Philip Roth - Letting Go

“I’m graduating, Asher,” Paul said, speaking with the patience of a wronged man. “She has a year to go, this girl you have so little regard for. When I leave Ithaca she’ll stay. Because I am so hard up, you see, so controlled by my hot pants and this guilt I feel at having deflowered her, I feel I want to marry her. It’s as simple as that.”

“Precisely.”

“Asher! Asher! When I leave, you shmuck, I lose her. That’ll be that.”

“I wouldn’t myself, if I were you, stand in the way of an ending.”

“But the plain and simple fact is, Asher, I don’t want it to end! Does that mean nothing?”

“Don’t you read history in your school? Don’t you study anything? ” Asher demanded. He ran his sleeve roughly under his nose so that the whole ungristled last inch of it moved back toward his face. The amazing thing was that Asher Buckner seemed to be angry. He swallowed; he looked as though he’d been weeping and wailing for an hour. “Listen to Uncle Shmuck, will you? Things come and go, and you have got to be a receptacle, let them pass right through. Otherwise death will be a misery for you, boy; I’d hate to see it. What are you going to grow up to be, a canner of experience? You going to stick plugs in at either end of your life? Let it flow, let it go. Wait and accept and learn to pull the hand away. Don’t clutch! What is marriage, what is it but a pissy form of greed, a terrible, disgusting ambitiousness. Do you know what I do now, Paulie, for a living? I paint gangsters, petty thieves, the lousiest of rats, way way up there in the unions and the garment trade. They come in with their henchmen and they spit tangerine pits on my floor and they make fun of me while I paint the boss. They’re rich and lord it over whole precincts, and I’m a sloppy-ass bohemian. They’re the big shots and I’m the nothing. All right, I take it. I accept. The boss’s got warts, I lop them off. He’s got murder in his eyes, I put doves instead. He sends his wife, and I fill up her brassiere for her. I take out scowls, boils, wrinkles, bags, pores — everything goes. I give out only peaches and cream. Please, I don’t want to be the greatest painter in the world. I don’t want to be a maker of beauty, a religious personage. I don’t bottle experience. I’m interested in the flow. I’ll take the shape the world gives me. Fuck the rest. Let me buy you a drink. It’s a hell of a day for a walk. You could freeze.”

In the bar, a no man’s land where Madison Avenue and the Bowery met and embraced, a drunken youngster in a tight suit and tight hair had his arm draped around a seventy-year-old alcoholic — somebody’s mother. “Nothing in the world is irretrievable,” said the young man to the old woman, his head lolling down on his shirt front. “Nothing. If you’d just go back to County Cork and start all over again you’d be amazed—”

The woman was shaking her head. “Ah, you just don’t know what it’s like, having to take all that crap day in and day out …”

The uncle and the nephew sipped whiskey and said nothing; Asher looked at his watch, then began to whistle to himself between his teeth. He didn’t look much less ravaged to Paul than the old lady next to him. So was this girl friend of his a dream? Asher had bad breath — wouldn’t a twenty-five-year-old girl mind? Had there ever really been a Chinese who had drawn with her lips at that skin of his, wrinkly like a dying old flower? Asher was a total surprise, not at all the kind of monk Paul had imagined. All his renunciations — family, children, food, clothes — hadn’t been for his art at all. He had no art left. He was a tube with no plugs at either end. A receptacle. And that was what — courage or cowardice?

Paul was serious beyond his twenty-one years, and once an idea had been planted he could not easily discard it. He could not help asking himself if it made any sense at all to let Libby go. He was too purposive a young man — applying always in January for scholarships in September had given him a strong sense of consequence — to be casual about his decisions. However, his plan to marry was, he knew, no simple revolt against family, no simple sexual bite. As an adolescent busing tables in mountain resorts, he had been well enough tipped by vacationing housewives and lonely widows; from beneath him they had stroked his hair: “Oh, how nice and serious. You’ll be something in life. I’m not worried about your future.” As for the family, there was no sense talking about revolutions at this point; he had revolted at birth and lived a separate life under his own flag from infancy on. His kind of independence had not even allowed for the usual complaints; nobody had to stand and shout at him to get into his bedroom and study — he had always gotten A’s and never once in his life had he been in trouble. If his father was prickled by his own failures, it was not because his son had insulted him by bringing them up. Something had tipped off the boy early not to expect anything of the man, and he had gone ahead to respect his father, if only on the strength of his office. When he had not known the spelling of a word, he had taken down the dictionary — this at age seven. His mother claimed it made her proud, though secretly it gave her the shivers. She was a normal-school graduate, a major in arithmetic, and she could have helped him with his long division. But he did everything himself, even fractions. When he was between the years one and four his father had failed in haberdashery; four to six it was hardware; six to eleven real estate; and then eleven to twelve — the blinding, total crash — he lost his shirt in quick-frozen foods. One day, creditors calling at every door, he got into the cab of a truckful of his frozen rhubarb and took a ride out to Long Island to think; the refrigeration failed just beyond Mineola, and by the time he got home his life was a zero, a ruined man. Now, in his reclining years, he got up once in a while to collect rents for an old friend.

And during all this, through all the bank notes and bewilderment, Paul had learned to read and write and reason, and above all to use his will. He had even willed Libby Herz herself into a seriousness she had not possessed when he had first met her. So complete a job had he done, in fact, that it had been she who had first suggested marriage. Though it was none of Asher’s business, it was nevertheless so. How could she go back to the other boys after Paul?

His own decision was not, however, out of anything so simple, so unemotional, as obligation. If there was a sense of obligation it was to himself; he would unite with her not to make Libby a better woman, but to make himself a better man. He would place a constant demand upon his spirit, solidify his finest intentions by keeping beside him this mixture of frailty, gravity, spontaneity, and passion. He would serve another with the same sense of worthiness he served himself. Surely that was love, where duty and passion (and lust too, to swallow Asher’s argument) mingled.

“Paulie, I have to leave,” said Asher. “First let me go to the toilet.” In a few minutes he came out of the men’s room wiping his hands on his coat. “Look, how about you come back with me? I want Patricia Ann and you to meet. She’ll make some tea. I won’t say anything more. You’re too smart for me to flood you with my personal philosophy. Just come back for an hour or two. I’m past fifty, nearing the end. Every emotion you’ve felt, multiply it by a thousand and that’s how often I felt it. It gives me a little edge, don’t it, Paulie? Till forty you think you’ve got bad emotions, you know, real killers — and then you find out they’re only little flowers compared with what’s coming. I’m not going to bombard you with any more wisdom of the aged. I only say you shouldn’t consider yourself a special case. Look at the hag next to you — her mistakes,” he said, not lowering his voice, “crawling over her like bugs. I’m not selling you my life, Paulie. Just maybe you should wait.”