Philip Roth - Letting Go

Duty! Screw duty! Feeling! Aren’t you a student of letters? A teacher of Dostoevsky? Puller of long faces, booster of The Brothers K? Enemy of Spigliano and the legions of reason? Are you not a writer of prose fiction, all heartfelt? No! Are you not the high priest of love? No! Were you ever? No! No! What an idea of himself he had constructed! What an impossible idea!

“Let me tell you what I’m going to do, Libby— nothing! I’m under no obligation, absolutely none. Well, what do you think? What are you crying about now?”

“Oh,” she wept, “you have no—”

From time to time he had to do what he did then. “I’ve got feelings!” he roared, having smacked her. “I’ve got feelings that tell me he could live without me, so he can die without me too!”

With the red mark on her pale cheek, she cried less, not more, which was why, having hit her that first time some years back, he had come to do it again: it worked. In their six years he had not indulged himself on more than four or five occasions. He did not quite know what to make of this set of facts — divide five into six and compare to the national average? To get what? How was he to measure her assault upon him? Didn’t he get a handicap because she had turned out to be a weakling? What about her handicap?

As had happened on the four or five previous occasions, he was now filled with remorse. Libby was sitting with her coffee cup, leafing through her Jewish homemaker’s book; she wasn’t crying, just deadly silent. “What are you looking up?” he asked softly, “a name? Does it give a list of names?” She nodded; three fingers still showed on her cheek; now two; now one.

“Well, which do you like?” Now, thank God, none. “What do you like, Lib?”

“What about Nahum?”

“For a boy,” he asked, “or a girl?”

“A boy.” She did more than answer — she smiled. Oh I’m coming back into her good graces. I need your good graces, oh yes I do, Libby. “It means comfort,” she said.

“Well, sure, Lib, if you like it. Nahum Herz? Does that sound, I don’t know, perfect to you?”

“I think so.”

“Well it’s nice , honey,” he said skeptically. “I suppose it’s a nice old name—”

“If your father dies, do we have to name it after your father?”

“We don’t have to do anything, Libby.”

“I thought you might want to.”

There! How many points does she get for that? He rose from the table; she was incurably — what, stupid or destructive, naïve or mean? “Libby, I want him to die! He should die, if there’s any justice in this world. He’s ruined our life! ” But shame came in, like a rolling of waves, and carried with it the truth: I ruined it. Me.

The following day he went to see Spigliano and told him he had to go East for a few days. He waited for Spigliano to ask why. “My father’s dying,” answered Paul gravely. Oh gravity! What a lie. I am a man of feeling, Spigliano, and you are not. I am at one with old Fyodor and you are — Bullshit. I am you.

And that evening, at the end of the third day, he had boarded the overnight coach to New York; why, he was not certain, though the blackness of Ohio — they were moving again, heads lolling on the seats around him — and the rushing of the train, the telegram in his pocket, the knowledge of what he had left behind, the uncertainty of what he was moving into, all produced in him now a sense of the profundity of the moment. But what? How? Why was he allowing himself to be borne through space at a rapid rate on a dark night? To where?

In the morning the dawn began to lift just outside of Philadelphia. He made his way down the car to the washroom, and when he came back to his seat it was becoming day. It was as though the sky and sun held fast while the earth spun out of its darkness into light. And then he realized that this was exactly what happened. All and everything. The thought made his eyes swell. All that was natural and simple in life reduced him to tears. The dawn … Love … Libby …

Only when he stepped off the train in New York, dragging his bag after him, did he understand his journey. He had left his wife.

In the station he went into the coffee bar. It was nine o’clock in New York, eight in Chicago. Was she up? Sleeping? Dead? He rejected the idea, not only that Libby might be dead (wish fulfillment? no, just the old business, just guilt) but that he had left her. But the two seemed somehow to fit together: if he had not left her, then she couldn’t be anything but living and breathing. Christ, was he trapped! It didn’t even give him comfort to realize he was being irrational. He took his change in dimes and went to the phone booth; inside he sat fingering the coins. If he hadn’t left Libby, it must be that he really had come East to see his father, to soothe his mother. So he made up his mind and called Brooklyn. (As he dialed he saw Libby stirring in their bed — yes, alive and breathing.) He allowed the phone to ring ten times, then an eleventh, and then — breathless — a twelfth. Then he hung up — bang! Twelve long rings because he was a dutiful man, a good son.

Good son? Dope! Jerk! Weakling! Where’s your courage?

He remained seated in the phone booth and found some serenity in thinking that no one except Libby knew he was in New York. He might as well be anywhere. It was the first time in six years that he had been separated from his wife. This morning he had awakened — or met the day, at any rate — without first having to feel, accidentally or on purpose, anybody’s hands, feet, or hair, without having to worry first thing in the morning about somebody else’s feelings. Five and a half years of it. Outside the booth, at nine A.M., there was no one he knew; nobody who passed paid him any attention. Every few minutes he heard announced the departure of another train for another part of the East. He had only to climb aboard and get off in Wilmington, Baltimore, or Miami Beach. Washington … get a little room somewhere, get a job in some government office, and disappear. Start making a life not on the basis of what he dreamed he was, or thought he was supposed to be, or what literature, philosophy, friends, enemies, wife, parents told him he must be, but simply in terms of his own possibilities.

Picking up his suitcase (the new life would be begun simply: one suit, one sport jacket, two shirts, and three pairs of underwear) he left the booth. But in the midst of the crowds pushing toward the tracks, he seemed not to be gaining anonymity but losing it; and so the only train he took that morning was the BMT, and where it carried him was back to the place where he had been born.

There is no need to chronicle Paul Herz’s feelings as he left the subway and walked the three blocks to the Liverpool Arms. He was anybody returning home. It was June in Brooklyn, and he had lived seventeen Junes in Brooklyn before he had gone off to college and a wife. Nothing was unfamiliar to his eyes. The elevator smelled like the inside of a tin can, and the corridors smelled milky — no change there either. Upstairs the same door was hinged on their apartment; under his feet was the same doormat. At the age of eleven Paul had cut a sliver from one of his father’s business cards with an old razor blade and Scotch-taped it above the doorbell: his father’s name. He had imagined at the time that it would give his saddened old man a little lift, for Mr. Herz had just gone under for the third time — real estate. That little sliver was still there above the bell, and considering what the sight of it did to Paul’s insides, he knew the apartment itself would be too much. She would make unfair claims. Paul, look at this photo — remember the picnics? Remember Uncle Nathan who died, such a young man and the only one on your father’s side with the benefits of a college education? Paulie, Sheepshead Bay, look. You ate shrimps till they came out of your ears, you and Maury, remember? And your stamps, no one has touched a single page, and your rocks and your butterflies and your baseball glove and your report cards, still framed — oh Paul, how could you do this to your parents, a boy who got such perfect grades in Conduct—