Philip Roth - Letting Go

“Goodbye, Cynthia,” I said.

“Goodbye.”

I went a step further, and she called, “Aren’t you coming back?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

She seemed, then, utterly confused. She raised her head from her hands, but then, flatly, she said, “Okay. Goodbye,” and turned and went back into her house.

I had two pieces of mail waiting for me at my apartment. One was an invitation from the Spiglianos for cocktails late on Christmas afternoon. I contemplated the affair: John’s Abruzzi dance, Pat’s Liverwurst Delight, dinner afterwards with some madman like Bill Lake … But I would be sick anyway, I thought; I would never be rid of this fever and so didn’t have to begin suffering over a Spigliano get-together.

There was also a picture post card in color from Grossinger’s. I went around the apartment letting shades fly up, and prying windows open to allow passage out for the musty unused odor that hung over the place. With my joints feeling heavier than the limbs they joined, I cautiously laid myself down on my unmade bed. “Hello! This is the life!” was written on the card in a large scrawl, and it was signed, “Fay and Dad.” A P.S. squeezed in at the bottom drifted over into the address. “We’re here thru N. Yrs. Day so you can stay in Chi have gd. time Dad.” That was it — no reference made to anything that had happened in his life, or mine, prior to the day before yesterday. I couldn’t believe he had forgotten, but apparently he had. It was a great day for separations.

Perhaps it is the watering-down of some racial guilt that causes the trouble, but Christmas has always been a day I don’t enjoy. As unpracticed in the faith of my fathers as I am — which is about as unpracticed as my own particular father is — I am nevertheless not at peace with the culture when most of my countrymen, in the warmth and privacy of their homes, are celebrating the birth of their Saviour. The radio stations are all bells and organ music, the streets are empty, the frames of my neighbors’ homes blink with colored light bulbs, and in snowy mangers on church lawns are assembled miniatures of figures in whose reality, or suprareality, I have never for a moment been able to believe. I realize the fun the Gentiles are having, and I wish them well, but for me it is as though all the long, shapeless Sundays of the year have fallen on one day, and I tap my fingers, a superfluous man, waiting for nightfall and December twenty-sixth, when I can come back into the world.

But nightfall seemed never to be coming — not even late afternoon. I marked dozens of freshman essays, and then I made myself a snack and carried it from the kitchen into the small living room. Sections of the Sunday Times that I had been intending to read for weeks were scattered around the apartment, whose furnishings seemed today to be exuding a special jumbo-sized portion of ugliness. The decor of the place might be designated as 1930s Modern; there was a chair of bent laminated wood that was upholstered in imitation alligator skin; several other chairs made of tubular steel, a chest of drawers of curved metal, and other icy-looking ornaments, none of them smacking much of hearth and home. It was a little like living in a supper club. The shades on the windows were still the blackout shades from the war.

I drank a little whiskey and ate my snack and lit the cigar that my colleagues Bill Lake and Mona Meyerling had given me when they had stopped by to visit a few days before. I settled down in earnest to smoke it — dragging on the wet end, then holding it off to look at as I exhaled. The good bachelor life. I tried to think of a girl I could invite over to share my dinner, but gave it up as a bad idea; I would end up overstimulated, undersatisfied, and a total alien from the day. Just relax, said I, and have a good time by yourself.

I went to the window. Since ten in the morning it had been looking like four in the afternoon, and it still did at half past two. I took a long gaze at myself in the mirror: old sweater, baggy trousers, hair uncombed, beard coming in orange again. To complete the picture, I jammed the cigar between my teeth and wondered about the future. It occurred to me that I would never marry; at about the same time I realized that I hated cigars.

The day crept on. Boredom soon began to teeter on the edge of something worse, and I put on my coat and went out to take a walk. When I returned, I tried to get back to marking papers, but at five I said the hell with it and went into the bathroom to shave. I changed my mind three times over, finished shaving, dressed, and walked over to John Spigliano’s.

The door to the Spigliano apartment opened, and in the entryway stood two red-headed children, each with a pink party dress, black patent-leather shoes, and a stern expression.

“Hello,” I said to the two of them.

Only their starched dresses creaked.

“Ooohh,” came a voice from around the corner — which was followed by a tray full of hors d’oeuvres and a vast contraption of green. Pat Spigliano stepped into the doorway, and her dress, with a quantity of stiff green netting encircling the green skirt, momentarily displaced the little girls.

“Gabe!” Saying my name somehow caused Pat to swing the hoop a little exuberantly — and out of sight went the children. “I thought you wouldn’t be coming. We heard you were sick. John will be so happy.”

“I’m feeling better, thanks,” I said. “I thought I’d come for—”

I was talking to myself. Pat was looking from one of her children to the other. “Stop hiding, girls — come on now, come on—”

The girls battled gamely against their mother’s dress, while Pat looked back to me. “And these are the twins,” she announced. “This is Michelle Spigliano and this is Stella Spigliano. And this is Doctor Wallach, girls, one of Daddy’s teachers.”

In loud hoarse voices, Michelle and Stella exclaimed: “Merry Christmas, Mr. Wallach!”

“Doctor,” their mother corrected them.

“That’s all right—”

But Stella erupted, as though one were needed in the house, “Doctor!” while her partner took the whole thing, as they say, from the top.

When they had both settled their heels back onto the floor, I said, “Merry Christmas to you, girls.”

Pat winked at me, then went back to the business of shaping destinies. “Now take Doctor Wallach’s things, young ladies—”

“No — it’s not—” But one child was dragging at my sleeves while the other jumped up toward my chest, after either my hat or my tie. With a sense of hopelessness about the whole afternoon, I gave up all the garments asked for and came into the apartment.

Pat immediately pushed her hors d’oeuvres my way, and waited for my comment.

“They’re very well-behaved,” I said.

“We think so,” she replied. “They’re going to Radcliffe.”

I refrained from asking whether they were just home now on vacation. As we came into the living room, Pat said, “Have some pâté?”

“No, thank you,” I said.

“Well then, have a good time — have fun—” she instructed me.

“It was liverwurst before he rose into the hierarchy, and it’ll be liverwurst till he dies, the symbol-hunting son of a bitch.” It was Bill Lake who spoke, his wiry carcass twined around the back and arms of a chair in which Mona Meyerling was stiffly seated.

“Or becomes president,” I said.

“Or bats fourth for the White Sox — who knows? The nice, frank, beastly opportunism in those two absolutely compels admiration,” said Bill, neither raising nor lowering his voice, despite Mona’s attempts to make him pipe down. “Which I don’t want confused with affection,” Bill added. “You ought to stop feeling sorry for yourself, Wallach. How would you like to be Associate Professor Spigliano and have to perform coitus on the hostess?”