Exit Ghost

by Philip Roth

  The evening before I was to leave for home, I went to eat at a small Italian restaurant not far from the hotel. The ownership hadn't changed since I'd last eaten there back in the early nineties, and to my surprise I was greeted by name by the youngest of the family, Tony, who seated me at the corner table I'd always liked best because it was the quietest in the place.

  You depart while others, unamazingly enough, stay behind to continue doing what they've always done—and, upon returning, you are surprised and momentarily thrilled to see that they are still there, and, too, reassured by there being somebody who is spending his whole life in the same little place and who has no desire to go.

  "You moved away, Mr. Zuckerman," Tony said. "We don't ever see you."

  "I moved up north. I live in the mountains now."

  "It must be beautiful there. Nice and quiet to write."

  "It is," I said. "How's the family?"

  "Everybody's good. Celia, though, she passed. Remember my aunt? Who was at the register?"

  "Sure I do. I'm sorry to hear Celia's gone. Celia wasn't that old."

  "No, not at all. But last year she got sick, and she went like that. But you look good," he said. "You want something to drink? Chianti, right?"

  Though Tony's hair had gone the same steel gray as his grandfather Pierluigi's—as revealed in the oil painting of the restaurant's immigrant founder, handsome as an actor in his chef's apron, that still hung just beside the coat-check room—and though Tony's frame had grown big and soft since I'd last seen him, in his early thirties, back when he was the only lean and bony member remaining in his well-fed restaurant clan, back some hundred thousand bowls of pasta ago, the menu itself hadn't changed, the specialties hadn't changed, the bread in the bread basket hadn't changed, and when the dessert cart was navigated past my table by the head waiter, I saw that the head waiter hadn't changed nor had the desserts. You would think that my relationship to all of this could not have shifted one iota, that once I had my drink in my hand and was chewing on a chunk of Italian bread of the kind that I'd eaten here dozens of times before I'd feel pleasantly at home, and yet I didn't. I felt like an impostor, pretending to be the man Tony had once known and suddenly craving to be him. But by living mostly in solitude for eleven years, I had got rid of him. I had gone off to flee a genuine menace; in the end, I stayed away to be rid of what no longer remained of interest and, as who doesn't dream of being, to be rid of the lingering consequences of a life's mistakes (for me, repeated marital failure, furtive adultery, the emotional boomerang of erotic attachment). Presumably by taking action rather than just dreaming of it, I had got rid of myself in the process.

  I'd brought something to read, just as I used to do when I ate at Pierluigi's by myself. Living alone, I'd become habituated to reading with my meals, but on this night I set the paper down on the table and instead looked around at those eating their dinner in New York City on the evening of October 28, 2004. One of city life's notable satisfactions: strangers fostering the chimera of human accord by eating together in a good little restaurant. And I was one among them. Late in the day to find so commonplace an experience momentous, but I did.

  Only with my coffee did I open the paper, the current issue of The New York Review of Books. I hadn't seen a copy since leaving New York. I hadn't wanted to see one, though I'd been a subscriber since the paper's inauguration in the early sixties and, in its first years, an occasional contributor. In passing a newsstand on the way to Pierluigi's I had caught a glimpse of the top of the front page, where above a set of David Levine caricatures of the presidential candidates there was printed an unfurled banner on which yellow lettering announced "Special Election Issue"—and beneath that, above a list of some dozen contributors, the words "The Election and America's Future"—and I had paid the newsdealer four dollars and fifty cents and carried the paper off with me to the restaurant. But now I was sorry I'd bought it, and even when curiosity got the best of me, instead of starting with the table of contents and the opening pages of the election symposium, I began my reimmersion by tiptoeing in at the back, reading the classified advertisements. "beautiful photographer/art educator, loving mother..." "complex, thoughtful, desirous and desirable woman, legally married..." "energetic, fun-loving, fit, established man of many interests..." "green-eyed, funny, kooky, curvaceous..." I skipped to "Real Estate," and in the brief "Rentals" column—above the much longer "International Rentals" column, where the residences available were mainly in Paris and London—I came upon an ad so pointedly addressed to me that I felt myself being urged on, as though with a whip, by chance, sheer chance that seemed brimming with intention.

  RELIABLE writing couple in early thirties wishes to swap homey, book-lined 3-room Upper West Side apartment for quiet rural retreat one hundred miles from New York. New England preferred. Immediate exchange, ideally for one year...

  Without waiting—as precipitously as I had gone ahead with the collagen injection I'd intended to think about back home before committing myself to having it, as precipitously as I'd bought The New York Review—I went down the stairway alongside the kitchen to where I remembered a pay phone hung on the wall across from the men's room. I'd copied the phone number onto a piece of scrap paper on which I'd written the name "Amy Bellette." Quickly I dialed and told the man who answered that I was responding to his ad to exchange residences for a year. I owned a small house in rural western Massachusetts, located on a dirt road atop a mountain and across from a large marshy swamp that was a bird and wildlife refuge. New York was a hundred and twenty-eight miles away, my nearest neighbors were half a mile away, and it was eight miles down the mountain to a college town where you could find a supermarket, a bookstore, a wine shop, a good campus library, and a convivial bar with edible food. If that sounded like what he had in mind, I'd be interested in stopping by, I said, and seeing the apartment and discussing a swap. I was only blocks away from the Upper West Side; if it wasn't an inconvenience I could be there in minutes.

  The man laughed. "You sound like you want to move in tonight."

  "If you'll move out tonight," I told him, and I meant it.

  Before returning to my table, I stopped off in the men's room and ducked into the single stall, where I lowered my trousers to learn whether the procedure had begun to work. To blot out what I saw I shut my eyes, and to blot out what I felt I cursed aloud. "A fucking dream!" by which I meant the dream of being suddenly like everyone else.

  I set about removing the absorbent cotton pad from my plastic briefs and replacing it with a fresh one from a small packet I carried in my inside jacket pocket. I wrapped the dirty pad in toilet paper, threw it into a covered wastebasket beside the sink, washed and dried my hands, and, fighting off the gloom, went upstairs to pay my bill.

  I walked to West 71st Street, startled, at Columbus Circle, to see that the bulky fortress of the Coliseum had metamorphosed into a pair of glass skyscrapers joined at the hip and lined at street level with swanky shops. I wandered into the arcade and out, and when I continued north on Broadway I felt not so much that I was in a foreign country as that some optical trick were being played on me, that things appeared as in the reflection of a fun-house mirror, everything simultaneously familiar and unrecognizable. Not without some hardship, as I've said, I'd conquered the solitary's way of life; I knew its tests and satisfactions and over time had shaped the scope of my needs to its limitations, long ago abandoning excitement, intimacy, adventure, and antagonisms in favor of quiet, steady, predictable contact with nature and reading and my work. Why invite the unanticipated, why court any more shocks or surprises than those that aging would be sure to deliver without my prompting? Yet I continued up Broadway—past the crowds at Lincoln Center that I did not wish to join, the theater complexes whose movies I had no inclination to see, the leather goods shops and the gourmet food shops whose merchandise I didn't care to buy—unwilling to oppose the power of the crazed hope of rejuvenation that was affecting all my actions, the crazed hope of the pro
cedure's reversing the strongest side of my decline, and aware of the mistake I was making, a revenant, a man who'd cut himself off from sustained human contact and its possibilities yielding to the illusion of starting again. And not through my own distinctive mental capacities but through the body refashioned, life seeming limitless again. Of course this is the wrong thing to do, the insane thing to do, but if so, I thought, what is the right thing to do, the sane thing, and who am I to claim that I ever knew enough to do it? I did what I did—that's all one knows looking backward. I made the ordeal that was mine out of the inspiration and the ineptitude that were mine—the inspiration was the ineptitude—and more than likely I am now doing the same. And at this batty speed, no less, as though fearful that my insanity is going to evaporate at any minute and I'm going to stop being able to go on with all that I'm doing that I know very well I shouldn't be doing.

  The elevator of the small six-story white-brick apartment building took me to the top floor, where I was greeted at the doorway of apartment 6B by a chubby young man with a soft, agreeable manner who immediately said, "You're the writer." "I am. And you?" "A writer," he said with a smile. He led me inside and introduced me to his wife. "Yet a third writer," he said. She was a tall, slender young woman who, unlike her husband, no longer had a playful, childlike aspect in evidence anywhere, at least not tonight. Her long, narrow face was curtained by straight, fine black hair that fell to her shoulders and a little below, the cut seemingly designed to conceal some disfiguring blemish, though by no means one that was physical—she had an impeccable, creamily soft surface, whatever else she might be hiding. That she was boundlessly loved by her husband and the source of his sustenance was apparent in the undisguised tenderness with which his every gaze and gesture enveloped her, even when what she said was not necessarily to his liking. It was clear that she was considered by them the more brilliant of the two and that his personality was swaddled in hers. Her name was Jamie Logan, his Billy Davidoff, and as they walked me through the apartment, he seemed to take pleasure in deferentially calling me Mr. Zuckerman.

  It was an attractive apartment of three spacious rooms, furnished with pricey European-designed modern furniture and Oriental throw rugs and a beautiful Persian rug in the living room. There was a large workspace in the bedroom overlooking a tall plane tree in the rear yard and another workspace in the living room, which looked across to a church. Books were piled everywhere, and hanging on the walls where there weren't book-laden shelves were framed photographs of statuary in Italian cities taken by Billy. Who was funding the modest opulence of these two thirty-year-olds? My guess was that the money was his, that they had met at Amherst or Williams or Brown, a tame, wealthy, kindhearted Jewish boy and an intense poor girl, Irish, maybe half Italian, who from grade school on had never stopped excelling, self-propelled, perhaps even something of a climber...

  I had it wrong. The money was hers and it came from Texas. Her father was a Houston oilman with origins as American as American origins could be. Billy's Jewish family owned a luggage and umbrella shop in Philadelphia. The two had met in the graduate writing program at Columbia. Neither had as yet published a book, though five years earlier she'd had a short story in The New Yorker that had prompted inquiries about a novel from agents and publishers. I wouldn't have guessed right off that hers was the more developed creative disposition.

  After I was shown around, we sat in the quiet living room, where the windows were double-glazed. The small Lutheran church across the street, a charming little building with narrow windows and pointed arches and a rough stone facade, though probably built in the early 1900s, seemed designed to transport its Upper West Side congregants back five or six centuries to a rural village in northern Europe. Immediately outside the window the fanlike leaves of a thriving ginkgo tree were just beginning to lose their summertime green. A recording of Strauss's Four Last Songs had been playing softly in the background when I'd come into the apartment, and when Billy went to turn off the CD player, I wondered if the Four Last Songs were what he or Jamie happened to have been listening to before I came or if my arrival had prompted one or the other of them to play such dramatically elegiac, ravishingly emotional music written by a very old man at the close of his life.

  "His favorite instrument is the female voice," I said.

  "Or two," said Billy. "His favorite combination was two women singing together. The end of Rosenkavalier. The end of Arabella. In The Egyptian Helen."

  "You know Strauss," I said to him.

  "Well, my favorite instrument is the female voice too."

  His intention in saying that was to flatter his wife, but I pretended otherwise. "Do you write music as well?" I asked him.

  "No, no," said Billy. "I have a hard enough time with fiction."

  "Well, my house in the woods," I told them, "is no more peaceful than this."

  "We're leaving for only a year," Billy said.

  "May I ask why?"

  "Jamie's idea," he answered, sounding not as tamed as I'd imagined him.

  Reluctant to appear to interrogate her, I merely looked her way. Her sensual presence was strong—perhaps she kept herself on the thin side so it wouldn't be stronger. Or maybe so it would, since her breasts weren't those of an undernourished woman. She wore jeans and a low-cut, lacy silk blouse that resembled a little lingerie top—that was a little lingerie top, I realized upon looking again—and wrapping her torso was a longish cardigan with a thick edge of wide ribbing and a tie of the same ribbing pulled loosely around her narrow waist. It was a garment at the other end of the spectrum of female apparel from the hospital gown Amy Bellette had converted into a dress, its color paler and softer than tan and woven of a thick, soft cashmere. The sweater could easily have cost a thousand bucks, and she looked languid wearing it, languid and in enticing repose, as though she were wearing a kimono. She spoke rapidly and quietly, however, as highly complicated people will do, under pressure particularly.

  "Why are you coming to New York?" was Jamie's response to my gaze.

  "I have a friend who's ill here," I said.

  I still had no clear idea what I was doing in their apartment, what it was I wanted. To make things different for myself? Exactly how? To see a Victorian replica of a medieval church out the window while I worked rather than my mammoth maples and uneven stone walls? To see cars moving when I looked down to the street below rather than the deer and the crows and the wild turkeys that populated my woods?

  "She has a brain tumor," I explained, merely out of a need to talk. To talk to her.

  "Well, we're leaving," Jamie told me, "because I don't wish to be snuffed out in the name of Allah."

  "Isn't that unlikely," I asked, "on West Seventy-first?"

  "This city is at the heart of their pathology. Bin Laden dreams only of evil, and he calls that evil 'New York.'"

  "I wouldn't know," I said. "I don't see any papers. I haven't for years. I picked up a New York Review for the ads. I have no idea what's going on."

  "You do know about the election," Billy said.

  "Practically nothing," I said. "People don't talk openly about politics in the hick town where I live, certainly never to an outsider like me. I don't turn on the TV much. No, I don't know a thing."

  "You haven't followed the war?"

  "No."

  "You haven't followed Bush's lies?"

  "No."

  "That's hard to believe," Billy said, "when I think of your books."

  "I've served my tour as exasperated liberal and indignant citizen," I said, seemingly talking to him while once again talking for her, and out of a motive hidden even from myself when I began, out of a yearning whose might I would have hoped had all but withered away. Whatever the force prying me back open at seventy-one—whatever the force that had sent me down to New York to the urologist in the first place—was quickly regathering its strength in the presence of Jamie Logan wearing her wide-necked thousand-buck cardigan sweater hanging loose over a low-cut camisole. "I don
't wish to register an opinion, I don't want to express myself on 'the issues'—I don't even want to know what they are. It no longer suits me to know, and what doesn't suit me, I expunge. That's why I live where I do. That's why you want to live where I do."

  "Why Jamie wants to," Billy said.

  "It's so. I'm scared all the time," she said. "A new vantage point might help." Here she broke off, but not because she had thought better of admitting her fears to someone interested in swapping his safely remote rural residence for a potentially imperiled New York apartment, but because Billy was looking at her as though she were deliberately attempting to provoke him in front of me. If his relationship to her was worshipful, it wasn't exclusively worshipful. This was a marriage, after all, and he could be tried by his lovely wife as well.

  "Are others leaving," I asked her, "because they're frightened of a terrorist attack?"

  "Others have certainly been talking about it," Billy allowed.

  "Some have left," Jamie put in.

  "People you know?" I asked.

  "No," Billy said decisively. "We'll be the first."

  With a smile not overly generous, with what I, transfixed by her (subjugated as quickly as I imagined Billy to have been, though for reasons having to do with finding myself at the other edge of experience from him, at the rim that borders oblivion), took to be the air of a temptress—a tauntingly aloof temptress—Jamie added, "I like to be first."

  "Well, if you want my place," I said, "it's yours. Here, I'll draw a diagram of the house."

  When I got back to the hotel, I phoned Rob Massey, the local carpenter who's worked for ten years as my caretaker, and his wife, Belinda, who during that time has been cleaning my place once a week and who does the grocery shopping when I don't want to drive the eight miles into Athena. I read out a list to them of what I wanted packed and brought to New York and told them about the young married couple who would be moving up to my place the following week and living there for the next year.