Philip Roth - Letting Go

“I don’t understand.”

“Would you like to see it? Me. Our fifth anniversary.”

“If you think I should—”

On her toes she walked slowly to the corner behind the stool. “Here,” she said, motioning for him to follow. She flipped through several canvases piled against the wall and then reached in to take one out. First she only looked at it herself; then, somewhat uncertainly, she put it on the easel and twisted a bulb on above them.

“It’s not done,” she said immediately. Then she laughed. Then she shrugged. Then she was dead serious. “Like it?”

The idea was not original with Asher. The figure in the painting was reclining unclothed on a sofa, one arm back of her hair, the other down beside her. But, unlike other women who had been posed in the position, Patricia Ann was not a particularly languorous specimen. She looked as though she’d just heard a knock at the door and was about to fly up after her clothes. The hand at her side was rolled into a fist, and her knees were together, discouraging entrance. The Woman Who Gets and Gives No Pleasure.

“Is it finished?” These were the only words that seemed available to him.

“I think he has to do more coloring,” she said. But he had her shade already; Asher knew exactly the depth and tone of his mistress. “It’s nice, isn’t it?” the girl asked the college boy, and then did not wait for an answer. “My girl friends and me once made a record — singing? — and when we heard it, we were hysterical. I mean laughing. But after a while, you know, we started to think it was kind of good and we were even going to send it to some disc jockey, with a photograph of us. But at first it seemed just real funny.”

“I know,” Paul said, hearing his uncle behind him release a desperate, froggy snore. “I’ve heard myself on a tape recorder. It’s a surprise.”

“It’s a surprise, all right … And,” she added gravely, “my husband Charlie, you know, don’t know anything about this. I had a whole picture painted, and Charlie don’t know. I even have a daughter, a little darling child.”

They both looked at the painting. At the door she smiled at him. “Good luck at Cordell.”

“Thank you.”

Pushing the door shut, she said, “Have a nice time at college.”

The stairs were unlit and he did not descend for a moment. He groped for a handrail, but there wasn’t any. Behind the door Paul heard, “Asher, Asher, oh wake up, pussy cat, it’s after five already.”

Uncle Jerry sent a note. If Paul felt inclined to, he could call Jerry at his office. If he chose to ignore the note, that was his prerogative as well.

“How are you holding up?” Jerry inquired when Paul telephoned.

“I think I’m all right. I’ve lost two pounds but I’ve got all my faculties.”

“How are things at home?”

“Just as you can imagine,” Paul said. “My mother keeps breaking down and my father keeps wanting to talk to me, but he gets all filled up too. I’ve explained several times, Jerry, but I’ve stopped. I’m not going to make a dent. They just say, Please don’t marry that girl. At least not now. At least put it off. And so forth, on and on and on. Honest to God, they’re going to make me hate them!”

He had not realized how menacing he had sounded until he heard Jerry protecting himself. “Paul, I feel obliged, you know — your father called me, he was in tears. I told him I would contact you. That’s why I dropped you the note. I don’t know what to say to you. I don’t want to advise you. I don’t believe in interfering.”

The intervention of Paul’s family in Jerry’s affairs lent a particular weightiness, a certain melancholy strain, to this remark. Paul felt a strong kinship with his uncle then — but it did not make him especially happy. It had not been his plan or his hope to line up, finally, against his family. He had decided to tell them about Libby in December so that their protests might wither with the months and they would come around to the idea of a wedding just after graduation. He had a sense of propriety about his parents, a realization of their responsibilities that perhaps they themselves had not. He had never given in, he thought, to any impulse to be cruel to them, and even if he had worked hard independently of them, it had been in part so as not to increase in any way their disappointments. He felt it now a filial duty to give them every chance; it humbled him not to, in the great world beyond the family to which he aspired, a world of order and decency, which, if he had not as yet experienced, he had fully imagined. Nevertheless, it began to appear that perhaps he had called Jerry for reasons no more elevated than those which had sent him on his walk with Asher: to be reassured.

“I told your father I would contact you,” Jerry said. “But of course I can’t say anything. I don’t even know the girl. Paul, we hardly know each other. I didn’t complicate matters explaining any of this to Leonard. It wouldn’t have interested him. I understand,” he said to Paul, softly, intimately. “Paul, you tell me, all right. What do you think?”

The young man’s voice was sharp when he answered. “What do I think? I think I’ll marry Libby! I don’t think any of this hysteria has anything to do with us. They hardly know her. In fact, they don’t know her.” Then his own chagrin swallowed him up; he had no reason whatsoever to be short-tempered with this particular uncle.

“Your father says they met her?” Jerry inquired, still delicate.

“I brought her here Thanksgiving. I wanted to please them.” Those words, like the rest of his familial generosity, suddenly turned a little sour on him. If his family wouldn’t please him, why must he be trying so hard to please them? “They knew I was going with a girl — I let them see her. She came for half an hour last week too, before I told them our plans.”

“Your father said something about her being a sickly girl. I’m only repeating him, believe me.”

“Jerry, she gets colds,” he answered wearily. “Jerry, let’s even say she’s a frail girl. But she’s not going to be a farmer. She’s going to be my wife. This is all very silly. Jerry, you know what they object to?”

“She’s Catholic.”

“She’s Catholic.” He himself knew that to be, however, only a strand in the whole tapestry of rejection. It was not just one crime they wanted to hang the girl on — there was her faith, plus her health, her youth, their son’s youth, and a dozen things more. If they had known the word they would have claimed that their sense of Paul’s error was intuitive; it was the word with which he had begun to argue with himself in favor of his decision. “Jerry, she’s a Catholic like I’m a Jew. It’s not the kind of thing that’ll have much to do with our lives. It hasn’t to do with us. It’s another ruse.”

“Paul, I’m put in a position where I’m asking questions I don’t even want to ask. How could I hope to reason with you, anyway, one way or the other? Even if I had the foolish impulse to. We’re not dealing with the mind, with the practical senses anyway. This is the mysterious, spontaneous choice — the choice of the heart. The unencumbered heart,” Jerry said.

“Yes,” Paul answered, unhinged slightly by his uncle’s reverent tones.

“The heart, Paul, knows. It cost me half a lifetime to learn such a simple fact. I had such neuroses pressing in upon me, they were the size of mountains. Tremendous pathetic pressures building and building, cutting me off from what you think of as your inside self. Paul, I didn’t do a spontaneous thing in twenty-seven years. Because the heart was under this terrific pressure. But what the heart decides, Paul, must be. I’m telling you, it won’t give you peace if it’s defied Love!” Jerry cried.