Philip Roth - Letting Go

In the morning I lay in bed until I figured that everyone was through in the bathroom. Cynthia and Markie had already held some sort of relay race in the hallway, but it was silent now, and I assumed that breakfast had begun. I wanted to surprise Martha — and to lighten her load — and before she brought my tray to me, I thought I would appear at the table, shaved and groomed, showing myself to everyone in my recovered condition. That morning I understood what people mean when they talk about feeling like a bigger person. With the cheery disposition not only of a physical convalescent, but a moral one as well, I put my bare feet into my shoes and moved as quietly as I could across the hall and into the bathroom.

Martha’s bathroom walls were covered with travel posters, two to mask windows opening onto the outside stairwell, and another to hide a crack in the plaster, which ran from the ceiling down to the toilet. Visit Switzerland! Visit France! Visit Holland! Brushing my teeth, I felt magnanimous about all three countries, especially little Holland, whose porcelain-faced girls in traditional garb would forever be tending tulips within the direct line of vision of whoever was sitting on the can. I picked up a brush that was on the sink; no sooner did I run it through my hair than my forehead and ears were draped with Martha’s long blond strands. I didn’t even feel a ripple of annoyance. Why should I?

I looked for a razor and found one in the soap dish of the bathtub; the blade was dull and I set out looking for a new one, feeling, as one can while engaged in trivial works, at one with the world. Perhaps it was because my spirits were so high that they were able to tumble so low when I opened the medicine chest. Capless bottles, squeezed-out tubes, open jars, toothless combs, a cracked orange stick, three wilted old toothbrushes, hairpins, pills and capsules scattered everywhere. Perhaps there was a blade, but in that square foot of chaos, who could tell? Curiously, the sight of that mess was a knife sunk right down into the apple of my well-being. Nevertheless, I stuck my head into the hallway and called out, in an unexasperated voice, “Honey! Do you have a razor blade?”

The conversational mumblings in the kitchen continued.

“ Martha! Have you got a new blade? I want to shave! ”

No answer. I took another poke at the medicine cabinet. About the only thing one could get one’s hands on — without everything falling after — was a bottle on the bottom shelf with a skull-and-crossbones label. I put my feet back into my shoes, and started down the hall, one of Martha’s hairs floating down over my nose. Clutching her old misshapen bathrobe around me, I charged into the kitchen to behold Mark and Cynthia spooning Wheatena, and Martha talking to a man. At first he was only a tannish leather jacket and a big shock of red hair combed flat with water — and then, for an instant, an astonished toothy smile and a little courtly bow. He even stuck a hand out toward me, but I was in flight, my unlaced shoes dropping off my heels with each step, clopping my guilt and shame after me. There hadn’t been much dignity in my getaway, which was perfectly evident to me as I leaned against the poster of Holland, catching my breath.

And it had only been the janitor. The janitor! The fury I began to feel was first directed at those damn shoes, then at my legs, which seemed by themselves to have carried me away before I’d even had a chance to think. But finally I was furious with myself for having thought again that I could simplify life.

My search through Martha’s bathroom was now undertaken with the kind of single-mindedness one associates with the insane. I was no longer even thinking about shaving, only about the blade. I flung open the medicine chest to be confronted again by that skull and crossbones. Big as life it said: DANGER. But she didn’t seem to know there were children in the house! She apparently didn’t read in the papers about all the poisoned kids! A mess! An unexcusable mess!

Next to the bathtub was a closet with two narrow doors. Till then I’d had no occasion to look into Mrs. Reganhart’s closets — so there were things that I could not have known. The apartment itself had always appeared to me to be not so much chaotic as in a state of disarray, a condition I originally liked to think of as an extension of the lighter side of Martha’s nature. Magazines spilled over onto the rugs; tables and chairs were turned so as to accommodate upraised feet; apple cores browned in brimming ashtrays. But all this had only seemed the sign of a relaxed life; I took it for evidence of a deep humanitarianism. But what I looked into as I swung open the doors of the bathroom closet was evidence of madness — dirty bed sheets thrown in amongst clean towels, wet wash clothes draped over torn Modess boxes, five bottles of suntan lotion (all sticky and dribbling), a stack of National Geographics , a beach pail not entirely empty of the beach, dish towels, blankets, a length of garden hose, several coffee cups full of pencil shavings — why go on? I sat down on the edge of the bathtub, and my hand came to rest in the little aluminum tray that was attached to the wall; several old wet hairy slivers of soap were instantly brought to my attention.

There was a knock at the bathroom door.

“Come on in,” I said, and the door flew back.

“Haven’t you at least got a razor blade without a little crud on it?” I demanded.

“Haven’t you got a head with brains in it?”

“I was only looking for a razor. I didn’t know anybody was out there.”

“I thought you were sick. I thought you were too sick to get out of bed.”

“I wanted to shave — I thought it might give a little lift to the general appearance of the place.”

She was wearing a pair of tight red cotton slacks with some kind of abstract black and white design all over them. I wanted to ask if her husband had painted her pants for her, then I remembered he was her ex-husband, and then I remembered — with an unfortunate degree of vividness — all that we had attested to and promised the night before. Yet I hated her that instant for those circusy slacks, and hated her behind, which bloomed without mystery within, and I didn’t care too much for her sweater either. Lumpy, turtlenecked, immense, it made her body seem mountainous and her head a pin. A pinhead! A dreamer!

“It would please me no end,” she said, as I registered on my face precisely the amount of sympathy I felt for her outfit, “if you wouldn’t flounce around this place in your nightclothes!”

“What the hell do you expect me to flounce around in? I didn’t come prepared to stay.”

“Then don’t flounce around! You jerk!”

“ Me? This place,” I said, getting off the tub and raising my arms as though to protest to the postered walls, “this place is a mess! Look,” I said, “look at this!” I flung open the medicine chest, which suddenly did not seem so hellish as it had two minutes earlier. If my sense wasn’t right, however, there was something right about the general direction in which I was charging. I presented to her the bottle that said DANGER. “IS this any way to keep drugs with kids in the house? Here , so even Markie can reach it?”

“I’ll worry about what Markie can reach, all right? You just worry about a little decorum.”

“And what am I supposed to do, hide? Is that what all that sweetness and light was about, is that what it means to be Mrs. Reganhart’s lover? Hole up in the latrine till the janitor leaves! What do you think I am? What the hell kind of nerve do you have telling me to be decorous anyway! Look at this place, look at it!” I turned and pulled back the closet door. A bottle of suntan lotion clinked obligingly out onto the tiles.