Philip Roth - Everyman

What went wrong was the weather. High winds and blustery storms swept through Europe, and no planes were able to take off all day Sunday and into Monday. Both days he sat at the airport with Merete, who had come along to cling to him until the last possible moment, but when it was clear that there would be no departures from de Gaulle until Tuesday at the earliest, they took a taxi back to the Rue des Beaux Arts, to Merete's favorite swank little Left Bank hotel, where they were able to rebook their room, the room mirrored with smoked glass. During every night ride they took by taxi in Paris, they performed the same impudent playlet, always as though inadvertently and for the first time: he'd drop his hand onto her knee and she'd let her legs fall open just far enough so that he could reach up under her silk slip of a dress – nothing more, really, than a piece of deluxe lingerie – and finger her while she adjusted her head to look idly out of the taxi at the illuminated shop windows and he, leaning back in his seat, pretended to be anything but riveted by the way she could continue to behave as if no one were touching her even as he sensed her beginning to come. Merete carried everything erotic to the limit. (Earlier, in a discreet antique jewelry shop down the street from their hotel, he'd adorned her throat with a stunning trinket, a pendant necklace set with diamonds and demantoid garnets and strung on its original gold chain. Like the knowledgeable son of his father that he was, he'd asked to examine the stones through the jeweler's loupe. "What are you looking for?" Merete asked. "Flaws, cracks, the coloring – if nothing appears under a ten-power magnification the diamond can be certified as flawless. You see? My father's words issue from my mouth whenever I speak about jewelry." "But not about anything else," she said. "Not about anything about you. Those words are mine." Not while shopping, not while walking the streets, not while taking an elevator or having coffee together in a booth around the corner from her apartment, could they ever stop seducing each other. "How do you know how to do that, to hold the thing-?" "The loupe." "How do you know how to hold the loupe in your eye like that?" "My father taught me. You just tighten your socket around it. Rather like you do." "So what color is it?" "Blue. Blue-white. That was the best in the old days. My father would say it still is. My father would say, 'Beyond the beauty and the status and the value, the diamond is imperishable.' 'Imperishable' was a word he loved to savor." "Who doesn't?" Merete said. "What is it in Danish?" he asked her. "' Uforgængelig.' It's just as wonderful." "Why don't we take it?" he told the saleswoman, who in turn, speaking in perfect English and with a touch of French – and with perfect cunning – told the young companion of the older gentleman, "Mademoiselle is very lucky. Une femme choyée," and the cost was about as much as the entire inventory of the Elizabeth store, if not more, back when he was running one-hundred-dollar engagement rings of a quarter or a half carat to be sized for his father's customers by a man working on a bench in a cubbyhole on Frelinghuysen Avenue circa 1942.) And now he withdrew the finger sticky with her slime, perfumed her lips with it, then pressed it between her teeth for her tongue to caress, reminding her of their first meeting and what they'd dared to do as strangers, an American adman of fifty and a Danish model of twenty-four, crossing a Caribbean island in the dark, transfixed. Reminding her that she was his and he hers. A cult of two.

There was a message from Phoebe waiting for him at the hotel: "Contact me immediately. Your mother gravely ill."

When he phoned he learned that his eighty-year-old mother had had a stroke at five a.m. Monday, New York time, and was not expected to live.

He explained to Phoebe about the weather conditions and learned that Howie was already on his way east and that his father was keeping vigil beside his mother's bed. He wrote down the telephone number of his mother's room at the hospital, and Phoebe told him that as soon as she hung up, she would be heading over to Jersey herself, to be with his father at the hospital until Howie arrived. She had only been waiting for him to call her back. "I missed you by a few minutes this morning. The desk clerk told me, 'Madame and monsieur have just departed for the airport.'"

"Yes," he said, "I shared a cab with the photographer's rep."

"No, you shared a cab with the Danish twenty-four-year-old with whom you are having an affair. I'm sorry, but I can no longer look the other way I looked the other way with that secretary. But the humiliation has now gone too far. Paris," she said with disgust. "The planning. The premeditation. The tickets and the travel agent. Tell me, which of you romantic cornballs dreamed up Paris for your sneaky little undertaking? Where did you two eat? What charming restaurants did you go to?"

"Phoebe, I don't know what you're talking about. You're not making any sense. I'll get the first plane back that I possibly can."

His mother died an hour before he was able to reach the hospital in Elizabeth. His father and his brother were sitting beside the body that lay beneath the covers of the bed. He had never before seen his mother in a hospital bed, though of course she had seen him there more than once. Like Howie, she had enjoyed perfect health all her life. It was she who would rush to the hospital to comfort others. Howie said, "We haven't told the staff she died. We waited. We wanted you to be able to see her before they took her away." What he saw was the high-relief contour of an elderly woman asleep. What he saw was a stone, the heavy, sepulchral, stonelike weight that says, Death is just death – it's nothing more.

He hugged his father, who patted his hand and said, "It's best this way. You wouldn't have wanted her to live the way that thing left her."

When he took his mother's hand and held it to his lips, he realized that in a matter of hours he had lost the two women whose devotion had been the underpinning of his strength.

With Phoebe he lied and lied and lied, but to no avail. He told her that he had gone to Paris to break off the affair with Merete. He'd had to see her face to face to do it, and that's where she was working.

"But in the hotel, while you were breaking off the affair, didn't you sleep with her at night in the same bed?"

"We didn't sleep. She cried all night long."

"For four whole nights? That's a lot of crying for a twenty-four-year-old Dane. I don't think even Hamlet cried that much."

"Phoebe, I went to tell her it was over – and it is over."

"What did I do so wrong," Phoebe asked, "that you should want to humiliate me like this? Why should you want to unhinge everything? Has it all been so hideous? I should get over being dumbstruck, but I can't. I, who never doubted you, to whom it rarely occurred even to question you, and now I can never believe another word you say. I can never trust you to be truthful again. Yes, you wounded me with the secretary, but I kept my mouth shut. You didn't even know I knew, did you? Well, did you?"

"I didn't, no."

"Because I hid my thoughts from you – unfortunately I couldn't hide them from myself. And now you wound me with the Dane and you humiliate me with the lying, and now I will not hide my thoughts and keep my mouth shut. A mature, intelligent woman comes along, a mate who understands what reciprocity is. She rids you of Cecilia, gives you a phenomenal daughter, changes your entire life, and you don't know what to do for her except to fuck the Dane. Every time I looked at my watch I kept figuring what time it was in Paris and what you two would be doing. That went on for the whole weekend. The basis of everything is trust, is it not? Is it not?"