Philip Roth - Indignation

“No.”

“You’re telling the truth.”

“Yes!”

“And you didn’t force yourself on her. You didn’t force yourself on Olivia Hutton.”

“No, sir. Never.”

“She visited you in your hospital room, did she not?”

“Yes, Dean.”

“According to a member of the hospital staff, something occurred between the two of you at the hospital, something sordid occurred that was observed and duly recorded. Yet you say you didn’t force yourself on her in your room.”

“I’d just had my appendix out, Dean.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“I’ve never used force in my life, Dean Caudwell. On anyone. I’ve never had to,” I added.

“You didn’t have to. May I ask what that means?”

“No, no, sir, you can’t. Dean Caudwell, this is very hard to talk about. I do think I have the right to believe that whatever may have happened in the privacy of my hospital room was strictly between Olivia and myself.”

“Perhaps and perhaps not. I think everyone would agree that if it ever was strictly between the two of you, in the light of circumstances it isn’t any longer. I think we would agree that’s why you came to see me.”

“Why?”

“Because Olivia is no longer here.”

“Where is she?”

“Olivia had a nervous breakdown, Marcus. She had to be taken away by ambulance.”

She who looked the way she looked was taken away in an ambulance? That girl so blessed with that brain and that beauty and that poise and that charm and that wit? This was almost worse than her being dead. The smartest girl around goes off in an ambulance because of a nervous breakdown while everybody else on this campus is taking stock of themselves in the light of biblical teachings and coming out feeling just fine!

“I don’t really know what goes into a nervous breakdown,” I admitted to Caudwell.

“You lose control over yourself. Everything is too much for you and you give way, you collapse in every conceivable way. You have no more control over your emotions than an infant, and you have to be hospitalized and cared for like an infant until you recover. If you ever do recover. The college took a chance with Olivia Hutton. We knew the mental history. We knew the history of electroshock treatment and we knew the sad history of relapse after relapse. But her father is a Cleveland surgeon and a distinguished alumnus of Winesburg, and we took her in at Dr. Hutton’s request. It didn’t work out well either for Dr. Hutton or for the college, and it especially didn’t work out for Olivia.”

“But is she all right?” And when I asked the question I felt as though I were myself on the brink of collapsing. Please, I thought, please, Dean Caudwell, let us speak sensibly about Olivia and not about “relapse after relapse” and “electroshock”! Then I realized that was what he was doing.

“I told you,” he said, “the girl had a breakdown. No, she is not all right. Olivia is pregnant. Despite her history, someone went ahead and impregnated her.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “And she’s where?”

“At a hospital specializing in psychiatric care.”

“But she can’t possibly be pregnant too.”

“She can and she is. A helpless young woman, a deeply unhappy person suffering from long-standing mental and emotional problems, unable adequately to protect herself against the pitfalls of a young woman’s life, has been taken advantage of by someone. By someone with a lot of explaining to do.”

“It’s not me,” I said.

“What was reported to us about your conduct as a patient at the hospital suggests otherwise, Marcus.”

“I don’t care what it ‘suggests.’ I will not be condemned on the basis of no evidence. Sir, I resent once again your portrayal of me. You falsify my motives and you falsify my deeds. I did not have sexual intercourse with Olivia.” Flushing furiously I said, “I have never had sexual intercourse with anyone. Nobody in this world can be pregnant because of me. It’s impossible!”

“Given all we now know,” the dean said, “that’s also hard to believe.”

“Oh, fuck you it is!” Yes, belligerently, angrily, impulsively, and for the second time at Winesburg. But I would not be condemned on no evidence. I was sick of that from everyone.

He stood, not to rear back like Elwyn and take a shot at me but to let himself be seen in all his office’s majesty. Nothing moved except for his eyes, which scanned my face as if in itself it were a moral scandal.

I left, and the wait to be expelled began. I couldn’t believe Olivia was pregnant, just as I couldn’t believe she’d sucked off Cottler or anyone else at Winesburg other than me. But whether or not it was true that she was pregnant — pregnant without telling me; pregnant, as it were, overnight; pregnant perhaps before she even got to Winesburg; pregnant, quite impossibly, like their Virgin Mary — I’d myself been drawn into the vapidity not merely of the Winesburg College mores but of the rectitude tyrannizing my life, the constricting rectitude that, I was all too ready to conclude, was what had driven Olivia crazy. Don’t look to the family for the cause, Ma — look to what the conventional world deems impermissible! Look to me, so pathetically conventional upon his arrival here that he could not trust a girl because she blew him!

My room. My room, my home, my hermitage, my tiny Winesburg haven — when I reached it that Friday after a trek more laborious than I’d been expecting up a mere three and a half flights of stairs, I found the bedsheets and blankets and pillows strewn in every direction and the mattress and the floor overspread with the contents of my dresser drawers, all of which were flung wide open. Undershirts, undershorts, socks, and handkerchiefs were wadded up and scattered across the worn wooden floor along with shirts and trousers that had been pulled with their hangers from my tiny alcove of a closet and hurled everywhere. Then I saw — in the corner under the room’s high little window — the garbage: apple cores, banana skins, Coke bottles, cracker boxes, candy wrappers, jelly jars, partially eaten sandwiches, and torn-off chunks of packaged bread smeared with what at first I took to be shit but was mercifully only peanut butter. A mouse appeared from amid the pile and scuttled under the bed and out of sight. Then a second mouse. Then a third.

Olivia. In a rage with my mother and me, Olivia had come to ransack and besmirch my room and then gone off to commit suicide. It horrified me to think that, crazed with rage as she was, she could have finished off this lunatic fiasco by slicing open her wrists right there on my bed.

There was a stink of rotting food, and another smell, equally strong, but one that I couldn’t identify right off, so stunned was I by what I saw and surmised. Directly at my feet was a single sock turned inside out. I picked up the sock and held it to my nose. The sock, congealed into a crumpled mass, smelled not of feet but of dried sperm. Everything I then picked up and held to my nose smelled the same. Everything had been steeped in sperm. The hundred dollars’ worth of clothing that I’d bought at the College Shop had been spared only because they’d been on my back when I went off to the infirmary with appendicitis.

While I was away in the hospital somebody camping in my room had been masturbating day and night into almost every item I owned. And it wasn’t, of course, Olivia. It was Flusser. It had to be Flusser. I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you. And this one-man bacchanalia was the revenge on me.

Suddenly I began to gag — as much from the shock as from the smells — and I stepped out the door to ask aloud of the empty corridor what harm I had done Bertram Flusser that he should perpetrate the grossest vandalism on my piddling possessions. In vain I tried to understand the enjoyment he had taken in defiling everything that was mine. Caudwell at one end and Flusser at the other; my mother at one end and my father at the other; playful, lovely Olivia at one end and broken-down Olivia at the other. And betwixt them all, I importunately defending myself with my fatuous fuck yous.