Philip Roth
Image: Ansellia Kulikku. Photo of Philip Roth: Nancy Crampton. At eleven, I ask Brian if I can take my break early because I’m worried next time the phone rings I’ll say Safe Haven Insurance the way I’m supposed to, then start to scream and not stop. When Brian sees the look on my face he tells me to take as much time as I need. He’s worked here for seven years and he understands how bad Tuesdays can get. Outside, on the ground floor, I call my mother.
“Trisha,” she says. “Is something wrong?” and I want to curl up inside her voice and fall asleep.
“No,” I say. “Nothing’s wrong.” I pick at a thread dangling from the front of my work pants. “Can’t I call to say hello? I miss you.”
“Why don’t you come home, then?” she says. “You get Thanksgiving off, right?”
“I can’t,” I say. “I’m going out of town.” The bottoms of my espadrilles press into the soft flesh of my heels. I wind my toes out though the straps and balance on the soles.
“What,” she says. “You’re spending it with that boy?”
“Boyfriend,” I say.
She snorts. “What’s his name? Greg?”
“Henry. It’s not important. How’s work?”
“If you don’t have anything else to say, I’m getting off the phone. I don’t need to drive into a telephone pole listening to talk to you about nothing.”
She hangs up just as the thread I’ve been toying with comes loose, whipping out a row of stitches on the inseam. Something inside me unravels with it. If I thought she would answer, I would dial her again. I would tell her about the photograph, framed and hung up above a window in Henry’s bedroom. In it, you can’t see his ex-girlfriend’s face, only pieces: black braids swept up and away from the nape of her neck, a smooth rectangle of brown skin, a thin silver cross on a delicate chain pressed against one shoulder blade.
“It’s gone now,” I would tell her. “He took it down and asked me home for Thanksgiving and I had to say yes.”
And she would say, ”No, you didn’t. The only thing you have to do is stay black and die.” So instead of calling her back I stand alone in the parking lot until the sun shines so hot I feel myself start to melt, and then I head back up the stairs.
Henry and I met at a birthday party for the girl in the apartment next to mine, Katie of the golden highlights, the perpetually perplexed expression, the entire weekdays spent asleep beside the pool. She’d tossed the invitation into the air between us while we waited for the elevator to take us down to the lobby. When I showed up at Jones on Third that Thursday night in my cuffed office slacks and white button-down blouse, I understood she’d only been trying to be polite.
“This is Trisha,” Katie offered feebly to her cluster of girlfriends, three versions of each other in varying heights and hair color. They smiled in unison and melted away. I spent the next twenty minutes gazing sullenly at the bartender. Her unwillingness to look in my direction was, I decided, personal. She proved me right when she took the order of the boy behind me over my head.
“I’ll have a Scotch and…what do you want?” He looked down at me, like I was his date. The bartender and I made matching expressions of surprise. When my gin and tonic came, he paid for it.
“What?” he said. “I can’t stand to see a face so sad on a girl so pretty.”
I knew it was a line, but it was rare for anyone in LA to use one on me, so I followed him home. Later that night, my legs wrapped around his naked waist, I told him the secrets you save for people you expect to sleep with once and never see again, the MCAT I’d walked out of, the final exams I never bothered to show up for. Waking up in May my senior year to find that Melanie, my roommate, whose steady
