Philip Roth - Letting Go

“He’s not a homosexual writer! How can you say that!”

Peggy tugged my hand. “Oh listen to him. All that has to happen is Tom Sawyer shakes Huck Finn’s hand, and Mark Twain is a queer!”

I said to Paul, “Victor’s psychoanalysis may reshape the whole nineteenth century—”

“It makes me so damn angry,” Peggy said, and she was moving across the room to join the debate.

Paul and I stood sipping our drinks, looking not at each other but around the room. Given the shape and size of the party, our silence would not have seemed unusual at all, I suppose, had we been either strangers or friends. But since it seemed that our fate was to be something in between, the silence eventually became more than I could bear. I did not see that matters might be improved, however, by my walking off. “You know,” I said, “I’m sorry about that outburst. I was going to telephone—”

There was no way of sounding casual. Paul looked at me attentively enough, but he had his amazing faculty for taciturnity to fall back on, and he seemed never to be beyond using it. I waited nevertheless, expecting that he might have some generous and forgiving word to say; I was willing again to be the one who had to be forgiven. It was a condition I seemed repeatedly to find myself in, and not only with the Herzes; I seemed to have to be forgiven even when I myself felt somehow wronged.

“I didn’t know about Libby’s condition,” I said, seeing that he wasn’t going to help me in what I had begun. “I didn’t realize that her kidney disorder meant she couldn’t …”

For a moment it seemed as though Paul would not finish my sentence for me. Then he said, “She can bear a child; the doctors”—the doctors again—“feel it wouldn’t be safe for her, however, if she did.” Then, significantly, he added, “That’s all.”

“I don’t mean to interfere,” I replied, “in what isn’t my business.”

“I understand,” Paul said; while from across the room, I heard Libby saying, “But I don’t care about his life — it’s his work , Victor.”

And Paul was trying to smile at me. “It’s okay,” he said. “We’ve decided anyway, you see, to adopt a baby.”

“Yes?”

“So it’s really all right,” he said, but there his smile failed him.

“Fine.” I was peculiarly bewildered by what Paul had announced. “That’s wonderful.”

“You won’t say anything. I’d appreciate that.”

“Of course not.”

Silence followed. “I mean,” Paul said, and now he looked very fatigued with me, as though it was we two who had been living together for years, “to Libby.”

“You’ll have to excuse me for whatever mistakes—”

“We all make mistakes,” he said, sharply.

“I suppose,” I said, “that’s what helps us to be generous to one another. That all of us make them.” I had to leave the room then, for I was full of emotion, and I did not know how it might express itself. It was good news I had heard — what anyone would have wanted for the Herzes — and yet it was not to good news that I seemed to be reacting. I went out into the Spigliano hallway, unable to say to Paul the very last thought that had crossed my mind: I hope this can make Libby happy.

“This is Michelle Spigliano, and this is Stella Spigliano, and this is Doctor McDougall, girls, one of Daddy’s teachers.”

“Merry Christmas, Doctor McDougall!”

From down the hall I heard Sam say, “Well, isn’t that something, isn’t that nice.” A moment later he was slapping me on the back. “How are you, boy? I called you last week and you didn’t answer. I thought, poor fella, must be sick as a dog. You need anything now? You feeling all right?”

“I’m much better, Sam.”

“We old bachelors have to stick together, huh? Okay, Patricia, where’s the cider—” and he and Pat went off to the living room. The Spigliano girls took their seats again, one on either side of the door. I was about to ask them to bring my coat and hat out of hiding when Libby came in from the living room.

I went up to her, and though I did not take her in my arms, my heart was beating as though I had. She looked up at me with her flushed face; I knew that she had watched me leave the room and had followed in order that we could be alone. My heart was beating so because I thought there was something very crucial she was going to say to me, or I was going to say to her.

But I told her simply that she was looking very well.

She answered, “Thank you. I hope you’re better. No one ever really thinks of Gabe as being sick.”

I let the remark remain unanswered. “I want to be straight with you, Libby,” I said, “I’ve never meant to tease—”

“That? Oh, it was nothing.” She wouldn’t look at me.

“You should know I went to see Paul’s parents in Brooklyn.”

She was startled for no more than half a second; flatly she said, “Thank you very much. That was kind of you.” She smiled then, as though I were Sam McDougall, or one of the Spigliano children. “Excuse me, will you?”

She went off to wherever she had been intending to go in the first place.

I behaved badly — with even less wisdom — from then on. I drank too much, and my voice carried, and finally I was putting my arm around Peggy Moberly, which one hasn’t the right to do unless one intends afterwards to lift her up and carry her over a threshold.

“Why don’t you ever call me?” Peggy asked. “Why do I give the impression that I’m only interested in books?”

“You don’t give that impression at all, Peg.”

“You’re a cruel man,” she said, but she took off her glasses anyway. “Don’t you ever want to take me to the movies?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to take me to dinner tonight?”

“Yes.”

“Where will we go?”

Bill Lake was performing a Cossack dance in the center of the room. Squatting, arms crossed, head up, he snapped his long legs in and out while the circle that had gathered around him clapped in time. “Hey! Ha! Hey! Ha!” The little Spigliano girls giggled in the doorway. In the corner, Charleen Carlisle and her fiancé were arguing … I should have married Charleen. I should have married Peggy.

“I should marry you, Peg.”

“Oh don’t be cruel with me, will you, Gabe?”

“I’m not being cruel. I’m being nice. Can’t anybody tell the difference?”

“You know, if you haven’t been feeling well, you shouldn’t drink too much.”

To that I shook my head. “Not so.”

“Maybe we should go to have dinner now.”

“Maybe we should get married.”

“Gabe, you’re being awful! What’s the matter with you!” She shook a fist at me — spectacles poked out at either end — and left.

Of course, there was no excuse. We all put in a few good reprehensible days in life — exclusive, that is, of the long-range cruelties — and this I suppose was one of mine. Later on, the party had thinned out — John had performed his folk dance, and we were out of liverwurst and down to plain rye rounds — and I was dancing with Peggy. I kissed her neck, a sheer piece of son-of-a-bitchery.

“Gabe,” she said, “don’t you be mean to me. Be good to me, Gabe.”

I held her tight, crushing what little she had against me, and we spun past Pat Spigliano, who was saying to her partner, Larry Morgan—

“Women are much more sexually excitable over thirty-five, of course—”

We danced on, two close bodies, two distant spirits. I shall catalogue no further my various indecencies, except to add that after a while I began to sing the particularly weighty lines of certain popular songs into Peggy’s lonely ear.