I Married a Communist by Roth Philip

Author:Roth, Philip [Roth, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 1998-10-22T07:00:00+00:00

“Throughout these months, Ira was becoming more and more isolated in the house. On the nights when he wasn’t at a union executive meeting or wasn’t at the meeting of his party unit, or they weren’t out for the evening together, Eve would be in the living room doing her needlepoint and listening to Sylphid plucking away and Ira’d be upstairs writing to O’Day. And when the harp went silent and he went downstairs to find Eve, she wouldn’t be there. She’d be up in Sylphid’s room, listening to the record player. The two of them in bed, under the covers, listening to Cost Fan Tutte. When he’d go up to the top floor and hear the Mozart blaring and see them together in bed, Ira felt as though he were the child. An hour or so later Eve would return, still warm from Sylphid’s bed, to get in bed with him, and that was more or less the end of conjugal bliss.

“When the explosion comes, Eve is astonished. Sylphid must get an apartment of her own. He says, ‘Pamela lives three thousand miles from her family. Sylphid can live three blocks from hers.’ But all Eve does is cry. This is unfair. This is horrible. He is trying to drive her daughter out of her life. No, around the corner, he says—she is twenty-four years old, and it’s time she stopped going to bed with Mommy. ‘She is my daughter! How dare you! I love my daughter! How dare you!’ ‘Okay,’ he says, ‘I’ll live around the corner,’ and the next morning he finds a floor-through apartment over on Washington Square North, just four blocks away. Puts down a deposit, signs a lease, pays the first month’s rent, and comes home and tells her what he’s done. ‘You’re leaving me! You’re divorcing me!’ No, he says, just going to live around the corner. Now you can lie in bed with her all night long. Though if, for variety, you should ever want to lie in bed with me all night long, he says, put on your coat and your hat and come around the corner and I will be delighted to see you. As for dinner, he tells her, who will even notice that I am not there? lust you wait. There is going to be a considerable improvement in Sylphid’s outlook on life. ‘Why are you doing this to me? To make me choose between my daughter and you, to make a mother choose—it’s inhuman!’ It takes hours more to explain that he is asking her to entertain a solution that would obviate the need for a choice, but it’s doubtful that Eve ever understood what he was talking about. Comprehension was not the bedrock on which her decisions were based—desperation was. Capitulation was.

“The next night, Eve went up as usual to Sylphid’s room, but this time to present her with the proposal she and Ira had agreed to, the proposal that was going to bring peace to their lives.

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