The Humbling

by Philip Roth

  And that he did—unlike the mother, he didn’t end the day shopping with his daughter but instead he phoned her at her house every night around dinnertime to continue, in much the same strong vein, the conversation that had begun at lunch in New York. Rarely did father and daughter speak for less than an hour.

  In bed, the evening after she’d seen her father in New York, Axler had said to her, “I want you to know, Pegeen, that I’m flabbergasted by all this stuff with your parents. I don’t understand the place they are coming to play in our lives. It seems entirely too large and, all things considered, a little absurd. On the other hand, I recognize that at any stage of life there are mysteries about people and their attachments to their parents that can be surprising. This being so, let me make a proposal: if you want me to fly out to Michigan and talk to your father, I’ll fly out to Michigan, and I’ll sit and listen to every word he wants to say, and when he tells me why he’s against this, I won’t even argue—I’ll side with him. I’ll tell him that everything he’s concerned about makes perfect sense and that I agree —it is an unlikely arrangement on the face of it, and there are, to be sure, risks involved. But the fact remains that his daughter and I feel as we do about each other. And the fact that he and Carol and I were friends as youngsters back in New York is of no relevance whatsoever. That’s the only defense I will make, Pegeen, if you want me to go and see him. It’s up to you. I’ll do it this week if you want me to. I’ll do it tomorrow if that’s what you want.”

  “His seeing me was quite enough,” she replied. “There’s no need for this to be carried further. Especially as you have made it clear that you think it’s already been carried too far.”

  “I’m not so sure you’re right,” he said. “Better to take on the raging father—”

  “But my father isn’t raging, it isn’t in his nature to rage, and I don’t think there’s any need to provoke a scene when there isn’t a scene in the offing.”

  He thought, Oh, there’s a scene in the offing all right—the two upstanding squares you have for parents are not through. But he only said to her, “Okay. I simply wanted to make the offer. It’s finally up to you.”

  But was that so? Wasn’t it up to him to neutralize them by opposing them rather than by simply leaving things to turn out opportunely on their own? He should, in fact, have accompanied her to New York—he should have insisted on being there and facing Asa down. Despite what Pegeen had said to assure him, he was reluctant to give up the idea that Asa was a father in a rage whom he should confront rather than flee. Are you starstruck? Of course that’s what he would believe, he who never got the big roles. Yes, thought Axler, that my fame stole away his only daughter, the fame that Asa himself could never garner.

  IT WAS in the middle of the next week that he got around to reading the previous Friday’s county newspaper and the front-page story about a murder that had taken place in a well-to-do suburban town some twenty-five miles away. A man in his forties, a successful plastic surgeon, had been shot dead by his estranged wife. The wife was Sybil Van Buren.

  The two were apparently living apart by then. She had driven to his house across town from hers, and as soon as he opened the door had shot him twice in the chest, killing him instantly. She had dropped the murder weapon on the doorstep, then gone back and sat in her parked car until the police came and took her to the station to be booked. When she had left home that morning, she had already arranged for the babysitter to spend the day with the two children.

  Axler phoned Pegeen and told her what had happened.

  “Did you think she could have done this?” Pegeen asked.

  “Such a helpless person? No. Never. She had the motive—the molestation—but homicide? She asked if I would murder him for her. She said, ‘I need someone to kill this evil man.’”

  “What a shocking story,” Pegeen said.

  “This fragile-looking woman built on the frailest, childlike scale. The least menacing person one could encounter.”

  “They’ll never convict her,” Pegeen said.

  “Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. Maybe she’ll plead temporary insanity and get off. But what will become of her then? What will become of the child? If the little girl wasn’t already doomed because of what the stepfather did, now she’s doomed because of what her mother’s done. Not to mention their little boy.”

  “Would you like me to come tonight? You sound shaky.”

  “No, no,” he said. “I’m all right. I’ve just never known anyone who’s killed somebody off the stage.”

  “I’m going to come over later,” Pegeen said.

  And when she did, they sat in the living room after dinner and he repeated to her in detail everything he remembered Sybil Van Buren saying to him at the hospital. He found her letter—the letter that had been mailed to him in care of Jerry’s office—and gave it to Pegeen to read.

  “The husband claimed to be innocent,” Axler explained. “He claimed she was seeing things.”

  “Was she?”

  “I didn’t think so. I saw her suffering. I believed her story.”

  During the day, he had read the article again and again and repeatedly looked at the photograph of Sybil that the paper had published, a studio portrait in which she looked less like a married woman in her thirties, let alone a Clytemnestra, than like a high school cheerleader, someone who as yet had been through nothing in life.

  The following day he phoned Information and, easy as that, got the Van Burens’ phone number. When he called, a woman answered who identified herself as Sybil’s sister. He told her who he was and told her about Sybil’s letter. He read it to her over the phone. They agreed she would pass it on to Sybil’s lawyer.

  “Are you able to see her?” he asked.

  “Only with the lawyer. She gets teary about not seeing the children. Otherwise she’s unnervingly calm.”

  “Does she talk about the murder?”

  “She says, ‘It had to be done.’ You’d think it was her fiftieth, not her first. She’s in a very strange state. The gravity seems to escape her. It’s as though the gravity is all behind her.”

  “For the moment,” he said.

  “I’ve been thinking the same. There’s a great crash going to occur. She won’t be living behind this placid mask for long. There must be a suicide watch on her cell. I’m frightened of what’s coming next.”

  “Of course. What she did in no way jibes with the woman I knew. Why did she do this after all this time?”

  “Because even when John moved out, he continued to deny everything and to tell her that she was delusional, and that put her into a mad frenzy. On the morning that she was going to see him, she told me that by whatever means it took she was going to extract a confession from him. I said, ‘Don’t see him. It will only drive you over the edge.’ And I was right. I was the one who had wanted her to go to the district attorney and bring charges. I was the one who told her that she should have him put behind bars. But she refused: he wasn’t a nobody and the case would wind up in the papers and on TV and Alison would get dragged into a courtroom nightmare to be exposed to yet more horror. Her saying this is why I never dreamed that extracting a confession ‘by any means’ would involve the use of his hunting rifle—using his hunting rifle might wind up in the papers too, you see. But when she got to John’s that Saturday morning she didn’t wait for him to let her into the house. She didn’t wait to hear him speak a single word. It isn’t that they had an argument and it escalated and she shot him. Seeing his face was all it took—right there in the front doorway, she pulled the trigger twice and he was dead. She told me, ‘He wanted mayhem, so I gave him mayhem.’ “

  “Does the little girl know anything?”

  “She hasn’t been told yet. That’s not going to be easy. Nothing about this is going to be easy. The late Dr. Van Buren made sure of that. The suffering that’s going to be Alison’s is unimaginable to me.”

  Axler repeated to himself for days afterward, The sufferi
ng that’s going to be Alison’s. It was probably the very thought that had driven Sybil to murder her husband—thereby enlarging Alison’s suffering forever.

  ONE NIGHT IN BED Pegeen said to him, “I’ve found a girl for you. She’s on the Prescott swim team. I swim with her in the afternoon. Lara. How would you like me to bring you Lara?”

  She was slowly rising and falling above him and all the lights were out, though the room was dimly lit by the full moon shining through the branches of the tall trees out back of the house.

  “Tell me about Lara,” he said.

  “Oh, you’d like her all right.”

  “Obviously you do already.”

  “I watch her in the pool. I watch her in the locker room. A rich kid. A privileged kid. She’s never known a minute’s hardship. She’s perfect. Blond. Crystal blue eyes. Long legs. Strong legs. Perfect breasts.”

  “How perfect?”

  “It makes you awfully hard to hear about Lara,” she said.

  “The breasts,” he said.

  “She’s nineteen. They’re solid and they’re just up there. Her cunt is shaved and there’s just a fringe of blond hair to either side.”

  “Who’s fucking her? The boys or the girls?”

  “I don’t know yet. But somebody’s been having some fun down there.”

  From then on Lara was with them whenever they wanted her.

  “You’re fucking her,” Pegeen would say. “That’s Lara’s perfect little pussy.”

  “You fucking her too?”

  “No. Just you. Close your eyes. You want her to make you come? You want Lara to make you come? All right, you blond little bitch—make him come!” Pegeen cried, and no longer did he have to tell her how to ride the horse. “Squirt it all over her. Now! Now! Yes, that’s it—squirt in her face!”

  They went to a local inn one night for dinner. From the rustic dining room you could see out over the road to a big lake emblazoned by the sunset. She wore her newest clothes; they’d gone shopping for them on an impulsive visit to New York the week before: a little clinging black jersey skirt, a red cashmere sleeveless shell with a red cashmere cardigan knotted over her shoulders, sheer black stockings, a soft leather shoulder bag trimmed with small leather streamers, and on her feet a pair of pointy black slingbacks cut to show the cleavage of the foot. She looked soft and curvaceous and enticing, red above and everything black from the waist down, and she carried herself with such casual comfort that she might have been dressing like that all her life. She wore the shoulder bag, as the saleswoman had suggested, with the strap slung across her body like a bandolier and the bag riding her hip.

  To try to prevent his back from locking and his leg from going dead, it was his habit to get up and walk around two or three times during a meal, and so after the main course and before dessert Axler stood and for the second time strolled through the restaurant and across the inn’s public sitting room and into the bar. There he saw an attractive young woman drinking by herself. She must have been in her twenties, and from the way she was talking to the bartender he could tell she was a little drunk. He smiled when she looked his way and, so as to prolong his stay, he asked the bartender if he knew the ball score. Then he asked her if she was local or staying at the inn. She said she had just taken a job at the antique shop down the road and had stopped in after work for a drink. He asked if she knew anything about antiques, and she said her parents owned an antique shop farther upstate. She had been working at a shop in Greenwich Village for three years and had decided to get away from the city and try her luck in Washington County. He asked how long she’d been out here, and she said she’d arrived only the month before. He asked what she was drinking, and when she told him he said, “Next one’s on me,” and indicated to the bartender that he should put the drink on his tab.

  When dessert arrived he said to Pegeen, “There’s a girl at the bar getting drunk.”

  “What does she look like?”

  “Like she can take care of herself.”

  “You want to?”

  “If you do,” he said.

  “How old is she?” she said.

  “I’d say twenty-eight. You’d be in charge. You and the green cock.”

  “You’d be in charge,” she said to him. “You and the real cock.”

  “We’d be in charge together,” he said.

  “I want to see her,” she said.

  He paid the bill and they left the restaurant and went to stand in the doorway of the bar. He stood behind Pegeen with his arms encircling her. He could feel her trembling with excitement as she watched the girl drinking at the bar. Her trembling thrilled him. It was as though they had merged into one maniacally tempted being.

  “You like her?” he whispered.

  “She looks as if she could be quite indecent, given half a chance. She looks like she’s ready for a life of crime.”

  “You want to take her home.”

  “She’s not Lara but she’d do.”

  “What if she vomits in the car?”

  “You think she’s about to?”

  “She’s been at it a long time. When she passes out at the house, how do we get rid of her?”

  “Murder her,” Pegeen said.

  While still closely holding Pegeen in front of him, he called across the bar, “Do you need a ride, young lady?”

  “Tracy.”

  “Do you need a ride, Tracy?”

  “I’ve got my car,” Tracy replied.

  “Are you in any shape to drive it? I can drop you off at home.” Pegeen was still quivering in his arms. She’s a cat, he thought, before the cat pounces, the falcon before it soars from the falconer’s wrist. The animal you can control—until you let it loose. He thought, I am providing her Tracy the way I give her the clothes. Everyone felt emboldened with Lara because there was no Lara there and so no consequences. This he knew to be different. It dawned on him that he was ceding all the power to Pegeen.

  “I can get my husband to pick me up,” Tracy said.

  He’d noticed earlier that she wore no wedding ring. “No, let us drive you. Where do you want to go?”

  Tracy mentioned a town twelve miles to the west.

  The bartender, who knew Axler lived in the opposite direction, went about his job as if he were a deaf-mute. Because of Axler’s movies, practically everyone in the rural town of nine hundred knew who he was, though few had any idea that his reputation rested on his lifetime’s achievement on the stage. The drunken young woman paid her bill and climbed off the stool and grabbed her jacket to leave. She was taller than he’d imagined and larger, too—a stray perhaps, but no waif—a buxom blond with an extensive body and a kind of ready-made Nordic prettiness. In all, a coarser, commonplace version of stately Louise.

  He put Tracy in the back seat with Pegeen and drove them along the dark country roads, empty of traffic, to his house. It was as though they were abducting her. The swiftness with which Pegeen moved did not take him by surprise. She was not constrained by inhibition or fear as she had been when she’d gotten her haircut, and he was already enthralled merely by what he could hear from the back of the car. In the bedroom at home Pegeen emptied onto the bed her plastic bag of implements, among them the toy-like cat-o’-nine-tails with its very soft, thin wisps of black unknotted leather.

  AXLER WONDERED what was going on in Tracy’s mind. She gets into a car with two people she’s never seen before, they drive her to a house on a dirt road deep in the country, and then she steps out of the car into a three-ring circus. She may be drunk but she’s also young. How oblivious to risk can she be? Or do Pegeen and I inspire trust? Or is risk what Tracy’s looking for? Or is she too drunk to care? He wondered if she had ever done anything like this before. He wondered again why she was doing it now. It didn’t make sense that this Tracy should fall into their laps to do all of the Lara-like stuff they’d been dreaming excitedly about in bed. Though what did make sense? His being unable to go out and act on a stage? His having been a psychiatr
ic inpatient? His conducting a love affair with a lesbian whom he’d first seen nursing at her mother’s breast?

  When a man gets two women together, it is not unusual for one of the women, rightly or wrongly feeling neglected, to wind up crying in a corner of the room. From how this was going so far, it looked as though the one who’d wind up crying in the corner would be him. Yet as he watched from the far side of the bed, he did not feel painfully overlooked. He had let Pegeen appoint herself ringmaster and would not participate until summoned. He would watch without interfering. First Pegeen stepped into the contraption, adjusted and secured the leather straps, and affixed the dildo so that it jutted straight out. Then she crouched above Tracy, brushing Tracy’s lips and nipples with her mouth and fondling her breasts, and then she slid down a ways and gently penetrated Tracy with the dildo. Pegeen did not have to force her open. She did not have to say a word—he imagined that if either one of them did begin to speak, it would be in a language unrecognizable to him. The green cock plunged in and out of the abundant naked body sprawled beneath it, slow at first, then faster and harder, then harder still, and all of Tracy’s curves and hollows moved in unison with it. This was not soft porn. This was no longer two unclothed women caressing and kissing on a bed. There was something primitive about it now, this woman-on-woman violence, as though, in the room filled with shadows, Pegeen were a magical composite of shaman, acrobat, and animal. It was as if she were wearing a mask on her genitals, a weird totem mask, that made her into what she was not and was not supposed to be. She could as well have been a crow or a coyote, while simultaneously Pegeen Mike. There was something dangerous about it. His heart thumped with excitement—the god Pan looking on from a distance with his spying, lascivious gaze.

  It was English that Pegeen spoke when she looked over from where she was, now resting on her back beside Tracy, combing the little black cat-o’-ninetails through Tracy’s long hair, and, with that kid-like smile that showed her two front teeth, said to him softly, “Your turn. Defile her.” She took Tracy by one shoulder, whispered “Time to change masters,” and gently rolled the stranger’s large, warm body toward his. “Three children got together,” he said, “and decided to put on a play,” whereupon his performance began.