The Humbling

by Philip Roth

  However, since Pegeen had seemingly rejected Carol’s account of him, he thought it best to stay silent about that as well as everything else that he didn’t like. What would be the good of attacking her mother for butting in? Better to appear to laugh it off. If she should come to see him through her mother’s eyes, there was nothing he could say or do to stop her anyway.

  “You’re wonderful to me,” Pegeen said to him. “You’re what the doctor ordered.”

  “And you to me,” he said, and he left it at that. He didn’t go on from there to add, “As for your parents, I’d just as soon spare them, but I can’t arrange my life according to their feelings. Their feelings don’t matter that much to me, frankly, and at this stage of the game they really shouldn’t matter that much to you either.” No, he would not take off in that direction. Instead he would sit tight and be patient and hope the family would fade away.

  The next day Pegeen devoted to stripping the wallpaper in her study. The wallpaper had been chosen by Victoria many years before, and though Axler didn’t care about it one way or another, Pegeen couldn’t stand the look of it and asked if she could take it down. He told her the room was hers to do with as she liked, as was the upstairs back bedroom and the bathroom beside it, as indeed was every room in the house. He told her he could easily get a painter in to do the job, but she insisted on stripping the walls and painting them herself, thereby making the study officially hers. She had all the necessary tools for stripping wallpaper at her house, and she had brought them with her to begin the job that Sunday, the very day after her mother, down in New York, had questioned the wisdom of her being there at all. He must have gone in to watch her removing the wallpaper ten times during the course of the day, and each time came away with the same reassuring thought: she wouldn’t be working away like that if Carol had succeeded in persuading her to leave him. She wouldn’t be doing what she was doing if she weren’t planning to stay.

  That evening Pegeen drove back to the college, where she had a class to teach early the following morning. When the phone rang around ten on Sunday night he thought it was she who was calling to say that she was safely home. It wasn’t. It was the jilted dean. “Be forewarned, Mr. Famous: she’s desirable, she’s audacious, and she’s utterly ruthless, utterly cold-hearted, incomparably selfish, and completely amoral.” And with that, the dean hung up.

  THE NEXT MORNING Axler dropped off his car to be serviced, and the mechanic gave him a ride back home in his tow truck. He would return the car to Axler at the end of the day when the job was done. Around noon, when Axler went into the kitchen to make a sandwich for himself, he happened to look out the window and saw something dart across the field adjacent to the barn and then disappear behind it. It was a person this time, not a possum. He stood back from the kitchen window and waited to see if perhaps there was a second, third, or fourth person lurking anywhere else. There had been a worrisome series of break-ins throughout the county in recent months, mainly into unoccupied houses owned by weekenders, and he wondered if the absence of a car in his carport had caught the attention of the robbers and made him a target for a daytime theft. Quickly, he headed for the attic to get his shotgun and load it with shells. Then he went back downstairs to survey his property from the kitchen window. A hundred yards to the north, on the road that ran perpendicular to his, he could see a parked car, but it was too far for him to make out whether there was anyone inside it. It was unusual to see a car parked there at any time of the day or night—there was a thickly wooded hill on the far side of the road, and on his side, open fields leading up to his barn, carport, and house. Suddenly the person hiding back of the barn came sneaking along the side of the barn and made a rush for the front of the house. From the kitchen he saw that the intruder was a tall, thin, redheaded woman dressed in jeans and a navy blue ski jacket. She was peering into the living room through a front window. As he was still uncertain whether or not she was alone, for the moment he froze, the gun in his hands. Soon she began to move from one window to the next, stopping each time to get a good look at the room inside. He slipped out of the house through the back door and, without her seeing him, came to within ten feet of where she was staring into one of the living room windows on the south side of the house.

  Aiming the rifle at her, he spoke. “What can I do for you, lady?”

  “Oh!” she cried when she turned and saw him. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “Are you alone?”

  “Yes. I’m alone. I’m Louise Renner.”

  “You’re the dean.”

  “Yes.”

  She did not look much older than Pegeen, but she was a good deal taller, only inches shorter than he was, and what with her erect carriage and the red hair pulled away from her high forehead and knotted severely at the back of her neck, there was a heroically statuesque aura to this woman. “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked her.

  “I’m trespassing, I know. I intended no harm. I thought no one was home.”

  “Have you been here before?”

  “Only to drive by.”

  “Why?”

  “Could you lower that gun? It’s making me very nervous.”

  “Well, you made me nervous, peeking into my windows.”

  “I’m sorry. I apologize. I’ve been stupid. This is shameful. I’ll go.”

  “What were you up to?”

  “You know what I was up to,” she said.

  “You tell me.”

  “I only wanted to see where she goes every weekend.”

  “You’re in a bad way. You drove from Vermont to find that out.”

  “She promised we’d be together forever, and three weeks later she left. I apologize again. This has never happened to me before. I should never have come here.”

  “And it probably doesn’t help much, your meeting me.”

  “It doesn’t.”

  “It makes you boil with jealousy,” he said.

  “With hatred, if you want the truth.”

  “It’s you who phoned last night.”

  “I’m not completely in charge of myself,” she replied.

  “You’re obsessed, so you phone, you’re obsessed, so you stalk. You’re a very attractive woman nonetheless.”

  “I’ve never been told that before by a man with a gun.”

  “I don’t know why she left you for me,” he said.

  “Oh, don’t you?”

  “You’re a red-haired Valkyrie and I’m an old man.”

  “An old man who’s a star, Mr. Axler. Don’t pretend to be no one.”

  “Would you like to come inside?” he asked.

  “Why? Do you want to seduce me too? Is that your specialty, retooling lesbians?”

  “Madam, it isn’t I who was the Peeping Tom. It isn’t I who phoned her parents in Michigan at midnight. It isn’t I who anonymously phoned ‘Mr. Famous’ last night. No need to take the accusatory tone so quickly.”

  “I’m not myself.”

  “Do you think she’s worth it?”

  “No. Of course not,” she said. “She’s not at all beautiful. She’s not that intelligent. And she’s not that grown up. She’s an unusually childish person for her age. She’s a kid, really. She turned her Montana lover into a man. She’s turned me into a beggar. Who knows what she’s turning you into. She leaves a trail of disaster. Where does the power come from?”

  “Take a guess,” he said.

  “Is it that that makes for disaster?” the dean asked.

  “Something about her sexually is very potent,” he said, and saw her cringe at the words. But then it could not be easy for the loser to stand there and confront the person who had won.

  “There’s plenty that’s potent,” the dean said. “She’s a girl-boy. She’s a child-adult. There’s an adolescent in her that’s not grown up. She’s a cunning naif. But it’s not her sexuality on its own that does it—it’s us. It’s we who endow her with the power to wreck. Pegeen’s nobody, you know.”

  “You
wouldn’t be suffering so if she were nobody. She wouldn’t be here if she were nobody. Look, you might as well step inside. Then you can see everything up close.” And he could hear more about Pegeen, seared though her observations would be by Pegeen’s having “exploited” her. Yes, he wanted to hear her speak out of the depths of her wound about the closest person on earth to him.

  “This has been more than enough,” the dean said.

  “Come inside,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Are you afraid of me?” he asked.

  “I’ve done something foolish for which I apologize. I’ve trespassed and I’m sorry. And now I’d like you to let me go.”

  “I’m not holding you. You have a way of trying to turn the moral tables on me. But I didn’t invite you here in the first place.”

  “Then why do you want me to come inside? Be cause of the triumph it would be to sleep with the woman that Pegeen used to sleep with?”

  “I have no such ambition. I’m satisfied with things as they are. I was being polite. I could offer you a cup of coffee.”

  “No,” the dean said coldly. “No, you want to fuck me.”

  “Is that what you want me to want?”

  “That is what you want.”

  “Is that what you came here to try to get me to do? So as to pay Pegeen back in kind?”

  All at once she could conceal her misery no longer and burst into tears. “Too late, too late,” she sobbed.

  He did not understand what she was referring to, but he didn’t ask. She cried with her face buried in her hands while he turned and, with the gun at his side, went back into the house through the rear door, trying to believe that nothing Louise had said about Pegeen, either there outside the house or the night before on the phone, could possibly be taken seriously.

  When he called Pegeen that night he made no reference to what had happened that afternoon nor did he tell Pegeen about Louise’s visit when she came for the weekend, nor, while they were having sex, was he able to keep the red-haired Valkyrie out of his mind and the fantasy of what hadn’t happened.

  3

  The Last Act

  THE PAIN FROM the spinal condition made it impossible for him to fuck her from above or even from the side, and so he lay on his back and she mounted him, supporting herself on her knees and her hands so as not to lower her weight onto his pelvis. At first she lost all her know-how up there and he had to guide her with his two hands to give her the idea. “I don’t know what to do,” Pegeen said shyly. “You’re on a horse,” Axler told her. “Ride it.” When he worked his thumb into her ass she sighed with pleasure and whispered, “Nobody’s ever put anything in there before”—”Unlikely,” he whispered back—and when later he put his cock in there, she took as much as she could of it until she couldn’t take any more. “Did it hurt?” he asked her. “It hurt, but it’s you.” Often she would hold his cock in her palm afterward and stare as the erection subsided. “What are you contemplating?” he asked. “It fills you up,” she said, “the way dildos and fingers don’t. It’s alive. It’s a living thing.” She quickly mastered riding the horse, and soon while she worked slowly up and down she began to say, “Hit me,” and when he hit her, she said mockingly, “Is that as hard as you can do it?” “Your face is already red.” “Harder,” she said. “Okay, but why?” “Because I’ve given you permission to do it. Because it hurts. Because it makes me feel like a little girl and it makes me feel like a whore. Go ahead. Harder.”

  She had a small plastic bag of sex toys that she brought with her one weekend, and she spilled them out on the sheets when they were getting ready for bed. He’d seen his share of dildos, but never, other than in pictures, the strap-on leather harness that held the dildo secure and enabled one woman to mount and penetrate another. He’d asked her to bring her toys with her, and now he watched as she pulled the harness over her thighs and on up to her hips, where she tightened it like a belt. She looked like a gunslinger getting dressed, a gunslinger with a swagger. Then she inserted a green rubber dildo into a slot in the harness that was just about level with her clitoris. She stood alongside the bed wearing only that. “Let me see yours,” she said. He removed his pants and threw them over the side of the bed while she grabbed the green cock and, having lubricated it first with baby oil, pretended to masturbate like a man. Admiringly he said, “It looks authentic.” “You want me to fuck you with it.” “No, thanks,” he said. “I wouldn’t hurt you,” she said cajolingly, kittenishly lowering her voice. “I promise to be very gentle with you,” she said. “Funny, but you don’t look like you’ll be gentle.” “You mustn’t be deceived by appearances. Oh, let me,” she said, laughing, “you’ll like it. It’s a new frontier.” “You’ll like it. No, I’d prefer you to suck me off,” he said. “While I wear my cock,” she said. “Yes.” “While I wear my big thick green cock.” “That’s what I want.” “While I wear my big green cock and you play with my tits.” “That sounds right.” “And after I suck you off,” she said, “you’ll suck me off. You’ll go down on my big green cock.” “I could do that,” he said. “So—that you could do. You draw strange boundaries. In any event, you should know you’re still a very twisted man to be turned on by a girl like me.” “I may well be a twisted man, but I don’t believe you qualify as a girl like you any longer.” “Oh, don’t you now?” “Not with that two-hundred-dollar haircut. Not with those clothes. Not with your own mother following your fashion in footwear.” Her hand continued slowly pumping the dildo. “You really think you’ve fucked the lesbian out of me in ten months?” “Are you telling me that you’re still sleeping with women?” he asked. She just kept pumping the dildo. “Are you, Pegeen?” With her free hand she held up two fingers. “What does that mean?” he asked. “Twice.” “With Louise?” “Don’t be crazy.” “With whom, then?” She flushed. “Two teams of girls were playing softball on the field I drive by on the way to school. I parked the car and I got out and went over and stood by the bench.” After a pause, she confessed, “When the game was over the pitcher with the blond ponytail came to the house with me.” “And the second time?” “The other pitcher with the blond ponytail.” “That leaves quite a few players waiting their turn,” he said. “I didn’t intend to do it,” she said, still stroking the green cock. “Perhaps, Pegeen Mike,” he said, falling into the Irish accent he hadn’t used since acting in Playboy, “you should tell me if you have plans to do it again. I’d rather you wouldn’t,” he said, knowing himself helpless to hold on to her and keep her his alone, knowing that his ardor had been laughable—and trying to hide his feelings behind the brogue. “I told you, I wasn’t planning to do it at all,” and then, either because desire had overpowered her or because she wanted to shut him up, she lowered her lips down the length of his cock while his gaze remained hypnotically fastened to hers, and the helplessness in him, the knowledge that the affair was a futile folly and that Pegeen’s history was unmalleable and Pegeen unattainable and that he was bringing a new misfortune down on his head, began to abate. The oddity of this combination would have put off many people. Only the oddity was what was so exciting. But the terror remained too, the terror of going back to being completely finished. The terror of becoming the next Louise, the reproachful, crazed, avenging ex.

  PEGEEN’S FATHER hadn’t helped things any when he had come to see her in New York on the Saturday following her mother’s visit. Asa picked up where Carol had left off in citing the dangers of their liaison, moving from her lover’s perilous age to his perilous psychiatric condition. Axler’s strategy remained the same, however: tolerate whatever you hear; don’t rush to challenge the parents so long as Pegeen doesn’t yield.

  “Your mother was right—that’s a wonderful haircut,” she’d reported her father’s telling her. “And she was right about your clothes too,” he’d said. “Yes? Do you think I look nice?” “You look terrific,” he’d said. “Better than I used to?” “Different. Quite different.” “Do I look more like the daughter
you would have liked to have had?” “You certainly have an air you never had before. Now tell me about Simon.” “After the hard time he had at the Kennedy Center,” she’d said, “he wound up at a psychiatric hospital. Is that what you want to talk about?” she’d asked. “Yes, it is,” he’d said. “We all have serious problems, Dad.” “We all have serious problems but we don’t all wind up in psychiatric hospitals.” “While we’re at it,” she’d said, “what about the difference in age? Don’t you want to ask about that?” “Let me ask you something else: are you starstruck, Pegeen? You know how certain kinds of characters carry around their force field, an encircling electric force field? It comes, in his case, with being a star. Are you starstruck?” She’d laughed. “At the beginning, probably. By this time, I assure you, he’s just himself.” “May I ask how committed you are to each other?” he’d said. “We don’t really talk about it.” “Maybe you ought to talk about it with me then. Are you going to marry him, Pegeen?” “I don’t think he’s interested in marrying anyone.” “Are you?” “Why are you treating me as though I’m twelve?” she’d said. “Because it may be that where men are concerned you are more twelve than forty. Look, Simon Axler’s an intriguing actor, and probably to a woman an intriguing man. But he is the age he is, and you are the age you are. He has had the life he’s had, with its triumphant ups and its cataclysmic downs, and you have had the life you have had. And because those downs of his worry me greatly, I’m not going to talk about them as glibly as you do. I’m not going to tell you that I’m not going to try to bring any pressure to bear on you. I am going to do just that.”