by Philip Roth
He went with her to an expensive hairdresser’s in the East Sixties. A young Japanese woman cut Pegeen’s hair after looking at the two photos they’d brought. He had never seen Pegeen look as disarmed as she did sitting in the chair in front of the mirror after her hair had been washed. He’d never before seen her look so weakened or so at a loss as to how to behave. The sight of her, silent, sheepish, sitting there at the edge of humiliation, unable even to look at her reflection, gave the haircut an entirely transformed meaning, igniting all his self-mistrust and causing him to wonder, as he had more than once, if he wasn’t being blinded by a stupendous and desperate illusion. What is the draw of a woman like this to a man who is losing so much? Wasn’t he making her pretend to be someone other than who she was? Wasn’t he dressing her up in costume as though a costly skirt could dispose of nearly two decades of lived experience? Wasn’t he distorting her while telling himself a lie—and a lie that in the end might be anything but harmless? What if he proved to be no more than a brief male intrusion into a lesbian life?
But then Pegeen’s thick brown shiny hair was cut —cut to below the base of her neck in a choppy way so none of the layers were even, a look that gave her precisely the right cared-for devil-may-care air of slight dishevelment—and she seemed so transformed that all these unanswered questions ceased to trouble him; they did not even require serious thought. It took her a little longer than it took him to be convinced that the two of them had chosen correctly, but in only a few days the haircut and all it signified about her allowing him to shape her, to determine what she should look like and advance an idea of what her true life was, appeared to have become more than just acceptable. Perhaps because she looked so great in his eyes she did not bridle at continuing to submit to his ministrations, alien though that might have been to a lifelong sense of herself. If indeed hers was the will that was submitting—if indeed it wasn’t she who had taken him over completely, taken him up and taken him over.
*
LATE ONE FRIDAY AFTERNOON Pegeen arrived at his house in distress—out in Lansing her family had received a midnight phone call from Louise to tell them how she had been opportunistically exploited and deceived by their daughter.
“What else?” he said.
His question brought Pegeen close to tears. “She told them about you. She said I was living with you.”
“And what did they say to that?”
“My mother was the one who answered. He was asleep.”
“And how did she take it?”
“She asked me if it was true. I told her I wasn’t living with you. I told her we had become close friends.”
“What did your father say?”
“He never came to the phone.”
“Why didn’t he?”
“I don’t know. That miserable bitch! Why won’t she stop!” she cried. “That obsessive, possessive, jealous, rancorous bitch!”
“Does it really matter to you that she told your parents?”
“Doesn’t it matter to you?” Pegeen asked him.
“Only inasmuch as it troubles you. Otherwise not at all. I think it’s all to the good.”
“What do I say when I talk to my father?” she asked.
“Pegeen Mike—say whatever you like.”
“Suppose he decides not to talk to me at all.”
“I doubt that will happen.”
“Suppose he wants to talk to you.”
“Then he and I will talk,” Axler said.
“How angry is he?”
“Your father is a reasonable and sensible man. Why would he be angry?”
“Oh, that bitch—she is completely whacked. She’s out of control.”
“Yes,” he said, “the thought of you tortures her. But you’re not out of control, I’m not, and neither are your mother and father.”
“Then why didn’t my father speak to me?”
“If you’re so worried, call and ask him. Perhaps you’d like me to speak to him.”
“No, I’ll do it—I’ll do it myself.”
She waited until after they’d eaten before phoning Lansing, and then doing it from her study, behind the closed door. After fifteen minutes she came out carrying the phone and pointed with it toward him.
Axler took the phone. “Asa? Hello.”
“Hi there. I hear you seduced my daughter.”
“I’m having an affair with her, that is true.”
“Well, I can’t say I’m not a little astonished.”
“Well,” Axler replied with a laugh, “I can’t say that I’m not either.”
“When she told me she was going to visit you, I really never figured that this was in the cards,” Asa said.
“Well, I’m glad you’re all right with it,” Axler replied.
There was a pause before Asa answered, “Pegeen’s a free agent. She left her childhood long ago. Look, Carol wants to say hello,” Asa said and then passed the phone to his wife.
“Well, well,” Carol said, “who ever could have imagined this when we were all kiddies in New York?”
“No one,” Axler replied. “I couldn’t have imagined it the day she showed up here.”
“Is my daughter doing the right thing?” Carol asked him.
“I think so.”
“What is your plan?” Carol asked.
“I have no plan.”
“Pegeen has always surprised us.”
“She surprised me too,” Axler said. “I think she’s no less surprised.”
“Well, she surprised her friend Louise.”
He did not bother to reply that Louise was something of a surprise herself. Carol’s intention, clearly, was to be mild and friendly, but he was sure from the brittleness of her tone that the call was an ordeal and that she and Asa were simply doing the right thing, which was their way, doing the sensible thing that would make Pegeen happiest. They did not want to alienate her at forty as they had at twenty-three when she’d told them she was a lesbian.
IN FACT, CAROL FLEW in from Michigan the following Saturday to meet Pegeen in New York for lunch. Pegeen drove down to the city that morning and got back about eight that night. He had made dinner for them, and only when dinner was over did he ask her how it had gone.
“Well, what did she say?” Axler asked.
“Do you want me to be entirely honest?” Pegeen replied.
“Please,” he said.
“All right,” she said, “I’ll try to remember as exactly as I can. It was kind of the benign third degree. There was nothing vulgar or self-serving about her. Just Mother’s flat-out Kansas candor.”
“Go ahead.”
“You want to know everything,” Pegeen said.
“Yes,” he replied.
“Well, first off, at the restaurant, she breezed right by my table—she failed to recognize me. I said, ‘Mother,’ and then she turned back and she said, ‘Oh, my goodness, it’s my daughter. Don’t you look pretty.’ And I said, ‘Pretty? Didn’t you think I was pretty before?’ And she said, ‘A new hairdo, clothes of a kind I never saw you wear before.’ And I said, ‘More feminine, you mean.’ ‘Decidedly,’ she said, ‘yes. It’s very flattering, dear. How long has this been going on?’ I told her, and she said, ‘That’s a very nice haircut. It couldn’t have been inexpensive.’ And I said to her, ‘I’m just trying something new.’ And she said, ‘I guess you are trying something new, in many ways. I came out because I want to be sure that you have thought through all the implications of your affair.’ I told her that I wasn’t sure anyone ever thinks through being with someone romantically. I told her that it made me very happy right now. And so she said, ‘News reached us that he was in a psychiatric hospital. Some people say he was there six months, some say a year— I don’t really know the facts.’ I told her that you were there for twenty-six days a full twelve months ago and that it had to do with performance problems on the stage. I said that you temporarily lost your power to act, and separated from your acting, you came apart. I said that whatev
er emotional or mental problems you had then, they didn’t manifest themselves in our life together now. I said you were as sane or saner than anyone I’ve ever been with, and that when we’re together you seem stable and quite happy. And she asked, ‘Is he still in the same bind with his acting?’ And I said yes and no—you were, but I thought that as a result of meeting me and being with me, it was no longer the same tragedy it had been. It was now more like an athlete who’s been injured and sidelined and is waiting to heal. And she said, ‘You don’t feel you have to rescue him, do you?’ I assured her that I did not, and she asked how you filled your time, and I said, ‘He sees me. I think he plans to continue seeing me. He reads. He buys me clothes.’ Well, she leaped on that—’So these are clothes he bought for you. Well, I would think there might be a certain rescue fantasy working there.’ I told her that she was making too much of it and that it was just fun for both of us, and why couldn’t we leave it at that? I said, ‘He’s not trying to influence me in any way I don’t want to be influenced.’ She asked, ‘Do you go with him when he buys you clothes?’ And I said, ‘Usually. But again, I think it makes him happy. And I can see that in him. Since it happens to be an experiment I want to conduct as well,’ I told her, ‘I don’t see why anyone should be concerned.’ And that’s when the tenor of the conversation changed. She said, ‘Well, I have to tell you that I am concerned. You’re new to the world of men, and it strikes me as strange—or maybe not so strange— that the man you should choose to initiate this new life with is a man twenty-five years older than you are who has been through a breakdown that led to his being institutionalized. And who now is essentially unemployed. All those things don’t bode well to me.’ I told her that it didn’t seem any worse than the situation I was in before, with someone whom I once loved very much and who told me one morning, ‘I can’t go on in this body,’ and decided she wanted to be a man. And then I made my speech, the speech I’d prepared and recited aloud driving down. I said, ‘As for his age, Mother, I don’t see it as a problem. If I’m going to try to be attractive to men and also learn whether I am attracted to men, this seems to be the best measure of it. This person is the test. The twenty-five years register with me as twenty-five years more experience than someone would have if I were trying this with a man my own age. We’re not talking about getting married. I told you—we’re just enjoying each other. I’m enjoying him, in part, because he is twenty-five years older.’ And she said, ‘And he’s enjoying you because you’re twenty-five years younger.’ I said, ‘Don’t be offended, Mother, but are you at all jealous?’ And she laughed and said, ‘Dear, I’m sixty-three and happily married to your father for over forty years. It’s true,’ she said, ‘and you may get a kick out of knowing this, but when I played Pegeen Mike and Simon played Christy in the Synge play, I had a crush on him. Who didn’t? He was wildly attractive, energetic, exuberant, playful, he was a big forceful actor, a wonderful actor, already his talent obviously a huge cut above everyone else’s. So, yes, I had a crush, but I was already married and pregnant with you. The crush was something I passed through. I think I’ve seen him no more than ten times in the intervening years. I respect him enormously as an actor. But I continue to be concerned by that hospital stay. It’s no small thing for someone to commit himself to a psychiatric hospital and to be there for however long or short a period it was. Look,’ she said, ‘for me the important thing is that you’re not going into this blind. You don’t want to be doing something that, for lack of experience, a twentyyear-old might do. I don’t want you to act out of innocence.’ And I said, ‘I’m hardly innocent, Mother.’ I asked her what she was afraid might happen that couldn’t happen with anyone. And she said, ‘What am I afraid of? I’m afraid of the fact that he is growing older by the day. That’s the way it works. You’re sixty-five and then you’re sixty-six and then you’re sixty-seven, and so on. In a few years he’ll be seventy. You’ll be with a seventy-yearold man. And it won’t stop there,’ she told me. ‘After that he’ll become a seventy-five-year-old man. It never stops. It goes on. He’ll begin to have health problems such as the elderly have, and maybe things even worse, and you’re going to be the person responsible for his care. Are you in love with him?’ she said. I said I thought that I was. And she asked, ‘Is he in love with you?’ And I said I thought that you were. I said, ‘I think it’ll be fine, Mother. It has occurred to me that he has to worry more than I do. That this is a more precarious situation for him than it is for me.’ She asked, ‘How so?’ I said, ‘Well, as you say, I’m trying this for the first time. Although it’s a novelty for him as well, it’s not nearly as much of one as it is for me. I’ve been very surprised by how much I’ve enjoyed it. But I couldn’t yet declare that it’s definitely the permutation I will always want.’ And she said, ‘Well, all right, I don’t want to go on and on and give this an urgency it doesn’t have and may never have. I just thought it was important for me to see you, and I must say, once again, I’m very impressed by your appearance.’ And I asked her, ‘Does it make you think you would still have preferred a daughter who was straight?’ She said, ‘It makes me think that you would prefer not to be a lesbian any longer. You can, of course, do whatever you like. In your independent youth you educated us about that. But I can’t fail to notice the physical change. You’ve taken great care that everybody should notice that. You even do your eyes. It’s an impressive transformation.’ That’s when I said, ‘What do you think Dad would think?’ And she said, ‘He couldn’t be here because a new play opens in a few days and he can’t leave it. But he wanted to come to see you, and as soon as the play is on, he will come, if that’s all right with you. And then you can ask him directly what he thinks. So there we are. Want to go shopping?’ she said to me. ‘I’m admiring your shoes. Where’d you get them?’ I told her, and she said, ‘Would you object if I bought a pair like that? Want to go with me to get them?’ And so we took a taxi to Madison Avenue and she bought a pair of two-toned pink-and-beige patent leather pumps with a pointy toe and a kitten heel in her size. Now she’s walking around Michigan in my Prada shoes. She also admired my skirt, so we went shopping for a skirt for her cut like mine down in SoHo. Good ending, isn’t it? But late in the afternoon, you know what she said, before leaving for the airport with her bags from the shopping? This, and not the shoes, is the true ending. She said, ‘What you were trying to do with me at lunch, Pegeen, was make it sound like the sanest and most reasonable arrangement on the planet, when of course it isn’t. But people on the outside are only going to frustrate you if they try to talk you out of what you wake up every day wanting and what is buoying you above everybody’s humdrum sameness. I have to tell you that when I first learned of this I thought it was wacky and ill advised. And now that I’ve spoken with you and spent the day with you and been shopping with you for the first time, really, since you went off to college, now that I’ve seen that you’re completely calm, rational, and thoughtful about it, I still think it’s wacky and ill advised.’”
Here Pegeen stopped. It had taken her close to half an hour to repeat the conversation to him, and in that time he had not spoken or moved from his chair, nor had he told her to stop on any of those several occasions when he thought he’d heard enough. But it was not in his interest to tell her to stop—it was in his interest to find out everything, to hear everything, even, if he had to, to hear her say, “I couldn’t yet declare that it’s definitely the permutation I will always want.”
“That’s it. That’s all,” Pegeen said. “That’s pretty close to what was said.”
“Was it better or worse than you expected?” he asked.
“Much better. I was very anxious driving down there.”
“Well, it sounds as though you had no need to be. You handled yourself very well.”
“Then I was very anxious coming back, about telling you all this and knowing that, if I was truthful, you weren’t going to like everything you heard.”
“Well, there was no need for that ei
ther.”
“Really? I hope my telling you everything hasn’t turned you against my mother.”
“Your mother said what a mother would say. I understand.” He laughed and said, “I can’t say that I disagree with her.”
Softly, and flushing as she spoke, Pegeen said, “I hope it hasn’t turned you against me.”
“It’s made me admire you,” he said. “You didn’t flinch from anything, either in talking with her or now in talking with me.”
“Truly? You’re not hurt?”
“No.” But of course he was—hurt and angry. He had sat there listening quietly—intently listening as he’d been listening all his life, offstage and on—but he was particularly stung by Carol’s clarification of the aging process and the jeopardy in which it placed her daughter. Nor, however softly he now spoke, was he unperturbed by “wacky and ill advised.” The whole thing disgusted him, really. It might be all right if Pegeen were twenty-two and there were forty years’ difference between them, but why this peculiar proprietary relationship with an adventurous forty-year-old? And what the hell did a woman of forty care what her parents wanted? A part of them, he thought, should be happy that she was with him, if only from a venal point of view. Here is this eminent man with a lot of money who’s going to take care of her. After all, she’s not getting any younger herself. She settles down with someone who’s achieved something in life— what’s so wrong with that? Instead the message is: Don’t set yourself up to be caretaker of a crazy old guy.
