I Married a Communist

by Philip Roth

  "Now, Ira figured that he could be being set up by Sylphid, so that first night all he did when Pamela had finished showing off and started upstairs to bed was to take her hand and say, 'You're not a kid, are you? I had you down for a kid.' 'I'm a year older than Sylphid,' she tells him. 'I'm twenty-four. I'm an expatriate. I'll never go back to that idiotic country with its stupid subterranean emotional life. I love being in America. Here I'm free of all that showing-your-feelings-is-taboo crap. You can't imagine what it's like there. Here there's life. Here I have my own apartment in Greenwich Village. I work hard and I earn my own way in the world. I do six shows a day, six days a week. I am not a kid. Not in any way, Iron Rinn.'

  "The scene went something like that. What there was to enkindle Ira is obvious. She was fresh, young, flirtatious, naive—and not naive, shrewd too. Off on her great American adventure. He admires the way this child of the upper middle class lives outside the bourgeois conventions. The squalid walk-up she lives in. Her coming alone to America. He admires the dexterity with which she adopts all her roles. For Eve she plays the sweet little girl, it's pajama-party stuff with Sylphid, at Radio City she's a flutist, a musician, a professional, and with him it's as though she'd been raised in England by the Fabians, a free, unfettered spirit, highly intelligent and unintimidated by respectable society. In other words, she's a human being—this with this one, that with that one, something else with the other one.

  "And all of this is great. Interesting. Impressive. But falling in love? With Ira everything emotional had to be superabundant. When he found his target, Ira fired. He not only fell for her. That baby he'd wanted to have with Eve? He wanted now to have it with Pamela. But he was afraid of frightening Pamela away, so about this he said nothing right off.

  "They just have their antibourgeois fling. She can explain to herself everything that she's doing. 'I'm a friend to Sylphid and I'm a friend to Eve, and I'd do anything for either of them, but, as long as it does them no harm, I don't see where being a friend involves the heroic self-sacrifice of my own inclinations.' She too has an ideology. But Ira is by then thirty-six, and he wants. Wants the child, the family, the home. The Communist wants everything that is at the heart of bourgeois. Wants to get from Pamela everything he thought he was getting from Eve when he got Sylphid instead.

  "Out together at the shack they used to talk a lot about Sylphid. 'What is her gripe?' Ira asks Pamela. Money. Status. Privilege. Harp lessons from birth. Twenty-three and her laundry is done for her, her meals are prepared for her, her bills are paid for her. 'You know the way I was brought up? Left home at fifteen. Dug ditches. I was never a kid.' But Pamela explains to him that when Sylphid was only twelve years old, Eve left Sylphid's father for the coarsest savior she could find, an immigrant dynamo with a hard-on who was going to make her rich, and her mother was so intoxicated by him that Sylphid lost her for all those years, and then they moved to New York and Sylphid lost her California friends, and she didn't know anybody and she started to get fat.

  "Psychiatric bullshit to Ira. 'Sylphid sees Eve as a movie star who abandoned her to the nannies,' Pamela tells him, 'who dumped her for men and her man craziness, who betrayed her at every turn. Sylphid sees Eve as someone who keeps throwing herself at men so as not to stand on her own two feet.' 'Is Sylphid a lesbian?' 'No. Her motto is, Sex makes you powerless. Look at her mother. She tells me never to get involved with anybody sexually. She hates her mother for giving her up for all these men. Sylphid has a notion of absolute autonomy. She's going to be beholden to no one. She's tough.' 'Tough? Yeah? So how come,' Ira asks, 'she doesn't leave her mother if she's so tough? Why doesn't she go out on her own? You're not making sense. Toughness in a vacuum. Autonomy in a vacuum. Independence in a vacuum. You want to know the answer to Sylphid? Sylphid is a sadist—sadist in a vacuum. Every night this Juilliard graduate rubs her finger through the leavings at the edge of her dinner plate, round and round the edge of her dinner plate till it squeaks, and then, the better to drive her mother round the bend, she puts the finger in her mouth and licks it till it's clean. Sylphid is there because her mother's afraid of her. And Eve will never stop being afraid of her because she doesn't want Sylphid to leave her, and that's why Sylphid won't leave her—until she finds a still better way to torture her. Sylphid is the one wielding the whip.'

  "So, you see, Ira repeated to Pamela that stuff I'd told him at the outset about Sylphid but that he'd refused to take seriously coming from me. He repeated it to his beloved as though he'd figured it out himself. As people will. The two of them had a lot of these conversations. Pamela liked these conversations. They excited her. It made her feel strong to talk freely like that with Ira about Sylphid and Eve.

  "One night something peculiar happened with Eve. She and Ira were lying in bed with the lights out, ready for sleep, when she began to weep uncontrollably. Ira said, 'What's the matter?' She wouldn't answer him. 'What are you crying about? What's happened now?' 'Sometimes I think ... Oh, I can't,' she said. She couldn't speak, and she also couldn't stop crying. He turned the light on. Told her to go ahead and get it out of her system. To say it. 'Sometimes I feel,' she said, 'that Pamela should have been my child. Sometimes,' she said, 'it seems more natural.' 'Why Pamela?' 'The easy way we get along. Though maybe that's because she isn't my daughter.' 'Maybe it is, maybe it isn't,' he said. 'Her airiness,' Eve said, 'her lightness.' And she started weeping again. Out of guilt, more than likely, for having allowed herself that harmless fairy-tale wish, the wish to have a daughter who didn't remind her every second of her failure.

  "By lightness I don't think Eve necessarily meant only physical lightness, the displacement of the fat by the thin. She was pointing to something else, to some kind of excitement in Pamela. Inner lightness. I thought she meant that in Pamela she could recognize, almost despite herself, the susceptibility that had once vibrated beneath her own demure surface. Recognized it however childishly Pamela behaved in her presence, however maidenly she acted. After that night, Eve never said anything like this again. It happened only that one time, just when Ira's passion for Pamela, when the illegitimacy of their reckless affair, was generating its greatest heat.

  "So, each lays claim to the spirited young flutist as the pleasure-piping dream creature each had failed to obtain: the daughter denied Eve, the wife denied Ira.

  '"So sad. So sad,' Eve tells him. 'So very, very sad.' She holds on to him all that night. Right through to the morning, weeping, sighing, whimpering; all the pain, the confusion, the contradiction, the longing, the delusion, all the incoherence pouring out of her. He never felt sorrier for her—what with the affair with Pamela, he never felt farther from her either. 'Everything's gone all wrong. I tried and I tried,' she says, 'and nothing comes out quite right. I tried with Sylphid's father. I tried with jumbo. I tried to give her stability and connection and a mother she could look up to. I tried to be a good mother. And then I had to be a good father. And she's had too many fathers. All I thought about was myself.' 'You haven't thought just about yourself,' he says. 'I have. My career. My careers. My acting. I always had to take care of my acting. I tried. She had good schools and good tutors and a good nanny. But maybe I should have just been with her all the time. She's inconsolable. She eats and she eats and she eats. That's her only consolation for something I didn't give her.' 'Maybe,' he says, 'that's just the way she is.' 'But there are plenty of girls who eat too much, and then they lose some weight—they don't just eat and eat and eat. I've tried everything. I've taken her to doctors, to specialists. She just keeps eating. She keeps eating to hate me.' 'Then maybe,' he says, 'if that is true, it's time for her to go out on her own.' 'What does that have to do with anything? Why should she be on her own? She's happy here. This is her house. No matter what other disruption I brought into her life, this is her house, it's always been her house, and it will be her house for as long as she wants. There's no reason that she should leave any sooner than she's ready to.' 'Suppose,' he says, 'her leaving were a way of gettin
g her to stop eating.' 'I don't see how eating and living where she does have anything to do with each other! You're not making any sense! This is my daughter we're talking about!' 'Okay. Okay. But you just expressed a certain amount of disappointment...' 'I said she was eating to console herself. If she leaves here, she'll have to console herself twice as much. She'll have to console herself that much more. Oh, there's something terribly wrong. I should have stayed with Carlton. He was a homosexual, but he was her father. I just should have stayed with him. I don't know what I was thinking. I would never have met Jumbo, I would have never gotten involved with you, she would have had a father, and she wouldn't always be eating so much.' 'Why didn't you stay with him?' 'I know it seems as though it was selfish, as though it was for me. So that I could find satisfaction and companionship. But really I wanted him to be freed. Why should he be confined by family life and with this wife that he couldn't find attractive or interesting? Every time we were together I thought he must be thinking about the next busboy or waiter. I wanted him not to have to lie so much anymore.' 'But he didn't lie about that.' 'Oh, I knew it, and he knew I knew it, and everybody in Hollywood knew it, but he was still always skulking around and planning. Phone calls and disappearing and excuses as to why he was late and why he wasn't at Sylphid's party—I couldn't take another sorry excuse. He didn't care, and yet he continued to lie anyway. I wanted to relieve him of that, I wanted to relieve me of that. It wasn't for my own personal happiness, really. It was more for his.' 'Why didn't you go off by yourself, then? Why did you go off with Jumbo?' 'Well ... that was an easy way to do it. To not be alone. To make the decision but to not be alone. But I could have stayed. And Sylphid would have had a father, and she wouldn't have known the truth about him, and we wouldn't have had the years with Jumbo, and we wouldn't have these dreadful trips to France that are just a nightmare. I could have stayed, and she could have just had an absent father like everyone else's absent father. So what if he was queer? Yes, some of it was jumbo, and the passion. But I couldn't take the lies anymore, the false deception. It was fake deceit. Because Carlton didn't care, but for some modicum of dignity, of decency, he would pretend to hide it. Oh, I love Sylphid so! I love my daughter. I'd do anything for my daughter. But if it could be lighter and easier and more natural—more like a daughter. She's here, and I love her, but every little decision is a struggle, and her power ... She doesn't treat me like a mother, and it makes it hard to treat her like a daughter. Though I'd do anything for her, anything.' 'Why don't you let her go away, then?' 'You keep bringing that up! She doesn't want to go away. Why do you think the solution is for her to go? The solution is for her to stay. She didn't get enough of me. If she were ready to go, she would have gone by now. She's not ready. She looks mature, but she isn't. I'm her mother. I'm her supporter. I love her. She needs me. I know it doesn't look as if she needs me, but she needs me.' 'But you're so unhappy,' he says. 'You don't understand. It's not me, it's Sylphid I worry about. Me, I'll get through. I always get through.' 'What do you worry about with her?' 'I want her to find a nice man. Somebody she can love and who'll take care of her. She's not dating that much,' Eve says. 'She doesn't date at all,' Ira says. 'That's not true. There was a boy.' 'When? Nine years ago?' 'A lot of men are very interested in her. At the Music Hall. A lot of musicians. She's just taking her time.' 'I don't understand what you're talking about. You have to go to sleep. Close your eyes and try to sleep.' 'I can't. I close my eyes and I think, What is going to happen to her? What is going to happen to me? So much trying and so much trying ... and so little peace. So little peace of mind. Each day is a new ... I know it may look like happiness to other people. I know she looks very happy and I know we look very happy together, and we really are very happy together, but each day just gets harder.' 'You look happy together?' 'Well, she loves me. She loves me. I'm her mummy. Of course we look happy together. She's beautiful. She's beautiful.' 'Who is?' he asks her. 'Sylphid. Sylphid is beautiful.' He had thought she was going to say 'Pamela.' 'Look deep into her eyes and her face. The beauty,' Eve says, 'and the strength there. It doesn't come out at you in that superficial look-at-me way. But there's deep beauty there. Very deep. She's a beautiful girl. She's my daughter. She's remarkable. She's a brilliant musician. She's a beautiful girl. She's my daughter.'

  "If ever Ira knew it was hopeless, it was that night. He couldn't have seen any more purely how impossible it was. Easier to make America go Communist, easier to bring about the proletarian revolution in New York, on Wall Street, than separate a woman and her daughter who didn't want to be separated. Yes, he should have just separated himself. But he didn't. Why? Finally, Nathan, I have no answer. Ask why anybody makes any tragic mistake. No answer."

  "Throughout these months, Ira was becoming more and more isolated in the house. On the nights when he wasn't at a union executive meeting or wasn't at the meeting of his party unit, or they weren't out for the evening together, Eve would be in the living room doing her needlepoint and listening to Sylphid plucking away and Ira'd be upstairs writing to O'Day. And when the harp went silent and he went downstairs to find Eve, she wouldn't be there. She'd be up in Sylphid's room, listening to the record player. The two of them in bed, under the covers, listening to Cost Fan Tutte. When he'd go up to the top floor and hear the Mozart blaring and see them together in bed, Ira felt as though he were the child. An hour or so later Eve would return, still warm from Sylphid's bed, to get in bed with him, and that was more or less the end of conjugal bliss.

  "When the explosion comes, Eve is astonished. Sylphid must get an apartment of her own. He says, 'Pamela lives three thousand miles from her family. Sylphid can live three blocks from hers.' But all Eve does is cry. This is unfair. This is horrible. He is trying to drive her daughter out of her life. No, around the corner, he says—she is twenty-four years old, and it's time she stopped going to bed with Mommy. 'She is my daughter! How dare you! I love my daughter! How dare you!' 'Okay,' he says, 'I'll live around the corner,' and the next morning he finds a floor-through apartment over on Washington Square North, just four blocks away. Puts down a deposit, signs a lease, pays the first month's rent, and comes home and tells her what he's done. 'You're leaving me! You're divorcing me!' No, he says, just going to live around the corner. Now you can lie in bed with her all night long. Though if, for variety, you should ever want to lie in bed with me all night long, he says, put on your coat and your hat and come around the corner and I will be delighted to see you. As for dinner, he tells her, who will even notice that I am not there? lust you wait. There is going to be a considerable improvement in Sylphid's outlook on life. 'Why are you doing this to me? To make me choose between my daughter and you, to make a mother choose—it's inhuman!' It takes hours more to explain that he is asking her to entertain a solution that would obviate the need for a choice, but it's doubtful that Eve ever understood what he was talking about. Comprehension was not the bedrock on which her decisions were based—desperation was. Capitulation was.

  "The next night, Eve went up as usual to Sylphid's room, but this time to present her with the proposal she and Ira had agreed to, the proposal that was going to bring peace to their lives. Eve had gone with him that day to look at the apartment he'd leased on Washington Square North. There were French doors and high ceilings and ornamental moldings and parquet floors. There was a fireplace with a carved mantel. Below the rear bedroom was a walled-in garden much like the one on West Eleventh Street. It wasn't Lehigh Avenue, Nathan. Washington Square North, in those days, was as beautiful a street as there was in Manhattan. Eve said, 'It's lovely.' 'It's for Sylphid,' Ira said. He would keep the lease in his name, pay the rent, and Eve, who always made money but was always terrified about money, always losing it to some Freedman or other, Eve wouldn't have to worry about a thing. 'This is the solution,' he said, 'and is it so terrible?' She sat down in the sunlight in one of those front parlor window seats. There was a veil on her hat, one of those veils with the dots on it that she made popular in some f
ilm, and she lifted it away from her delectable little face and she began to sob. Their struggle was over. Her struggle was over. She jumped to her feet, she hugged him, she kissed him, she began to run from room to room, figuring out where to put the lovely old pieces of furniture that she was going to move from West Eleventh Street for Sylphid. She couldn't have been happier. She was seventeen again. Magical. Enchanting. She was the come-hither girl in the silent films.

  "That night she gathered her courage and went upstairs bearing the drawing she'd made, the floor plan of the new apartment, and a list of the pieces from the house that would have gone to Sylphid anyway and so were hers to have forever right now. It took no time at all, of course, for Sylphid to register her objection and for Ira to be racing up the stairs to Sylphid's room. He found them in bed together. But no Mozart this time. Bedlam this time. What he saw was Eve on her back screaming and crying, and Sylphid in her pajamas sitting astride her, also screaming, also crying, her strong harpist's hands pinning Eve's shoulders to the bed. There were bits of paper all over the place—the floor plan for the new apartment—and there, on top of his wife, sat Sylphid, screaming, 'Can't you stand up to anyone? Won't you once stand up for your own daughter against him? Won't you be a mother, ever? Ever?'"