Philip Roth - Letting Go

And Paul cried back, “Jerry, I love her.”

And his uncle replied sweetly, “That’s all then. That’s all that counts.”

Then, for having provoked such wholesale approval, Paul felt wave upon wave of indecency wash over him. True as they may have been, his words had been spoken out of nothing less than design. And why had he to convince Jerry? So Jerry could turn around and convince him? It was an unavoidable fact that, ever since his afternoon on Third Avenue, certainty had somehow been seeping away. He could not believe that Asher and his bird-brained mistress had demonstrated anything other than what everybody knew about squandered lives, yet he had begun to think of himself as being not so courageous as fearful. Fear began to seem the springboard of much that he had done in his short life. He was a scholarship holder all right, a planner, a young man investing emotions one day to accumulate love and admiration the next. He had come to see his marrying Libby in two distinct ways, both of which, unfortunately, cast doubt on his manliness and dignity.

On the one hand, it all seemed so safe. Husband, wage-earner, father — right on down the line, all the duties and offices laid out for him. From home to college to a wife, no chances taken. Without much effort, he could recall from his past more than a few risks he had worked a little hard at avoiding. Even recently with his parents: he knocked against the walls of their house in December, hoping that somehow by May they would find a way to prevent the roof from falling in. He wanted to remain the good son. Even to himself he seemed to be working strenuously at being upright.

Otherwise he would tell them to go to hell. Run off, marry the girl and leave them to drip tears till their eyes fell out. It was what Asher would have done, he thought. And because he saw it as being a choice that Asher might have made, it too caused him discomfort. If marrying Libby was taking no risks, it was also taking every risk. Asher’s life had unnerved him deeply; with a little twisting and turning he could think of it as his own. Way down, he had begun to bend an ear toward his parents’ objections. He was no longer so sure that he was seeing Libby as clearly as his uncle saw Patricia Ann, at least as he saw her in paint, if not in life. He did not know that he wanted to see that clearly. He only knew that he did not want merely to stick it right up in Libby; he wanted to love her.

Feeling something less than a daredevil, he listened to Uncle Jerry on the other end comforting him. “Paul, good luck then. I think that’s the only proper thing for any of us to say.”

“Thank you.”

“Tell Libby good luck too.” Jerry pronounced her name easily, and Paul knew they would like each other right off. “When will you be married?”

“Not till May. Around graduation.”

“Will I get to see you before you go back? I’d like to take you to dinner. I’ll invite Claire and her husband. She’d love to see you.”

“That’s very kind, Jerry. I’ll call Libby. I think tomorrow night, if you could, would be best for us. We were going to meet with news from both fronts.”

“How is she bearing up?”

“Fine,” Paul said, lying, as if he had to spare that two-time loser from any further knowledge of the hardships of loving.

“I know I’ve got character in my face, but won’t someone say I’m pretty?” Well, on the steps of the Plaza, with all that swank hurrying by, she had her wish. Character had been bled from her for the evening, and in its place was prettiness. She had made up her eyes heavily, and managed even to reduce the proud leap of her nose — its sailing proportions were lost beneath the great mast of her black hair, which was piled atop her head, revealing a slender boyish back of the head. The doorman bowed and opened the door for both the lady and her escort, who even in dark suit and tie made a slightly seedy appearance — seedy perhaps only by comparison to the glitter and chic of the slender girl beside him.

At the sight of Libby, Paul had been visited with a definite burst of pleasure. Gradually, however, he became irritated because she had decked herself out. Why? Actually she was wearing only a simple black suit with a tight jacket and a full skirt, but its fetchingness — acknowledged by its owner in her very gait — was in the way it made so apparent the delicacy of her shoulders and neck. Despite her dripping nose and the weather, she had worn no blouse, so that one was of course touched by the wistful fragility revealed in the wide neck of the jacket. The wad of Kleenex in her white glove (there to inform his parents of sanitoriums and hospital bills) only made more glamorous her tiny garnet earrings and bracelet. They proceeded through the lobby to the entrance of the Oak Room, and when Paul looked at her again, he looked deeply, intently, for some sign of the college girl he had planned to marry: the straight shoulder-length black hair, the pale lips, the over-used eyes, the winterized, libraryized, studentized Libby. What he found instead was something that bothered him, something that he could only think of as aspiration.

Yet as they spotted Uncle Jerry, and moved into the dining room, Paul put his mouth to her hair. He explained her little display of prosperity and polish to himself as an attempt to impress some Herz. That his mother and father dreaded her so for their son, led her, he knew, to begin to wonder what kind of ogre she might actually be. He knew this, and he knew how much protection his intended needed. He said into her ear, “My wife,” feeling a little ripple of well-being as the word passed from his lips.

“Husband,” Libby whispered, and that thrilled him too. Oh Libby had come a long long way from being a sorority sister to being a woman. He, Paul, had lifted her up from childhood with him. Now — the thought had a peculiar forcefulness as Libby swished up to Uncle Jerry — now she was all his!

Uncle Jerry’s daughter Claire was Paul’s age. It had always been expected in the family that because they had been born within a month of each other they should like each other. But even during the flirtation they had carried on in the closing months of their seventeenth year, there had been little affection between them. Following an evening when they had taken off their clothes and stood glaring, breathlessly, at one another, Paul had gone on to college and high literature, and Claire to a promiscuity at Syracuse, stories of which had reached Paul’s ears every Monday morning, sixty miles away at Cornell. But with dinner at the Plaza — snow fell on the carriages out the window, beyond Libby’s hair — all was changed. Claire seemed to be taking a special delight in showing Paul how matronly she had become, and how human. With her whole being she listened to the remarks of her husband, an average crew-cut sort of I.B.M. machine, who had taken away from Syracuse an M.A. in Business Administration, and hot Claire Herz. The firm he was with was splitting stock or changing hands, or something that Paul was not following; whatever, Claire responded as though he was singing exquisite tenor. Once Paul thought he saw her eyes shut when her husband spoke about a large loan a Mr. Richmond was floating. She might have been visualizing it aloft. Finally she discovered Libby and her clothes; and Libby, it seemed, discovered herself.

“I never usually go to Carita,” Libby said, measuring Claire’s response, “because you have to wait so long.”

“They do do a wonderful job,” Claire said. “It’s so lovely.”

“It’s only the second time I’ve been there.”