Philip Roth - Letting Go

“No,” she said.

“Martha,” Sid said calmly, “this is getting ridiculous. I’m a grown man, you’re a grown woman—”

“It’s one of those things that’s ridiculous and is going to have to be, Sidney.”

Sid swam an hour a day at the Chicago Athletic Club; he had been a Marine Corps officer in two wars; at forty-one he wore the same size belt he had at twenty-one — and now he asked, with a nervous display of bravado, if perhaps it was simply that she found him physically repellent.

“I find you nothing of the sort,” she said, touched, but not of course impassioned, by the question. “A lot of traffic has moved across this sofa, Sid. I’ve been living here going on four years, and a lot of men have come through, you know, on their way home from work. I think there’s a bus stops in front of our steps, I don’t know. Anyway, if I let everybody’s hands go traveling down my blouse, what kind of mother would I be?”

“I’d appreciate it, Martha, if you could just be serious for a minute.”

He was dead serious, which caused her to feel all the strain of being a joker. She felt dumb and inconsequential and foolish. Here was a man with a hard-on (and all the seriousness that implied) and she wouldn’t give him a straight answer. But there she went again! She just couldn’t sneak out of things by turning phrases all the time. She addressed herself in a stern voice: Be serious … But if she were to become serious about old Sidney, she knew — why not face it — that she would marry him. Once they had stripped down together, and she had realized that aside from being a father to her children, he could also give her about as much bedroom excitement as any other girl she knew was getting — once she let him prove this, wouldn’t she be a goner? Wed once more for wrong and expedient reasons … No, there was only one bag to put your marbles in, one basket for your eggs, and that was love. Nobody was going to marry her again out of necessity; nobody was going to marry her for her breasts, her troubles, or her kids. Nor was she going to miss the mark herself. This time she would do it for love.

At bottom, her demands were no more complicated or original than any other girl’s.

Sid walked to where she stood running her hand over the bindings of her small and eclectic collection of paperbacks. He said, “I didn’t mean that, Martha,” whereupon she thought: What! What are you apologizing for now! “I understand,” he said. “You’re in a tricky position. I’m not trying to make things more difficult for you at all. I care for you so much, Martha. You’ve got a lot of guts, and you’ve been remarkable, really, in a very awkward situation. I do appreciate just how complicated it’s been for you. But, honey, there’s such a simple solution. It doesn’t have to go on like this at all. I’m going to get you down on the sofa, and you’re going to jump up, and there’s such a simple and obvious solution.”

“And what’s that?”

He took her hand, as was appropriate. “Marry me.”

Since her return to Chicago, two other proposals had come Martha’s way. One was from Andy Ratten, a Rush Street musician much admired by co-eds and their dates, who pretended to be Paul Hindemith to one set of friends and Dizzy Gillespie to another; when Martha turned him down, he had sent in the mail — the measure of his crew-cutted wit and marijuanaed charm — a Sammy Kaye LP. “Your fate, baby,” was all the enclosed card had said. The second proposal had come from Billy Parrino, who at the time was the husband of her best friend. On the playground, while soft-faced, bug-eyed exhausted Billy was watching his three kids — his wife was home cracking up, a phenomenon only recently completed — and Martha was watching her two, he had come right out with it. “Martha, let’s just take off.” “I think you have a wife named Beverley.” “She’s so wacked-up it’s driving me crazy.” “Well, I’d love to, Billy, but the kids—” “We’ll take them; we’ll take them all, and we’ll just go somewhere. Paris.” “It all sounds too glamorous — you, me, five kids, Paris.” “Oh,” wailed Billy, “how this life does stink,” and he went home.

So a full-hearted, unqualified, sensible proposal from a man as substantial as Sid Jaffe — which now that it was here melted the cartilage in her knees — was a considerable achievement. Sid made $15,000 a year, was neat and clean, and, God knew, his heart was in the right place. Just three weeks before, they had sat by her TV set, and while poor Adlai Stevenson had conceded defeat in measured eighteenth-century sentences, tears had rolled from Sid’s eyes. Sid Jaffe was for all the right things; he was decent and just and kind (she would always have her way; she would be in a marriage, imagine it, where she would always have her way) and he was good to children, if somewhat plodding. And even that was mostly eagerness, and would surely have disappeared by the time of their first anniversary — to be celebrated, no doubt, with ten days in the Bahamas …

She had really to search for some switch to throw, something to divert the current that was building up to carry her toward an affirmative reply. “My kids, you know, are little Protestant kids. Markie’s circumcision was strictly pragmatic, I don’t want you to be tricked by that. He’s a slow learner, Sid, and it may take him fifteen years to figure out what a Jew is. And Cynthia may turn out to be an anti-Semite; she comes home with something new every day. My grandmother, you know, is a flying buttress still of the DAR—” Yet even as her mouth released all this feeble chatter, she remembered her old grandmother’s balanced judgment on the men of Zion: “They’re tight-fisted ugly little fellas, Martha Lee, but they’re good to their wives and children.”

“Martha, you don’t have to give me an answer in the next sixty seconds.”

When it came to honoring the other person’s surface emotions, Sid Jaffe was a very sweet considerate man. “Let me think about it, Sid — all right?”

But he had suggested she wait, apparently, not expecting she would choose to; he had to turn away to hide the fact that he was crushed. Suddenly Martha had a vision of Sid proposing to girls ever since high school.

And then he was pressing her to him. She was wearing her one other extravagance, her white silk V-neck blouse, and Sid had buried his head in the V. His mouth sent through her an arc, a spasm of passion, and if Markie was not sleeping in the other room, if Cynthia’s jump-rope song had not ceased, if the phone had not all at once begun to ring, Martha Reganhart might have had a far different future.

“Martha, we can just have the most wonderful—” His mouth went down and down and she closed her eyes.

“Wonderful wonderful—”

“—The phone.”

“Let it ring.”

But it stopped ringing.

“Mommy! It’s Daddy!”

“What!” She was racing for the kitchen — racing away, not toward. “What is it, Cynthia? What? ”

“It’s Daddy from New York! For Mrs. Reganhart! You, Mommy! The operator!”

She took the receiver from Cynthia’s hands, wondering — among other things — how long the child had been in the kitchen. Couldn’t she even get felt up in private? And now this — Dick Reganhart! From where! “Yes? … Operator? This is Martha Reganhart.”

“It’s not Daddy, however,” said the voice at the other end.

She sank down in a chair. “Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

“Shall I hang up?”

“Certainly not — my child’s drunk on Mott’s apple juice. How are you?”

“Fine.”

“ Where are you?”

“Daddyland,” Gabe Wallach answered. “New York.”