Exit Ghost

by Philip Roth

  "Is Jamie's an old- or a new-money family?" I asked Billy.

  "Old. The old money is oil money, and the new money is professional money."

  "How old is the old money?"

  "Well, not that old, because Houston's relatively young. But since the oil tycoons like Jamie's grandfather, whenever that would have been."

  "And how did the old Houston money feel about your being a Jew?" I asked.

  "Her parents weren't thrilled. The mother just cried. It was the father who took the cake. When Jamie came home to tell them we were engaged, he put his head in his hands, and that's what he did from then on, every time my name was mentioned. She'd e-mail him from back east and he deliberately wouldn't answer her for three, four weeks at a time. She'd check her e-mail hourly and he would not have answered her. An authentically coarse tyrant, this guy. A travesty of a father. Selfish. Thoughtless. Big temper. Utterly irrational. Domineering. Venomous. No good boorish bastard through and through. Imagine: trying, by not answering her, to break his own daughter down, consciously and deliberately exploiting a daughter's decency to make her feel herself in the wrong. Wants to crush her. And, of course, to crush me too. I had never laid eyes on him, nor he on me, yet he wanted to harm me nonetheless. And who had ever purposefully set out to harm me before? To my knowledge, Mr. Zuckerman, no one. But this brute feels himself wholly entitled to do harm to a man his daughter happens to love! Now, Jamie is a good daughter, a very good daughter—she'd given her all trying to love this person who was persistently on the wrong side of the argument, tried as hard as she could however much she'd hated his bullying of her mother and his politics and his arrogant right-wing friends. After one three-week silence, he finally sends her a one-sentence e-mail: 'I love you, sweetheart, but I cannot accept that boy.' But Jamie Logan's got guts, dignity and guts, and even though the old man held the purse strings, even though he began to hint, not very subtly, that if she went through with marrying a Jew he would cut her off, she wouldn't break. She stuck it out, and eventually the bigoted son of a bitch had to either swallow his animus and accept me or lose his beloved summa-cum-laude child. A lesser girl of twenty-five, one lacking Jamie's courage, lacking Jamie's independence, would have capitulated. But Jamie is a lesser nothing. Jamie is neither spoiled nor a fraud nor without a sense of honor and would never dream of submitting to what she could not stand. Jamie is the best. She said to me, 'I love you and I want you and I will not be a slave to his dough.' She as good as told him to take the money and shove it, and so in the end she crushed him. Oh, Mr. Zuckerman, it was a thing of beauty watching Jamie hold out. Though you would have thought that the father would have been used to it by the time she got around to me. 'It' being Jamie and Jews. Their country club lets in Jews now. That wouldn't have been the case in her grandparents' time, or even as recently as fifteen years ago, with her parents' generation. It's all pretty new. Like letting Jews and blacks into Kinkaid. That's relatively new. The Jewish girls were Jamie's study buddies. You can imagine how much the great hothead loved that. But they were talented and smart, and they didn't try to hide their bookishness to be popular. The brother of one of Jamie's Jewish girlfriends—Nelson Speilman, who attended St. John's, the other prestigious prep school in Houston—was her boyfriend for two years, until he went off to Princeton the year before she graduated from Kinkaid. Jamie was one of the dedicated studious ones in a very protected place where to be socially acceptable was everything. It's a school where the football team votes for the homecoming queen, and the girls can't be seen with a public school boy, only with Kinkaid or St. John's boys. The Kinkaid boys drive Broncos and hunt and watch sports, and all of them want to go to UT, and there's a lot of drinking and a lot of parental looking-the-other-way at the drinking."

  "You know a lot about her school. You know a lot about her city."

  "I'm fascinated," he said with a laugh. "I am. I'm a slave to Jamie's background."

  "And that never happened with any girl you'd taken out before her?"

  "Never."

  "Well," I said, "that's probably as good a reason to marry as any."

  "Oh," he said jokingly, "there are a few more."

  "I can imagine," I said.

  "She makes me proud of her all the time. Do you know what she did four years back when her older sister, Jessie, the wild one, was in the last stages of Lou Gehrig's disease? She picked up and got on a plane to Houston and stayed there at Jessie's bedside and nursed her till she died. Stayed there night and day for five horrible, misery-ridden months while I was here in New York. It's a nightmarish disease. It's usually not till their mid-fifties that people come down with it, but Jessie was thirty when suddenly her hands and feet began to weaken, and the diagnosis was made. Over time, all the motor neurons go, but because the brain alone is spared, the person is fully cognizant that she's a living corpse. In the end, all Jessie could move were her eyelids. That's how she communicated with Jamie—by blinking. For five months Jamie didn't leave her side. At night she slept on a cot in Jessie's room. Early on, their mother had gone to pieces and was utterly useless, and their father, from start to finish, was himself to a T—would have nothing to do with the daughter who'd inconvenienced him by coming down with a fatal disease. Wouldn't tend to her, after a while wouldn't even go into her room to say a fatherly word to soothe her, let alone touch her or give her a kiss. Went on making money as though everything at home was just fine, while his younger daughter, twenty-six, was helping his older daughter, thirty-four, to die. But the night before it happened, the night before Jessica succumbed, he was in the kitchen with Jamie, where the maid was preparing them something to eat, and all at once he broke down. In the kitchen, he finally broke down and began to sob his heart out like a child. He clung to Jamie and you know what he said to her? 'If only it were me instead of her.' And you know what Jamie said back to him? 'If only it were.' That's the girl I fell for. That's the girl I married. That's Jamie."

  When Jamie came through the door carrying her bags of food, she said, "On the street somebody told me Ohio doesn't look good."

  "I just spoke to Nick," Billy said. "Kerry's going to win Ohio."

  She turned to me. "I don't know what I'd do if Bush gets back in. It'll be the end of the road for a whole way of political life. All their intolerance focuses on a liberal society. It'll mean that the values of liberalism will continue to be reversed. It'll be terrible. I don't think I could live with it."

  As she was hurriedly speaking, Billy had taken the groceries from her and gone into the kitchen to sort things out.

  "It's a flexible instrument that we've inherited," I told her. "It's amazing how much punishment we can take."

  My effort to be consoling seemed to strike her as condescension, and she all but snapped at me for the imagined affront. "Have you ever lived through an election like this one? With the magnitude of this one?"

  "Some. This is one I haven't followed."

  "Haven't you?"

  "I told you the other night—I don't follow such things."

  "So you don't care who wins." She gave me a hard look of disapproval for the willed quality of my obliviousness.

  "I didn't say that."

  "These are terrible, evil people," she told me, echoing her husband. "I know these people. I grew up with these people. It wouldn't just be a shame if they won—it could prove to be a tragedy. The turn to the right in this country is a movement to replace political institutions with morality—their morality. Sex and God. Xenophobia. A culture of total intolerance..."

  She was too agitated by the menacing world she lived in to stop herself—and, for whatever reason, to be entirely civil to me—and so I listened to her while making no further foolish attempt to embark on the knightly quest for the Holy Grail of her attention. The slender, full-breasted frame and the curtain of black hair pleased me no less than on the evening I'd come to look at the apartment. She'd returned from shopping wearing a wine-colored, closely fitted corduroy blazer, which she'd taken off
after Billy had relieved her of the groceries—taken off along with her low-heeled dark brown boots. Beneath the blazer she wore a ribbed black cashmere turtleneck that was also close-fitting, as were the dark denim jeans that flared just a bit at the bottom, probably to accommodate the boots. To walk around the apartment she'd put on a pair of flat shoes that looked like ballet slippers. Though the calculation was subtle, she didn't look as if she were necessarily pursuing guileless ends by the way she dressed or as if she lacked confidence in her power to arouse the admiration of men. Did she care one way or another whether I was as wowed as the others? If not, why had she gotten herself up so appealingly just to go for the groceries and watch the election results? Though maybe any unknown guest would have prompted her to choose to wear something attractive. Regardless, the lure of the apparel was matched by the voice, the rapid speech, warm and musical even when she was upset, and with a lot of Texas in it, or her part of Texas, a relaxing of vowels, a softening, particularly in the soft "I," and then her connecting the words a little lazily, one word running into the next. It wasn't the kind of twang that's harsh on the ear—not the Wild West Texas accent that George W. Bush took on but the well-bred Texas accent belonging more to the South that his Yankee father picked up. There's a gentility to it, certainly as spoken by Jamie Logan. Maybe it's just the accent of the cream of River Oaks and the Kinkaid School.

  I was as glad as Billy that she was home. It didn't matter if the clothes had nothing to do with my presence. In its deliberateness, there was something intensely exciting about her not giving me a tumble. There is no situation that infatuation is unable to feed on. Looking at her provided a visual jolt—I allowed her into my eyes the way a sword swallower swallows a sword.

  As though to an ailing child, Billy said, "You're not going to be devastated. You're going to be dancing in the street."

  "No," she replied, "no, this country is a haven of ignorance. I know—I come from the fountainhead. Bush talks right to the ignorant core. This is a very backward country, and the people are so easily bamboozled, and he's exactly like a snake-oil salesman..." She must have been angrily brooding aloud for months now, and so, for the moment, she seemed to give out, and I wondered if she was someone who didn't ever know how to say anything unseriously, or if the election overrode everything and for now I could have no idea what Jamie was like without an ordeal and whether her response to the great world was ever anything but painfully intense.

  We arranged ourselves around the coffee table with the plates, the cutlery, and the linen napkins Billy had set out, taking what we wanted from the platters of food and, while we steadily emptied my two bottles of wine, watching the screen where the available results were being tabulated state by state. By a little after ten the phone calls from Nick at Democratic headquarters were becoming less optimistic, and by a quarter to eleven they were dour. "The exit polls," Billy told us after hanging up, "aren't proving to be accurate. Things don't look good in Ohio, and he's not going to win Iowa or New Mexico. Florida is lost."

  Most of this we knew from watching television, but Jamie had no faith in the television tabulations, and so the call from Nick caused her to cry, a little drunkenly, "This is now the night before it all got even worse! I don't know what to think!" while I thought, At some point capitulation will kick in, but till then it'll be a big job to exorcise the illusions. Till then she'll be thrashing around in pain or hiding away like a wounded animal. Hiding away in my house. In these clothes. In no clothes. In my bed, beside Billy, unclothed.

  "I don't know what to think!" she cried again. "There's nothing to stop them now, except Al Qaeda."

  "Sweetheart," Billy said softly, "we don't yet know what will happen. Let's wait it out."

  "Oh, the world is so dim," Jamie exclaimed with tears in her eyes. "Last time it seemed like a fluke. There was Florida. There was Nader. But this I don't understand! I can't believe it! It's incredible! I'm going to go out and get an abortion. I don't care if I'm pregnant or not. Get an abortion while you can!"

  She was looking at me when she made this bitter joke, now without antipathy—looking at me the way somebody being helped from a burning building or freed from a car crash looks at you, as though as an observer you might have something to say that could account for the catastrophe that's altered everything. All the things I thought to tell her would likely strike her as cant. I thought to repeat, It's amazing how much punishment we can take. I thought to say, If in America you think like you do, nine times out of ten you fail. I thought to say, It's bad, but not like waking up the morning after Pearl Harbor was bombed. It's bad, but not like waking up the morning after Kennedy was shot. It's bad, but not like waking up the morning after Martin Luther King was shot. It's bad, but not like waking up the morning after the Kent State students were shot. I thought to say, We have all been through it. But I said nothing. She didn't want words anyway. She wanted murder. She wanted to wake up the morning after George Bush had been shot.

  It was Billy who said, "Something will be their undoing, honey. Terror will be their undoing."

  "Oh, what's the sense of living with it?" Jamie asked, and so deep was her dismay, and so close to the surface her vulnerability, that she broke into sobs.

  Each of their cell phones started ringing then—the cruelly disappointed friends calling, many of them in tears as well. The first time, as Jamie said, it seemed like a fluke, but this was their idealism's second staggering electoral shock and the dawning of the hard realization that they could not will this country back into being the Roosevelt stronghold it had been some forty years before they were born. For all their sharpness and articulateness and savoir-faire, and despite Jamie's knowledge of rich Republican America and the brand of ignorance bred in Texas, they'd had no idea who the great mass of Americans were, nor had they seen so clearly before that it was not those educated like themselves who would determine the country's fate but the scores of millions unlike them and unknown to them who had given Bush a second chance, in Billy's words, "to wreck a very great thing."

  I sat there, in what was soon to be the home where I would awaken every morning, and listened to the two of them, who'd soon be waking up each day in my house, a place where, if you liked, you could erase the rage about how much worse it all was than you thought and the sorrow over how far down your country had sunk and, if you were young and hopeful and engaged by your world and still enraptured by your expectations, learn instead to relinquish caring about America in 2004—to live and not be on the rack because of how stupid and corrupt it all is—by looking for fulfillment to your books, your music, your mate, and your garden. Watching these two, I got the sense easily enough of why anyone their age with their commitments would want to flee the pain-inducing lover their country had become.

  "Terrorism?" Jamie cried into her phone. "But all the states that were touched by terrorism, the places where it happened and the places where people came from who were killed—all of them voted for Kerry! New York, New Jersey, D.C., Maryland, Pennsylvania—none of them wanted Bush! Look at the map east of the Mississippi. It's the Union versus the Confederacy. The same split. Bush carried the old Confederacy!"

  "Do you want to know the sick next war?" Billy was telling someone. "They need a victory. They need a clean victory and without a messy occupation. Well, it's sitting ninety miles off the Florida coast. They'll connect Castro to Al Qaeda and go to war against Cuba. The provisional government is already in Miami. The property maps have already been drawn up. Wait and see. In their war against the infidel, Cuba will be next. Who is there to stop them? They don't even need Al Qaeda. They're intent on more violence, and Cuba's criminal enough on its own. The constellation that elected him will love it. Drive the last of the Communists into the sea."

  I hung around long enough to be able to overhear them talk to their folks. By then they were feeling so drained that all they could do was wish they had parents with whom they could emotionally give way and be succored in return. Both were dutiful childre
n, so when the time came they dutifully phoned, but Jamie's parents, as I knew from Billy's rendering of Jamie's Houston, were members of the same country club as the elder George Bush—and so on the phone Jamie vainly tried to remember that she was a married woman living more than a thousand miles away from where she was indoctrinated in privilege by archconservative Texans, led by the father, whom she mainly despised for his unconscionable disregard for her dying sister and whom she had flatly and obstinately defied by daring him to disinherit her by boldly marrying a Jew.

  She had by now become something a good deal more than somebody beautiful I was staring at. In her voice you could hear just how battered she was, not least by the fact that her parents were the very sort of people her liberal conscience couldn't abide, and yet she still happened to be their daughter and still needed, apparently, to lay her troubles at their feet. You could hear both the great bond and the great struggle against. You could hear all it had cost her to forge a new being and all the good it had done.

  Billy's parents in Philadelphia were by no means alien or adversarial or distasteful, but clearly very dear to him; yet when he hung up the phone, he shook his head and had to empty his half-full wine glass before he spoke. His gentle face could not hide the disappointment or the humiliation that he felt, and the tender heart attuned always to the feelings of others would not allow for an airing of the disgust that might have gone a ways toward easing the pain. At the moment a tender heart had no useful function, and Billy was at sea. "My father voted for Bush," he said, as surprised as if he'd discovered that his father had robbed a bank. "My mother told me. When I asked her why, she said, 'Israel.' She had him all lined up to vote for Kerry, and when he comes out of the booth he tells her, 'I did it for Israel.' 'I could have killed him,' my mother said. 'He still believes they'll find the weapons of mass destruction.'"