The Prague Orgy by Philip Roth

Author:Philip Roth [Roth, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-01-30T08:00:00+00:00

Prague, Feb. 5, 1976

The phone awakens me at quarter to eight.

“This is your wife-to-be. Good morning. I am going to visit you. I am in the lobby of the hotel. ! am coming now to visit you in your room.”

“No, no. I’ll come down to you. It was to be lunch, not breakfast.”

“Why are you scared for me to visit you when I love you’?” asks Olga.

“It’s not the best idea here. You know that.”

“I am coming up.”

“You’re going to get yourself in trouble.”

“Not me,” she says.

I’m still doing up my trousers when she is at the door, wearing a long suede coat that might have seen her through trench warfare, and a pair of tall leather boots that look as if she’d been farming in them. Against the worn, soiled animal skins, her white neck and white face appear dramatically vulnerable—you can see why people do things to her that she does not necessarily like: bedraggled, bold, and helpless, a deep ineradicable sexual helplessness such as once made bourgeois husbands so proud in the drawing room and so confident in bed. Since I am frightened of everything, it is as well to go in one direction as the other, Well, not only is she going, she’s gone: she is reckless desperation incarnate.

I let her in quickly and close the door. “Prudence isn’t your strong point.”

“This I have never heard. Why do you say this?” she asks.

I point to the brass chandelier suspended above the bed, a favored place, Sisovsky had already told me back in New York, for the installation of a bugging device. “In your room,” he warned me, “be careful about what you say. There are devices hidden everywhere. And on the phone it is best to say nothing. Don’t mention the manuscript to her on the phone.”

She drops into a chair beside the window while I continue to dress.

“You must understand,” she says loudly, “that I am not marrying you for your money. I am marrying you,” she continues. gesturing toward the light fixture, “because you tell me you love me at first sight, and because I believe this, and because at first sight I love you.”

“You haven’t been to sleep,”

“How can I sleep? I am thinking only of my love for you, and I am happy and sad ail at once. When I am thinking of our marriage and our children I do not want to sleep.”

“Let’s have breakfast somewhere. Lei’s get out of here.”

“First tell me you love me.”

“I love you.”

“Is this why you marry me? For love?”

“What other reason could there be?”

“Tell me what you love most about me.”

“Your sense of reality.”

“But you must not love me for my sense of reality, you must love me for myself. Tell me all the reasons you love me.”

“At breakfast.”

“No. Now. I cannot marry a man who I have only just met” —she is scribbling on a piece of paper as she speaks—”and risk my happiness by making the wrong choice. I must be sure. I owe it to myself.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.