Letting Go (6 page)

Margie said, “I’d like to stay with you.”

“You can stay,” I said.

“Can I?”

“Yes.”

“Shouldn’t we go back and get some things?”

“I have eggs and orange juice,” I assured her.

“I meant stay,” she said. “Really stay.”

I spoke then not only for Kenosha but for all small towns everywhere. “Marge, we hardly know each other.”

“We can be happy as kings,” she said, very sweetly.

“What do you need to get?”

“Do you have Breck shampoo?”

“No.”

“I want to get my Breck and my Olivetti. I have an electric frying pan,” she said, a little breathlessly.

“I have gas,” I pointed out.

“Electric cooks perfect eggs,” she told me. “Oh I want to eat so many breakfasts here.”

So we drove to Margie’s room and she packed a suitcase full of skirts and underwear, and in a large cardboard carton which I took from the shelf of her closet, I began to lay her frying pan and her Olivetti and her steam iron and her Breck and her
Oxford Book of Seventeenth-Century Verse.
And all the time I bent over the carton I wondered what I was doing. Some things—carrying George Herbert into a sinful union! Not till I felt fully the absurdity of what I was about did I realize how clutchy I had become of late: when I had seen Paul Herz in class, I had rushed to give him a book; when Libby called for a lift, I had dropped my studies and run right over. That very morning I had tried virtually to graft the Herzes to me by loaning them my car. That was an anxious way to interpret a simple act of kindness, but with all the evidence, with Marge Howell’s soapy smell moving back and forth only a foot behind me, what else could I think about myself? I had not realized that I had been missing my father as much as he had been missing me.

She put her arms around me, this sweet empty-headed girl, and from behind me kissed my neck. With wryness, which never protected anyone from anything for very long, I said, “Oh, Margie, I am your Trotsky, your Einstein, your Moses Maimonides.” And that foe of Luther and the Middle West asked, “Was that his last name?”

Was it a feeble joke or didn’t she know? Either way, I continued to lose confidence in myself.

Mindlessly, mindlessly, mindlessly—pushing our shopping cart through the market, and late in the afternoon sipping cocoa in bed, and every few nights watching Marge let down her whirly blond hair to be washed. 1 would be sitting on the edge of the tub translating
Beowulf
to her while she leaned across the sink wearing her half slip and raising luxurious bubbles on her scalp. With her hair combed out straight, the wet strands just touching her back, she would turn to
me with a look of perfect well-being and satisfaction. “And yet I don’t feel I have to marry you. Isn’t that something? I didn’t think I could feel so liberated.” There were nights when it was charming, but there were other nights too, and then the girl at the sink and 1 on the tub seemed no more facts of this life than those impossibilities, Hrothgar and Grendel, whose words and deeds I had just been trying to comprehend.

Margie soon came down with the grippe and was very hard to deal with. In bed she took to wearing my pajamas, and posing in them. She wanted to hear about all the girls I had made love to, and then I could hear about all the boys who had wanted to make love to her. She would not sleep with the lights out, and finally when she did sleep and I was alone, I had to face the fact that she was not much different sick from what she was well: the strain was simply purer, that was all. On the third day of her illness I was at last able to tear myself away from her by way of the necessities of shopping. Leaving our casino game, I drove to the supermarket under threatening winter skies. I knew that when Margie was fully recovered, strong and bouncy, we would have to arrange a parting; I was no gray-haired Chicago investor, no left-wing Jewish intellectual, and I could not continue to serve as either, or both. Nevertheless, because I was at the time as weak in the face of loneliness as in the face of pleasure, I shopped for two for the week, buying in the drug section of the market four bottles of Breck and three jars of the dainty underarm deodorant she used, and later the chocolate drink she was so fond of. Then as I was rounding an aisle by the meat department, I saw Libby Herz pushing a cart toward my own. I ducked away, but a few minutes later we collided in front of Detergents.

“Hi,” she said.

“Why, hello—how are you?”

“Better. How are you?”

“I’m fine. What’s the matter?” I asked. “Were you sick? Or are you just feeling generally better?”

“I had a fever.”

“There’s one going around.”

“It’s gone now,” she answered cheerily; too cheerily, for looking at her I saw the after-effects of illness still in her face.

“How’s your husband?”

“He’s fine.”

We both did not know where to go from there. She must have heard, as 1 did, that I had not called Paul Paul.

“You must come see us some night,” Libby suggested.

“I’ve been very busy.”

A strand of hair that was swept away from the side of her head suddenly engaged her; she brushed it with her hand, and pulled everything tighter through the rubber band at the back. “I want to thank you,” she said, “for the car offer. That was very nice. Paul told me.”

“I’m sorry he couldn’t use it.”

With her hair out of the way, she began fiddling with the items in her cart; she had a great deal of oleo but no Breck. “Thank you anyway,” she said, and we both looked off at the shelves of Tide and Rinso.

“How do you get all those groceries home now?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Walk.”

“It’s far.”

“Not that far.”

“Why don’t you wait—” I found myself looking at a crease that extended from the edges of her nostrils to the edges of her mouth, barely visible, but still a mark on the skin. “Maybe you shouldn’t walk …”

“Oh but I’m fine.”

“I can drive you. I’m almost finished.”

When she looked to see how finished I was, I realized that it was clear from my cartful that I was feeding and deodorizing more than one. It was also clear—to me—that the other person was not one toward whom I had a great deal of feeling. It was beginning to seem that toward those for whom I felt no strong sentiment, I gravitated; where sentiment existed, I ran. There was my father; there was even the girl before me. With her, of course, circumstances had combined with judgment to hold me back. But no circumstances had forced me, really, into a liaison with Margie Howells, whose sickroom behavior informed me that even if I had not developed feelings, I had at any rate initiated obligations. Standing there with Libby Herz, I found myself feeling rather shabby.

“Do let me drive you,” I said.

“I’ll wait just outside.”

In the car I put my bundles out of sight on the back seat. I propped up Libby’s bag in front, between us, and asked her how school was.

“I’m not in school any more.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

“I decided to quit a couple of weeks ago. A few days after we saw you, I guess.”

“I suppose it’s less hectic.”

She shrugged her shoulders again, and I saw that somehow I was making her nervous. “I’m working in the registrar’s office,” she said. “You’re right, it is less hectic. I mean generally.” And rather than explain, she raced ahead. “I finished your book. You don’t mind if we keep it for a while, do you? Paul hasn’t gotten around to it yet. He’s just starting to get some time.”

“That’s all right.”

“Isabel
has
a lot of courage in the end,” she said. “You were right. Going back to Osmond, I mean. I don’t know—I think some people might think it was stubbornness. Do you think it was?”

I thought she thought it was, so I said, yes, in a way it probably was. However, I said, stubbornness might be the other side of courage.

“That’s very hard to figure out,” she answered. “When you’re being stubborn and when you’re being courageous. I mean, if you were alone—but there are other people …” The conversation seemed suddenly to depress her. Whenever we talked principle it always wound up seeming as though we were talking about her. I could tell when she spoke next that she had told herself to stop brooding.

“Why don’t you come visit us?” she asked.

I did not answer.

“Don’t judge us by that night,” Libby said. “Please don’t. We, both of us, were preoccupied.”

“It’s not that,” I said. “Actually I’ve just been busy.”

“Paul …” she began slowly, “did appreciate your offering the car.” She looked out the side window as she spoke, and I was reminded vividly of our first interview. “It simply wasn’t a solution for us. I hope you didn’t think he was ungrateful. He did appreciate the ride. He appreciated it very much. He’s—very private. He’s sweet, you know”—she toppled one word on the next—“and, I know, I know he can look a little rude, to strangers—”

“No, no. I didn’t think him rude at all.”

“We’re much better off now, really. I thought it was awfully kind of you, considering what we’d been the night before. I realize,” she said in a voice too loud for a two-door sedan, “that I must have complained all night.”

“Oh no. I just thought you were telling some stories.”

What I said confused me, and confused Libby too. Her voice
was hardly natural when she said, “Paul was just overworked. It’s not nearly so bad as I must have made it seem.”

“Doesn’t he teach at Coe any more?” I asked.

“Well, he does—but he won’t be, starting next semester. It’s too much. And I don’t mind working. Really, it’s sort of a nice change. There’s a bus, he found out, that goes up to Cedar Rapids and he’s finishing out the semester taking that. It shoots a lot of his day—but that’s okay anyway because he can read on it—and oh, I know it sounds involved, but now in fact it’s less involved than it was. Before he couldn’t write, and he was up every night marking papers, and he was too upset. We’ll finish one education at a time. I think tempers are better all around.”

“I’m glad everything is going well.”

“Oh yes. You must come to see us.”

“I will.”

“I’m sure Paul would like it.”

Then why the hell hadn’t he asked me himself? I saw him three times a week, and got from him only a hello and goodbye … But his life had only just changed, I told myself, and perhaps it was true that as his several frustrations dropped away, he would come to feel less defensive about me.

“I will come,” I said.

“Come tonight.”

“I don’t think I can make it tonight.”

As we headed up toward the barracks, Libby said, “You’re certainly welcome to bring somebody with you, if you like.”

“Maybe some other night.” Obviously I could not tell her that at the moment there was a sick girl home in my bed. “After Christmas,” I said, hoping that by then there would be no girl in my bed at all.

“Paul will return the book soon,” Libby said. She pointed up to the gray hut that was theirs. “Right here. There are a lot of things to talk about, about Isabel’s character.”

“There are, I know.”

“I’d like to talk about them,” she said. “And do, really, bring anyone you like. I think Paul would like you to bring someone.” When I looked at her pulling the bundle from the car, she tried to avoid my eyes. I knew she did not want me to suggest that I carry the bundle for her.

We two Wallach men, my father and I, stood in place on the tennis court, pushing dull lifeless shots back and forth at one another. Each of us had been trying for over an hour not to inconvenience his opponent by so much as a foot. For four days now, life—off the court as well as on—had consisted of just this sort of polite emotionless volleying. Running into one another in the bathroom, we bowed in our bathrobes. At dinner, eyes glued to utensils, we waited for Millie to serve, then dipped into our grapefruit as though one wrist controlled our separate hands. One of us couldn’t sneeze without the other waving a clean handkerchief in his face.

Now, when a slight powder-puff shot of my father’s twisted three feet to my left, his apology was endless. He didn’t want to see me moving—three feet to the left and next thing I’d be off the courts, out of the club, gone from New York forever. For the rest of the afternoon he aimed at a dime; all I had to do, in turn, was close my eyes and bring my racket forward and I would meet the ball. See how easy life is in New York?

I chose, however, to keep my eyes open and on him. Across the court, in WSAC sweatshirt and white ducks that broke so low on his sneakers they nearly covered his toes, his undernourished figure, spidery and nervous, bounced in place awaiting my return. He had a stringy little body, a large head, and thick hair the color of iron. I am taller and heavier, like my mother, but his face, without the sags and wrinkles, could have been my own: gray eyes, flat nose, wide nostrils,
and a big jaw which my father maintains has resulted in no wisdom-teeth trouble for two centuries. In his family they rise right up through the gums with room to spare. The aesthetic results of functionalism, however, are not always very satisfying; these abundant jaws of ours tend to make both my father and myself look a little like farmers. Or soldiers. You know we come from strong stock, but that’s all you know; it was on my mother’s side that all the nuance lay.