Philip Roth - Letting Go

To that she had no answer; I had not really permitted one, and perhaps she realized that I was not talking only about the book.

Crushed, she answered finally, “I didn’t mean to be so flip. Or nosey.”

“All right, let’s forget it.” Though I was myself unable to. “I don’t usually leave letters in books,” I said. “It was a peculiar time. I was in the Army—” I heard myself becoming, in front of this girl, as momentous about my life as she had been about her own, and I stopped talking.

“Mr. Wallach,” she said, “I didn’t show it to Paul, if that alleviates anything.”

“We’re making much too much of this. Let’s do forget it.”

The next time she spoke it was only to point up ahead and say, “There he is.”

On the other side of the highway a figure in a long coat was leaning against the darkened headlamp of a car. I moved onto the shoulder at the right-hand side of the road just as Libby took my arm.

“Please forgive me. I’m a snoop, and I’m dumb about novels,” she said. “About people.”

It was supposed to have been a genuine admission, but once made I realized that it was not true; she was not so dumb finally about either.

“I’m sure you’re right about everything,” she said to me.

“Maybe we’re both right,” I answered, though not overgenerously, and turned off the motor and headlights.

Before she reached for the door handle, she turned her face toward me once again. When people have much to say to you, and hardly any time in which to say it, their eyes are sometimes like Libby Herz’s were that moment; above all, they were kind. “Mr. Wallach, I stayed up to read the book because I was very moved by the letter,” and then, as though we were being watched, we both jumped from the car.

All that had to be removed from Paul Herz’s Dodge was a briefcase stuffed with freshman themes, a flashlight, and an old army blanket that had been used to cover the torn upholstery in the front seat. We had to sit for half an hour in my car waiting for the wrecker; Herz had asked a state trooper to call one for him. There was little conversation: Libby discovered that her husband had ripped his new coat, and Herz said that he’d caught it on the hood, and from the back seat I thought I heard his wife begin to sob. Finally the wrecker arrived and the four of us gathered solemnly in the dark around the damaged hood. A sinewy little grease monkey, the wrecker flexed his knuckles and then stuck his hand down through the hole which the flying piston had made in the engine.

“Ten dollars,” he said.

“For repairs?” Libby asked.

“For the car,” the wrecker replied.

Headlights flashed by on the highway, illuminating on Libby Herz’s face astonishment and woe. “Ten dollars! That’s ridiculous. Paul, that’s ridiculous.”

The wrecker addressed the husband. “It’s junk.”

“It’s a ’47,” Libby said feebly.

“Lady, it’s got five pistons. It’s junk.”

“Five?”

“It’s gotta have six to go,” said the wrecker.

“Still.” Then she looked toward her husband. “Paul …”

The wrecker stuck his hand in again, and Libby turned quickly back to him as though perhaps he’d miscounted the first time. He only looked at me and shrugged his shoulders. Herz looked at none of us; I saw him shut his eyes.

“How much would it cost … to fix it?” Libby asked the question generally, as she had to; she was being ignored all around. The wrecker folded his arms and made me once again special witness to his exasperation. The two of us, thank God, were not married to this woman: he gave off a slow hiss for our side.

“We can’t fix it,” Herz said. “Please, Lib.”

“Paul, ten dollars. The parts alone — the heater alone.”

“Lady,” the wrecker said, and he seemed to have summoned his patience for an explanation of engine dynamics. “Lady, it’s junk,” he said.

“Will you stop saying junk! ” She was seeing through teary eyes, and talking with a full nose, and she turned her back to all of us and walked off toward the tow truck. Under the thick iron hook that swung off the crane, she stopped and blew her nose; she looked up, whether at the clear moony sky or the iron hook I didn’t know, but one or the other must have made an ungenerous comment to her about her fate, for she shuddered, and holding her arms around her front like a sick woman, climbed into the back seat of my car.

Paul Herz took his hands out of his coat pockets. “She’s upset,” he explained.

I nodded; the wrecker said, “I haven’t got all night.”

Herz looked at him and then, by himself, took a little walk around his car, staring down at each of the tires as though above all else he hated losing those four old friends. When he came back to us he tried to smile at me. “Okay,” he said.

The wrecker took a tight fat wad from his pocket; he flashed it a little at us college boys and peeled off two fives. He rubbed them a moment with his black fingers and handed the cash to Herz.

“Is that all?” Herz said.

The grease monkey was overcome suddenly with cheeriness. He lifted his arms in the air. “That’s all, professor.”

We drove back to Iowa City with Paul Herz sitting alongside me in the front. As soon as we got in the car Herz had said to me, “Thanks for being so patient. I’m sorry about all this.”

“It’s okay.”

“The thief,” Libby Herz said. In the rear-view mirror I saw she was sitting on her knees looking out the back window.

Herz seemed at first to decide not to be provoked, but at last he spoke. “Libby, the car blew a piston. It’s junk.”

“That’s what the man said,” his wife answered.

“Okay,” Herz said.

“Ten dollars … the fenders alone—”

Herz glanced my way to see if I was listening. I tried my best to attend only to the black road, but of course there were my ears to contend with. “Libby,” he said, “will you please? You don’t know anything about cars, honey.”

“I know about thieves.”

“Damn it,” Herz said, turning in his seat, “nobody cheated me!”

“I didn’t say he cheated you—”

“What did you expect me to do? Bargain with him for a couple of dollars in the middle of the highway? I’ve been standing there for over an hour!”

“We’re not millionaires!”

“You don’t know anything about cars. Will you please be quiet!”

“Why did the piston come through like that?” she whined.

Herz turned to the front window again; he was fingering his coat where the cuff was torn. “I don’t know.”

“What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know! ”

By this time I was practically hunched behind the wheel, feeling the emotions of an eavesdropper — and having the thoughts of one too. Like most people with an ear to the wall, I had taken a side: the impossible one to live with, I could see now, was clearly the wife. Her husband’s car had been raised on a hook and towed away; his briefcase was splitting with ungraded themes; his new coat, which looked to me to be a pretty old coat, was torn in the sleeve; and to top things off, his Anglo-Saxon verbs, like mine, had been waiting for centuries to be memorized, and waited still. And she wouldn’t let the poor guy alone. Without being too obvious about it, I pushed the accelerator into the floor, though I realized that by outracing Paul Herz’s temper, and avoiding what I could of his familial difficulty, I was of course racing back to familial problems of my own. I would walk through the door, the phone would ring, I would lift it, and my father would say: “Where were you — I’ve been calling all night?” I could race up the stairs and crash through the apartment and catch the phone on the second ring, and he still wouldn’t be satisfied: What’s the matter I wasn’t there for the first? In short, why hadn’t I called him? In short, why had I run off to Iowa for graduate work when Columbia was only two subway stops north? I could go back to Harvard, couldn’t I? At least it wasn’t six million miles away!