Philip Roth - Letting Go

“I thought you never flew before.”

“I know I’ll get sick any place else,” she said, and she ran ahead of us, catching up to her brother, who was skipping down to the gate, handsome in his new hat, coat, and suit sent from Lord & Taylor’s in New York.

On the plane I had to ask several people if they would move so that Cynthia would have a place over the wing. Markie slid in beside her and immediately grabbed all the paraphernalia in the pocket before him; most of it fell to the floor. He waved the paper bag up toward Martha.

“A bag,” he said.

Cynthia took it from his hand and returned it to the slot. A blond stewardess — running, it appeared, for number-one charmer of the airways — gave us a look at all her teeth. “Everything hunky-dory up here?” she asked.

“Fine,” I said.

“I’m afraid you folks will have to be going now,” she said.

But at this point Martha pushed past her — she had been standing aside till then, letting me do what had to be done. When she bent down across the children the jacket of her suit hiked up, showing where her slip was weakening at the seam. She had put on six or seven pounds in the last month; she was big, and not very pretty. “Goodbye, babies. Now, you write letters, hear? You’ve got the stamps in your suitcase and all the envelopes are addressed. You just write the letters, all right? And take care of your brother, Cyn. You listen to Cynthia, Mark. Be nice to each other, all right?”

“We’re nice to each other,” Cynthia insisted.

“I know,” Martha said, kissing them both. She turned, and without even a glance at me, left the plane.

I leaned down one last time, and Cynthia asked if I was going to marry Martha.

“We’ll see,” I said. “I’m glad we two became friends, Cynthia.”

She toughened instantly. “I’m always friends.”

“Okay,” I said. “Goodbye, Mark. Be a good boy. Send me a card from the Statue of Liberty.”

Some connection was made. “Coney Island!” Markie shouted, and I started down the aisle of the plane. The blond stewardess said to me, “We’ll take extra good care of them, you bet.”

Minutes later we watched the plane taxi up the field, and then it was aloft, without incident. Martha said that she would just as soon not go right back to the apartment, and so we took a long ride that afternoon, all the way out to Evanston to look at the big trees and the pretty houses. Finally it was dark and we had to go home.

Of course he had been miserable. Between the pretension and the fact, what’s invented and what’s given, stands one’s own tortured soul. Paul Herz had been pretending all these awful years that he was of another order of men. It occurred to him now — as an icicle occurs to a branch, after a cold hard night of endless dripping — that, no, he was not a man of feeling; it occurred to him that if he was anything at all it was a man of duty. And that when his two selves had become confused — one self, one invention — when he had felt it his duty to be feeling, that then his heart had been a stone, and his will, instead of turning out toward action, had remained a presence in his body, a concrete setting for the rock of his heart. It all led to a very heavy sense of self — an actual sensation of these last years — to a weird textual consciousness of what stood between him and others, a weighted-down feeling under the burden of underwear, tie, shirt, jacket, and coat; a sense of the volume of air itself.

Nowhere was it worse than in bed with his wife; paradoxically, undressed was worse than dressed, by a long shot. Beneath the sheets he was made particularly aware of the heaviness, the brutal materiality of his own body; his little fingers and toes, all the hard extremities of his body, were like little steel caps. The dancer has a sense of flow into the world — he felt blunt. The only hard extremity in which he felt soft was his penis. Though it rose on occasion to duty’s call, and on rarer occasion to feeling’s provocation, for the most part it seemed to have retired from active life. He might almost have forgotten about it had he not had reason (getting in and out of bed each day with a woman) to think about it so much. In adolescence, of course, one of his burdens had been his erection; it had seemed to him his cross to bear. Getting off buses he had tried slouching; along the corridors at school he had covered himself with his three-ring notebook; at the urinal, one out of two times he was peeing up in the air. But now at twenty-seven, in a state apparently of hormonal balance, or loss, he was in need of some stimulant. For a moment in his seat in the dark coach, he thought about getting up and going into the rocking bathroom at the end of the car and stimulating himself. It was not simply the movement of the train that suggested the idea; he had entertained it, and succumbed to it, in the past, at home when Libby was out; there had even been times with Libby sleeping in the other room. It was not so much an act of defiance, or spite, or even perversion, as of conviction: I am a man yet. But afterwards it was not usually that of which he was convinced; afterwards it was as though the milk of life itself had drained out of him, and he slumped onto the toilet seat a hollow thing, as though if he were to crack a bone upon the bathroom tile, the dull ringing of his body would reverberate through the house, even to the ears of his wife.

The train was dragging to a stop. Outside it was black and beginning to rain; they were somewhere in Ohio. Please Do Not Masturbate While Train Is In Station. He responded to neither duty nor feeling, just common sense. There was nothing to be gained by making a bad thing worse. No? Then why was he headed East?

The telegram had come to him at the University. He had put it in his pocket and gone about his business, which, that afternoon, was to journey down to LaSalle Street and talk to the lawyer. He had given Jaffe a check for thirty-six dollars, covering three visits that the girl had made to the obstetrician. Of course, had it been Libby’s own pregnancy there would have been Blue Cross and Blue Shield to cover expenses; now, following their uninsured crisis in Pennsylvania, he was insured to the teeth — but now it was not his wife’s hospital bills he was going to have to pay. None of their dealings with doctors had ever come under normal headings anyway, items the insurance companies recognized. But then little in his life had come under normal headings: abortion, adoption, familial excommunication … Still, he had only recently been introduced to Jaffe and he did not want to appear unappreciative, or self-pitying. He had handed over the money, smiling, and Jaffe had assured him that the obstetrician had assured Jaffe that it was a perfectly normal pregnancy. But if it’s a normal pregnancy keep smiling, this is for free why must she go to see him so often? She’s nervous, Jaffe answered impatient with me? Well, it’s my money, it’ll be my baby she needs reassuring, that’s all. Excuse me, Paul, I’ve got a client waiting I’m a client, I came all the way down here, I’m nervous , I need reassuring — hey, how much more is this going to cost —Thank you, Sid, thanks for everything something for nothing, be nice, you pauper , we appreciate, we appreciate, I’m deeply appreciative get out, he’s got a client waiting, smile and go home.

The next day he had showed the telegram to Libby. She had begun to make a scene over something (oh yes, he never listened to her any more — which he didn’t), and he had only pulled it from his pocket and tossed it on the table so as to alter the course of events. “Here! This is why I’m preoccupied. Sure, I’m preoccupied — here, read this! ” “Oh Paul,” said Libby, reading, “what are we going to do?” “We’ll do what we have to do — what I have to—”