Philip Roth - Letting Go

“Can’t use you,” Libby broke in. “This enchanting child poops a blue streak.” They were in the living room, speaking in normal voices, smiling with kindness at one another. “Will you stay?” Libby asked, pushing her hair back. “Stay for coffee?”

He had not come so as to leave more firmly convinced that nothing at all had changed. There was Libby smiling — wasn’t that a change? And Rachel was a living fact, which counted for something. “I wouldn’t mind some,” he said.

“Let me just turn it on.”

When she returned to the living room he asked her if Paul was still at his office. Alone with Libby he always felt the necessity to establish clearly Paul’s whereabouts. That compulsion had a long history, and the contemplation of it momentarily fatigued him. No sooner had he decided to remain in her company to be cheered up a little, than he saw how inappropriate she was to induce in him optimism and serenity.

“He went to services,” she said. “He should be home soon.”

“Is tonight the holiday?”

“He’s saying Kaddish.”

“… I didn’t know.”

“You did know it was Chanukah though — didn’t you?”

“Libby—” he began, ending only with, “I’m afraid not.” And he remained seated.

“Now you know what that is?” She pointed to the four candles flickering into extinction in the holder.

“Candles for Chanukah?”

“A menorah — oh you did know. You pretend because it gives you some pleasure — a savage atheistic pleasure”—she smiled still—“to frustrate me about all this.”

“You have certainly become a very Jewish girl, Libby,” was his reply.

“Well, what are you being, Gabe — skeptical? Don’t you believe it’s possible? You don’t see me as a very religious person? Do I strike you as unalterably secular?”

“You strike me as very religious.”

“But you don’t take it seriously, do you?”

“What?”

“Being Jewish. Being religious!”

“For myself or for you?”

“Either. Both!” she said, slightly leaving her seat.

“It’s not an issue in my life.”

“It is in mine.” Clearly it was only herself that she cared to talk about anyway; though she added, “And it can’t help but be in yours. You were born one.”

“I can only assure you again that it isn’t. At least it hasn’t been yet — all right?”

“Not on the conscious level perhaps.”

He made a slight whistling noise through his teeth.

“Well, you have an unconscious,” she said.

To which he nodded.

“So how do you know what’s in it?” she asked.

He remembered her having said something like that long ago. “How do you?” he asked.

“I”—she hesitated, and she flushed—“interpret your actions.”

“Oh yes?”

“Don’t you interpret mine?” Before he could answer, she spared him by opening the question out all the way. “Don’t we interpret everyone’s? I’m not saying all your problems have to do with your identity as a Jew—”

“You see me as a man with a lot of problems, it seems.”

“I just think now that you’re like the rest of us.” Her gaze dropped.

Of late a drop of self-pity was coloring his life — more than a drop. It colored his answer. “You didn’t always,” he said.

With that, the tug he had once felt toward this girl came back to him. They still had the old impulse to flirt, it seemed. Had they been brave enough, or weak enough, or silly enough, to have gone ahead and slept with one another a certain tender curiosity would probably have died out between them long ago. But their sentimental exchange released an anchor, and sexuality moved now on the surface. He sensed the energies of Libby’s body — the purr, the whininess — as he had not earlier, when they had been together beside the crib. Though there she had been conscious — he thought — of whatever energies she imagined him still to have.

Libby became at once dramatic and metaphysical; she tossed her head, not simply to deal with her hair. “We lose some things, we gain others.”

“Well,” he answered, smiling and appalled, “you’ve gained religion.”

“And it makes all the difference.”

“Oh does it? Between what and what?”

“Between knowing what you are and what you aren’t,” she said. “Knowing what’s important and what’s not. Go ahead and be cynical if you want. Remember Isabel Archer?”

“I do.”

“Well, she didn’t know what was valuable; she didn’t know who was valuable.”

“At the end I thought she came to know—”

“Now I do too.”

He paused. “That statement,” he said, knowing he had just been maligned, “isn’t marked by much humility, for a religious person like yourself.”

“Well, I do know more.”

He only nodded; one of the energies he happened to be without was the energy to resist an attack, from himself or from another.

“I feel different about myself, Gabe. My marriage, my child.” The word turned her lyrical on the spot. “Paul lights the candles and he says the prayer, in Hebrew, and I stand on the side and watch — and I’m holding Rachel — and that’s a very special feeling. I’ve never had it before.”

“You’re happier?”

The reverent mood into which she had plunged herself made it impossible for her to give him a facile answer. However he was taking her, she was taking herself absolutely seriously. “We have Rachel,” she said.

He had no desire to be hard on her any longer, even if she should be hard on him. What was she but a very simple girl? “She’s a fine little baby,” he said.

“She’s a dream. I know I sound corny saying all these excessive things, but I can’t help it. When I was growing up I swore I’d refrain from certain practices — one of them was boring people about my babies.”

“It shows you don’t have to be true to adolescent ideas, or fantasies.”

“It does. I was a great enemy of religion too, you know. I raised a lot of hell — caused a lot of hell — around our house about God and Christ and the Virgin Mother. But it’s different now, Gabe. Being a Jew.”

“What is?”

“You’re skeptical again.”

Not until she made me so, he thought. The truth was that more often than not he was willing to believe the best of her. “Do you believe in God now? Is that what you’re saying?”

“I don’t know whether I believe in God,” came her sharp reply.

“Then we’re probably a good deal closer in our theology than you think.”

“You don’t understand. What’s important is being something. Maybe I’m not making myself clear.”

“In one way you are, in one way you aren’t.”

“You don’t understand,” she told him, “the power of faith.”

“Faith in what?” he demanded.

“All I’m saying is that everything’s changed … I’m changed … Paul’s changed.” In a lower, less courageous voice, she said again, “Paul is changed.”

“I didn’t mean to be cavalier about your happiness,” he said, after some time had passed. “Or about your conversion. I’m really not a very fierce atheist, Libby. How did all of this begin anyway?”

“I only wanted to let you know …” Apparently she saw no sense in going on.

“… Of course.”

“It was only a discussion. I only want to add”—she seemed unable finally to drop the subject—“that in the end believing or disbelieving in God isn’t the point.”

“Not for you perhaps.”

“Not for a lot of Jews.”

“Not even for Paul?”

She lifted her chin — too high. “I don’t know. Religion has a different meaning for a man than for a woman.”