Philip Roth - Letting Go

That the couple we chose — I chose — was Libby and Paul was not really as thoughtless and unimaginative as it may seem. If anything, it was too imaginative, too thoughtful — or too thought out. Only a moment after our evening together began, I knew how it was going to end. I still maintain, however, that for every reason one can think of why all these people would never have liked one another, there was a perfectly good one why they should have. Paul Herz could be a witty man, certainly a pensive and attentive man. Libby could be lively and gay. Martha could always laugh. And as for me, I was more than willing to be any sort of middleman in order to bring to an unbloody conclusion a painful chapter in my life. But certain chapters and pains are best left unconcluded. They can’t be concluded — all one needs is to know that at the time.

The first disappointment was Martha; she wore the wrong clothes. I had thought she had been planning to don her purple wool suit, toward which I had both a sentimental and aesthetic attachment, or at least the skirt to the suit and her white silk blouse. But when she rushed past me to answer the knock at the front door, it was not a woman that moved by but a circus — a burst of color and a clattering of ornaments. She had managed to tart herself up in a full orange skirt, an off-the-shoulder blouse with a ruffled neck, strands of multicolored beads, and on her feet what I shall refer to in the language of the streets (the streets around the University) as her Humanities II sandals. So that none of us would miss the point, she had neither braided her hair nor put it up. It was combed straight out, and when she tossed her head, the heavy blond mane draped down her back and almost brushed her bottom. Somehow her outfit managed to call into question the very thing we wished (or I wished) to impress upon Libby and upon Paul — the seriousness of our relationship. That the Herzes’ lives were often more threatened than my own had led me on occasion to believe that their lives were also more serious than my own; whatever the mixture of insight and bafflement that had produced in me such an idea, it contributed also to the quality of my affections and anxieties where these two needy people were concerned.

The visitors peered out of the stairway; they were Paul and Libby Herz, they said, but was this Mrs. Reganhart’s apartment? Apparently Martha looked to them as though she could not be a Mrs. anything, which may indeed have been what was in her head as she had dressed herself before her bedroom mirror. Perhaps what she had wanted to look precisely like was a free spirit, someone un-worried and without cares — for a change, nobody’s mother. But what she resembled finally — what I was sure the Herzes thought she looked like — was some tootsie with whom I had decided to pass my frivolous days. Through the early stages of their visit I felt some circumstantial link between myself and a gigolo or pimp. Despite several energetic attempts to govern my unconscious, I began during dinner to make a series of disconnected remarks all of which turned out to have a decidedly smutty air. “So I laid it on the line to the Chancellor’s secretary—” “Remember Charlotte Foster from Iowa City? Well, she turned up in Chicago and blew me to a meal—” And so on, through the pimento and anchovies and into the roast itself. All I had to do really was shut up; we would then have been bathed in a silence that could probably have been no more destructive of pleasure than was my banal chatter.

To make matters worse — to make my Martha brassier — Libby that day was the child saint about to be lifted onto the cross. There was even in her very flat-chestedness something that lent her an ethereal and martyred air. She was buttoned up to her white throat in a pale green cardigan sweater whose sleeves reached nearly into the palms of her hands; and her hands were just small half-closed fists in her lap. Every time a serving dish was passed to Paul he would lean over to ask Libby if she would have some. If she shook her head, he urged half a spoonful on her anyway, whispering words I couldn’t hear into those ears of hers, which stuck poignantly out just where the hair was pulled back above them. If she parted her unpainted lips and consented to be fed, he would croon fine, good and arrange a portion of food for her on her plate. His behavior engaged Martha instantly, and the attention she showed him was almost embarrassing in its openness. After a while she looked to me not so much disgusted — though there was that in it all right — as offended by this demonstration of nutritional billing and cooing.

I had never seen Paul so solicitous toward his wife, and it would have made me uneasy too, had I not my own private source of uneasiness sitting directly in the center of the table — the roast. When it appeared and I had sunk my knife down into its pink center, a new wave of silence, deeper and more significant, went around the table (granted, this may have been my imagination again). It was as though a particularly gross display of wealth had been flaunted; we were about to dine on some mysterious incarnation of rubies and gold. Then I opened a bottle of Gevrey Chambertin (1951) and with the classy thhhppp of the cork, we were all reminded once again of the superfluity that characterized my particular sojourn on this earth. In short, I felt that Paul and Libby — in different degrees, for different reasons — resented me for Martha’s gaudy voluptuousness and for the meal as well. I told myself that they would never understand my life, and that I shouldn’t allow them to upset me. But then I thought that if all their suspicion and resentment was merely of my own imagining, it was perhaps I myself who would never understand it.

When the children came in to be appreciated in their clean pajamas, they were introduced to the guests.

“And this is Cynthia,” I said, “and this is Mark.”

Markie immediately went for Martha; Cynthia said, “How do you do?”

“How do you do?” Paul said.

Libby looked up from her food — in which she had all of a sudden taken an interest — but only for a second. She had already returned to separating something on her plate when she commented, “Aren’t they nice.”

Martha ignored the remark, though not the person who had made it; she glared at Libby, then, taking a hand of each of her children, said, “Good night, dears.”

“You going to come kiss us good night?” Mark asked.

“As soon as dinner is over,” Martha said. “You go off to bed now.”

“You going to come?” Markie asked me.

They left, Cynthia turning at the door to say that it had been a pleasure to meet the Herzes; she skipped off, her behind like a little piece of fruit, and nobody at the table seemed charmed. We ate in silence until at last Paul asked Martha how old they were, and she didn’t answer.

“Cynthia is seven,” I said, “and Mark is — how old, Martha? Four?”

I passed the information on to Paul. “Four,” I said. “Look, would anyone care for more meat?”

“No, thank you,” Paul said.

“How about some wine, Libby?” I asked.

She shook her head. Paul said, “She can’t drink too much alcohol.”

Some few minutes later, Paul said, “We’ve had a very tiring day. You’ll have to excuse us.”

I thought for a moment they were going to get up and leave without even finishing. He was only apologizing, however, for his wife’s silence. I suppose he never felt a need to apologize for his own.

“That’s all right,” Martha said. “I’m tired myself.”

“Do you know?” I rushed in. “It’s very interesting about this wine. Now 1951 was supposedly a good year, so I procured—” Procured? Bought, damn it, bought! I babbled on, explaining how I had come to purchase the wine, while Martha began making offerings of food to Libby, calling her Mrs. Herz. Paul sat listening so silently to what I said that I went on and on and on, waiting as it were for some signal from him that I had spoken enough and could stop. But it was like sending one’s voice down a well.