Philip Roth - Letting Go

“I like that picture, don’t you?” Cynthia asked.

“I think it’s terrific,” Martha said. “I think it’s very beautiful.”

“Can I cut it out and keep it?”

“Sure.”

“Can I hang it up?”

“Absolutely.”

“Oh boy! Hey Markie — look what Mommy gave me! ”

“Oh Cynthia, don’t start that, will you? Cynthia—” But the little girl was skipping off toward the living room; she met her brother halfway.

“Look what Mommy gave me. I’m going to hang it up!”

“I want it!” he shouted. “What is it?”

“Daddy’s picture. Here. Don’t touch. Don’t touch. ”

“I want it. Where — where’s Daddy’s picture?”

“Here, dope. Can’t you see?”

“Cynthia—” Martha said, from the doorway to the living room. “Cynthia …” But she found herself unable to attach a command, an instruction, a warning, to her child’s name. Cynthia, Cynthia, born of sin.

“Who—?” Markie was asking.

“This—” Cynthia said. “It’s Daddy’s picture!”

Mark didn’t get it; his jaw only hung lower and lower. Would he ever learn to read? Lately she had begun to wonder if he might not be retarded. Should she take him in for tests?

“And it’s mine. I’m hanging it over my bed! ” Cynthia cried.

“ My bed—” howled Mark, but his sister had already fled on one bare, one bandaged leg — both willowy, both more perfect every day — carrying her prize to some private corner of the house.

It might have been Christmas, and Sid, Saint Nick. He arrived with bottles of Pouilly Fuissé, Beefeater’s, Noilly Prat dry vermouth, and a fifth of Courvoisier. “That’s for the kids,” he said, placing a row of liquor cartons at Markie’s feet. “And now for you,” and he unwrapped a doll almost three feet tall and a portable basketball set, both of which he deposited in Martha’s arms.

“What’s for us?” Cynthia demanded.

The sandpapery voice in which Cynthia had addressed him nearly flattened the man on the spot, but, hanging on courageously to what he had doubtless been planning for the last half hour, he said, “Whiskey.”

“It’s sour!” Markie cried. “It’s beer!”

“Oh Mommy,” cried Cynthia, “Mommy we didn’t get anything—”

And then, just as Sid’s good intentions and his bad judgment threatened to plunge all present into despair, Martha swooped into the center of the room, gathered her children in with the armful of presents, and went spinning around in a circle. “Dummies, dummies, this is for you! ” Spinning, they fell onto the rug, and the two children came up clutching their rightful gifts to their chests. And Sid was down on the floor with them too, clutching Martha’s wrist with his hand — and all the laughter and noise seemed to her only a mockery of a real and natural domesticity. Nevertheless, propelled by a seething desire to make the afternoon work, she kissed the faces of her two children and the brow of her gentleman caller. The skirt of her purple suit — an extravagance of her first winter back in Chicago — was above her knees. Sid Jaffe’s weighty brown eyes, those pleading, generous orbs, turned liquidy and hot; he tried to engage her in a significant glance, but she quickly began to explain to Markie the rules of basketball, as she understood them.

There had been a scene with Sid the last time, which neither of them could have forgotten. Martha had rushed away from the sofa, trembling, but acting tough: “Stop persevering, will you! What are you — a schoolboy?” “Just the opposite, Martha!” he had said. “I want to sleep with you!” “I don’t care what you want— stop trying to cop feels! ” And he had left, she knew, feeling more abusive than abused, an unfair state to have produced in a man forty-one years old. But then Sid could never think of himself as having been in the right for very long anyway. Forceful as he may have been in court, out of it he defended himself with only the rawness of his needs — he seemed so baldly willing to protect others and not himself. Much as this willingness of his sometimes discomfited her, in the end it was for sexual reasons that Martha had sworn she would let him drift out of her life, just as five or six men had had to drift out previously.

It was almost immediately after Sid had left last time that she had called Gabe Wallach and asked him —whom she hardly knew — to join her and hers for Thanksgiving dinner. He was a smoothy, though, and had given some excuse about a party for his father in New York. She, whose parents were of an entirely different chapter of her life, had accepted his refusal graciously, if disbelievingly. Since she suspected Wallach of a kind of polished lechery anway, she almost felt relieved afterward — she might only have been throwing herself back into the struggle from which she had been trying to extricate herself. Yet she knew that Thanksgiving alone with the kids would be a hollow day. You might as well spend Thanksgiving in China if there wasn’t a man around to carve. So some days later she had called Sid’s office. And the first thing he said to her was that he was sorry, which only re-enforced a belief she had in her ability to emasculate when she put her mind to it. He said he had missed her; he said he had thought about her; he said he had thought about the kids; he said of course that he would come.

In a way Martha had missed him too, or missed the chance he had given her; she almost regretted now not having submitted to his passion and her own stifled, immeasurable itch. Sid was a vigorous man with a bald head and a broken nose, both of which gave him a kind of athletic, trampled-on good looks. His body was exercised and a little thick, like a weight-lifter’s, though he was two inches taller than Martha. He was a little too prissy about not running to seed, but that was a minor quibble and hardly the sort that soured lust. Which was fortunate, for it was lust (plus a natural instinct for sharing pleasure, an inability even to see a movie alone) that she would finally have to rely on with Sid. Well of decency that he was, she did not love him and never could. The affection he did inspire made her feel sorry for him, and sorrow had never for a moment produced a single quiver in her loins. Early in life she had allowed herself the luxury of many men, but she had never been swept backwards into bed out of feelings of pity or pathos. For all her genuine humanity the plight that touched her most was her own. She looked up fiercely and demandingly into men’s faces, and some of them — those with more staying power than perception — had circulated stories of nymphomania, when what they had witnessed was only simple selfishness, the grinding out of one’s own daily bread.

Sid gazed once again into her eyes; thinking to herself, why not? what’s lost? she gazed back. Then she saw him soften, saw his eyes saying to her that he demanded no more than he deserved. Ah, he was too just, too kind. It seemed that almost as great as his desire to sleep with her was his desire to pay her bills and get her a steady maid; something he had once said led her to believe that he had already talked over the possibility with his own cleaning lady.

But despite the feelings which washed over and over her through the afternoon, she carried on with the festivities. After Markie had broken the hoop on the basketball set, and Cynthia had spilled Sid’s martini — burrowing into his lap whenever he conversed with her mother — they had their dinner.