Philip Roth - Letting Go

I was still looking out after her husband, however. I wanted to shout for him to come back: I wanted to demand a reason for his leaving.

“I’m in the bedroom,” Libby said, directing me.

Herz walked further into the white mist, until at last I couldn’t see him any more.

Libby was sitting in bed, propped up by two pillows, her knees bent girlishly under the blankets. The bed was made of iron and painted silver and had an institutional air. There was not much more furniture in the room. A floor lamp threw a saucer of light up on the water-damaged ceiling; poor for reading, it was at first generous to the sick. From the doorway Libby looked, in that dim light, no more ravaged than she had in the supermarket early in December; the man’s woolen muffler thrown over her greenish shetland sweater even gave her somewhat of a rakish air. Only after I pulled up to the bed a cracking wicker chair, the room’s only chair, could I see where the fever had turned against her. The fine polished edge of her complexion had been altered; the hollows, the curves, the distinctive shape of her face had been consumed by fatigue. And when she spoke, it was with her voice as with her features: no vigor. There were spurts of pep, as there had been on the phone, but nothing sustaining, nothing to signal a strong will and solid feelings. She was without energy, and that almost made her seem without sweetness. But perhaps she was simply nervous — I know I was. What kind of joke, after all, was Herz’s departure? I remembered the day he had turned down my car, and after all these weeks I was disliking him again. I saw myself being made a pawn in another domestic argument.

“I wish Paul could have stayed a few minutes,” I said.

“I told him you wanted to ask him something. He said he’ll be back. Your coming gave him a chance to get out. I went into the hospital Christmas Eve. He’s been up twenty-four hours a day since.”

“Where did he have to go? It’s storming out.”

“To do some work. To his office.”

“Can’t he work in the living room?”

“We’d be talking. He’d be distracted. He hasn’t written in weeks, you see. He — well, I’ve been sick, and time — oh his time is just all fouled up. He’ll be back soon.” She blushed at this point and looked away.

By no means did I find this a satisfactory explanation of Herz’s behavior — or my reaction to it — but I nodded my head.

Libby said, “It hasn’t been easy for him.”

“It’s probably not been easy for you,” I replied.

“I don’t know. I think maybe it’s easier sometimes being sick.”

“Easier than what?”

Clearly, she was sorry now for having made the distinction in the first place. Most of what Libby was sorry for or about, one saw just that way — clearly. “Oh — being well.” She took a deep breath and pushed her back into the pillows. “I complain too much. I must have had my development arrested somewhere. I’m twenty-two; I should know enough not to go around having expectations all the time. I should be able to get used to things.” She appeared to be making her resolves right in front of me. “Paul’s the one who should be complaining,” she said.

“Oh, doesn’t he?”

She looked at me with real surprise. Immediately I regretted having been so openly skeptical about her husband’s character; it only increased her uneasiness.

Vaguely she said, “His attitude toward life is better, I think. In the situation.”

“Well,” I said, smiling, “I suppose you have some right to complain,” and tried to end it with that.

She shook her head, defending her husband by annihilating herself.

I said, “Well,” again, and looked over her head, where there hung a rather pedestrian Utrillo print. I examined it while she organized her thoughts. The picture encouraged me to reorganize my own, for it managed to make me overwhelmingly aware that Libby Herz and Paul Herz were married. In all that institutional and cast-off furniture (the wicker chair must surely have been bought off some Iowan’s back porch) it alone looked to have been really chosen. Together they had hung it over the bed they shared.

“What’s Paul working on?” I asked, trying to appear more kindly disposed toward the pursuits of the man who was her husband.

“A novel. He does one for a degree. Instead of a dissertation.”

“How’s it going?”

“Fine, wonderful,” she said. “It’s just, well, as I said — time. I mean that’s why I went to work, to give him a little time. Now I haven’t been in that damn office for almost three weeks.”

“You’ll be better soon. The flu has been going around.”

“Oh yes, I know.” The rapidity with which she answered indicated that she didn’t want me to think that she felt she didn’t deserve to get the flu. What made talking to her almost impossible for me was this incredible pendulum action of hers, the swiftness with which she swung back and forth between valuing herself too much and then valuing herself not at all. I realized now that, having had no questions for Herz, I should have turned around and gone home. One did not idly enter the door of this house.

“It’s actually ironic,” Libby was telling me. “When I was a student I could have gone into the hospital free, under student health. But I quit so we could get the tuition back, and then I got sick, and already it’s cost even more than the tuition we got back. You see, it’s not the flu,” she corrected me. “They don’t know what it is, but I don’t think it’s flu or grippe. It’s just — it’s just ironic was all I meant to point out. At least I call it ironic. Paul doesn’t call it anything.” She spoke her next words with some disbelief. “He calls it life.”

“Well,” I said, while she waited to hear what I would say, “I suppose people have to expect a little trouble.”

“Oh I know that,” she interrupted. “I’m not that underdeveloped. I know people get sick. It’s better to have to struggle when you’re young, I think, than when you’re older,” she platitudinized. “I expect trouble, of course, but … but this is such a funny sickness, you know? What do I have? Maybe it’s something psychosomatic — I mean that’s always a possibility. God, everything enters your mind when they can’t diagnose the thing. You think about it, and you think that here Paul wants to write — so I get sick. Do you think maybe I don’t want him to write? Does that make any sense?”

“No. Does it make any sense to you?”

“Well if it’s my unconscious, how can I know? Does it look to you as though I’m giving up? Because I’m not giving up. At least I don’t think I’m giving up. Not consciously , at least. But then I’ve got this thing and they can’t diagnose it. I left all that blood there and all that pee — you’d think they could find something. It’s not a joke either; I just give in to myself, damn it.”

“Maybe you’re anemic. Maybe you’re not eating right. Maybe it’s Iowa. Everybody gets sick some time without their knowing why. I’d worry about my psyche last of all.”

“You’re trying to make me feel better.”

“You try to make yourself feel worse.”

“You’ve really been very kind to us,” she said. “Paul appreciates it—”

I don’t believe I could have done anything to keep my face from again registering my skepticism.

“—probably more than you think,” she finished.

“Yes.” Though I went on to ask none of the obvious questions, she started in answering them anyway.

“You see,” she said, “if he acted grateful — well, he just can’t. Not now.”

I said that I understood.