by Philip Roth
Sheila had been with Merry and she had told him nothing.
All the trust between them, like all the happiness he'd ever known (like the killing of Fred Conlon—like everything), had been an accident.
She'd been with Merry and said nothing.
And said nothing now. The eagerness with which others spoke seemed, under the peculiar intensity of her gaze, to strike her as a branch of pathology. Why would anyone say that? She herself was to say nothing all evening, nothing about Linda Lovelace or Richard Nixon or H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, her advantage over other people being that her head was not filled by what filled everybody else's head. This way of hers, of lying in wait behind herself, the Swede had once taken to be a mark of her superiority. Now he thought, "Icy bitch. Why?" Once she had said to him, "The influence you allow others to have on you, it's absolute. Nothing so captivates you as another person's needs." And he had said, "I think you are describing Sheila Salzman," and, as always, he was wrong.
He thought she was omniscient and all she was was cold.
Whirling about inside him now was a frenzied distrust of everyone. The excision of certain assurances, the last assurances, made him feel as though he had gone in one day from being five to being one hundred. It would give him comfort, he thought, it would help him right then if, of all things, he knew that resting out in the pasture beyond their dinner table was Dawn's herd, with Count, the big bull, protecting them. If Dawn still had Count, if only Count....A relief-filled, realityless moment passed before he realized that of course it would be a comfort to have Count roaming the dark pasture among the cows, because then Merry would be roaming among the guests, here, Merry, in her circus pajamas, leaning up against the back of her father's chair, whispering into her father's ear. Mrs. Orcutt drinks whiskey. Mrs. Umanoff has BO. Dr. Salzman is bald. A mischievous intelligence that was utterly harmless—back then unanarchic and childish and well within bounds.
Meanwhile he heard himself saying, "Dad, take some more steak," in what he knew was a hopeless effort—a good son's ef fort—to get his self-abandoned father to be, if not tranquil, less insistently chagrined over the inadequacies of the non-Jewish human race.
"I'll tell you who I'll take some steak for—for this young lady." Spearing a slice from the platter that one of the serving girls was holding beside him, he dumped it onto Jessie's plate; he had taken Jessie on as a full-scale project. "Now pick up your knife and fork and eat," he told her, "you could use some red meat. Sit up straight," and, as though she believed he could well resort to violence if she did otherwise, Jessie Orcutt drunkenly mumbled, "I was going to," but began to fiddle with the meat in such a clumsy way that the Swede feared his father was going to start cutting her food for her. All that crude energy that, try as it might, could not remake the troubled world.
"But this is serious business, this children business." Having gotten Jessie taking nourishment, he was in a state again about Deep Throat. "If that isn't serious, what is anymore?"
"Dad," said the Swede, "what Shelly is saying is not that it's not serious. He agrees it's serious. He's saying that once you've made your case to an adolescent child, you've made your case and you can't then take these kids and lock them up in their rooms and throw away the key."
His daughter was an insane murderer hiding on the floor of a room in Newark, his wife had a lover who dry-humped her over the sink in their family kitchen, his ex-mistress had knowingly brought disaster upon his house, and he was trying to propitiate his father with on-the-one-hand-this and on-the-other-hand-that.
"You'd be surprised," Shelly told the old man, "how much the kids today have learned to take in their stride."
"But degrading things should not be taken in their stride! I say lock them in their rooms if they take this in their stride! I remember when kids used to be at home doing their homework and not out seeing movies like this. This is the morality of a country that we're talking about. Well, isn't it? Am I nuts? It is an affront to decency and to decent people."
"And what," Marcia asked him, "is so inexhaustibly interesting about decency?"
The question so surprised him that it left him looking a little frantically around the table for somebody with an opinion learned enough to subdue this woman.
It turned out to be Orcutt, that great friend of the family. Bill Orcutt was coming to Lou Levov's aid. "And what is wrong with decency?" Orcutt asked, smiling broadly at Marcia.
The Swede could not look at him. On top of all the things he could not think about there were two people—Sheila and Orcutt—he could not look at. Did Dawn consider Bill Orcutt handsome? He never thought so. Round face, snout nose, puckering lower lip... piggy-looking bastard. Must be something else that drove her to that frenzy over the kitchen sink. What? The easy assurance? Was that what got her going? The comfort taken by Bill Orcutt in being Bill Orcutt, his contentment in being Bill Orcutt? Was it because he wouldn't dream of slighting you even if both you and he knew that you weren't up to snuff? Was it his appropriateness that got her going like that, the flawless appropriateness, how very appropriately he played his role as steward of the Morris County past? Was it the sense he exuded of never having had to grub for anything or take shit from anyone or be at a loss as to how to behave even when the wife on his arm was a hopeless drunk? Was it because he'd entered the world expecting things not even a Weequahic three-letterman begins to expect, that none of us begin to expect, that the rest of us, if we even get those things by working our asses off for them, still never feel entitled to? Was that why she was in heat over the sink—because of his inbred sense of entitlement? Or was it the laudable environmentalism? Or was it the great art? Or was it simply his cock? Is that it, Dawn dear? I want an answer! I want it tonight! 75 it just his cock?
The Swede could not stop imagining the particulars of Orcutt fucking his wife any more than he could stop imagining the particulars of the rapists fucking his daughter. Tonight the imagining would not let him be.
"Decency?" Marcia said to Orcutt, foxily smiling back at him. "Much overvalued, wouldn't you say, the seductions of decency and civility and convention? Not the richest response to life I can think of."
"So what do you recommend for 'richness'?" Orcutt asked her. "The high road of transgression?"
The patrician architect was amused by the literature professor and the menacing figure she tried to cut in order to appall the squares. Amused he was. Amused! But the Swede could not turn the dinner party into a battle for his wife. Things were bad enough without colliding with Orcutt in front of his parents. All he had to do was to not listen to him. Yet each time that Orcutt spoke, every word antagonized him, convulsed him with spite and hatred and sinister thoughts; and when Orcutt wasn't speaking, the Swede was constantly looking down the table to see what in God's name there was in that face that could so excite his wife.
"Well," Marcia was saying, "without transgression there isn't very much knowledge, is there?"
"My God," cried Lou Levov, "that's one I never heard before. Excuse me, Professor, but where the hell do you get that idea?"
"The Bible," said Marcia, deliciously, "for a start."
"The Bible? Which Bible?"
"The one that begins with Adam and Eve. Isn't that what they tell us in Genesis? Isn't that what the Garden of Eden story is telling us?"
"What? Telling us what?"
"Without transgression there is no knowledge." "Well, that ain't what they taught me," he replied, "about the Garden of Eden. But then I never got past eighth grade."
"What did they teach you, Lou?"
"That when God above tells you not to do something, you damn well don't do it—that's what. Do it and you pay the piper. Do it and you will suffer from it for the rest of your days."
"Obey the good Lord above," said Marcia, "and all the terrible things will vanish."
"Well ... yes," he replied, though without conviction, realizing that he was being mocked. "Look, we are way off the subject—we are not talking about
the Bible. Forget the Bible. This is no place to talk about the Bible. We are talking about a movie where a grown woman, from all reports, goes in front of a movie camera, and for money, openly, for millions and millions of people to see, children, everyone, does everything she can think of that is degrading. That's what we're talking about."
"Degrading to whom?" Marcia asked him.
"To her, for God's sake. Number one, her. She has made herself into the scum of the earth. You can't tell me you are in favor of that"
"Oh, she hasn't made herself into the scum of anything, Lou."
"To the contrary," said Orcutt, laughing. "She has eaten of the Tree of Knowledge."
"And," announced Marcia, "made herself into a superstar. The highest of the high. I think Miss Lovelace is having the time of her life."
"Adolf Hitler had the time of his life, Professor, shoveling Jews into the furnace. That does not make it right. This is a woman who is poisoning young minds, poisoning the country, and in the bargain she is making herself the scum of the earth—period!"
There was nothing inactive in Lou Levov when he argued, and it looked as though just observing the phenomenon of an opinionated old man, fettered still to his fantasy of the world, was all that was prompting Marcia to persist. To bait and bite and draw blood. Her sport. The Swede wanted to kill her. Leave him alone! Leave him alone and he'll shut up! It's no big deal getting him to say more and more and more—so stop it!
But this problem that he had long ago learned to circumnavigate, in part by subduing his own personality, seemingly subjugating it to his father's while maneuvering around Lou where he could—this problem of the father, of maintaining filial love against the onslaught of an unrelenting father—was not a problem that she'd had decades of experience integrating into her life. Jerry just told their father to fuck off; Dawn was driven almost crazy by him; and Sylvia Levov stoically and impatiently endured him, her only successful form of resistance being to freeze him out and live with the isolation—and see more of herself evaporating year by year. But Marcia took him on as the fool that he was for still believing in the power of his indignation to convert the corruptions of the present into the corruptions of the past.
"So what would you want her to be instead, Lou? A cocktail waitress?" Marcia asked.
"Why not? That's a job."
"Not much of one," Marcia replied. "Not one that would interest anyone here."
"Oh?" said Lou Levov. "They'd prefer what she does instead?"
"I don't know," said Marcia. "We'll have to poll the girls. Which would you prefer," she said to Sheila, "cocktail waitress or porn star?"
But Sheila was not about to be engulfed in Marcia's mockery, and with eyes that seemed to stare past it and right on through to the egotism, she gave her unequivocal reply. The Swede remembered that after Sheila had first met Marcia and Barry Umanoff here, at the Old Rimrock house, he had asked her, "How can he love this person?" and instead of answering him as Dawn did, "Because he's a ball-less wonder," Sheila had replied, "By the end of a dinner party, everybody is probably thinking that about somebody. Sometimes everybody is thinking that about everybody." "Do you?" he'd asked her. "I think that about couples all the time," she'd said.
The wise woman. And yet this wise woman had harbored a murderer.
"What about Dawn?" Marcia asked. "Cocktail waitress or porno actress?"
Smiling sweetly, exhibiting her best Catholic schoolgirl posture—the girl who makes the nuns happy by sitting at her desk without slouching—Dawn said, "Up yours, Marcia."
"What kind of conversation is this?" Lou Levov asked.
"A dinner conversation," Sylvia Levov replied.
"And what makes you so blasé?" he asked her.
"I'm not blasé. I'm listening."
Now Bill Orcutt said, "Nobody's polled you, Marcia. Which would you prefer, assuming you had the choice?"
She laughed merrily at the slighting innuendo. "Oh, they've got big fat mamas in dirty movies. They, too, appear in the dreams of men. And not only for comic relief. Listen, you folks are too hard on Linda. Why is it that if a girl takes off her clothes in Atlantic City it's for a scholarship and makes her an American goddess, but if she takes off her clothes in a sex flick it's for filthy money and makes her a whore? Why is that? Why? All right—nobody knows. But seriously, folks, I love this word 'scholarship.' A hooker comes to a hotel room. The guy asks her how much she gets. She says, 'Well, if you want blank I get a three-hundred-dollar scholarship. And if you want blank-blank I get a five-hundred-dollar scholarship. And if you want blank-blank-blank—'"
"Marcia," said Dawn, "try as you will, you can't get under my skin tonight."
"Can't I?"
"Not tonight."
There was a beautiful floral arrangement at the center of the table. "From Dawn's garden," Lou Levov had told them all proudly as they were sitting down to eat. There were also large platters of the beefsteak tomatoes, sliced thickly, dressed in oil and vinegar, and encircled by slices of red onion fresh from the garden. And there were two wooden buckets—old feed buckets that they'd picked up at a junk shop in Clinton for a dollar apiece—each lined gaily with a red bandanna and brimming with the ears of corn that Orcutt had helped her shuck. Cradled in wicker baskets near either end of the table were freshly baked loaves of French bread, those new baguettes from McPherson's, reheated in the oven and pleasant to tear apart with your hands. And there was good strong Burgundy wine, half a dozen bottles of the Swede's best Pommard, four of them open on the table, bottles that five years back he had laid down for drinking in 1973—according to his wine register, Pom mards laid down in his cellar just one month to the day before Merry killed Dr. Conlon. Yes, earlier in the evening he had found 1/3/68 inscribed, in his handwriting, in the spiral notebook he used for recording the details of each new purchase..."1/3/68" he had written, with no idea that on 2/3/68 his daughter would go ahead and outrage all of America, except perhaps for Professor Marcia Umanoff.
The two high school kids who were doing the serving emerged from the kitchen every few minutes, silently offering around the steaks he'd cooked, arranged on pewter platters, all carved up and running with blood. The Swede's set of carving knives were from Hoffritz, the best German stainless steel. He'd gone over to New York to buy the set and the big carving block for their first Thanksgiving in the Old Rimrock house. He once had cared about all that stuff. Loved to hone the blade on the long conical file before he went after the bird. Loved the sound of it. The sad inventory of his domestic bounty. Wanted his family to have the best. Wanted his family to have everything.
"Please," said Lou Levov, "can I get an answer about the effect of this on the children? You are all way, way off the topic. Haven't we seen enough tragedy with the young children? Pornography. Drugs. The violence."
"Divorce," Marcia threw in to help him out.
"Professor, don't get me started on divorce. You understand French?" he asked her.
"I do if I have to," she said, laughing.
"Well, I got a son down in Florida, Seymour's brother, whose spécialité is divorce, I thought his spécialité was cardiac surgery. But no, it's divorce. I thought I sent him to medical school—I thought that's where all the bills were coming from. But no, it was divorce school. That's what he's got the diploma in—divorce. Has there ever been a more terrible thing for a child than the specter of divorce? I don't think so. And where will it end? What is the limit? You didn't all grow up in this kind of world. Neither did I. We grew up in an era when it was a different place, when the feeling for community, home, family, parents, work ... well, it was different. The changes are beyond conception. I sometimes think that more has changed since 1945 than in all the years of history there have ever been. I don't know what to make of the end of so many things. The lack of feeling for individuals that a person sees in that movie, the lack of feeling for places like what is going on in Newark—how did this happen? You don't have to revere your family, you don't have to revere your country
, you don't have to revere where you live, but you have to know you have them, you have to know that you are part of them. Because if you don't, you are just out there on your own and I feel for you. I honestly do. Am I right, Mr. Orcutt, or am I wrong?"
"To wonder where the limit is?" Orcutt replied.
"Well, yes," said Lou Levov, who, the Swede observed—and not for the first time—had spoken of children and violence without any sense that the subject intersected with the life of his immediate family. Merry had been used for somebody else's evil purposes—that was the story to which it was crucial for them all to remain anchored. He kept such a sharp watch over each and every one of them to be certain that nobody wavered for a moment in their belief in that story. No one in this family was going to fall into doubt about Merry's absolute innocence, not so long as he was alive.
Among the many things the Swede could not think about from within the confines of his box was what would happen to his father when he learned that the death toll was four.
"You're right," Bill Orcutt was saying to Lou Levov, "to wonder where the limit is. I think everybody here is wondering where the limit is and worrying where the limit is every time they look at the papers. Except the professor of transgression. But then we're all stifled by convention—we're not great outlaws like William Burroughs and the Marquis de Sade and the holy saint Jean Genet. The Let Every Man Do Whatever He Wishes School of Literature. The brilliant school of Civilization Is Oppression and Morality Is Worse."
And he did not blush. "Morality" without batting an eye. "Transgression" as though he were a stranger to it, as though it were not he of all the men here—William III, latest in that long line of Orcutts advertised in their graveyard as virtuous men—who had transgressed to the utmost by violating the unity of a family already half destroyed.
His wife had a lover. And it was for the lover that she'd undergone the rigors of a face-lift, to woo and win him. Yes, now he understood the gushing letter profusely thanking the plastic surgeon for spending "the five hours of your time for my beauty," thanking him as if the Swede had not paid twelve thousand dollars for those five hours, plus five thousand more for the clinic suite where they had spent the two nights. It is quite wonderful, dear doctor. It is as though I have been given a new life. Both from within and from the outside. In Geneva he had sat up with her all night, held her hand through the nausea and the pain, and all of it for the sake of somebody else. It was for the sake of somebody else that she was building the house. The two of them were designing the house for each other.
