Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth

liked Gauguin. Every morning before the library opened, the boy was waiting; sometimes he seated himself on the lion’s back, sometimes under his belly, sometimes he just stood around throwing pebbles at his mane. Then he would come inside, tap around the main floor until Otto stared him up on tiptoes, and finally headed up the long marble stairs that led to Tahiti. He did not always stay to lunch time, but one very hot day he was there when I arrived in the morning and went through the door behind me when I left at night. The next morning, it was, that he did not show up, and as though in his place, a very old man appeared, white, smelling of Life Savers, his nose and jowls showing erupted veins beneath them. “Could you tell me where I’d find the art section?”

    “Stack Three,” I said.
    In a few minutes, he returned with a big brown-covered book in his hand. He placed it on my desk, withdrew his card from a long moneyless billfold and waited for me to stamp out the book.
    “Do you want to take this book out?” I said.
    He smiled.
    I took his card and jammed the metal edge into the machine; but I did not stamp down. “Just a minute,” I said. I took a clipboard from under the desk and flipped through a few pages, upon which were games of battleship and tick-tack-toe that I’d been playing through the week with myself. “I’m afraid there’s a hold on this book.”
    “A what?”
    “A hold. Someone’s called up and asked that we hold it for them. Can I take your name and address and drop a card when it’s free …”
    And so I was able, not without flushing once or twice, to get the book back in the stacks. When the colored kid showed up later in the day, it was just where he’d left it the afternoon before.
    As for Brenda, I saw her every evening and when there was not a night game that kept Mr. Patimkin awake and in the TV room, or a Hadassah card party that sent Mrs. Patimkin out of the house and brought her in at unpredictable hours, we made love before the silent screen. One muggy, low-skied night Brenda took me swimming at the club. We were the only ones in the pool, and all the chairs, the cabanas, the lights, the diving boards, the very water seemed to exist only for our pleasure. She wore a blue suit that looked purple in the lights and down beneath the water it flashed sometimes green, sometimes black. Late in the evening a breeze came up off the golf course and we wrapped ourselves in one huge towel, pulled two chaise longues together, and despite the bartender, who was doing considerable pacing back and forth by the bar window, which overlooked the pool, we rested side by side on the chairs. Finally the bar light itself flipped off, and then, in a snap, the lights around the pool went down and out. My heart must have beat faster, or something, for Brenda seemed to guess my sudden doubt—we
should go, I
thought.

    She said: “That’s okay.”
    It was very dark, the sky was low and starless, and it took a while for me to see, once again, the diving board a shade lighter than the night, and to distinguish the water from the chairs that surrounded the far side of the pool.
    I pushed the straps of her bathing suit down but she said no and rolled an inch away from me, and for the first time in the two weeks I’d known her she asked me a question about me.
    “Where are your parents?” she said.
    “Tucson,” I said. “Why?”
    “My mother asked me.”
    I could see the life guard’s chair now, white almost.
    “Why are you still here? Why aren’t you with them?” she asked.
    “I’m not a child any more, Brenda,” I said, more sharply than I’d intended. “I just can’t go wherever my parents are.”

    “But then why do you stay with your aunt and uncle?”
    “They’re not my parents.”
    “They’re better?”
    “No. Worse. I don’t
know
why I stay with them.”
    “Why?” she said. “Why don’t I know?”
    “Why do you stay? You do know, don’t you?”
    “My job, I