Free Everyman by Philip Roth Page B

you back to the easel."
    "It takes an hour for it to work. The class will be over."
    "You're welcome to stay and keep painting after the others go. Where is the medication?"
    "In my purse. In the studio. By my easel. The old brown bag with the worn shoulder strap."
    He brought it to her, and with what was left of the water in the glass, she took the pill, an opiate that killed pain for three or four hours, a large, white lozenge-shaped pill that caused her to relax with the anticipation of relief the instant she swallowed it. For the first time since she'd begun the class he could see unmistakably how attractive she must have been before the degeneration of an aging spine took charge of her life.
    "Lie here until it starts to work," he said. "Then come join the class."
    "I do apologize for all this," she said as he was leaving. "It's just that pain makes you so alone." And here the fortitude gave way again and left her sobbing into her hands. "It's so shameful."
    "There's nothing shameful about it."
    "There is, there is," she wept. "The not being able to look after oneself, the pathetic need to be comforted..."
    "In the circumstances, none of that is remotely shameful."
    "You're wrong. You don't know. The dependence, the helplessness, the isolation, the dread—it's all so ghastly and shameful. The pain makes you frightened of yourself. The utter otherness of it is awful."
    She's embarrassed by what she's become, he thought, embarrassed, humiliated, humbled almost beyond her own recognition. But which of them wasn't? They were all embarrassed by what they'd become. Wasn't he? By the physical changes. By the diminishment of virility. By the errors that had contorted him and the blows—both those self-inflicted and those from without—that deformed him. What lent a horrible grandeur to the process of reduction suffered by Millicent Kramer—and miniaturized by comparison the bleakness of his own—was, of course, the intractable pain. Even those pictures of the grandchildren, he thought, those photographs that grandparents have all over the house, she probably doesn't even look at anymore. Nothing anymore but the pain.
    "Shhh," he said, "shhh, quiet down," and he returned to the bed to momentarily take her hand again before heading back to the class. "You wait for the painkiller to work and come back in when you're ready to paint."
    Ten days later she killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills.
    At the end of the twelve-week session virtually everyone wanted to sign up for a second one, but he announced that a change of plans would make it impossible for him to resume giving the courses until the following fall.
    ***
    When he'd fled New York, he'd chosen the shore as his new home because he'd always loved swimming in the surf and battling the waves, and because of the happy childhood associations he had with this stretch of Jersey beach, and because, even if Nancy wouldn't join him, he'd be just over an hour away from her, and because living in a relaxing, comfortable environment was bound to be beneficial to his health. There was no woman in his life other than his daughter. She never failed to call before leaving for work each morning, but otherwise his phone seldom rang. The affection of the sons of his first marriage he no longer pursued; he had never done the right thing by their mother or by them, and to resist the repetitiveness of these accusations and his sons' version of family history would require a measure of combativeness that had vanished from his arsenal. The combativeness had been replaced by a huge sadness. If he yielded in the solitude of his long evenings to the temptation to call one or the other of them, he always felt saddened afterward, saddened and beaten.
    Randy and Lonny were the source of his deepest guilt, but he could not continue to explain his behavior to them. He had tried often enough when they were young men—but then they were too young and angry to understand, now