Exit Ghost

by Philip Roth

  When I returned to the hotel, I wrote this little scene:

  HE

  You didn't tell me that we met before.

  SHE

  I didn't think it was worth mentioning. I didn't think you'd remember.

  HE

  I thought perhaps you didn't remember.

  SHE

  No, I remember.

  HE

  You remember where we met?

  SHE

  The Signet.

  HE

  Right. Do you remember that day at all?

  SHE

  I remember it quite well. I was a member of the Signet but I didn't go to lunch there much. And a friend of mine called to tell me that she had invited you to lunch the next day, and she wasn't sure if you would show up but you'd said that you would and that I ought to come. So I did. I brought Richard, and luckily I got to sit at your table instead of the table in the other room. And I sat down and you came in and sat at our table, and I watched you during lunch.

  HE

  You didn't speak, but you did stare.

  SHE

  (Laughing apologetically) I'm sorry if I was forward.

  HE

  I stared back at you. And not merely in self-defense. Do you remember that?

  SHE

  I thought perhaps I was imagining that. I couldn't believe I could get a response. I couldn't believe you'd take any notice of me. I had you down for inaccessible. You remember sitting opposite me, truly?

  HE

  It's only ten years ago.

  SHE

  Ten years is a long time to remember somebody you don't speak to. What impression did I make on you?

  HE

  I couldn't tell if you were shy or just had great serene reserve.

  SHE

  Both.

  HE

  Did you go to the reading the night before?

  SHE

  Yes. I remember sitting in the living room on the leather sofas after lunch. About half of us stayed. I thought what an awkward thing this must be for this man. All of us crowding around him, waiting for him to say something that we can all go home and write in our journals.

  HE

  Did you go home and write in your journal?

  SHE

  I'll have to go and check in my journal. I can do that, you know. I could if you wanted me to. I keep them all. What did you think of that day?

  HE

  I don't remember what I thought. It was not unusual to be asked to do such a thing. Usually it's a class you're asked to attend. You do it, and then you go home. But why didn't you mention it the other day, when we met?

  SHE

  Why bring up that I gawked at you once over lunch? I don't know, I wasn't keeping it a secret. We're exchanging houses. I didn't see any reason to talk about when I sat in an audience and stared at you in college. Why did you agree to go and have lunch with a bunch of undergraduates?

  HE

  I must have thought it might be interesting. The night before I'd just read for an hour and taken some questions. I hadn't met anyone other than the people who'd invited me. I don't remember anything about it except you.

  SHE

  (Laughing) Are you flirting with me?

  HE

  Yes.

  SHE

  That seems so unlikely it's almost hard to believe.

  HE

  It shouldn't be. It's not unlikely at all.

  On rereading the scene in bed before I went to sleep, I thought: If ever there was something that didn't need doing, it's this. Now you are taken up with her totally.

  It was dreadful in New York the next day, a lot of enraged people walking around looking glum and disbelieving. It was quiet, the traffic so thin you could barely hear it in Central Park, where I had gone to meet Kliman on a bench not far from the Metropolitan. There had been a message from him on my voice mail at the hotel when I got back around midnight from West 71st Street. It would have been easy enough to ignore it and I intended to, until, under the spell of this impetuous reimmersion—and stimulated by the prospect of a meeting with Amy Bellette, whose whereabouts I could probably extract from him—I phoned Kliman the next morning at the number he'd left, despite my having twice hung up on him the day before.

  "Caligula wins," he said upon answering the phone. He was expecting someone else, and after a second's pause I said, "So it seems, but this is Zuckerman." "It's a dark day, Mr. Zuckerman. I've been eating crow all morning. I couldn't believe it would happen. People voted for moral values? What values are those? Lying to get us into a war? The idiocy! The idiocy! The Supreme Court. Rehnquist will be dead by tomorrow. Bush'll make Clarence Thomas chief justice. He'll have two, three, maybe even four appointments—horrendous!"

  "You left a message last night about our meeting."

  "Did I?" he asked. "I haven't slept. Nobody I know has slept. A friend of mine who works at the Forty-second Street library phoned to tell me that there are people crying on the library steps."

  I was familiar with the theatrical emotions that the horrors of politics inspire. From the 1965 transformation into a Vietnam hawk of the peace candidate Lyndon Johnson until the 1974 resignation of all-but-impeached Richard Nixon, they were a staple in the repertoire of virtually everyone I knew. You're heartbroken and upset and a little hysterical, or you're gleeful and vindicated for the first time in ten years, and your only balm is to make theater of it. But I was merely onlooker and outsider now. I did not intrude on the public drama; the public drama did not intrude on me.

  "Religion!" Kliman cried. "Why don't they put their trust in crystal gazing as a means of apprehending the truth? Suppose evolution should turn out to be a crock, suppose Darwin was nuts. Could he begin to be as nuts as Genesis on the origins of man? These are people who don't believe in knowledge. They don't believe in knowledge in exactly the same way I don't believe in faith. I feel like going outside," Kliman told me, "and delivering a long speech."

  "Wouldn't help," I told him.

  "You've been around. What does?"

  "The senile solution: forget it."

  "You're not senile," Kliman said.

  "But I've forgotten it."

  "All of it?" he asked, providing a glimpse of a possible relationship he might try to work up and exploit: the young man asking the older man for his sage advice.

  "Everything," I replied truthfully enough—and as though I'd fallen for his ploy.

  Kliman was jogging around the oval of the big green lawn and waved at me when I approached the Central Park bench where we were to meet. I waited for him, thinking that once I had made the original mistake—of coming to New York for the collagen procedure—thinking things through had given way to meandering erratically into a renewal I'd had no idea I had the slightest longing for. To disrupt the basic unity of one's life and change the patterns of predictability at seventy-one? What could be more fraught with the likelihood of disorientation, frustration, even of collapse?

  Kliman said, "I had to get those shits out of my head. I thought a run would do it. Didn't work."

  He wasn't a genial, chubby Billy but well over two hundred pounds, easily six-three, a large, agile, imposing young man with a lot of dark hair and pale gray eyes that were the wonder that pale gray eyes are in the human animal. A beautiful fullback built to pile-drive. My first (untrustworthy) impression was of someone also constrained by a generalized bafflement—at only twenty-eight bowed by the unwillingness of the world to submit without objection to his strength and beauty and the pressing personal needs they served. That's what was in his face: the angry recognition of an unexpected, wholly ridiculous resistance. He had to have been a very different sort of lover for Jamie from the young man she married. Where Billy had the soft, skillful tact of an obliging brother, Kliman had retained much of the schoolyard menace. That's what I perceived when he phoned me at the hotel, and so it was: self-control was not his watchword. Soon enough, it turned out not to be mine.

  In running shorts, run
ning shoes, and a damp sweatshirt, he sat dejectedly beside me, his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. Dripping with sweat—this is how he comes to meet someone who is a key component of his first big professional endeavor, someone he desperately wants to win over. Well, he's genuine, I thought, whatever else he may be, and, if an opportunist, not quite the slick, self-interested opportunist I had imagined from our first conversation.

  He wasn't finished expressing himself about the election. "That a right-wing administration motivated by insatiable greed and sustained by murderous lies and led by a privileged dope should answer America's infantile idea of morality—how do we live with something so grotesque? How do you manage to insulate yourself from stupidity so bottomless?"

  They were some six to eight years out of college, I thought, and so Kerry's loss to Bush was taking a prominent place in the cluster of extreme historical shocks that would mentally shape their American kinship, as Vietnam had publicly defined their parents' generation and as the Depression and the Second World War had organized the expectations of my parents and their friends. There had been the barely concealed chicanery that had given Bush the presidency in 2000; there had been the terrorist attacks of 2001 and the indelible memory of the doll-like people leaping from the high windows of the burning towers; and now there was this, a second triumph by the "ignoramus" they loathed as much for his undeveloped mental faculties as for his devious nuclear fairy tales, to enlarge the common experience that would set them apart from their younger brothers and sisters as well as from people like me. To them Bush Junior's was never an administration but a regime that had seized power by judicial means. They were meant to be reclaiming their franchise in 2004, and horribly they didn't, leaving them with the feeling, along about eleven last night, not only of having lost but in some way or other of having been defrauded again.

  "You wanted to tell me Lonoff's unpardonable secret," I said.

  "I never said 'unpardonable.'"

  "You were suggesting that much."

  "Do you know about his childhood?" he asked me. "Do you know anything about his growing up? Can I trust you not to repeat what I'm about to tell you?"

  I leaned back on the bench and erupted with my first laugh since returning to New York. "You want to shout from the rooftops whatever it is that constitutes this utterly private man's carefully kept and plainly humiliating 'great secret,' and you ask me to be discreet enough not to repeat it? You're about to write a book to destroy the dignity that he rigidly protected and that meant everything to him and was legitimately his, and you ask if I can be trusted?"

  "But this is the same as the phone call. You're being awfully hard on someone you don't even know."

  I thought, But I do know you. You're young and you're handsome and nothing gives you more assurance than being devious too. You have a taste for deviousness. It's another of your entitlements to do harm should you want to. And, strictly speaking, it's not harm that you do—merely the fulfilling of a right you would be a fool to relinquish. I know you: you wish to gain the approval of the adults you clandestinely set about to defile. There's a cunning pleasure in that, and safety too.

  There was some foot traffic around the big oval lawn, women pushing baby carriages, elderly folks on the arms of black caretakers, and a couple of joggers in the distance whom I at first took for Billy and Jamie.

  I could have been a fifteen-year-old boy on that bench, my mind given over completely to the new girl who'd been seated next to me on the first day of school.

  "Lonoff declined membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters," Kliman was telling me. "Lonoff wouldn't contribute a biography to Contemporary Authors. Lonoff never in his life gave an interview or made a public appearance. He did everything to remain as invisible as he could out there in the boondocks where he lived. Why?"

  "Because he preferred the contemplative life to any other. Lonoff wrote. Lonoff taught. In the evenings Lonoff read. He had a wife and three children, beautiful, unspoiled rural surroundings, and a pleasant eighteenth-century farmhouse full of fireplaces. He made a modest income that sufficed. Order. Security. Stability. What more did he need?"

  "To hide. Why else did he wear that bridle all his life? He stood perpetual vigil over himself—it's in his life, it pervades his work. He sustained his constraints because he lived in fear of exposure."

  "And you are to do him the favor of exposing him," I said.

  There was a moment of unhappiness while he searched for a reason not to punch me in the mouth for having failed to be bowled over by his eloquence. I remembered such moments easily enough, having known them myself as a literary young man just about his age and fresh to New York, where I'd been treated by writers and critics then in their forties and fifties as though I didn't and couldn't know anything about anything, except a little something perhaps about sex, knowledge they considered essentially fatuous, though of course they were themselves endlessly at the mercy of their desires. But as for society, politics, history, culture, as for "ideas"—"You don't even understand when I say you don't understand," one of them liked to tell me while waving his finger in my face. These were my notables, the intellectually exceptional American sons of immigrant Jewish housepainters and butchers and garment workers who were then in their prime, running Partisan Review and writing for Commentary and The New Leader and Dissent, irascible rivals sharply contentious with one another, bearing the emotional burden of having been raised by semiliterate Yiddish-speaking parents whose immigrant limitations and meager culture evoked ire and tenderness in equally crippling portions. If I dared to speak, these elders would scornfully shut me up, sure that I knew nothing because of my age and my "advantages"—advantages wholly imagined by them, their intellectual curiosity curiously never extending to anyone younger, unless the younger one was much younger and pretty and a woman. In their later years, marital hardships having left them badly bruised (and financially busted), the diseases of age and difficult children having taken their toll, a few of them softened toward me and became friends and didn't necessarily dismiss everything I had to say all the time.

  "You see—I'm reluctant even to tell you," Kliman said at last. "You jump on me when I ask if I can tell you something in confidence, but why do you think I bother to ask?"

  "Kliman, why don't you forget about whatever it is you think you've found out? Nobody knows who Lonoff is anymore. What's the point?"

  " That. He should be in the Library of America. Singer is, with three volumes of stories. Why not E. I. Lonoff?"

  "So you're going to redeem Lonoff's reputation as a writer by ruining it as a man. Replace the genius of the genius with the secret of the genius. Rehabilitation by disgrace."

  When, after another angry pause, he resumed speaking, it was in the voice you use with a child who's failed to understand for the umpteenth time. "It won't be ruined," he explained to me, "if the book is written the way I intend to write it."

  "Doesn't matter how you write it. The scandal will do the job by itself. You won't restore him to his place—you'll deprive him of his place. And what is it that happened anyway? Someone remember something 'inappropriate' Lonoff did fifty years ago? Defiling revelations about another contemptible white male?"

  "Why do you insist on trivializing what I want to do? Why do you rush to cheapen what you know nothing about?"

  "Because the dirt-seeking snooping calling itself research is just about the lowest of literary rackets."

  "And the savage snooping calling itself fiction?"

  "You characterizing me now?"

  "I'm characterizing literature. It nurtures curiosity too. It says the public life is not the real life. It says there is something beyond the image you set out to give—call it the truth of the self. I'm not doing anything other than what you do. What any thinking person does. Curiosity is nurtured by life."

  We had come to our feet at the same time. There is no doubt that I should have walked quickly away from those pale gray eyes, eerily lit up now
by our antipathy. For one thing, I could tell that the pad cradled in my plastic underwear to absorb and contain my urine was heavily soaked and that it was time to hurry back to the hotel to wash and change myself. There is no doubt that I should have said no more. Why else had I lived apart from people for eleven years if not to say not one word more than was in my books? Why else had I given up reading the papers and listening to the news and watching television if not to hear nothing further about all that I couldn't stand and was powerless to alter? I lived, by choice, where I could no longer be drawn down into the disappointments. Yet I couldn't stop myself. I was back, I was on a tear, and nothing could have inspired me more than the risk I was taking, because not only was Kliman forty-three years younger than me, a hulking, muscular figure wearing just his running attire, but he was enraged by the very resistance that he could not abide.

  "I'm going to do everything I can to sabotage you," I told him. "I'm going to do everything I can to see that no book by you about Lonoff ever appears anywhere. No book, no article, nothing. Not a word, Kliman. I don't know the great secret that you turned up, but it's never going to see the light of day. I can prevent your being published, and, whatever the expense, whatever the effort, I will."

  Back in the drama, back in the moment, back into the turmoil of events! When I heard my voice rising, I did not rein it in. There is the pain of being in the world, but there is also the robustness. When was the last time I had felt the excitement of taking someone on? Let the intensity out! Let the belligerence out! A resuscitating breath of the old contention luring me into the old role, both Kliman and Jamie having the effect of rousing the virility in me again, the virility of mind and spirit and desire and intention and wanting to be with people again and have a fight again and have a woman again and feeling the pleasure of one's power again. It's all called back—the virile man called back to life! Only there is no virility. There is only the brevity of expectations. And that being so, I thought, in taking on the young and courting all the dangers of someone of this age intermingling too closely with people of that age, I can only end up bloodied, a big fat target of a scar for unknowing youth, savage with health and armed to the teeth with time. "I'm warning you, Kliman—leave Lonoff alone."