by Philip Roth
There was one particular girl whom he never failed to wave to when she jogged by, and one morning he set out to meet her. Always she waved back and smiled, and then forlornly he watched her run on. This time he stopped her. He called out, "Miss, miss, I want to talk to you," and instead of shaking her head no and breezing by with a "Can't now," as he fully imagined her doing, she turned and jogged back to where he was waiting, by the plank stairs that led down to the beach, and stood with her hands on her hips only a foot away from him, damp with perspiration, a tiny creature perfectly formed. Until she fully relaxed, she pawed the boardwalk with one running shoe like a pony while looking up at this unknown man in the sunglasses who was six feet three and had a full head of wavy gray hair. It turned out, fortuitously, that she had been working for seven years at an ad agency in Philadelphia, lived here at the shore, and was currently on her two-week vacation. When he told her the name of the New York agency where he'd worked for nearly a lifetime she was terrifically impressed; his employer was legendary, and for the next ten minutes they made the kind of advertising talk that had never interested him. She would have to be in her late twenties and yet, with her long, crinkly auburn hair tied back and in her running shorts and tank top, and small as she was, she might have been taken for fourteen. He tried repeatedly to prevent his gaze from falling to the swell of the breasts that rose and fell with her breathing. This was torment to walk away from. The idea was an affront to common sense and a menace to his sanity. His excitement was disproportionate to anything that had happened or that possibly could happen. He had not just to hide his hunger; so as not to go mad he had to annihilate it. Yet he doggedly continued on as he had planned, still half believing that there was some combination of words that would somehow save him from defeat. He said, "I've noticed you jogging." She surprised him by responding, "I've noticed you noticing me." "How game are you?" he heard himself asking her, but feeling that the encounter was now out of his control and that everything was going much too fast—feeling, if it were possible, even more reckless than when he'd draped that pendant necklace costing a small fortune around Merete's neck in Paris. Phoebe the devoted wife and Nancy the cherished child were home in New York, awaiting his return—he'd spoken to Nancy the day before, within only hours of her getting back from summer camp—and still he'd told the saleswoman, "We'll take it. You needn't wrap it. Here, Merete, let me do it. I teethed on these clasps. It's called a tubular box clasp. In the thirties, it would have been the safest one around for a piece like this. Come, give me your throat." "What do you have in mind?" the jogger boldly replied, so boldly that he felt at a disadvantage and did not know how forthright to make his answer. Her belly was tanned and her arms were thin and her prominent buttocks were round and firm and her slender legs were strongly muscled and her breasts were substantial for someone not much more than five feet tall. She had the curvaceous lusciousness of a Varga Girl in the old 1940s magazine illustrations, but a miniaturized, childlike Varga Girl, which was why he had begun waving to her in the first place.
He'd said, "How game are you?" and she'd replied, "What do you have in mind?" Now what? He removed his sunglasses so she could see his eyes when he stared down at her. Did she understand what she was implying by answering him like that? Or was it something she said just to be saying something, just to be sounding in charge of herself even as she was feeling frightened and out of her depth? Thirty years ago he wouldn't have doubted the result of pursuing her, young as she was, and the possibility of humiliating rejection would never have occurred to him. But lost was the pleasure of the confidence, and with it the engrossing playfulness of the exchange. He did his best to conceal his anxiety—and the urge to touch—and the craving for just one such body—and the futility of it all—and his insignificance—and apparently succeeded, for when he took a piece of paper from his wallet and wrote down his phone number, she didn't make a face and run off laughing at him but took it with an agreeable little catlike smile that could easily have been accompanied by a purr. "You know where I am," he said, feeling himself growing hard in his pants unbelievably, magically quickly, as though he were fifteen. And feeling, too, that sharp sense of individualization, of sublime singularity, that marks a fresh sexual encounter or love affair and that is the opposite of the deadening depersonalization of serious illness. She scanned his face with two large, lively blue eyes. "There's something in you that's unusual," she said thoughtfully. "Yes, there is," he said and laughed, "I was born in I933." "You look pretty fit to me," she told him. "And you look pretty fit to me," he replied. "You know where to find me," he said. Engagingly she swung the piece of paper in the air as though it were a tiny bell and to his delight shoved it deep into her damp tank top before taking off down the boardwalk again.
She never called. And when he took his walks he never saw her again. She must have decided to do her jogging along another stretch of the boardwalk, thereby thwarting his longing for the last great outburst of everything.
Shortly after the folly with the childlike Varga Girl in the running shorts and the tank top, he decided to sell the condominium and move back to New York. He considered his giving up on the shore a failure, almost as painful a failure as what had happened to him as a painter in the past half year. Even before 9/11 he had contemplated a retirement of the kind he'd been living for three years now; the disaster of 9/11 had appeared to accelerate his opportunity to make a big change, when in fact it had marked the beginning of his vulnerability and the origin of his exile. But now he'd sell the condo and try to find a place in New York close to Nancy's apartment on the Upper West Side. Because the condo's value had almost doubled in the short time he'd owned it, he might be able to shell out enough cash down to buy a place up by Columbia big enough for all of them to live together under one roof. He'd pay the household expenses and she could meet her own expenses with the child support. She could cut back to working three days a week and spend four full days with the children, as she'd been wanting to do—but couldn't afford to do—since she'd returned to her job from maternity leave. Nancy, the twins, and himself. It was a plan worth proposing to her. She might not mind his assistance, and he was hungering for the company of an intimate to whom he could give and from whom he could receive, and who better in all the world than Nancy?
He allowed himself a couple of weeks to determine how workable the plan was and to gauge how desperate he might seem presenting it. Finally, when he'd decided that for the time being he would propose nothing to Nancy but rather go into New York for a day to begin on his own to investigate the possibility of finding an apartment in his price range that could comfortably accommodate the four of them, the rush of bad news came over the phone, first about Phoebe and the next day about three of his former colleagues.
He learned of Phoebe's stroke when the phone rang a little after six-thirty in the morning. It was Nancy calling from the hospital. Phoebe had phoned her about an hour earlier to tell her that something was happening to her, and by the time Nancy got her to the emergency room her speech was so thick she could barely make herself understood and she'd lost movement in her right arm. They had just finished the MRI and Phoebe was now resting in her room.
"But a stroke, someone as youthful and healthy as your mother? Was it something to do with the migraines? Is that possible?"
"They think it was from the medication she was taking for the migraines," Nancy said. "It was the first drug that had ever helped. She realized the medication posed a minute danger of causing a stroke. She knew that. But once she found that it worked, once she was rid of that pain for the first time in fifty years, she decided it was worth the risk. She'd had three miraculous years pain free. It was bliss."
"Till now," he said sadly. "Till this. Do you want me to drive up?"
"I'll let you know. Let's see how things go. They believe she's out of trouble."
"Will she recover? Will she be able to speak?"
"The doctor says so. He thinks she'll recover one hundred percent."
>
"Wonderful," he said, but thought, Let's see what he thinks a year from now.
Without his even asking her, Nancy told him, "When she leaves the hospital, she's going to come to stay with me. Matilda will be there during the day and I'll be there the rest of the time." Matilda was the Antiguan nanny who'd begun looking after the children once Nancy had gone back to work.
"That's good," he said.
"It's going to be a total recovery, but the rehab will take a long time."
He was to have driven into New York that very day to begin the search for an apartment for all of them; instead, after consulting Nancy, he went into the city to visit Phoebe at the hospital and then drove back to the shore that evening to resume his life there alone. Nancy, the twins, and himself—it had been a ridiculous idea to begin with, and unfair as well, an abdication of the pledge he'd made to himself after having moved to the shore, which was to insulate his all too responsive daughter from the fears and vulnerabilities of an aging man. Now that Phoebe was so ill, the change he'd imagined for them was impossible anyway, and he determined never to entertain any such plan for Nancy again. He could not let her see him as he was.
At the hospital, Phoebe lay there looking stunned. In addition to the slurred speech caused by the stroke, her voice was barely audible, and she was having difficulty swallowing. He had to sit right up against the hospital bed in order to understand what she was saying. They hadn't been this close to each other's limbs in over two decades, not since he'd gone off to Paris and was there with Merete when his own mother had the stroke that killed her.
"Paralysis is terrifying," she told him, staring down at the lifeless right arm by her side. He nodded. "You look at it," she said, "you tell it to move . .." He waited while the tears rolled down her face and she struggled to finish the sentence. When she couldn't, he finished it for her. "And it doesn't," he said softly. Now she nodded, and he remembered the heated eruption of fluency that had come in the wake of his betrayal. How he wished she could scald him in that lava now. Anything, anything, an indictment, a protest, a poem, an ad campaign for American Airlines, a one-page ad for the Reader's Digest—anything as long as she could recover her speech! Playfully-full-of-words Phoebe, frank and open Phoebe, muzzled! "It's everything you can imagine," she painstakingly told him.
Her beauty, frail to begin with, was smashed and broken, and tall as she was, under the hospital sheets she looked shrunken and already on the way to decomposing. How could the doctor dare to tell Nancy that the mercilessness of what had befallen her mother would leave no enduring mark? He leaned forward to touch her hair, her soft white hair, doing his best not to cry himself and remembering again—the migraines, Nancy's birth, the day he'd come upon Phoebe Lambert at the agency, fresh, frightened, intriguingly innocent, a properly raised girl and, unlike Cecilia, unclouded by a crushing history of childhood chaos, everything about her sound and sane, blessedly not prone to outbursts, and yet without her being at all simple: the very best in the way of naturalness that Quaker Pennsylvania and Swarthmore College could produce. He remembered her reciting from memory for him, unostentatiously and in flawless Middle English, the prologue to The Canterbury Tales and, too, the surprising antique locutions she'd picked up from her starchy father, things like "We must be at pains to understand this" and "It is not going too far to say," which could have made him fall for her even without that first glimpse of her striding single-mindedly by his open office door, a mature young woman, the only one in the office who wore no lipstick, tall and bosomless, her fair hair pulled back to reveal the length of her neck and the delicate small-lobed ears of a child. "Why do you laugh sometimes at what I say," she asked him the second time he took her to dinner, "why do you laugh when I'm being perfectly serious?" "Because you charm me so, and you're so unaware of your charm." "There's so much to learn," she said while he accompanied her home in the taxi; when he replied softly, without a trace of the urgency he felt, "I'll teach you," she had to cover her face with her hands. "I'm blushing. I blush," she said. "Who doesn't?" he told her, and he believed that she'd blushed because she thought he was referring not to the subject of their conversation—all the art she'd never seen—but to sexual ardor, as indeed he was. He wasn't thinking in the taxi of showing her the Rembrandts at the Metropolitan Museum but of her long fingers and her wide mouth, though soon enough he'd take her not just to the Metropolitan but to the Modern, the Frick, and the Guggenheim. He remembered her removing her bathing suit out of sight in the dunes. He remembered them, later in the afternoon, swimming back together across the bay. He remembered how everything about this candid, unaffected woman was so unpredictably exciting. He remembered the nobility of her straightness. Against her own grain, she sparkled. He recalled telling her, "I can't live without you," and Phoebe's replying, "Nobody has ever said that to me before," and his admitting, "I've never said it before myself."
The summer of 1967. She was twenty-six.
Then the next day came news of the former colleagues, the same men he worked with and often ate lunch alongside while they were all with the agency. One was a creative supervisor named Brad Karr, who'd been hospitalized for suicidal depression; the second was Ezra Pollock, who had terminal cancer at seventy; and the third, his boss, was a gentle, lucid bigwig who walked around with the company's most profitable accounts in his pocket, who was almost maternal toward his favorites, who had been suffering for years with heart trouble and the aftereffects of a stroke, and whose picture he was stunned to see in the obituary section of the Times: "Clarence Spraco, Wartime Eisenhower Aide and Advertising Innovator, Dies at 84."
He immediately called Clarence's wife at their retirement home up in the Berkshires.
"Hello, Gwen," he said.
"Hi, dear. How are you?"
"I'm okay. How are you doing?" he asked.
"I'm doing all right. My kids came. I have a lot of company. And a lot of help. There are so many things I could tell you. In a sense, I was prepared, and in a way one never is. When I came home I found him dead on the floor, and that was a terrible shock. He had been dead for a couple of hours at that point. He seemed to have died at lunchtime. I had gone out for lunch, and so forth. You know, for him it was a good end. It was sudden, and he didn't have another stroke that would have debilitated him and put him in the hospital."
"Was it a stroke or was it a heart attack?" he asked her.
"It was a myocardial infarct."
"Had he been feeling ill?"
"Well, his blood pressure had been—well, he had a lot of trouble with his blood pressure. And then this past weekend he wasn't feeling so great. His blood pressure had gone up again."
"They couldn't control that with drugs?"
"They did. He took all kinds of drugs. But he probably had a lot of arterial damage. You know, bad old arteries, and there's a point at which the body wears out. And he was so weary at that point. He said to me just a couple of nights ago, 'I'm so weary.' He wanted to live, but there wasn't anything anybody could do to keep him alive any longer. Old age is a battle, dear, if not with this, then with that. It's an unrelenting battle, and just when you're at your weakest and least able to call up your old fight."
"That was a very nice tribute to him in the obituary today. They recognized that he was someone special. I wish I'd had a chance to tell them a few things about his wonderful ability to recognize the value of the people who worked with him. I saw his picture today," he said, "and I remembered a day years ago when a client had taken me to lunch at the Four Seasons, and we were heading down those stairs into the lobby there, and we bumped into Clarence. And my client was feeling expansive and he said, 'Clarence, how are you? Do you know this young art director?' And Clarence said, 'I do. Thank God I do. Thank God the agency does.' He did this again and again, and not just with me."
"He had the highest regard for you, dear. He meant every word of that. I remember," she said, "how he plucked you out of the bullpen when you weren't at the agency even a year. He c
ame home and told me about you. Clarence had an eye for creative talent, and he plucked you out of the bullpen and made you into an art director before you'd even completed your penal servitude working on brochures."
"He was good to me. I always thought of him as the general."
"He'd only been a colonel under Eisenhower."
"He was a general to me. I could tell you dozens of things that are in my mind now." Clarence's suggestion that he fuck his secretary in her apartment rather than in his office wasn't among them.
