The Humbling by Philip Roth Page B

institutionalized. And who now is essentially unemployed. All those things don't bode well to me.' I told her that it didn't seem any worse than the situation I was in before, with someone whom I once loved very much and who told me one morning, 'I can't go on in this body,' and decided she wanted to be a man. And then I made my speech, the speech I'd prepared and recited aloud driving down. I said, 'As for his age, Mother, I don't see it as a problem. If I'm going to try to be attractive to men and also learn whether I am attracted to men, this seems to be the best measure of it. This person is the test. The twenty-five years register with me as twenty-five years more experience than someone would have if I were trying this with a man my own age. We're not talking about getting married. I told you—we're just enjoying each other. I'm enjoying him, in part, because he is twenty-five years older.' And she said, 'And he's enjoying you because you're twenty-five years younger.' I said, 'Don't be offended, Mother, but are you at all jealous?' And she laughed and said, 'Dear, I'm sixty-three and happily married to your father for over forty years. It's true,' she said, 'and you may get a kick out of knowing this, but when I played Pegeen Mike and Simon played Christy in the Synge play, I had a crush on him. Who didn't? He was wildly attractive, energetic, exuberant, playful, he was a big forceful actor, a wonderful actor, already his talent obviously a huge cut above everyone else's. So, yes, I had a crush, but I was already married and pregnant with you. The crush was something I passed through. I think I've seen him no more than ten times in the intervening years. I respect him enormously as an actor. But I continue to be concerned by that hospital stay. It's no small thing for someone to commit himself to a psychiatric hospital and to be there for however long or short a period it was. Look,' she said, 'for me the important thing is that you're not going into this blind. You don't want to be doing something that, for lack of experience, a twenty-year-old might do. I don't want you to act out of innocence.' And I said, 'I'm hardly innocent, Mother.' I asked her what she was afraid might happen that couldn't happen with anyone. And she said, 'What am I afraid of? I'm afraid of the fact that he is growing older by the day. That's the way it works. You're sixty-five and then you're sixty-six and then you're sixty-seven, and so on. In a few years he'll be seventy. You'll be with a seventy-year-old man. And it won't stop there,' she told me. 'After that he'll become a seventy-five-year-old man. It never stops. It goes on. He'll begin to have health problems such as the elderly have, and maybe
things even worse, and you're going to be the person responsible for his care. Are you in love with him?' she said. I said I thought that I was. And she asked, 'Is he in love with you?' And I said I thought that you were. I said, 'I think it'll be fine, Mother. It has occurred to me that he has to worry more than I do. That this is a more precarious situation for him than it is for me.' She asked, 'How so?' I said, 'Well, as you say, I'm trying this for the first time. Although it's a novelty for him as well, it's not nearly as much of one as it is for me. I've been very surprised by how much I've enjoyed it. But I couldn't yet declare that it's definitely the permutation I will always want.' And she said, 'Well, all right, I don't want to go on and on and give this an urgency it doesn't have and may never have. I just thought it was important for me to see you, and I must say, once again, I'm very impressed by your appearance.' And I asked her, 'Does it make you think you would still have preferred a daughter who was straight?' She said, 'It makes me think that you would prefer not to be a lesbian any longer. You can, of course, do whatever you like. In your independent youth you educated
us
about that. But I can't fail to notice the