Philip Roth - Indignation

Here my father had to pause because of his hacking cough. It sounded worse than ever. When he was able to resume speaking, he asked, “Why are they letting you out so soon?” “Four or five days is normal. There’s no need for me to be hospitalized longer.” “I’m going to take the train out there after they discharge you. I’m shutting the store and I’m coming out there.” “Don’t, Dad. Don’t talk that way. I appreciate the offer, but I’ll be fine in the dorm.” “Who will look after you in the dorm? You should recuperate in your house, where you belong. I don’t understand why the college doesn’t insist on this. How can you recuperate away from your home with nobody looking after you?” “But I’m up and walking already. I’m fine already.” “How far is the hospital from the college?” I was tempted to say “Seventeen thousand miles,” but he was coughing too painfully for me to be satirizing him. “Less than half an hour by ambulance,” I said. “It’s an excellent hospital.” “There’s no hospital there in Winesburg itself? Am I understanding you correctly?” “Dad, put Mother on. This isn’t helping me any. And it isn’t helping you. You sound awful.” “I sound awful? You’re the one in a hospital hundreds of miles away from home.” “Please let me talk to Mother.” When my mother came on, I told her to do something to contain him or next I’d transfer to the University of the North Pole, where there were no phones, hospitals, or doctors, just polar bears who stalk the ice floes where the undergraduates, naked in subzero temperatures—“Marcus, that’s enough. I’m coming to see you.” “But you don’t have to come — neither of you has to come. It was an easy operation, it’s over, and I’m fine.” Whispering, she said, “ I know that. But your father will not let up. I’m leaving here on the Saturday night train. Otherwise nobody in this house will sleep ever again.”

Olivia. I hung up from speaking to my mother and there she was. In her arms she had a bouquet of flowers. She carried them over to where I lay propped up in the bed.

“It’s no fun being in a hospital alone,” she said. “I brought these to keep you company.”

“It was worth the appendicitis,” I replied.

“I doubt it,” she said. “Were you very ill?”

“For less than a day. The best part came in Dean Caudwell’s office. He called me in to grill me about changing my dorm room and I puked on his trophies. Then you turn up. It’s been a great case of appendicitis all around.”

“Let me get a vase for these.”

“What are they?”

“You don’t know?” she said, holding the bouquet to my nose.

“I know concrete. I know asphalt. I don’t know flowers.”

“They’re called roses, dear.”

When she came back into the room, she’d taken the roses out of their paper wrapping and arranged them in a glass vase half filled with water.

“Where will you be able to see them best?” she asked me, looking around the room, which, though small, was still larger and certainly brighter than the one I occupied in Neil Hall. At Neil Hall there was only a small dormer window up in the eaves, while here two good-sized windows looked out onto a well-tended lawn where somebody was trailing a rake along the ground, gathering the fallen leaves into a heap to burn. It was Friday, October 26, 1951. The Korean War was one year, four months, and one day old.

“I see them best,” I said, “in your two hands. I see them best with you standing there. Just stay like that and let me look at you and your roses. That’s what I came for.” Yet by saying “hands,” I caused myself to remember what Sonny Cottler had said about her, and again the fury rose in me, directed at both Cottler and Olivia. But so too did my penis rise.

“What are they giving you to eat?” she asked.

“Jell-O and ginger ale. Tomorrow they begin with the snails.”

“You seem very chipper.”

She was so beautiful! How could she blow Sonny Cottler? But then how could she blow me? If he took her out only once, then she would have blown him on the first date too. Too, the torment of that “too”!

“Look,” I said, and pulled back the sheets.

Demurely, she lowered her lashes. “What happens, my master, should someone walk in?”

I couldn’t believe that’s what she had said, but then I couldn’t believe what I had just done. Was it she who emboldened me, or I who emboldened her, or we two who emboldened each other?

“Is the wound draining?” she asked. “Is that tube dangling down there a drain?”

“I don’t know. I can’t tell. I suppose so.”

“What about stitches?”

“This is a hospital. Where better to be when they come undone?”

There was a gently erotic sway to her gait as she slowly approached the bed pointing a finger at my erection. “You are odd, you know. Very odd,” she told me, once she’d at last arrived at my side. “Odder than I think you realize.”

“I’m always odd after I have my appendix out.”

“Do you always get as huge as this after you’ve had your appendix out?”

“Never fails.” Huge. She’d said huge. Was it?

“Of course we shouldn’t,” she whispered mischievously while wrapping my dick in her hand. “We could both get thrown out of school for this.”

“Then stop!” I whispered back, realizing that, of course, she was right — that’s exactly what would happen: caught and thrown out of school, she to slouch back home in shame to Hunting Valley, I to be drafted and killed.

But then she hadn’t to stop, she hadn’t even really to begin, because I had already ejaculated high in the air, and down over the bedsheets the semen showered, while Olivia recited sweetly, “I shot an arrow into the air / It fell to earth I knew not where” and just as my nurse walked through the door to take my temperature.

She was a round, gray-haired, middle-aged spinster named Miss Clement, the epitome of the thoughtful, soft-spoken, old-fashioned nurse — she even wore a starched white bonnet, unlike most of the younger nurses on the hospital staff. When I’d had to use the bedpan for the first time after the surgery, she’d quietly reassured me, saying, “I’m here to help you while you need help, and this is the help you now need, and there’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” and all the while she was gently positioning me over the bedpan and then cleaning me with moist toilet tissue and finally removing the pan containing my slime and settling me back under the sheets.

And this was her reward for ever so tenderly wiping my ass. And mine? For that one quick stroke of Olivia’s hand, my reward would be Korea. Miss Clement must already be on the phone to Dean Caudwell, who’d himself be on the phone to my father following that. And easily enough I could envision my father, after receiving the news, swinging the meat cleaver with such force as to split wide open the four-foot-thick freestanding butcher block on which he ordinarily cracked open the carcasses of cows.

“Excuse me,” murmured Miss Clement and, pulling the door closed, disappeared. Quickly Olivia went into my bathroom and returned with hand towels, one for the bed linens, another for me.

Struggling to feign a manly calm, I asked Olivia, “What’s she going to do now? What’s going to happen next?”

“Nothing,” Olivia replied.

“You’re awfully poised about this. Is it all the practice you’ve had?”

Her voice was husky when she replied. “It wasn’t necessary to say that.”

“I apologize. I’m sorry. But this is all new to me.”

“You don’t think it’s new to me? ”

“What about Sonny Cottler?”

“I don’t see where that’s your business,” she shot back.