Philip Roth - Letting Go

“We made an appointment already. We discussed money.”

“That doesn’t bind me to a thing.”

“Where are we going to get all that money?”

“It’s in the bank.”

“Paul, that’s all we’ve got. Everything!”

“Money,” he said firmly, as though it were a truth he had known for more than a few hours, “is to get you out of trouble with.”

“You’ve decided.”

“I’ve decided.” Quickly he added. “So did you.”

“I didn’t decide anything!”

“All afternoon you were on a seesaw, Libby. If you said no, it would have been no. I wouldn’t have gone against you.”

Limply, she held out for herself. “I did say no.”

“No, then yes, then no. When you went to the doctor’s office—”

“You tricked me!”

“Lower your voice!”

“It’s my body! It’s my body he’s going to operate on!”

At last they touched: he clamped a hand over her mouth. “Libby, Libby,” he said through his teeth, “it’s been a difficult day. These old men, my hand, everything.” When he removed his hand, allowing her to breathe again, she rolled away from him. “You want to think the decision is mine,” he said, “then it’s mine.”

“It is yours.”

“All right, you think that.”

“Stop trying to get the upper hand!” she said. “I’m thinking it because it’s so.”

“Libby, you’re twenty years old. We came down here to make some money. We want to go back to school. We’re married a year, we’re broke—”

“We’re not broke if we’ve got four hundred and fifty dollars in the bank to throw out!”

“In the end, a baby will cost more, much, much more. It’ll change our lives altogether. Honey, I’m only trying to protect us from even more crap. If there’s a baby, we have to move out of this room, you have to stop working. And we’ll never get caught up, Libby. I know it, we’ll just flounder along.”

She turned back toward him, covering her face with her hands. “You think you shouldn’t even have married me. I made you marry me.”

“Don’t talk stupidly, please.”

“When I think of all the stuff I said I’m just so ashamed. You’ve changed me, now you’ve got to marry me — how can I ever go out with other boys—”

“Lib,” Paul said, not sure that he wasn’t lying, “you never said any of that.”

“I thought it.”

“I wanted to marry you. I went out of my way to marry you.”

“I made you want to.”

“Go to sleep. Nobody’s talking sense at this hour.”

“I can’t go to sleep. My mind’s a whirlpool … What does an osteopath know about uteruses?”

“Osteopaths are like doctors. Smith is very well known.”

“They’re bone-crackers.”

“The man’s been doing this for years.”

“What about infection?”

“This is a doctor, Libby, not just anybody. Would he do it if it was risky?”

“Paul?”

“Yes.”

“Give me your hand. Feel my breasts. Do they feel bigger?”

“I think so, honey.”

She brought his hand up to her mouth and kissed it; she tried to be funny. “It’s what I’ve always wanted.” Then, as he knew she would, she wept. “And it’s going to last one day. Oh Paul …” She lay still, holding his hand to her, and then because she was exhausted she soon fell asleep.

He himself had no such luck. His own whirlpool went round and round and round … Infection was Libby’s worry; his own mind turned and turned now on a single word: jail. Korngold had been showing his pathetic photograph, and all he had been thinking was jail! Suppose the police should come in before Libby was in the operating room. Couldn’t he simply say she was there for an examination? Couldn’t they deny everything? Unless she were already on the table — then what? Whom do they put in jail? After all, he was her husband, not just a man who had got a girl into trouble. But what weight, if any, did that carry? Did that not make it seem worse? He tried to remember accounts of eases reported in the newspapers. Was the boy friend or husband an accomplice? The girl? Surely they didn’t throw her in jail! But in the headlines she was always dead.

Through the hectic night, at the center of his imaginings, stood the police. You’re an accomplice to an abortion. No, my wife said she had to come here to have a cyst removed. All right, says the Captain, ask the wife … Libby, if anything should happen, if anybody should question you, say I didn’t know, say you told me it was a cyst—

In the morning neither of them heard the alarm clock. They dressed in a frenzy, couldn’t get into the bathroom, and had no time for coffee on the hot plate. They parted at the bus stop without even a kiss. Only a few hours earlier, Paul had tried to force his way into sleep by telling himself that all this preoccupation with the police was only his super-ego asserting itself. But that had in no way been able to increase his self-respect; he felt lucky then to have avoided a morning conversation with his wife, for he might have confessed to her the nature of his fears and so shaken her even further. He was aware of his momentum again, carrying him forward.

The bus started away from the corner, then stopped; someone was hammering on the side. The driver swung back the doors and Mr. Levy charged up the stairs, eyebrows floating and sinking, cane swinging disastrously near the driver’s head. “Don’t be disrespectful! I’ll take your number!” He started up the aisle, a little eager old man, sun-tanned from the ultraviolet bulb in his room. He snapped a sharp look into each seat until he spotted Paul. “Ah, nice morning,” he said; refining himself down into an oily friendliness, he slid in beside the young man. “A little chilly, but bracing.”

“Good morning,” Paul said. He had to free his coat from Levy’s backside.

“Heigh ho, heigh ho, off to work you go?”

“Yes,” Paul said. “Yourself?”

“Enterprises, enterprises. I’m moving some gloves for a friend. You wrote the letter?”

He found himself looking out the window as he said, “I haven’t gotten around to it yet.”

“I thought maybe Korngold picked it up last night.”

“No.”

“I thought maybe it was his limp I heard dragging down the hall. Must be some mistake.”

Paul’s eyes fixed on the dull two-storied rooming houses along the street.

“You look a little underneath the weather,” commented Levy. “Up too late at night, no?”

“No.”

“Funny.”

“What’s funny?”

“Over sixty-five you can’t trust your senses. My hearing is a tricky item where I’m concerned.” Levy made a quick survey of the ads posted in the bus, checking the competition. He said, “Korngold, of course, is an old old friend, but senility will rob him of his sense of fair play, I’m afraid.”

Paul at last forced himself to engage Levy’s excited glittery eyes. “He doesn’t seem senile. Maybe a little fatigued. He seems to have had a lot of trouble.”

“Oh, nobody’s taking his troubles away from him. A sad case, that man. Fleeced all his life, then health goes, whew! No wonder he’s such a suspicious specimen. It’s pathetic how he doesn’t know the best road no longer. Needs help. Good thing you and me are around, because drowning would be his end. Starvation probably.”

They rode on a little further. Paul’s growing discomfort with Levy arose in part from a sense of incongruity; it was not simply that he did not like the fellow — it was that here was a crisis in his life, the crisis perhaps, and these two old men had somehow gotten tied up in it. It was all he could do not to get up and change his seat.