Philip Roth - Everyman

When he returned from dinner he would try to settle in and read. He had a library of oversized art books filling one wall of the studio; he had been accumulating and studying them all his life, but now he couldn't sit in his reading chair and turn the pages of a single one of them without feeling ridiculous. The delusion – as he now thought of it – had lost its power over him, and so the books only magnified his sense of the hopelessly laughable amateur he was and of the hollowness of the pursuit to which he had dedicated his retirement.

Trying to pass more than a little time in the company of the Starfish Beach residents was also unendurable. Unlike him, many were able not merely to construct whole conversations that revolved around their grandchildren but to find sufficient grounds for existence in the existence of their grandchildren. Caught in their company, he sometimes experienced loneliness in what felt like its purest form. And even those among the village residents who were thoughtful, well-spoken people were not interesting to be with more than once in a while. Most of the elderly residents had been settled into their marriages for decades and were sufficiently connected still to whatever was left of their marital felicity that only rarely could he get the husband to go off by himself for lunch without the wife. However wistfully he might sometimes look at such couples as dusk approached or on Sunday afternoons, there were the rest of the hours of the week to think about, and theirs wasn't a life for him when he was on top of his melancholy. The upshot was that he should never have moved into such a community in the first place. He had displaced himself just when what age most demanded was that he be rooted as he'd been for all those years he ran the creative department at the agency. Always he had been invigorated by stability, never by stasis. And this was stagnation. There was an absence now of all forms of solace, a barrenness under the heading of consolation, and no way to return to what was. A sense of otherness had overtaken him – "otherness," a word in his own language to describe a state of being all but foreign to him till his art student Millicent Kramer had jarringly used it to bemoan her condition. Nothing any longer kindled his curiosity or answered his needs, not his painting, not his family, not his neighbors, nothing except the young women who jogged by him on the boardwalk in the morning. My God, he thought, the man I once was! The life that surrounded me! The force that was mine! No "otherness" to be felt anywhere! Once upon a time I was a full human being.

There was one particular girl whom he never failed to wave to when she jogged by, and one morning he set out to meet her. Always she waved back and smiled, and then forlornly he watched her run on. This time he stopped her. He called out, "Miss, miss, I want to talk to you," and instead of shaking her head no and breezing by with a "Can't now," as he fully imagined her doing, she turned and jogged back to where he was waiting, by the plank stairs that led down to the beach, and stood with her hands on her hips only a foot away from him, damp with perspiration, a tiny creature perfectly formed. Until she fully relaxed, she pawed the boardwalk with one running shoe like a pony while looking up at this unknown man in the sunglasses who was six feet three and had a full head of wavy gray hair. It turned out, fortuitously, that she had been working for seven years at an ad agency in Philadelphia, lived here at the shore, and was currently on her two-week vacation. When he told her the name of the New York agency where he'd worked for nearly a lifetime she was terrifically impressed; his employer was legendary, and for the next ten minutes they made the kind of advertising talk that had never interested him. She would have to be in her late twenties and yet, with her long, crinkly auburn hair tied back and in her running shorts and tank top, and small as she was, she might have been taken for fourteen. He tried repeatedly to prevent his gaze from falling to the swell of the breasts that rose and fell with her breathing. This was torment to walk away from. The idea was an affront to common sense and a menace to his sanity. His excitement was disproportionate to anything that had happened or that possibly could happen. He had not just to hide his hunger; so as not to go mad he had to annihilate it. Yet he doggedly continued on as he had planned, still half believing that there was some combination of words that would somehow save him from defeat. He said, "I've noticed you jogging." She surprised him by responding, "I've noticed you noticing me." "How game are you?" he heard himself asking her, but feeling that the encounter was now out of his control and that everything was going much too fast – feeling, if it were possible, even more reckless than when he'd draped that pendant necklace costing a small fortune around Merete's neck in Paris. Phoebe the devoted wife and Nancy the cherished child were home in New York, awaiting his return – he'd spoken to Nancy the day before, within only hours of her getting back from summer camp – and still he'd told the saleswoman, "We'll take it. You needn't wrap it. Here, Merete, let me do it. I teethed on these clasps. It's called a tubular box clasp. In the thirties, it would have been the safest one around for a piece like this. Come, give me your throat." "What do you have in mind?" the jogger boldly replied, so boldly that he felt at a disadvantage and did not know how forthright to make his answer. Her belly was tanned and her arms were thin and her prominent buttocks were round and firm and her slender legs were strongly muscled and her breasts were substantial for someone not much more than five feet tall. She had the curvaceous lusciousness of a Varga Girl in the old 1940s magazine illustrations, but a miniaturized, childlike Varga Girl, which was why he had begun waving to her in the first place.

He'd said, "How game are you?" and she'd replied, "What do you have in mind?" Now what? He removed his sunglasses so she could see his eyes when he stared down at her. Did she understand what she was implying by answering him like that? Or was it something she said just to be saying something, just to be sounding in charge of herself even as she was feeling frightened and out of her depth? Thirty years ago he wouldn't have doubted the result of pursuing her, young as she was, and the possibility of humiliating rejection would never have occurred to him. But lost was the pleasure of the confidence, and with it the engrossing playfulness of the exchange. He did his best to conceal his anxiety – and the urge to touch – and the craving for just one such body – and the futility of it all – and his insignificance – and apparently succeeded, for when he took a piece of paper from his wallet and wrote down his phone number, she didn't make a face and run off laughing at him but took it with an agreeable little catlike smile that could easily have been accompanied by a purr. "You know where I am," he said, feeling himself growing hard in his pants unbelievably, magically quickly, as though he were fifteen. And feeling, too, that sharp sense of individualization, of sublime singularity, that marks a fresh sexual encounter or love affair and that is the opposite of the deadening depersonalization of serious illness. She scanned his face with two large, lively blue eyes. "There's something in you that's unusual," she said thoughtfully. "Yes, there is," he said and laughed, "I was born in 1933." "You look pretty fit to me," she told him. "And you look pretty fit to me," he replied. "You know where to find me," he said. Engagingly she swung the piece of paper in the air as though it were a tiny bell and to his delight shoved it deep into her damp tank top before taking off down the boardwalk again.

She never called. And when he took his walks he never saw her again. She must have decided to do her jogging along another stretch of the boardwalk, thereby thwarting his longing for the last great outburst of everything.