Letting Go (68 page)

“We’ll see,” I said. “I’m glad we two became friends, Cynthia.”

She toughened instantly. “I’m always friends.”

“Okay,” I said. “Goodbye, Mark. Be a good boy. Send me a card from the Statue of Liberty.”

Some connection was made. “Coney Island!” Markie shouted, and I started down the aisle of the plane. The blond stewardess said to me, “We’ll take extra good care of them, you bet.”

Minutes later we watched the plane taxi up the field, and then it was aloft, without incident. Martha said that she would just as soon not go right back to the apartment, and so we took a long ride that afternoon, all the way out to Evanston to look at the big trees and the pretty houses. Finally it was dark and we had to go home.

Of course he had been miserable. Between the pretension and the fact, what’s invented and what’s given, stands one’s own tortured soul. Paul Herz had been pretending all these awful years that he was of another order of men. It occurred to him now—as an icicle occurs to a branch, after a cold hard night of endless dripping—that, no, he was not a man of feeling; it occurred to him that if he was anything at all it was a man of duty. And that when his two selves had become confused—one self, one invention—when he had felt it his duty to be feeling, that then his heart had been a stone, and his will, instead of turning out toward action, had remained a presence in his body, a concrete setting for the rock of his heart. It all led to a very heavy sense of self—an actual sensation of these last years—to a weird textual consciousness of what stood between him and others, a weighted-down feeling under the burden of underwear, tie, shirt, jacket, and coat; a sense of the volume of air itself.

Nowhere was it worse than in bed with his wife; paradoxically, undressed was worse than dressed, by a long shot. Beneath the sheets he was made particularly aware of the heaviness, the brutal materiality of his own body; his little fingers and toes, all the hard extremities of his body, were like little steel caps. The dancer has a sense of flow into the world—he felt blunt. The only hard extremity in which he felt soft was his penis. Though it rose on occasion to duty’s call, and on rarer occasion to feeling’s provocation, for the most part it seemed to have retired from active life. He might almost have
forgotten about it had he not had reason (getting in and out of bed each day with a woman) to think about it so much. In adolescence, of course, one of his burdens had been his erection; it had seemed to him his cross to bear. Getting off buses he had tried slouching; along the corridors at school he had covered himself with his three-ring notebook; at the urinal, one out of two times he was peeing up in the air. But now at twenty-seven, in a state apparently of hormonal balance, or loss, he was in need of some stimulant. For a moment in his seat in the dark coach, he thought about getting up and going into the rocking bathroom at the end of the car and stimulating himself. It was not simply the movement of the train that suggested the idea; he had entertained it, and succumbed to it, in the past, at home when Libby was out; there had even been times with Libby sleeping in the other room. It was not so much an act of defiance, or spite, or even perversion, as of conviction: I am a man yet. But afterwards it was not usually that of which he was convinced; afterwards it was as though the milk of life itself had drained out of him, and he slumped onto the toilet seat a hollow thing, as though if he were to crack a bone upon the bathroom tile, the dull ringing of his body would reverberate through the house, even to the ears of his wife.

The train was dragging to a stop. Outside it was black and beginning to rain; they were somewhere in Ohio. Please Do Not Masturbate While Train Is In Station. He responded to neither duty nor feeling, just common sense. There was nothing to be gained by making a bad thing worse. No? Then why was he headed East?

The telegram had come to him at the University. He had put it in his pocket and gone about his business, which, that afternoon, was to journey down to LaSalle Street and talk to the lawyer. He had given Jaffe a check for thirty-six dollars, covering three visits that the girl had made to the obstetrician. Of course, had it been Libby’s own pregnancy there would have been Blue Cross and Blue Shield to cover expenses; now, following their uninsured crisis in Pennsylvania, he was insured to the teeth—but now it was not his wife’s hospital bills he was going to have to pay. None of their dealings with doctors had ever come under normal headings anyway, items the insurance companies recognized. But then little in his life had come under normal headings: abortion, adoption, familial excommunication … Still, he had only recently been introduced to Jaffe and he did not want to appear unappreciative, or self-pitying. He had handed over the money, smiling, and Jaffe had assured him that
the obstetrician had assured Jaffe that it was a perfectly normal pregnancy. But if it’s a normal pregnancy
keep smiling, this is for free
why must she go to see him so often? She’s nervous, Jaffe answered
impatient with me? Well, it’s my money, it’ll be my baby
she needs reassuring, that’s all. Excuse me, Paul, I’ve got a client waiting
I’m a client, I came all the way down here, I’m nervous
, I
need reassuring—hey, how much more is this going to cost
—Thank you, Sid, thanks for everything
something for nothing, be nice, you pauper
, we appreciate, we appreciate, I’m deeply appreciative
get out, he’s got a client waiting, smile and go home.

The next day he had showed the telegram to Libby. She had begun to make a scene over something (oh yes, he never listened to her any more—which he didn’t), and he had only pulled it from his pocket and tossed it on the table so as to alter the course of events. “Here! This is why I’m preoccupied. Sure, I’m preoccupied—here, read
this!
” “Oh Paul,” said Libby, reading, “what are we going to do?” “We’ll do what we have to do—what I have to—”

Duty! Screw duty!
Feeling!
Aren’t you a student of letters? A teacher of Dostoevsky? Puller of long faces, booster of
The Brothers K?
Enemy of Spigliano and the legions of reason? Are you not a writer of prose fiction, all heartfelt? No! Are you not the high priest of love? No! Were you ever? No! No! What an idea of himself he had constructed! What an impossible idea!

“Let me tell you what I’m going to do, Libby—
nothing!
I’m under no obligation, absolutely none. Well, what do
you
think? What are you crying about now?”

“Oh,” she wept, “you have no—”

From time to time he had to do what he did then. “I’ve got feelings!” he roared, having smacked her. “I’ve got feelings that tell me he could live without me, so he can die without me too!”

With the red mark on her pale cheek, she cried less, not more, which was why, having hit her that first time some years back, he had come to do it again: it worked. In their six years he had not indulged himself on more than four or five occasions. He did not quite know what to make of this set of facts—divide five into six and compare to the national average? To get what? How was he to measure her assault upon him? Didn’t he get a handicap because she had turned out to be a weakling? What about
her
handicap?

As had happened on the four or five previous occasions, he was now filled with remorse. Libby was sitting with her coffee cup, leafing through her Jewish homemaker’s book; she wasn’t crying, just
deadly silent. “What are you looking up?” he asked softly, “a name? Does it give a list of names?” She nodded; three fingers still showed on her cheek; now two; now one.

“Well, which do you like?” Now, thank God, none. “What do you like, Lib?”

“What about Nahum?”

“For a boy,” he asked, “or a girl?”

“A boy.” She did more than answer—she smiled.
Oh I’m coming back into her good graces. I need your good graces, oh yes I do, Libby.
“It means comfort,” she said.

“Well, sure, Lib, if you like it. Nahum Herz? Does that sound, I don’t know, perfect to you?”

“I think so.”

“Well it’s
nice
, honey,” he said skeptically. “I suppose it’s a nice old name—”

“If your father dies, do we have to name it after your father?”

“We don’t have to do anything, Libby.”

“I thought you might want to.”

There!
How many points does she get for that? He rose from the table; she was incurably—what, stupid or destructive, naïve or mean? “Libby, I want him to die! He
should
die, if there’s any justice in this world.
He’s ruined our life!
” But shame came in, like a rolling of waves, and carried with it the truth: I ruined it. Me.

The following day he went to see Spigliano and told him he had to go East for a few days. He waited for Spigliano to ask why. “My father’s dying,” answered Paul gravely. Oh gravity! What a lie. I am a man of feeling, Spigliano, and you are not. I am at one with old Fyodor and you are—Bullshit. I am you.

And that evening, at the end of the third day, he had boarded the overnight coach to New York; why, he was not certain, though the blackness of Ohio—they were moving again, heads lolling on the seats around him—and the rushing of the train, the telegram in his pocket, the knowledge of what he had left behind, the uncertainty of what he was moving into, all produced in him now a sense of the profundity of the moment. But what? How? Why was he allowing himself to be borne through space at a rapid rate on a dark night? To where?

In the morning the dawn began to lift just outside of Philadelphia. He made his way down the car to the washroom, and when he came back to his seat it was becoming day. It was as though the sky and sun held fast while the earth spun out of its darkness into light. And
then he realized that this was exactly what happened. All and everything. The thought made his eyes swell. All that was natural and simple in life reduced him to tears. The dawn … Love … Libby …

Only when he stepped off the train in New York, dragging his bag after him, did he understand his journey. He had left his wife.

In the station he went into the coffee bar. It was nine o’clock in New York, eight in Chicago. Was she up? Sleeping? Dead? He rejected the idea, not only that Libby might be dead (wish fulfillment? no, just the old business, just guilt) but that he had left her. But the two seemed somehow to fit together: if he had
not
left her, then she couldn’t be anything but living and breathing. Christ, was he trapped! It didn’t even give him comfort to realize he was being irrational. He took his change in dimes and went to the phone booth; inside he sat fingering the coins. If he hadn’t left Libby, it must be that he really had come East to see his father, to soothe his mother. So he made up his mind and called Brooklyn. (As he dialed he saw Libby stirring in their bed—yes, alive and breathing.) He allowed the phone to ring ten times, then an eleventh, and then—breathless—a twelfth. Then he hung up—bang! Twelve long rings because he was a dutiful man, a good son.

Good son? Dope! Jerk! Weakling!
Where’s your courage?

He remained seated in the phone booth and found some serenity in thinking that no one except Libby knew he was in New York. He might as well be anywhere. It was the first time in six years that he had been separated from his wife. This morning he had awakened—or met the day, at any rate—without first having to feel, accidentally or on purpose, anybody’s hands, feet, or hair, without having to worry first thing in the morning about somebody else’s feelings. Five and a half years of it. Outside the booth, at nine
A.M
., there was no one he knew; nobody who passed paid him any attention. Every few minutes he heard announced the departure of another train for another part of the East. He had only to climb aboard and get off in Wilmington, Baltimore, or Miami Beach. Washington … get a little room somewhere, get a job in some government office, and disappear. Start making a life not on the basis of what he dreamed he was, or thought he was supposed to be, or what literature, philosophy, friends, enemies, wife, parents told him he must be, but simply in terms of his own possibilities.

Picking up his suitcase (the new life would be begun simply: one suit, one sport jacket, two shirts, and three pairs of underwear)
he left the booth. But in the midst of the crowds pushing toward the tracks, he seemed not to be gaining anonymity but losing it; and so the only train he took that morning was the BMT, and where it carried him was back to the place where he had been born.

There is no need to chronicle Paul Herz’s feelings as he left the subway and walked the three blocks to the Liverpool Arms. He was anybody returning home. It was June in Brooklyn, and he had lived seventeen Junes in Brooklyn before he had gone off to college and a wife. Nothing was unfamiliar to his eyes. The elevator smelled like the inside of a tin can, and the corridors smelled milky—no change there either. Upstairs the same door was hinged on their apartment; under his feet was the same doormat. At the age of eleven Paul had cut a sliver from one of his father’s business cards with an old razor blade and Scotch-taped it above the doorbell: his father’s name. He had imagined at the time that it would give his saddened old man a little lift, for Mr. Herz had just gone under for the third time—real estate. That little sliver was still there above the bell, and considering what the sight of it did to Paul’s insides, he knew the apartment itself would be too much. She would make unfair claims. Paul, look at this photo—remember the picnics? Remember Uncle Nathan who died, such a young man and the only one on your father’s side with the benefits of a college education? Paulie, Sheepshead Bay, look. You ate shrimps till they came out of your ears, you and Maury, remember? And your stamps, no one has touched a single page, and your rocks and your butterflies and your baseball glove and your report cards, still framed—oh Paul, how could you do this to your parents, a boy who got such perfect grades in Conduct—

He rang the bell for two reasons. First, if it was not for his parents’ sake that he had come East, then it was for something else, and he did not want to think about that right now. (Though he could not help himself really: if he had actually left Libby, then she must be dead. Ridiculous. She was awake now in Chicago—then he had not left her. This was ridiculous reasoning!) Secondly, he rang because, having telephoned earlier, he was pretty sure no one was home. He rang again and again. Then there was only one more thing to do. He turned the door handle; to his relief he found that it was locked. He began to breathe again. Imagine having to sit in that club chair in the living room, one hand on either doily, waiting for his mother to come home. So what now? Where? Suitcase in hand, he moved past all the empty milk and sour-cream bottles to
the elevator. Where? Anywhere. Start again. Last chance. Once there’s a baby it’s all over. To go back and become not just a husband but a father too—well, that would be that. If it had taken five and a half years to walk out on his Libby, it would take forever with some little Nahum sleeping in the other room. He got in the elevator and traveled down to the main floor. His body actually shook at the thought that if he wanted to he need no longer have any connection to anybody. Consequently he did not even leave the elevator but pushed the button marked 6 and rose once again.