked glass. During every night ride they took by taxi in Paris, they performed the same impudent playlet, always as though inadvertently and for the first time: he'd drop his hand onto her knee and she'd let her legs fall open just far enough so that he could reach up under her silk slip of a dress—nothing more, really, than a piece of deluxe lingerie—and finger her while she adjusted her head to look idly out of the taxi at the illuminated shop windows and he, leaning back in his seat, pretended to be anything but riveted by the way she could continue to behave as if no one were touching her even as he sensed her beginning to come. Merete carried everything erotic to the limit. (Earlier, in a discreet antique jewelry shop down the street from their hotel, he'd adorned her throat with a stunning trinket, a pendant necklace set with diamonds and demantoid garnets and strung on its original gold chain. Like the knowledgeable son of his father that he was, he'd asked to examine the stones through the jeweler's loupe. "What are you looking for?" Merete asked. "Flaws, cracks, the coloring—if nothing appears under a ten-power magnification the diamond can be certified as flawless. You see? My father's words issue from my mouth whenever I speak about jewelry." "But not about anything else," she said. "Not about anything about you. Those words are mine." Not while shopping, not while walking the streets, not while taking an elevator or having coffee together in a booth around the corner from her apartment, could they ever stop seducing each other. "How do you know how to do that, to hold the thing—?" "The loupe." "How do you know how to hold the loupe in your eye like that?" "My father taught me. You just tighten your socket around it. Rather like you do." "So what color is it?" "Blue. Blue-white. That was the best in the old days. My father would say it still is. My father would say, 'Beyond the beauty and the status and the value, the diamond is imperishable.' 'Imperishable' was a word he loved to savor." "Who doesn't?" Merete said. "What is it in Danish?" he asked her. "'Uforgængelig.' It's just as wonderful." "Why don't we take it?" he told the saleswoman, who in turn, speaking in perfect English and with a touch of French—and with perfect cunning—told the young companion of the older gentleman, "Mademoiselle is very lucky. Une femme choyée," and the cost was about as much as the entire inventory of the Elizabeth store, if not more, back when he was running one-hundred-dollar engagement rings of a quarter or a half carat to be sized for his father's customers by a man working on a bench in a cubbyhole on Frelinghuysen Avenue circa 1942.) And now he withdrew the finger sticky with her slime, perfumed her lips with it, then pressed it between her teeth for her tongue to caress, reminding her of their first meeting and what they'd dared to do as strangers, an American adman of fifty and a Danish model of twenty-four, crossing a Caribbean island in the dark, transfixed. Reminding her that she was his and he hers. A cult of two.
There was a message from Phoebe waiting for him at the hotel: "Contact me immediately. Your mother gravely ill."
When he phoned he learned that his eighty-year-old mother had had a stroke at five A.M. Monday, New York time, and was not expected to live.
He explained to Phoebe about the weather conditions and learned that Howie was already on his way east and that his father was keeping vigil beside his mother's bed. He wrote down the telephone number of his mother's room at the hospital, and Phoebe told him that as soon as she hung up, she would be heading over to Jersey herself, to be with his father at the hospital until Howie arrived. She had only been waiting for him to call her back. "I missed you by a few minutes this morning. The desk clerk told me, 'Madame and monsieur have just departed for the airport.'"
"Yes," he said, "I shared a cab with the photographer's rep."
"No, you shared a cab with the Danish twenty-four-year-old with whom you are having an affair. I'm sorry, but I can no longer look the other way. I looked the other way with that secretary. But the humiliation has now gone too far. Paris," she said with disgust. "The planning. The premeditation. The tickets and the travel agent. Tell me, which of you romantic cornballs dreamed up Paris for your sneaky little undertaking? Where did you two eat? What charming restaurants did you go to?"
"Phoebe, I don't know what you're talking about. You're not making any sense. I'll get the first plane back that I possibly can."
His mother died an hour before he was able to reach the hospital in Elizabeth. His father and his brother were sitting beside the body that lay beneath the covers of the bed. He had never before seen his mother in a hospital bed, though of course she had seen him there more than once. Like Howie, she had enjoyed perfect health all her life. It was she who would rush to the hospital to comfort others. Howie said, "We haven't told the staff she died. We waited. We wanted you to be able to see her before they took her away." What he saw was the high-relief contour of an elderly woman asleep. What he saw was a stone, the heavy, sepulchral, stonelike weight that says, Death is just death—it's nothing more.
He hugged his father, who patted his hand and said, "It's best this way. You wouldn't have wanted her to live the way that thing left her."
When he took his mother's hand and held it to his lips, he realized that in a matter of hours he had lost the two women whose devotion had been the underpinning of his strength.
With Phoebe he lied and lied and lied, but to no avail. He told her that he had gone to Paris to break off the affair with Merete. He'd had to see her face to face to do it, and that's where she was working.
"But in the hotel, while you were breaking off the affair, didn't you sleep with her at night in the same bed?"
"We didn't sleep. She cried all night long."
"For four whole nights? That's a lot of crying for a twenty-four-year-old Dane. I don't think even Hamlet cried that much."
"Phoebe, I went to tell her it was over—and it is over."
"What did I do so wrong," Phoebe asked, "that you should want to humiliate me like this? Why should you want to unhinge everything? Has it all been so hideous? I should get over being dumbstruck, but I can't. I, who never doubted you, to whom it rarely occurred even to question you, and now I can never believe another word you say. I can never trust you to be truthful again. Yes, you wounded me with the secretary, but I kept my mouth shut. You didn't even k
now I knew, did you? Well, did you?"
"I didn't, no."
"Because I hid my thoughts from you—unfortunately I couldn't hide them from myself. And now you wound me with the Dane and you humiliate me with the lying, and now I will not hide my thoughts and keep my mouth shut. A mature, intelligent woman comes along, a mate who understands what reciprocity is. She rids you of Cecilia, gives you a phenomenal daughter, changes your entire life, and you don't know what to do for her except to fuck the Dane. Every time I looked at my watch I kept figuring what time it was in Paris and what you two would be doing. That went on for the whole weekend. The basis of everything is trust, is it not? Is it not?"
She had only to say Cecilia's name to instantaneously recall the vindictive tirades visited on his mother and father by his first wife, who, fifteen years later, to his horror, turned out to have been not merely abandoned Cecilia but his Cassandra: "I pity this little Miss Muffet coming after me—I genuinely do pity the vile little Quaker slut!"
"You can weather anything," Phoebe was telling him, "even if the trust is violated, if it's owned up to. Then you become life partners in a different way, but it's still possible to remain partners. But lying—lying is cheap, contemptible control over the other person. It's watching the other person acting on incomplete information—in other words, humiliating herself. Lying is so commonplace and yet, if you're on the receiving end, it's such an astonishing thing. The people you liars are betraying put up with a growing list of insults until you really can't help but think less of them, can you? I'm sure that liars as skillful and persistent and devious as you reach the point where it's the one you're lying to, and not you, who seems like the one with the serious limitations. You probably don't even think you're lying—you think of it as an act of kindness to spare the feelings of your poor sexless mate. You probably think your lying is in the nature of a virtue, an act of generosity toward the dumb cluck who loves you. Or maybe it's just what it is—a fucking lie, one fucking lie after another. Oh, why go on—all these episodes are so well known," she said. "The man loses the passion for the marriage and he cannot live without. The wife is pragmatic. The wife is realistic. Yes, passion is gone, she's older and not what she was, but to her it's enough to have the physical affection, just being there with him in the bed, she holding him, he holding her. The physical affection, the tenderness, the comradery, the closeness ... But he cannot accept that. Because he is a man who cannot live without. Well, you're going to live without now, mister. You're going to live without plenty. You're going to find out what living without is all about! Oh, go away from me, please. I can't bear the role you've reduced me to. The pitiful middle-aged wife, embittered by rejection, consumed by rotten jealousy! Raging! Repugnant! Oh, I hate you for that more than anything. Go away, leave this house. I can't bear the sight of you with that satyr-on-his-good-behavior look on your face! You'll get no absolution from me—never! I will not be trifled with any longer! Go, please! Leave me alone!"
"Phoebe—"
"No! Don't you dare call me by my name!"
But these episodes are indeed well known and require no further elaboration. Phoebe threw him out the night after his mother's burial, they were divorced after negotiating a financial settlement, and because he did not know what else to do to make sense of what had happened or how else to appear responsible—and to rehabilitate himself particularly in Nancy's eyes—a few months later he married Merete. Since he had broken everything up because of this person half his age, it seemed only logical to go ahead and tidy everything up again by making her his third wife—never was he clever enough as a married man to fall into adultery or to fall in love with a woman who was not free.
It was not long afterward that he discovered that Merete was something more than that little hole, or perhaps something less. He discovered her inability to think anything through without all her uncertainties intruding and skewing her thought. He discovered the true dimensions of her vanity and, though she was only in her twenties, her morbid fear of aging. He discovered her green card problems and her long-standing tax mess with the IRS, the result of years of failing to file a return. And when he required emergency coronary artery surgery, he discovered her terror of illness and her uselessness in the face of danger. Altogether he was a little late in learning that all her boldness was encompassed in her eroticism and that her carrying everything erotic between them to the limit was their only overpowering affinity. He had replaced the most helpful wife imaginable with a wife who went to pieces under the slightest pressure. But in the immediate aftermath, marrying her had seemed the simplest way to cover up the crime.
Passing the time was excruciating without painting. There was the hour-long morning walk, in the late afternoon there was twenty minutes of working out with his light weights and a half hour of doing easy laps at the pool—the daily regime his cardiologist encouraged—but that was it, those were the events of his day. How much time could you spend staring out at the ocean, even if it was the ocean you'd loved since you were a boy? How long could he watch the tides flood in and flow out without his remembering, as anyone might in a sea-gazing reverie, that life had been given to him, as to all, randomly, fortuitously, and but once, and for no known or knowable reason? On the evenings he drove over to eat broiled bluefish on the back deck of the fish store that perched at the edge of the inlet where the boats sailed out to the ocean under the old drawbridge, he sometimes stopped first at the town where his family had vacationed in the summertime. He got out of the car on the ocean road and went up onto the boardwalk and sat on one of the benches that looked out to the beach and the sea, the stupendous sea that had been changing continuously without ever changing since he'd been a bony sea-battling boy. This was the very bench where his parents and grandparents used to sit in the evenings to catch the breeze and enjoy the boardwalk promenade of neighbors and friends, and this was the very beach where his family had picnicked and sunned themselves and where he and Howie and their pals went swimming, though it was now easily twice as wide as it had been then because of a reclamation project recently engineered by the army. Yet wide as it was, it was still his beach and at the center of the circles in which his mind revolved when he remembered the best of boyhood. But how much time could a man spend remembering the best of boyhood? What about enjoying the best of old age? Or was the best of old age just that—the longing for the best of boyhood, for the tubular sprout that was then his body and that rode the waves from way out where they began to build, rode them with his arms pointed like an arrowhead and the skinny rest of him following behind like the arrow's shaft, rode them all the way in to where his rib cage scraped against the tiny sharp pebbles and jagged clamshells and pulverized sea-shells at the edge of the shore and he hustled to his feet and hurriedly turned and went lurching through the low surf until it was knee high and deep enough for him to plunge in and begin swimming madly out to the rising breakers—into the advancing, green Atlantic, rolling unstoppably toward him like the obstinate fact of the future—and, if he was lucky, make it there in time to catch the next big wave and then the next and the next and the next until from the low slant of inland sunlight glittering across the water he knew it was time to go. He ran home barefoot and wet and salty, remembering the mightiness of that immense sea boiling in his own two ears and licking his forearm to taste his skin fresh from the ocean and baked by the sun. Along with the ecstasy of a whole day of being battered silly by the sea, the taste and the smell intoxicated him so that he was driven to the brink of biting down with his teeth to tear out a chunk of himself and savor his fleshly existence.
Quickly as he could on his heels he crossed the concrete sidewalks still hot from the day and when he reached their rooming house headed around back to the outdoor shower with the soggy plywood walls, where wet sand plopped out of his suit when he kicked it off over his feet and held it up to the cold water beating down on his head. The level force of the surging tide, the ordeal of the burning pavement, the bristling shock of the
ice-cold shower, the blessing of the taut new muscles and the slender limbs and the darkly suntanned flesh marked by just a single pale scar from the hernia surgery hidden down by his groin—there was nothing about those August days, after the German submarines had been destroyed and there were no more drowned sailors to worry about, that wasn't wonderfully clear. And nothing about his physical perfection that he had any reason not to take for granted.
When he returned from dinner he would try to settle in and read. He had a library of oversized art books filling one wall of the studio; he had been accumulating and studying them all his life, but now he couldn't sit in his reading chair and turn the pages of a single one of them without feeling ridiculous. The delusion—as he now thought of it—had lost its power over him, and so the books only magnified his sense of the hopelessly laughable amateur he was and of the hollowness of the pursuit to which he had dedicated his retirement.
Trying to pass more than a little time in the company of the Starfish Beach residents was also unendurable. Unlike him, many were able not merely to construct whole conversations that revolved around their grandchildren but to find sufficient grounds for existence in the existence of their grandchildren. Caught in their company, he sometimes experienced loneliness in what felt like its purest form. And even those among the village residents who were thoughtful, well-spoken people were not interesting to be with more than once in a while. Most of the elderly residents had been settled into their marriages for decades and were sufficiently connected still to whatever was left of their marital felicity that only rarely could he get the husband to go off by himself for lunch without the wife. However wistfully he might sometimes look at such couples as dusk approached or on Sunday afternoons, there were the rest of the hours of the week to think about, and theirs wasn't a life for him when he was on top of his melancholy. The upshot was that he should never have moved into such a community in the first place. He had displaced himself just when what age most demanded was that he be rooted as he'd been for all those years he ran the creative department at the agency. Always he had been invigorated by stability, never by stasis. And this was stagnation. There was an absence now of all forms of solace, a barrenness under the heading of consolation, and no way to return to what was. A sense of otherness had overtaken him—"otherness," a word in his own language to describe a state of being all but foreign to him till his art student Millicent Kramer had jarringly used it to bemoan her condition. Nothing any longer kindled his curiosity or answered his needs, not his painting, not his family, not his neighbors, nothing except the young women who jogged by him on the boardwalk in the morning. My God, he thought, the man I once was! The life that surrounded me! The force that was mine! No "otherness" to be felt anywhere! Once upon a time I was a full human being.
