Letting Go (10 page)

“Can’t he work in the living room?”

“We’d be talking. He’d be distracted. He hasn’t written in weeks, you see. He—well, I’ve been sick, and time—oh his time is just all fouled up. He’ll be back soon.” She blushed at this point and looked away.

By no means did I find this a satisfactory explanation of Herz’s behavior—or my reaction to it—but I nodded my head.

Libby said, “It hasn’t been easy for him.”

“It’s probably not been easy for you,” I replied.

“I don’t know. I think maybe it’s easier sometimes being sick.”

“Easier than what?”

Clearly, she was sorry now for having made the distinction in the first place. Most of what Libby was sorry for or about, one saw just that way—clearly. “Oh—being well.” She took a deep breath and pushed her back into the pillows. “I complain too much. I must have had my development arrested somewhere. I’m twenty-two; I should know enough not to go around having expectations all the time. I should be able to get used to things.” She appeared to be making her resolves right in front of me. “Paul’s the one who should be complaining,” she said.

“Oh, doesn’t he?”

She looked at me with real surprise. Immediately I regretted having been so openly skeptical about her husband’s character; it only increased her uneasiness.

Vaguely she said, “His attitude toward life is better, I think. In the situation.”

“Well,” I said, smiling, “I suppose you have some right to complain,” and tried to end it with that.

She shook her head, defending her husband by annihilating herself.

I said, “Well,” again, and looked over her head, where there hung a rather pedestrian Utrillo print. I examined it while she organized her thoughts. The picture encouraged me to reorganize my own, for it managed to make me overwhelmingly aware that Libby Herz and Paul Herz were married. In all that institutional and cast-off furniture (the wicker chair must surely have been bought off some Iowan’s back porch) it alone looked to have been really
chosen.
Together they had hung it over the bed they shared.

“What’s Paul working on?” I asked, trying to appear more kindly disposed toward the pursuits of the man who was her husband.

“A novel. He does one for a degree. Instead of a dissertation.”

“How’s it going?”

“Fine, wonderful,” she said. “It’s just, well, as I said—time. I mean that’s why I went to work, to give him a little time. Now I
haven’t been in that damn office for almost three weeks.”

“You’ll be better soon. The flu has been going around.”

“Oh yes, I know.” The rapidity with which she answered indicated that she didn’t want me to think that she felt she didn’t
deserve
to get the flu. What made talking to her almost impossible for me was this incredible pendulum action of hers, the swiftness with which she swung back and forth between valuing herself too much and then valuing herself not at all. I realized now that, having had no questions for Herz, I should have turned around and gone home. One did not idly enter the door of this house.

“It’s actually ironic,” Libby was telling me. “When I was a student I could have gone into the hospital free, under student health. But I quit so we could get the tuition back, and then I got sick, and already it’s cost even more than the tuition we got back. You see, it’s not the flu,” she corrected me. “They don’t know what it is, but I don’t think it’s flu or grippe. It’s just—it’s just ironic was all I meant to point out. At least I call it ironic. Paul doesn’t call it anything.” She spoke her next words with some disbelief. “He calls it life.”

“Well,” I said, while she waited to hear what I would say, “I suppose people have to expect a little trouble.”

“Oh I know that,” she interrupted. “I’m not
that
underdeveloped. I know people get sick. It’s better to have to struggle when you’re young, I think, than when you’re older,” she platitudinized. “I expect trouble, of course, but … but this is such a funny sickness, you know? What do I have? Maybe it’s something psychosomatic—I mean that’s always a possibility. God, everything enters your mind when they can’t diagnose the thing. You think about it, and you think that here Paul wants to write—so I get sick. Do you think maybe I don’t
want
him to write? Does that make any sense?”

“No. Does it make any sense to you?”

“Well if it’s my unconscious, how can
I
know? Does it look to you as though I’m giving up? Because I’m not giving up. At least I don’t think I’m giving up. Not
consciously
, at least. But then I’ve got this thing and they can’t diagnose it. I left all that blood there and all that pee—you’d think they could find something. It’s not a joke either; I just give in to myself, damn it.”

“Maybe you’re anemic. Maybe you’re not eating right. Maybe it’s Iowa. Everybody gets sick some time without their knowing why. I’d worry about my psyche last of all.”

“You’re trying to make me feel better.”

“You try to make yourself feel worse.”

“You’ve really been very kind to us,” she said. “Paul appreciates it—”

I don’t believe I could have done anything to keep my face from again registering my skepticism.

“—probably more than you think,” she finished.

“Yes.” Though I went on to ask none of the obvious questions, she started in answering them anyway.

“You see,” she said, “if he acted grateful—well, he just can’t. Not now.”

I said that I understood.

“He doesn’t want to look needy. He doesn’t think he
is
needy. You see, I’ve had it so easy. I never had to pay for anything in my life. And I had lots of brothers and sisters, and everybody looking after me—and Paul, well, Paul had to work for everything. It’s not so bad really if you had things and then you have to give them up. It’s better than sacrificing at the beginning and then
still
sacrificing later on. The worst thing about poverty is it’s so boring. He—he has to give up so many things.” She paused here to fix her blankets; when she went on, the sacrifice of Paul’s which she chose to speak about did not strike me as the specific one she’d had in mind. “He was an only child and very attached to his family, and now they’ve really been hideous. Do you know what a
mikvah
is? A ritual bath? Well, I had one. The rabbi in Ann Arbor took me to the swimming pool at the Y, and in my old blue Jantzen I had this
mikvah.
And his parents
still
won’t lift the phone when he calls. We call and they hang up. I could just kill them for that. Really take a knife and drive it right in them.”

“It doesn’t sound very pleasant.”

“It isn’t.”

For her sake, I generalized again. “Everybody has some kind of trouble with their family,” I said.

“I know. It’s just that sometimes the accident of things gets you. If Paul had had another set of parents … Oh this is silly.”

But only a little later she rode on in the same direction. “When—” she said, “when I read your mother’s letter— Is this rude?” she asked, and answered herself with a surge of blood to the forehead. “But I did read the letter, Gabe, and I saw she was intelligent, and I thought, Oh what a relief if Paul’s parents could just be a little like that. I didn’t think anybody was going to act the way they did. I thought it would be
exciting
to have Jewish in-laws. I was all ready
to be—well, Christ, I had that
mikvah
in my Jantzen, what else could I do? But not them. They don’t want to be happy. They want to be miserable,
that
makes them happy. Well, it doesn’t make anybody else happy.”

“My mother,” I said, taking a final stab at cheering her up, “might not have been much of a help, you know. She was a very willful woman.”

“She was intelligent.”

“All I’m saying is that she was no less firm in her opinions than the Herzes apparently are.”

“Yes?” Libby said. “But suppose you had married a Gentile. You’re Jewish, aren’t you?”

“I am, but I don’t think that particular thing would have made any difference to her.”

“Ah, you see …”

What I saw I did not like. I pretended to be straightening her out about my mother while I worked to squelch a regret she seemed momentarily to have developed over marrying Paul and not me! “Libby, look, you read the letter. My mother was a woman of strong likes and dislikes. She liked her way. There were plenty of things she wouldn’t put up with. That Gentile business just wasn’t one of them.”

“Well, it’s one of them with the Herzes all right.”

I did not like her for the remark. I experienced my first real fellow-feeling for Paul Herz since that night out on the highway when Libby had behaved so badly. “What about the DeWitts?” I asked.

“I don’t care about them any more. Not a single one of them!”

It was a fierce remark, and courageous mostly because it was so clearly a lie. Libby leaned over toward the wicker table—also porch furniture—and took a pill. When she turned back to me she was almost pleading. “Paul’s my husband,” she said. “I prefer him to them. I have to. But Paul—” I had to wait a long time for her to decide whether to finish what she had begun to say, or perhaps to decide how to finish it. “Paul,” she said finally, “was very attached to his family. I mean he wants us all—he’d like us all. Together.”

There was no sense in my saying anything but, “It’s too bad he can’t have that.”

She looked up at me gratefully. “It is.”

“Maybe you should begin to have a family of your own.”

“Oh no!”

Apparently I had gone too far, but I simply didn’t care. What
was
intimacy for this girl and what wasn’t? I was close to exasperation when, looking down and fingering the binding of the blanket, Libby said, “I had a miscarriage in Detroit.”

I couldn’t believe her. No well was so bottomless, no storm so unrelenting; even the worst rocks have a little greenery sticking to the bottom, not just bugs. I was convinced now that she was a liar and a nut.

I said that I was sorry to hear it.

“We weren’t,” she answered icily. “We—we don’t want any children now. We didn’t want that one actually. I had to go to the hospital—but truly it made me
happy.
It was a mistake, you see—we … I—oh I don’t know
what
I want!”

She covered her tears with the tips of her fingers. “I worked myself into this,” she said. “I think I’ve been trying for this.” She dried her face with her muffler and then reached under the pillow for a handkerchief. “We just don’t want any children now, that’s all. How can we afford children? We can’t even really
risk
having any …”

Her white hands and her handkerchief flitted about her face, and just when I was hoping she was at the edge of self-control, having only to step across, she fell back the other way. The lower half of her face became just mouth, and her body shook and shook.

I did not leave my seat or lean forward. Yet all my impulses were directing me toward movement, one way or another. The girl was not a nut and she was not a liar, and that knowledge produced in me a feeling of helplessness that was almost a presence in my limbs. I just couldn’t
sit
there, being witness to Libby Herz’s troubles. “Please,” I said, “please, Lib … Please, try to relax. Libby, you’re sick, you’re a little upset … Libby, you were in school,” I said, “you were busy, you didn’t want children then. There’ll always—”

“I don’t want them now! I just want him to sleep with me! Oh, Christ, that’s all!” She twisted herself away from me and toward the wall, carrying the blanket with her up over her head.

When she spoke next it was in a voice so breathless with humiliation I could hardly hear her. “I’ve overstated things. We just feel … we feel we have to be extra careful. We—could you get me another glass of water?”

I took her old full glass and poured it out in the kitchen sink, and then I let the faucet run a very long time. The little kitchen was really nothing more than the end of the living room. Over the sink was a small window, and outside I could see that the storm had lost most of its strength; it was simply snowing now. Down the street
someone starved for exercise had already begun to scrape the sidewalks with a shovel, and the rasping of the metal hitting the concrete floated all the way up to the Herz barrack.

When I came back into the bedroom again, Libby was sitting in her bed just as I had found her when I’d entered earlier. Only now she looked even more completely the victim of her undiagnosed illness.

“I managed it,” she said.

I looked at her from the doorway. “What?”

“To tell somebody everything.”

I walked over and handed her the water. She took only a sip and then handed it back. I felt the touch of both the cool glass and her fingers. I sat down on the edge of the bed and without too much confusion, we kissed each other. We held together afterwards, but for only a second.

“I’ll be all right, I think,” she said.

I stood, and then I sat again, very upright in the wicker chair.

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “You don’t have to stay until Paul gets back.” Her husband’s name gave her trouble.

“I think I’d rather stay,” I said.

“But I don’t mind being alone.”

“That’s all right.”

“I just don’t want you to think I expect anything.”

“I don’t think you expect anything!” I answered. “Jesus, Libby.”

She raised her hands to her face again so that the fingers barely touched it, as though the bone beneath were sore and fragile. “I wormed that out of you too,” she said.

Following our embrace I had been visited with a mess of emotions, no one of which I could clearly identify. It wasn’t so much emotion, in fact, as emotionality: much strong feeling, no particular object. Now all I’d felt refined itself down into anger. “Listen, you didn’t have to do any worming of anything out of anybody. I did what I wanted to do. Stop feeling guilty about everything, will you? I don’t even believe it. You wanted me to kiss you, and I wanted to. I was glad I had, in fact, until you started talking. I’m not going to run off now, Libby, and I’m not sneaking out of any bedroom windows. I’ll wait till Paul gets back—” The name, short and simple as it was, gave me some trouble too. “I came over here to ask him something anyway.” I had difficulty, momentarily, remembering what it was.