Philip Roth - Letting Go

He nodded his head, then checked the time again.

“Well, I won’t keep you …” I said, though he hadn’t moved.

“I shouldn’t have lost my temper.” He looked up at me, speaking in a very soft voice. “It was a bad outburst to show those pricks.” The light from a nearby lamp revealed the creases in his thin face; at that moment he looked nothing at all like the boy in the picture with Maury Horvitz. “Don’t you think so?”

I sat down next to him. “I don’t think much of some of them,” I said. “Do you mind if I sit down? I’ve got a few minutes before dinner.”

“You liked that paper — it had a little something, didn’t it?”

“I thought it was pretty good,” I said. “It was lively, you were right.”

A girl emerged from Goodspeed Hall, and Paul leaned forward and looked her way; then he leaned back again, saying nothing.

“Do you know the student who wrote the paper?” I asked.

“No. But that’s the point …” he said.

I wondered if perhaps he had planned some elaborate hoax; I really didn’t know very much about Paul Herz, and so it was possible to think any number of things. “You didn’t write it, did you?” I asked, kiddingly.

“Who do you think — a boy or a girl?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ve been thinking a boy. A kid I’ve seen in the halls.”

“A student of yours?”

“No,” he said, “I just picked him out. I saw him whining one day in the halls to a friend of his. He’s got an awful face. He was making a terrible scene. Bad posture. Picking at his shorts all the time. He probably has some nasty habit like not flushing after himself.”

The clock in Mitchell Tower struck six gongs, and I realized that I might be late for dinner. Still, across from me Paul Herz had smiled. He was talking, no small thing.

“Why this paper?” I asked. “Why this kid?”

“Just a joke. I’m reasoning after the fact,” he said gloomily. “I don’t know who wrote it.”

“Oh,” I said, mystified.

“Look, what is Spigliano?”

“What?”

“Spigliano. Harvard too?”

“Harvard too,” I said.

“Who fires people around here?” he asked, after a moment.

“There’s a committee. Spigliano’s one. So is Sam, and the Dean — I don’t know, three or four others. It’s depressing, I know. Sometimes I wonder why I don’t go downtown and get a job pushing toothpaste for five times the salary.” I hadn’t meant, of course, to indicate that I was in any need of cash; nevertheless, Paul sensed an irony I didn’t intend, and gave me a fishy look. “But in the end,” I said, meaning it, “it’s a healthier life, this one. You go into class and you can do as you please. It’s not a bad life.”

Solemnly, suddenly, he said to me, “I appreciate, of course, what you were able to do …”

“Look,” I jumped in, as his voice trailed off, “why do you think this kid who doesn’t flush after himself wrote this paper? You may have developed a whole new technique of psychological testing.”

He smiled. “Oh — here’s this disgusting unimportant kid being a first-rate bastard to his roommate in public. And here’s this sweet very excited little essay. That’s all. It’s nice to think it happens. I’d like to kick Spigliano right in the ass for filling their heads with all that form crap.”

Hating the same people usually turns out to be a weak basis for friendship; nevertheless, I allowed myself to feel considerable fondness for Paul Herz. He seemed to me nothing less than a genuine and capable man. At any rate, I was willing to believe this as the snow fell and we sat together in the dignified environs of the University. I was even willing to believe that he was not Libby’s misfortune, but that she was his. Perhaps the truth was that Libby was a girl with desires nobody could satisfy; perhaps they weren’t even “desires” but the manifestation of some cellular disorder, some physiochemical imbalance that fated her to a life of agonized yearning in our particular world of flora and fauna, amongst our breed of humanity. I was willing to believe that Libby either did not need to be rescued, or was impossible to rescue. The more involved I became in her life, I told myself — repeating a lesson learned several times already — the more anguish we would all have. No one had to marry Libby; she was already married!

“Why don’t you come over to the club with me?” I suggested. “We’ll have a drink. Warm up—”

He checked his watch again and told me he was waiting for his wife.

“She’s still working?” I asked.

“… I suppose so.”

“Well,” I said, “we can all three have a drink.”

“I’m afraid she’ll be too tired. It’s better not to tire her. The weather …” His mood had changed, and so had his voice. Leaving his sentence unfinished, he huddled in his coat.

“What is it?” I asked. “Is she ill?”

“No,” he said. “She only gave it up because the doctors don’t think she should be out at night. Not in this kind of climate.”

“Gave what up? I’m sorry.”

He peered over at me. “School. Classes.”

“I haven’t seen Libby, so I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

“She said, I think, she met you in the Loop.”

“I meant I haven’t seen her to talk with. I was shopping.”

He chose not to reply. Instantly I imagined scenes in his home where my name was introduced as evidence of duplicity and crime. The little trust that had seemed to have sprung up between us disappeared, and I began to wonder just how disloyal Libby was to me. It was clearly time for me to be moving off, by myself.

I said, “Well, I’m sorry about that.”

“She can go back in the spring and summer, you see,” Paul was telling me. “It’ll be all right. When it’s warm again, she can start in again.” I felt as though I were a parent being given an explanation by a child; there was suddenly that in Paul Herz’s tone. “Right now, getting to the train, getting off the train, walking to the Downtown College—” he said. “The doctors—” he began, and the plural of the noun seemed to depress both of us. “The doctors think she should build up resistance first.”

“Yes. That sounds like a sensible solution.”

However there was an even better one. Doubtless it came to me as quickly as it did because it had been hiding all these years only a little way under the surface. It made me feel both old and giddy: they could borrow my car. Warmed by my heater, Libby could drive back and forth to her classes; I could park it near Goodspeed on the days she would be needing it; an extra key could easily—

“Well,” I said to Paul, “I’ll be seeing you.”

“Okay,” he said.

The formal nature of our relationship immediately reasserted itself; more often than not, when Paul Herz and I came together or parted, we shook hands. It seemed to me always to combine a measure of distrust and a measure of hope. Now when we shook hands I felt a rush of words move up, and what I finally said had to stand for all that I had decided to keep to myself. “By the way, I was in a funk this morning. I dialed your number by mistake. I didn’t realize it until I hung up. I hope it didn’t ruin your day, the mystery of it.”

Though I am twenty pounds heavier than Paul, we are the same height, and when he rose, suddenly, holding onto my hand, I found myself looking into his worried eyes. I couldn’t imagine precisely what it was he was going to say — though I thought for a moment that we had at last reached our particular crisis. I was instantly unnerved, and also, melancholy. Though I tell myself I value passion, I must admit that I do not value scenes of it; though I try to live an honest life, I do not like to see honesty stripped of civility and care. I was prepared, all at once, to be humiliated. But all Paul said, with a pained look of determination, was, “Why don’t we have that drink?”