Free Indignation by Philip Roth

punched me in the jaw. I felt as if I were going to collapse, then as if I were going to be sick, then, holding my face where he’d struck me, to see whether I was bleeding or the bone was broken or the teeth were knocked out, I watched as he picked up the two books and made his exit.
    I didn’t understand Elwyn, didn’t understand Flusser, didn’t understand my father, didn’t understand Olivia—I understood no one and nothing. (Another big theme of my life’s last year.) Why had a girl so pretty and so intelligent and so sophisticated wanted to die at the age of nineteen? Why had she become a drunk at Mount Holyoke? Why had she wanted to blow me? To “give” me something, as she put it? No, there was more than that to what she’d done, but what that might be I couldn’t grasp. Everything couldn’t be accounted for by her parents’ divorce. And what difference would it make if it could? The more chagrined I became thinking about her, the more I wanted her; the more my jaw hurt, the more I wanted her. Defending her honor, I had been punched in the face for the first time in my life, and she didn’t know it. I was moving into Neil Hall because of her, and she didn’t know that either. I was in love with her, and she didn’t know that—I had only just found out myself. (Another theme: only just finding things out.) I had fallen in love with an ex–teenage drunk and inmate of a psychiatric sanitarium who’d failed at suicide with a razor blade, a daughter of divorced parents, and a Gentile to boot. I had fallen in love with—or I had fallen in love with the folly of falling in love with—the very girl my father must have been imagining me in bed with on that first night he’d locked me out of the house.
    Dear Olivia,
    I did see the scar at dinner. It wasn’t hard to figure out how it got there. I didn’t say anything, because if you didn’t care to talk about it, why should I? I also surmised, when you told me that you didn’t want anything to drink, that you were someone who once used to drink too much. Nothing in your letter comes as a surprise.
    I would very much like it if we could at least get together to take a walk—
    I was going to write “to take a walk down by Wine Creek” but didn’t, for fear that she would think I was perversely suggesting that she might want to jump in. I didn’t know what I was doing by lying to her about noticing the scar and then compounding the lie by saying I’d doped out her drinking all on my own. Until she’d told me of the drinking in her letter, and despite the drunkenness I witnessed each weekend while working at the Willard, I’d had no idea that anyone that young could even be an alcoholic. And as for accepting with equanimity the scar on her wrist—well, that scar, which I had not noticed the night of our date, was now all I could think about.
    Was this moment to mark the beginning of a lifetime’s accumulation of mistakes (had I beengiven a lifetime in which to make them)? I thought then that it marked, if anything, the beginning of my manhood. Then I wondered if the two had coincided. All I knew was that the scar did it. I was transfixed. I’d never been so worked up over anyone before. The history of drinking, the scar, the sanitarium, the frailty, the fortitude—I was in bondage to it all. To the heroism of it all.
    I finished the letter:
    If you’d resume sitting next to me in History it would enable me to keep my mind on the class. I keep thinking of you sitting behind my back instead of thinking about what we’re studying. I look over at the space previously occupied by your body, and the temptation to turn is a perpetual source of distraction—because, beauticious Olivia, I want nothing more than to be close to you. I love your looks and am nuts about your exquisite frame.
    I debated whether to write “am nuts about your exquisite frame, scar and all.” Would it appear insensitive of me to be making light of her scar, or would it