Deception, p.1
Deception, page 1
Philip Roth
Deception
In the 1990s Philip Roth won America’s four major literary awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book Award for Sabbath’s Theater (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral (1997). He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist (1998); in the same year he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife (1986) and the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959). In 2000 he published The Human Stain, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos of postwar America. For The Human Stain Roth received his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britain’s W. H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year. In 2001 he received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, given every six years “for the entire work of the recipient.”
books by Philip Roth
zuckerman books
The Ghost Writer
Zuckerman Unbound
The Anatomy Lesson
The Prague Orgy
The Counterlife
American Pastoral
I Married a Communist
The Human Stain
roth books
The Facts
Deception
Patrimony
Operation Shylock
kepesh books
The Breast
The Professor of Desire
The Dying Animal
miscellany
Reading Myself and Others Shop Talk
other books
Goodbye, Columbus
Letting Go
When She Was Good
Portnoy’s Complaint
Our Gang
The Great American Novel
My Life as a Man
Sabbath’s Theater
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, APRIL 1997
Copyright © 1990 by Philip Roth
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States in hardcover by Simon & Schuster, New York, in 1990.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Roth, Philip.
Deception : a novel / by Philip Roth.—1st Vintage Books ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-679-75294-3
I. Title.
[PS3568.0855D44 1997]
813’.54—dc21 96-46866
CIP
Ebook ISBN 9780593685044
Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/
a_prh_6.0_140999378_c0_r1
for David Rieff
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Books by Philip Roth
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
“I’LL write them down. You begin.”
“What’s it called?”
“I don’t know. What do we call it?”
“The Dreaming-About-Running-Away-Together Questionnaire.”
“The Lovers - Dreaming - About - Running - Away-Together Questionnaire.”
“The Middle - Aged - Lovers - Dreaming -About-Running-Away-Together Questionnaire.”
“You’re not middle-aged.”
“I certainly am.”
“You seem young to me.”
“Yes? Well, that shall certainly have to come up in the questionnaire. Everything to be answered by both applicants.”
“Begin.”
“What’s the first thing that would get on your nerves about me?”
“When you are at your worst, what is your worst?”
“Are you really this lively? Do our energy levels correspond?”
“Are you a well-balanced and charming extrovert, or are you a neurotic recluse?”
“How long before you’d be attracted to another woman?”
“Or man.”
“You must never get older. Do you think the same about me? Do you think about this at all?”
“How many men or women do you have to have at one time?”
“How many children do you want to interfere with your life?”
“How orderly are you?”
“Are you entirely heterosexual?”
“Do you have any specific idea of what interests me about you? Be precise.”
“Do you tell lies? Have you lied to me already? Do you think lying is only normal, or are you against it?”
“Would you expect to be told the truth if you demanded it?”
“Would you demand the truth?”
“Do you think it’s weak to be generous-minded?”
“Do you care about being weak?”
“Do you care about being strong?”
“How much money can I spend without your resenting it? Would you let me have your Visa card, no questions asked? Would you let me have any power over your money at all?”
“In what ways am I already a disappointment?”
“What embarrasses you? Tell me. Do you even know?”
“What are your real feelings about Jews?”
“Are you going to die? Are you mentally and physically okay? Be specific.”
“Would you prefer someone richer?”
“How inept would you be if we were discovered? What would you say if someone came in that door? Who am I and why is it all right?”
“What things don’t you tell me? Twenty-five. Any more?”
“I can’t think of any.”
“I look forward to your answers.”
“And I to yours. I have one.”
“Yes?”
“Do you like what I wear?”
“That’s straining.”
“Not at all. The more trivial the defect the more anger it inspires. That’s my experience.”
“Okay. Last question?”
“I have it. I have it. The last question. Do you in any way, in any corner of your heart, still harbor the illusion that marriage is a love affair? If so, that can be the cause of a lot of trouble.”
* * *
—
“My husband’s girlfriend gave him a present the other day. She’s very pretentious, a very jealous and ambitious kind of person. Everything has to be high drama for her. She gave him this record. I can’t remember, but it’s a very well known, very beautiful piece of music. Schubert—and all about the loss of the greatest passion in his life, the most interesting woman of the century, who was tall and thin—oh, it’s all related to that. All this is made very plain in the liner notes, how this is the greatest passion that could ever be conceived, the true marriage of true minds, and all this really high-flown stuff about the misery and ecstasy of being separated by cruel fate. It was so clearly a pretentious gift. He makes the mistake of being open about all these things, you see. He could simply have said that he bought it himself. But he told me that she had given it to him. And I don’t think he’d looked at the back. I was drunk one evening, and I’ve got this pink stuff that you underline with and it makes things stand out. And I underlined about seven phrases that just looked hilariously funny when you did that. Then I calmly withdrew to a dignified distance and handed him the cover of this record. Do you think that was awful of me?”
“Why were you drunk?”
“I wasn’t drunk. I’d had a lot of drinks.”
“You have a lot to drink at night.”
“Yeah.”
“How much?”
“Oh, I drink a huge amount. It depends. Some evenings I don’t drink anything. But if I were drinking, I could easily drink several doubles before dinner, and several afterwards, and wine in between. I wouldn’t even be drunk. I would just be kind of elevated.”
“So you don’t get much reading done these days.”
“No. Though I don’t drink by myself. There’s someone there when I drink. Though we don’t really stay together very much. Well, we have recently—but it’s not usual.”
“It’s such a strange life you lead.”
“Yes, it is strange. It’s a mistake. But there we are, that’s my life.”
“How unhappy are you?”
“What I find is that it goes in periods. One has periods of ghastliness. And then long periods of sort of quiet and love. There was a long time when it seemed that all these things were getting worse. And then there was a short time when they seemed to be resolving themselves. And now I think neither of us wishes to have too many confrontations. Because it achieves nothing. And it just makes it all the more difficult to live with each other.”
“Do you still sleep together?”
“I thought you were going to ask me that. I’m not going to answer that question. If you want to go somewhere in Europe, I know exactly where I want to go.”
“You with me?”
“Ummm. Amsterdam. I’ve never been there. And there’s a wonderful exhibition.”
* * *
—
“You’re looking at the clock to see what time it is.”
“People who drink too much often look at the clock before they have their first drink. Just in case.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Oh, nothing. Two nannies, two children, and two cleaning women all squabbling, and the usual English damp. Then my daughter, since she’s been ill, has taken to waking me up at any time, three, four, five. What’s tiring is I’m responsible to all my responsibilities. I need a holiday. And I don’t think we can continue to have a sexual relationship. The day’s too short.”
“Is that right? That’s too bad.”
“No, I don’t think we can. Don’t you agree, actually? Last time we talked about it, wasn’t that the direction in which your own conversation was tending?”
“Oh, I see. This is a preemptive strike. Okay. Whatever you want.”
Laughing. “Well, I think that’s best. I think that you put yourself very neatly when you said it was driving you nuts.”
“What was driving me nuts?”
“Well, all these sexual matters. You said you didn’t think you were very keen on just a romantic friendship.” “I see.”
“That’s sort of your we’ll-let-that-ride expression.”
“No, no, it’s not. It’s my I’m-still-listening expression.”
“Well, perhaps I shouldn’t have simplified like that.”
“Really? Oh, I’ll simplify it for you, if you want it simple.”
“Don’t say nothing. I hate you to say nothing.”
* * *
—
“It’s very strange to see you.”
“Stranger not to, isn’t it?”
“No, I usually don’t see you.”
“You do look a bit different. What’s been happening to you?”
“That makes me look so different? You tell me what the difference is and I’ll tell you what did it. Am I taller, shorter, fatter, wider?”
“No, it’s very subtle.”
“Something subtle? Shall I be serious? I missed you.”
* * *
—
“I went to see a friend of ours who left her husband. She’s very clever, she’s very beautiful, and she’s very successful. And she’s extremely courageous and self-disciplined. And she’s got lots of money. And she looks terrible.”
“How long has she been on her own?”
“Two months.”
“She’ll look worse.”
“Not only does she earn this huge amount of money in an interesting job, but she had a lot of money, so that there are no problems of that sort.”
“She have children?”
“She has two children.”
“A cautionary visit.”
“Well, if she can’t do it, well…really. She’s just been terribly ill, she’s moved house, she’s just got divorced, and her children are kicking up from being wretched and…I couldn’t begin. I couldn’t begin.”
* * *
—
“You don’t want him to give her up though, do you? You don’t want to say, ‘If you don’t give her up, I’m going to sleep in the other room. You can either fuck me or you can fuck her. Take your choice.’ ”
“No. No. I think that she’s really an important part of his life, and it would not only be mad but selfish.”
“Selfish on your part?”
“Yes.”
“Really? Is that your point of view? If it is, then you can marry me. That’s a lovely point of view—I’ve never run into it before. A woman saying, ‘It would be selfish for me to ask my husband to give up his girlfriend.’ ”
“I think it would though.”
“Usually people think it’s selfish of the man to want her and to have her, not selfish of the woman to ask him to give her up.”
“A point of view that is reasonable and right doesn’t come naturally. That was my first response. But it is what I think…I can see that I’ve behaved very stupidly with my husband, but maybe it’s because I don’t know what I’ve done wrong. He has had to put up with years of me being terribly depressed and lonely. I don’t think it was entirely surprising—I was alone so much and he was away so much and working so hard. I didn’t have other affairs, because I always thought he was vulnerable and had to be protected.”
“He doesn’t sound that vulnerable to me.”
* * *
—
“So he’s safely in a hospital room. You think the tootsie’s over there?”
“ ‘Tootsie’ is such a wonderful word.”
“I thought you might like it. You’re getting your little vacation finally.”
“Well, I think I’ve given him an unduly bad press. He has many, many qualities. But the truth of the matter is that I haven’t slept so well for a long time. I woke up this morning feeling absolutely normal.”
“Did you listen to the record I gave you?”
“No. I had to hide it.”
“Why do you have to hide it?”
“Because it would be unusual for me to buy a record. I don’t often do it.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Well, I’ll play it in the evening when I’m alone.”
“What are you going to do if it’s found? Salt and pepper it and eat it?”
“I did buy records, but I did get so upset for a while that—well, that’s history.”
“What? Did you have fights about that too?”
“Yes.”
“Did you really?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not necessary.”
“No.”
* * *
—
“You look lovely. That’s a nice outfit. Is it on inside out?”
“No. I have lots of clothes with seams on the outside. You never noticed. It’s terribly smart. Suggests that you’re somewhat anarchic.”
“Well, you look lovely but you sound awfully tired. And you’re getting skinny again. Don’t you take vitamins and all the rest of those things?”
“Intermittently I do. It’s that I haven’t eaten for three days. I’m so busy.”
“Too busy.”
“Yeah. I’m sitting in this room trying to type, and this little one comes in and first of all she does a pee on the carpet. And then she goes out and she cries some more and then she comes in again. Then she shuffles several pages around, then she takes the telephone off the hook, and then she comes up to me and she does a crap all over my sofa. Then I have to go off to work and make sycophantic noises at my boss for eight hours.”
“And the husband?”
“It’s easier when I don’t see you. One makes an adjustment and places one’s distractions elsewhere—and just forgets, you know? You don’t get involved in this terrible comparing. I’ve wanted very much to explain to you what’s been going on in my head. But I feel that perhaps I’m abusing you, and I don’t want to do that. One thing that I want is to stop having to explain all that shit to you. I will if you ask me but I’d rather not talk about it.”
“Talk about it. I like to know what’s going on in your head. I’m very fond of your head.”
“I just had my mother for the weekend. And he just disappeared. I had my mother entirely on my own for the weekend. And I haven’t slept well for nights. And I think about you a great deal. And tomorrow I have to have lunch with my mother-in-law, which is a slightly grueling experience—she’s a woman who can really criticize. She can be so hellishly unpleasant that one tries to keep things out of her way. And the nanny is restive. They all hop around from one house to another, the nannies, comparing employers, and ours becomes very restive. And you know what a cervix is?”
“I think so.”
“Such a silly word, ‘cervix.’ Well, I’ve got a lump on mine. I have to go have a test or something. And my husband says I’ve ruined his sex life. He says, ‘You’re so heavy, everything is so serious, awful, there’s no joy, no fun, no humor in anything’—and it’s true, I think. I think he exaggerates grossly, but it’s truish. I don’t enjoy sex at all. It’s all rather lonely and hard. But it’s like this, life, isn’t it?”
