Philip Roth - Letting Go

Now, when a slight powder-puff shot of my father’s twisted three feet to my left, his apology was endless. He didn’t want to see me moving — three feet to the left and next thing I’d be off the courts, out of the club, gone from New York forever. For the rest of the afternoon he aimed at a dime; all I had to do, in turn, was close my eyes and bring my racket forward and I would meet the ball. See how easy life is in New York?

I chose, however, to keep my eyes open and on him. Across the court, in WSAC sweatshirt and white ducks that broke so low on his sneakers they nearly covered his toes, his undernourished figure, spidery and nervous, bounced in place awaiting my return. He had a stringy little body, a large head, and thick hair the color of iron. I am taller and heavier, like my mother, but his face, without the sags and wrinkles, could have been my own: gray eyes, flat nose, wide nostrils, and a big jaw which my father maintains has resulted in no wisdom-teeth trouble for two centuries. In his family they rise right up through the gums with room to spare. The aesthetic results of functionalism, however, are not always very satisfying; these abundant jaws of ours tend to make both my father and myself look a little like farmers. Or soldiers. You know we come from strong stock, but that’s all you know; it was on my mother’s side that all the nuance lay.

The steely Germanic strain in my father’s features may not at first seem at one with his manner — particularly with his wisecracking, which he was allowing me that day to sample after each of my returns. In part, I suppose, this wisecracking is a watered-down version of my mother’s wit; in part it arises from having lived his life in America, where he early came to admire the spirit of certain of our radio comedians. But mostly what one is witnessing when my father makes a joke, is the surface reaction of a gloomy northern disposition, the response of a man who would gush and weep if he did not kid around.

“Oh-ho,” my father called, as I, out of boredom, gave the ball a little spin. “Oh-ho, a trickster. Is that what I’ve got on my hands? What are you doing, working out your Oedipus complex?”

Subsequently I hit the ball listlessly back, a simple easy return. “So what now — giving up? Letting an old man beat your pants off? Oh-ho, a push-over, Charlie,” he called to the towel-and-soap attendant who was passing along the side of the court. “Strictly a pushover I’m up against today.”

“How are you, Doctor?” Charlie asked. “He sure has grown up.”

“Ah him, he’s still a school kid,” my father called. “Still wet behind the ears,” he added, so that Charlie laughed, and I felt provoked to give a little vent to my Oedipus complex and slammed a wicked one past his backhand. Charlie moved off, counting towels; my father quieted a moment; and I had the usual filial remorse.

At home, what was there to do? It looked as though I might at last get a chance to go out on the streets alone. Millie, the woman who had cooked and cleaned for our family for years, came into the living room directly after our return and said that there had been a phone call for me from Iowa City. My father, who had been rubbing his hands together in an anticipatory way and looking out the window at the park, asked his question without turning.

“A woman?”

“I think so. Specifically, a girl.”

“Well,” he said, “you better go ahead and phone her.” In a voice with a little edge to it, he added, “It doesn’t take you too long, huh?”

“For what?”

He looked at me, trying to grin. “To get a foot in the door. Hey, I sound dirty. To get established. You going to call?”

“Not now. I thought I might take a walk.”

“It’s freezing out. You’ll freeze to death.”

“It’s not too bad.”

“How about giving me a look at your teeth?”

“I think you looked at them in August.”

“August, September, October, November — it’s the end of December already. January is six months. (Come in the office. I’ve got new equipment you haven’t even seen yet.”

“I think I saw it in August. I thought I’d walk down—”

“Come on, it’s your vacation.”

“It’s your vacation too,” I said. “You ought to stay out of the office today. Millie says you work too hard.”

“Oh does Millie? Maybe Millie should take a couple lessons from me. Come on, you’ll get me at the top of my form. A good game of tennis makes my technique sharper. Spend an hour in the office,” he said, coming past me to put a hand to my shoulder, “you used to love it.” He started down the hallway, calling out to the maid, “Millie, we’re going out to dinner tonight.” He opened the door at the end of the apartment, and there was nothing to do but follow him into the reception room.

Up straight in the dental chair, everything was as it used to be He whistled some tuneless collection of notes, while behind me faucets dripped and little drawers were opened and closed. Over in the park, around the slickly iced reservoir, the limbs of the trees were as black this December as they’d been fifteen and twenty Decembers before. I heard my father’s rubber-soled sports shoes — his working shoes — move across the floor, just as a window at 93rd and Fifth took the sun at a wide angle and flamed out over Manhattan. A plastic bib slid past my eyes, the back rest dropped gently down, and swimming familiarly above me was my father’s face, his hand, his silver pick. Crisp from his shower at the club, his hair looked fierce as a helmet under the bluish bulb. Commanded, the patient opened wider, wider , and the slow trek began, the hunt, along the gum line into the darkest regions of the mouth. He searched deep inside me: how far down had I hidden my heart?

“Ah yes ah yes—” He lingered a while at each molar, then went on to caress the next. “Ah, this one was something. We took good care of this mouth, all right. Not a hundred mouths in all of New York like this one. People pay me to build a mouth like this — no, no, keep it open. Wider.”

Marge Howells had called. I allowed that business to occupy my mind while I obliged my father with my mouth. I closed my eyes, shutting out his gleeful face, and took stock. Just five days earlier I had repacked Marge’s cardboard carton, and had had to pack her suitcase too, while she pounded at me from behind with her fists. “You’re not folding my skirts right!” she wailed into my ear. “Stop it, you’re getting everything wrinkled! Oh Gabe, stop! I love you I love you I love you” until at last she hurled a bottle of Breck against the bathroom wall. Nevertheless I had carried her belongings to the car and driven her, weeping, to her room. Then I drove alone to the airport, and late that night had rubbed unshaven cheeks with another weeper, my father, in the freezing rainy openness of Idlewild. Now Marge had called and I was sure it was from my own phone. I was weary with the knowledge that despite all I had determined to set right, she had managed to retain her key — which I had forgotten about in my determination just to get her out — and had probably engaged some taxi driver to carry her belongings back up the two flights to my apartment.

I would not call her back.

“I just want to take some pictures,” my father was saying. He had rolled the black X-ray machine noiselessly up to my cheek and was taking aim at my back molars. “Let’s just get the lay of the land,” he said. “Remember, Gabe, how I used to carry an X-ray of your mouth in my wallet? Just for a gag—”

“Why don’t you use that one?” I asked limply.

The prints, when developed, glowed with health. What more was there to do? I made a move to leave the chair, but my father touched his fingers to my chest. “You know,” he said, “you always have to have a total picture to see the whole thing.”