by Philip Roth
I am in the easy chair in the living room, and she is sitting facing me, straddling my knees. “Tell me something,” I ask, “do you ever say fuck?”
“Yes, I say it quite a lot, I’m afraid. My husband does too, in our marital discussions. But not down here.”
“Why not?”
“I’m on my best behavior when I come to see an intellectual.”
“A mistake. Maria, I’m too old to have to find somebody suitable. I adore you.”
“You can’t. You can’t possibly. If anything, it’s the illness I’ve captivated, not you.”
“‘And as for my long sickness, do I not owe it indescribably more than I owe my health?’”
“I would have thought you were more hardheaded,” she says. “Those portraits you paint of the men in those books didn’t prepare me for this.”
“My books aren’t intended as a character reference. I’m not looking for a job.”
“There’s quite an age gap between us,” she says.
“Nice, isn’t it?”
She agrees, inclining her head to acknowledge that yes, it is indeed, and that our affinity is just about all she could ask for. Though you’d think a man who has been himself a husband on three occasions might know the answer, I cannot understand, when I see her like that, looking so wooable and so content, how to the husband upstairs practically nothing she does is right. As far as I can tell there’s nothing she can do that’s wrong. What I can’t figure out is why every man in the world hasn’t found her as enchanting as I do. That is how undefended I am.
“I had a very bumpy ride last night,” she says. “A terrible scene. Howls of rage and disappointment.”
“About what?”
“You continually ask questions and I keep answering them. That’s really out of bounds. It feels like such a betrayal of him. I shouldn’t tell you all of this because I know you’re not to be trusted. Are you writing a book?”
“Yes, it’s all for a book, even the disease.”
“I half believe that. You’re not, at any rate, to write about me. Notes are okay, because I know I can’t stop you taking notes. But you’re not to go all the way.”
“Would that really bother you?”
“Yes. Because this is our private life.”
“And this is a very boring subject about which, over these many years, I have already heard too much from too many people.”
“It’s not so boring if you happen to be on the wrong end of it. It’s not so boring if you find your private life spread all over somebody’s potboiler. ‘Twere profanation of our joys to tell the laity our love.’ Donne.”
“I’ll change your name.”
“Terrific.”
“No one would know it was you anyway, except me.”
“You don’t know what people will recognize. You won’t write about me, will you?”
“I can’t write ‘about’ anyone. Even when I try it comes out someone else.”
“I doubt that.”
“It’s true. It’s one of my limitations.”
“I haven’t begun to list all of mine. You have an easily excited imagination—you ought to take a moment and ask yourself if you’re not inventing a woman who doesn’t exist, making me somebody else already. Just as you want to make this something else. Things don’t have to reach a peak. They can just go on. You do want to make a narrative out of it, with progress and momentum and dramatic peaks and then a resolution. You seem to see life as having a beginning, a middle, an ending, all of them linked together with something bearing your name. But it isn’t necessary to give things a shape. You can yield to them too. No goals—just letting things take their own course. You must begin to see it as it is: there are insoluble problems in life, and this is one. As for me, I’m just the housewife who moved in upstairs. You’d be risking too much for far too little. There’s much that’s missing in me.”
“You’ve been underappreciated so long upstairs that that’s all you can think about. But as a matter of fact you’re looking very expensive today. You have a very expensive face and long, expensive limbs and the voice is positively sumptuous. You look very well, you know; much better than when I met you.”
“That’s because I’m happier than when I met you. I would never have pulled myself together if I hadn’t met you. It did a lot for me. To put it in reductive country English, it cheered me up. You too, I think. You look eighteen.”
“Eighteen? That’s very sweet of you.”
“Like a bright boy.”
“You’re trembling.”
“I’m frightened. Happier but very frightened. My husband’s going away.”
“Is he? When?”
“Tomorrow.”
“You should have told me. You English do keep things to yourself. How many years is he going away for?”
“He’s only going away for two weeks.”
“Can you get rid of the nanny?”
“I’ve already seen to it.”
We play house for two weeks. Every night we eat dinner upstairs after the baby has gone to sleep. She tells me about her parents’ divorce. I see girlhood snapshots of her in Gloucestershire, a middle child, fatherless, all bones and dark braids, clinging to the jeans of two sisters. I see the desk where she sits when she phones each morning minutes after her husband has left for work. On the desk is a framed Polaroid shot of them at university, a seemingly solemn young man, towering even over her and wearing round wire-rimmed sixties spectacles. That recently they were at college, and thinking that, I feel entirely shut out. “Laid-back establishment,” she says, when I hold up the photo and ask about his background; “the difficulty is that in worldly terms, you see, it’s quite a suitable marriage.” In the elevator, when he and I happen to meet, we each pass ourselves off as men without mood or passion. Large-boned and ruddy-complexioned, at thirty successful, vigorous, and on his way, he gives no outward sign, other than his size, of being a bit of a bully who likes all sorts of people around and a lot of noise—he presents to me only his Etonian opacity, and I pretend that I’ve never met his wife. If this were Restoration drama the audience would be in stitches, since it’s the husband, after all, who is cuckolding the impotent paramour.
After she has drunk lots of wine at dinner, she is less inclined to be so doggedly sensible, though I still find myself thinking that the husband who is known to throw the dishes when crossed and then not to speak to her for days at a time is still more appropriate and satisfactory a mate than I, unable to enact my love. There are insoluble problems in life and this is one.
“I never had a Jewish boyfriend before. Or have I said that?”
“No.”
“At university I did have a protracted meeting of mouths with a Nigerian Marxist, but it was only mouths that met. He was the same year as me. The boyfriends I had in darkest Gloucestershire were all sort of landed-gentry types and absolutely thick. You tell me when you have to go—I’m drunk.”
“I don’t have to go.” Yet I should, must—she seduces me with every word into risking my life.
“There wasn’t just repressiveness in my background, you know—there was an extraordinary mixture of that and freedom.”
“Yes? Freedom emanating from what?”
“The freedom emanated from the horse. Because you could go long distances with all sorts at any time of the day, and you met a lot of people that way. If I’d actually been remotely sexually aware, which I wasn’t, I could have just been screwing all the time from the age of twelve on. It would have been no problem. Not many really did but an awful lot of people spent an awful lot of time getting quite close.”
“But not you.”
Wryly, sadly: “No, never me. Would you like to look at one of my stories? It’s about people messing about in the English mud, and dogs, and it’s full of hunting slang, and there’s no reason why it should mean anything to anyone born in the twentieth century. Do you really want to see it?”
“Yes. Though don’t expect a brilliant r
eading. At college I gave up on Victorian literature because I could never figure out the difference between a vicar and a rector.”
“I shouldn’t show you this,” she says. “Remember, I don’t really aspire to newness of perception,” and hands me the typescript. The story begins, Hunting people swear like fury, their language is quite blue. When I was a child people used to hunt sidesaddle …
As I finish the last page, she says, “I told you we’d heard it all before.”
“Not from you.”
“If you don’t like it you’re free to say so.”
“The fact is that you’re a much better writer than I am.”
“Oh, nonsense.”
“You’re much more fluent than I am.”
“That,” she replies, mildly indignant, “has nothing to do with it. There are plenty of literate people who can write fluent, good English. No, this isn’t anything really. It’s embarrassingly beside the point. It’s just that the combination of this extraordinary nineteenth-century carry-on and the way they swore outrageously … well, that’s it. I’m afraid that’s all. There is fiction that is fired noisily into the air, wildly into the crowd, and there is the fiction that misfires, explosives that fail to ignite, and there is fiction that turns out to be aimed into the skull of the writer himself. Mine’s none of those. I don’t write with ferocious energy. Nobody could ever use what I write as a club. Mine is fiction displaying all the English virtues of tact, good sense, irony, and restraint—fatally retrograde. It all comes very naturally, unfortunately. Even if I found the nerve to ‘tell all’ and write about you, you’d just come out as a rather pleasant chap. I should sign these stories ‘By a throwback.’”
“And what if you are?”
“Not very suitable for you.”
* * *
Two days before her husband is to return:
“I had a dream last night,” she says.
“What about?”
“Well, it’s difficult to explain the geography of the place I was in. A shipyard, something like that, the open sea, a harbor. I don’t know the terms for those places, but I’ve seen them. The open sea is on my left, and then there are all those jetties and wharves and landings and things. It’s actually a harbor, yes. I was swimming from one jetty to another one, which was some distance away. I was fully dressed. I had a bundle under my coat, a baby—it wasn’t my daughter, it was another child, I don’t know who it was. I was swimming toward this other jetty. I was escaping from something. There were all these boys jumping up and down, gesticulating on the far jetty. They were encouraging me—‘Come on, come on!’ Then they started directing me to turn right. And when I looked right, and started to swim toward the right, there was, on the right-hand side, another inlet, water, which was a little tiny boatyard. And it was under a great big—like a railway station, a great big roof. They were suggesting that I should get a boat and, instead of swimming, I could row. Out to sea, of course. They were all gesticulating and shouting at me, ‘Judea! Judea!’ But when I got there and was about to take a boat—and there were several moored up, you know, tied together—and I was still half in the water—I realized that my husband was there, in charge of the boats, and waiting to take me home. And he had a green tweed suit on. That was the dream.”
“Does he own a green tweed suit?”
“No. Of course not.”
“‘Of course not’? Why, isn’t that ‘done’?”
“No. Sorry. I mean ‘of course not’ in private terms. But green and tweed represent all kinds of blatantly obvious English things. The whole dream is so grotesquely obvious, Freud needn’t have bothered. Anybody could understand that dream—couldn’t they? It’s childishly simple.”
“Simple how?”
“Well, green, straightaway, as soon as you wake up, you know that green means country, lots of trees and countryside—green means Gloucestershire. Gloucestershire is the land where the grass couldn’t be greener. And tweed means something the same, but with the air of formality and—well, one wears tweeds, one has a tweed suit as a woman because one is grown-up and conventional. I don’t go in for that myself, but the point is that tweeds arise from the country, they take the colors from the countryside, the heather and the stones, and even when they’re beautiful they make of them something terribly repressive, with a slight hint of snobbishness. That’s what tweeds are used for anyway—they’re ‘frightfully English’ and,” she said, laughing, “I don’t like it.”
“And the boatyard?”
“Boatyards, railway stations. Points of departure.”
“And Judea?” I ask. “The preferred English term is West Bank.”
“I wasn’t reading headlines. I was asleep.”
“And whose baby was it, Maria, under your coat?”
Shyly: “No idea. It didn’t feature.”
“It’s the one we’re going to have.”
“Is it?” she asks helplessly. “It’s a sad dream, isn’t it?”
“And getting sadder.”
“Yes.” Then she bursts out, “It drives me absolutely wild that he cannot appreciate what is under his nose unless I start behaving like a prima donna. It just makes me feel so terribly cross that you get put through all this for nothing, really. It’s just heartbreaking that if you’re nice to people, if you’re reasonable, if you’re modest, they tread all over you. It just drives me absolutely insane. Don’t you think it’s a cruel thing that all the virtues that we’ve been brought up with are nothing, absolutely nothing, in marriage, at work, everywhere? It was the same at the magazine in London. What a load of bullies there are in the world! I find it absolutely outrageous.” Then, characteristically: “Never mind. I shouldn’t really simplify like that. The frenzy I get into invariably disperses, and I slide into my usual Slough of Despond. I really don’t know why, but it goes and I lose the impetus to move.”
“Judea, Judea.”
“Yes. Isn’t that strange?”
“The Promised Land versus the Green Tweed Suit.”
The night before her husband comes back I conduct an investigation lasting to dawn. The transcript here, heavily abridged, omits to mention those demi-intimacies that disrupted the questioning, and the attendant despair that’s transformed everything.
I imagine that the more I ask her, the less likely I will be to make a terrible mistake, as though misfortune can be contained by knowing.
“Why do you stay in this?” I begin. “With me in this condition.”
“Do you think that women only stay in relationships for sex? It usually comes to be the last thing. Why do I stay? Because you’re intelligent, because you’re kind, because you seem to love me (to use the terrible word), because you tell me I’m beautiful, whether I am or not—because you’re an escape. Of course I’d like to have the other as well, but we don’t.”
“How frustrated are you?”
“It’s frustrating … but not dangerous.”
“What do you mean by that? It’s under control?”
“Yes, yes, I do. I mean that without the physical commitment somehow a woman like me feels stronger. I suppose most women feel stronger once they think they’ve got you physically addicted to them. But that’s when I begin to feel most vulnerable. This way I still in a way have the upper hand. I have the control and the choice. Or feel I have. It’s even I that am refusing you marriage. It is frustrating, but it gives me a power that in an ordinary relationship I would never have, because you’d have power over me. I find it somehow exciting. You want me to be candid, I am.”
“He still sleeps with you, your husband.”
“I take back what I said about candor. This is the point where I retire into polite discretion.”
“You can’t. How often? Not at all, infrequently, sometimes, or often.”
“Often.”
“Very often?”
“Very often.”
“Nightly?”
“Not quite. But nearly.”
“You fight over everyth
ing, you don’t speak for days, he throws the crockery, and yet he wants you that much.”
“I don’t know what that much is.”
“I mean all this cruelty obviously turns him on. I mean his sexual enthusiasm, if nothing else, appears to be undiminished.”
“He’s very highly sexed. He’d happily boff me all day and all night. He doesn’t particularly want me for anything more.”
“Do you get satisfaction yourself?”
“It’s all complicated by my being so furious and resentful. We go to bed negotiating all sorts of degrees of hostility. In any case, it’s very impersonal. As though it isn’t happening. He never thinks of me.”
“Why don’t you tell him no then?”
“I don’t want that kind of trouble. Sexual tension like that is all we need to make it completely impossible to live together.”
“So you remain sexually available to a very nasty man.”
“You could put it that way if you like.”
“And still you see me every afternoon. Why do you continue to show up?”
“Because I wouldn’t be anywhere else. Because I’m welcome. Because if I don’t see you I miss you. Up here it’s cold and we’re always fighting and jarring each other’s nerves. Either we’re saying rather polite, friendly, icy things to each other, which each finds rather dull, and secretly thinking about someone else or something else, or we’re not saying anything, or we’re fighting. But when I come downstairs, I come into a lovely room with books and the fireplace and the music and the coffee and your affection. Who wouldn’t go there, if they’re given that? I don’t think you give that to everybody, but you give it to me. I think that for you it’s a vast frustration that you don’t have the other as well and so I wish you had it. But for me it’s almost enough.”
