Philip Roth - Letting Go

The motor thumped under me, the heater whirred; I shot nose drops up to my sinuses (I saw the cavities of my head thick with a kind of London fog), but they only burned their way down to my raw throat. The body has no loyalty — bank it with pleasure and draw out disease. Parked across from the Hawaiian House, waiting for Martha to finish work, I was getting the common cold.

My watch showed one minute after one; then two after. I had a fevered fantasy of the hands on my watch advancing toward morning, and the temperature plummeting down and down, until by daybreak Chicago would simply have cracked in two, one half to tumble in the lake, the other to be blown westward, across endless prairies and mountains, until it dropped over into the Pacific and melted away to nothing. I was dying for spring, for warmth; the weather and my pleasures were out of joint.

Three after one. Still no Martha. Mr. Spicer, the manager of the Hawaiian House, appeared in his overcoat and hat, carrying his moneybags. The police, who waited each night to take him to the deposit box, opened the door to the squad car and Spicer stepped in. A chill ran over me; I sneezed once, and then again. My head rolled down and I half slept. Mrs. Silberman was knitting a gigantic sweater for me. A workman in overalls and tennis shoes was building a box with black windows; he was my father; the box was for me to sit in.

“Hey, open up.”

On the sidewalk was Martha, and someone else — a girl bundled in a coat and hat, whose face I couldn’t see. “Let us in,” Martha called. The air that rushed in with them penetrated my coat and moved right down to the bone.

Martha inclined her face toward me and we brushed cheeks. “Can you give Theresa a ride? Theresa, come on, this is Gabe. Can we drive her to the El, she’s not feeling too fit. Theresa, close the door.”

“Thank yuh.”

“Don’t worry about those books,” I said, turning to get a look at her, “just push everything aside.”

“I hardly need …” She blew her nose. Halfway to the El, she began to sob. Martha touched my leg, but she needn’t have, for I was in no mood anyway to ask questions.

When we got to the train, Martha turned on her knees and faced the back seat. “Everything will be all right. Just try to get some sleep.”

“I knew it,” the girl wept. “I just knew it.”

We waited until Theresa had walked up the stairway to the train and disappeared, and then I drove off.

“Poor dumb cluck,” Martha said.

“Martha, I’m going to take you home. I’m going home myself—” She wasn’t listening, however, and I didn’t feel I had the strength to repeat myself.

“The poor jerk got herself pregnant.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, but I’m going to collapse of exhaustion myself. I’m taking you home, then I’m going back to my place.”

“Oh yes?”

“I’m a dying man, sweetheart. Honestly, I’m dead.” She didn’t answer. “You come tomorrow,” I said, “to my place. Doesn’t Annie LaSmith come tomorrow?”

“I promised Markie I’d take him to buy a Christmas tree tomorrow.”

“Let Annie stay with him — you can come—”

“I promised him.”

“Okay. I’m just too dead tonight.”

In front of her building I did not even turn off the motor.

“All day I’ve been saying to myself: tonight I am going to have illicit relations with Gabriel Wallach.”

“That makes me very proud,” I said, “but my throat feels as though it’s been ripped open.”

“I had Abercrombie’s deliver a new set of whips and thumbscrews.”

“Martha, every night you roll over and go to sleep. Every night I have to go out into this weather and drive home and try to get a few hours sleep—”

She was whistling; nothing like eight hours of work to pep her up.

“I’ve got two classes to teach in the morning,” I said. “I just haven’t the strength.”

“I’m not asking you to lift weights, poor baby.”

I kissed her, and she said, “Come up for just an hour.”

“But my body fails me …”

She took my hand and touched it to her cheek. “Why don’t you just leave everything to me,” she said.

“Oh sweet Martha—”

“Why don’t you just come with me, all right?”

“You sound like a tart, baby.”

“See? Already you’re stimulating your imagination. Come.”

So I followed her up the stairs; before she placed the key in the lock, she turned and put her hand on me.

“Oh,” she said, “that’s so nice and sweet.”

“Martha, I’ve got to tell you that it’s got no more wind in it than a choir boy’s. It’s spiritless, it’s humbled and limp—”

“It’s sweet humbled and limp.”

I went into her bedroom and she continued down the hall to the children’s room, where she turned off the night lamp. I heard her close the door leading to Sissy’s room. Sitting on the blanket in the dark, the feel of the quilt and the sheets and the mattress under my hands filled me with awe. I waited, and then I was sinking, and then, I suppose, I was out.

When my eyes opened, it took me several minutes to see who was moving in the dark. Beneath me and above me I felt the clean white sheets I had so desired; someone had even been kind enough to remove my clothes. I raised my head a little and saw Martha by the window; she had one foot on a stool, and was bending forward, pulling down her stockings; the way in which her breasts hung from her body sent through my mind thoughts of flowers, mermaids, cows, things female. But I did not want to possess Martha or a nasturtium or a Guernsey; I wanted only sleep.

Martha’s hands were on the flesh of her hips; they ran down over her stomach and were touching her thighs. She was looking toward me in the bed, and it was as though I were waiting for some decision of hers. Even the furniture in the bedroom seemed altered, because between us something seemed to be being altered. Since Thanksgiving I had done the wooing, I had done the undressing, the caressing, and on the hard and serious work we had both pitched in. We had been dogged and conventional, we had proceeded step by step, until we had both clutched, and hung on, and then fallen away into sleep. To please one another we had had to do nothing at the expense of our own separate pleasures; we had been uncompromising and we had been lucky.

But now Martha stood by the window looking toward me for what seemed a very long time, pronouncing words I could not make out, and I was overcome with exhaustion; though I reached up to her, saying I would have to go, I don’t think my head ever left the bed. I dropped away, beyond hallucination or dream, and when I did rise up, it was never to regain power or lucidity; I was simply there, and Martha’s hair was down across my legs. I raised my head — such a feather, such a weight — and I saw her hands, saw her face, possessing me miles and miles away.

“Oh Gabe,” she said, “my Gabe—”

I left her there alone, just lips, just hands, and was consumed not in sensation, but in a limpness so total and blinding, that I was no more than a wire of consciousness stretched across a void. Martha’s hair came raking up over me; she moved over my chest, my face, and I saw her now, her jaw set, her eyes demanding, and beneath my numb exterior, I was tickled by something slatternly, some slovenliness in the heavy form that pinned me down. I reached out for it, to touch the slovenliness—

“Just lie still,” I heard her say, “don’t touch, just still—”

She showed neither mercy then, nor tenderness, nor softness, nothing she had ever shown before; and yet, dull as I was, cut off in my tent of fever and fatigue, I felt a strange and separate pleasure. I felt cared for, labored over; I felt used. Above, she was me now, and below I was her, and however I fell away from consciousness, or floated up toward light, always, beating on me, was Martha. Beating, beating, and then rising up and away, and wordlessly calling back of her delight.