Philip Roth - Letting Go

She did, I think, give a little gasp: found out at last.

“You could,” she said in a more respectful tone, “have waited until he left. Was that asking too much?”

“I didn’t know he was here. That’s the point, Martha. You want to wire the place, flash lights back and forth? What are you making of me?” I considered the closet again. “Look at that!”

“Oh shut up.” She pulled the cover down on the toilet and sat down. “Just shut up.”

But I didn’t want to, or intend to. I had moved well beyond the closet. I saw myself as having been weak and unimaginative the night before. Right at the start I should have had the sense, the courage, to go off and be ill by myself. I was old enough and wise enough. How could I live in a house where no strange man would ever live in peace?

I picked the lotion bottle up from the floor. “You ought to be ashamed,” I said. It was not quite to the point, but I couldn’t think of much else that was nasty to say. Bending over had made me woozy, and when the wooziness passed I still found it difficult to sustain my powers of concentration. What was it we were arguing about?

“Oh will you please …” she moaned.

“You don’t know what you want, do you know? You don’t know what in the world you want.”

She had been ruminating, her turtleneck pulled over her chin. Now she looked up. “Look, if you don’t want to stay here, nobody’s twisting your arm. You don’t have to precipitate some lousy argument to leave. Spare me that, will you? If you want to go”—she made a slow backhanded movement—“just go.”

“You know,” I said, leaning against the sink, “I’m beginning to have a little sympathy for your first husband, that poor bastard.”

“Oh, that poor bastard. We all ought to shed tears for you and him. He was another one who couldn’t walk out until we had a real rip-snorter that gave him the right. If you want to leave, Gabriel, just leave, all right?”

“What is it you want though? Can you tell me? Can you put it into a sentence or two? Tell me how you expect somebody who’s supposed to be living here not to ever show his face in the kitchen. How can you want one thing,” I said, slamming the sink, “and then not be willing to take what follows— ”

She rose and stuck a fist under my nose. “I can take what follows, damn you! Don’t tell me about consequences, you!”

“I’m sorry,” I said, without any display of sorrow, “but you know what I’m talking about.”

Her eyes were suddenly full of tears. “You didn’t have to make a silly jerk out of me in front of him! Our kids play together — his daughter gives my daughter measles! Couldn’t you at least have shaved?” she cried. “Oh you looked like such a bum!”

“ I was looking for a razor blade! I was trying to shave in this pigsty! Oh this is impossible — this is ridiculous! I don’t need this kind of agony, really!”

“Then go. Lower your voice, damn it, and go.”

“You don’t want me to be here anyway, that’s pretty clear to anybody.”

“Look, you don’t want to be here, so don’t pull that stuff.”

“Maybe that’s so—”

“If maybe that’s so, then maybe you ought to take your leftover pills and shove off.” She painted a smile on her face and inclined toward me. “If maybe that’s so, all right?”

“That’s fine. I don’t need this kind of crap, no sir.”

There was some rhythmic lapse in that last sentence, an absence of thunder, that left me feeling like something less than Winston Churchill on the floor of Parliament. I was dying to make some final crack about her slacks, but it wasn’t really necessary. Everything we had set out to accomplish, we had accomplished. Henceforth and forever after, last night did not exist.

In the bedroom I had to hunt through the dresser to find some of the clothes I had been wearing three days before. It was a pleasure for me to have to open all her drawers: evidence, piles and piles of evidence in every one. My jacket and trousers were hanging in the closet, there with tennis rackets, snowboots, back issues of Art News , rolled-up rugs, stockpiles of red bricks, and, of course, all of Martha’s clothes, which were hung from the rack, or piled on the floor, or shoved in on the overhead shelf. Naked, I stood there and allowed the sight to flood me with a deep sense of righteousness.

After I dressed, I looked at myself a moment in the mirror; my eyes were as expressive as two marbles, and my beard hid the angles of my face. It was a streaky orange color, as though tea had been strained through it. Looking at that face, it was difficult to think that I had been in the right. But I was glad I was leaving, I told myself, and before I left I wanted that fact registered upon the consciousness of this house.

This time I did not turn away from the threshold of the kitchen, but entered and stood firm. Markie had a milk mustache, and Cynthia, in her red jacket with the hood up and wearing her leggings, was ready for school — though the act was that she was casually lingering over her last drop of Ovaltine. She was about as casual, of course, as us two adults.

Martha was looking out the window, drinking coffee from a mug. On the back porch was a snowless gray ring where the garbage pail had stood; the sun was shining onto the white railing of the porch and the white window frames, and it lit up the walls of the kitchen with a fine, healthy glare.

“I think I’ll be going now,” I said.

She did not turn. Markie was leaning out toward me from his seat; Cynthia moved not a muscle.

“Okay,” Martha said.

Everything that had happened, including this final eloquent exchange, seemed all at once rather shabby. I felt, with a touch of desperation, the desire to leave on good terms. Slowly, so that neither Cynthia nor Markie would miss a word, I said, “Thank you for letting me stay while I was sick.” The little speech would not have fooled me, but then I was not a child; at least the sounds had been made, and they would live in the history of this family.

Martha turned; she made a movement with her mouth — wry, I suppose you would call it — which indicated to me that she found me incredibly predictable. I was disappointed that she did not at least understand what I had tried to do; but her understanding was only for her own troubles. I thought back to how she had made love on the night I had fallen ill, and I thought back on all she had said to me the evening before, and I did not care very much for her.

“So long, Cynthia,” I said. “Goodbye, Mark.” I started back down the hallway, feeling suddenly fevered and weak. But I was strong enough — I told myself — to make it down the stairs and into my car, and home.

When I was almost into the small dark foyer that led to the street, I heard the door of Martha’s apartment open above me. There was Cynthia, her head within her hood, stretched over the bannister. In her red jacket, with her blue eyes, she looked as innocent and pretty as I had ever seen her.

She extended a hand over the railing. “Here,” she said. “Mommy says these are the keys to your car.”

I would have asked that she simply drop them down to me had I not thought there was a certain forlorn quality in her voice. I went back up the stairs, but when I took the keys she merely looked away.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

I hurried back down, and when, from the first floor landing, I took a quick look up, the child was still there. Her face rested sideways on her wrists, which were flat on the bannister. She may have had her father’s dark hair, but the eyes were Martha’s — inquisitive, lively, and not at all sure what they were after.