Exit Ghost

by Philip Roth

  People walking round the oval looked our way as they passed. Some slowed to a stop, fearful that an elderly man and a young man were about to commence swinging at each other, most likely out of some dispute over the election, and that a slaughter was in store.

  "You stink," he shouted at me, "you smell bad! Crawl back into your hole and die!" Shambling athletically, loose and limber, he sprinted off, calling back over the swell of his shoulder, "You're dying, old man, you'll soon be dead! You smell of decay! You smell like death!"

  But what could a specimen like Kliman know about the smell of death? All I smelled of was urine.

  I had come to New York only because of what the procedure had promised. I had come in search of an improvement. However, in succumbing to the wish to recover something lost—a wish I'd tried to put down long ago—I had opened myself up to believing I could somehow perform again as the man I once was. A solution was obvious: in just the time it took to return to the hotel—and to undress, shower, and put on fresh clothes—I decided to abandon the idea of exchanging residences and leave immediately for home.

  Jamie answered when I phoned. I said I had to talk to her and Billy, and she replied, "But Billy's not here. He left about two hours ago to go look at your house. He should be at your caretaker's soon to pick up a key. He was going to call me when he arrived."

  But I had no knowledge of having arranged for Billy to see the house or for Rob to give him the key so he could let himself in. When had these arrangements been made? Couldn't have been the night before. Had to have been the night we met. Yet I had no memory of making them.

  Alone in my hotel room, without even Jamie's face before me, I felt myself flushing furiously, though, in fact, in recent years I had been having a problem remembering any number of small things. To address the difficulty, I had begun to keep, along with my daily calendar, a lined school composition book—the kind with the black-and-white marbled covers that has the multiplication tables inside the back—in which to list each day's chores and, in more abbreviated form, to note my phone calls, their content, and the letters I wrote and received. Without the chore book, I could (as I'd just proven) easily forget whom I had spoken to about what as recently as yesterday, or what someone was supposed to be doing for me the following day. I had started accumulating chore books some three years before, when I first realized that a perfectly reliable memory was beginning to fray, back when drawing a blank was no more than a minor nuisance and before I came to understand that the process of my forgetting things was ongoing and that if my memory continued to deteriorate at the pace at which it had advanced in these first few years, my ability to write could be gravely impaired. If one morning I should pick up the page I'd written the day before and find myself unable to remember having written it, what would I do? If I lost touch with my pages, if I could neither write a book nor read one, what would become of me? Without my work, what would be left of me?

  I did not let on to Jamie that I didn't know what she was talking about and that I had begun to live in a world full of holes, my mind—from the minute I hit New York as an alien species, as a stranger to the world everyone else was inhabiting—swinging to and fro from obsession to forgetfulness. It's as though a switch has been pulled, I thought, as though they're starting to shut the circuits down one by one. "Any questions," I said, "have him call me. Rob knows more about the place than I do, and Billy will make out fine."

  I wondered if I hadn't just repeated to her what I had said to them on the occasion of arranging for Billy's inspection of the house.

  It was not the time to explain that I'd changed my mind. That would have to wait until Billy got home. Maybe by then he'd have found my little house unsuitable and everything could be resolved without difficulty.

  "I would have thought you would have gone with him. Especially as you're not in great shape."

  "I'm in the middle of a story," she said, but I didn't believe that writing was her reason for staying. Kliman was her reason for staying. She's the one who wants to move up to Massachusetts; isn't she the one who would check out the house? She's stayed to see Kliman.

  "And how do you like your America now," she asked me, "on the first day of the second coming?"

  "The pain will recede," I said.

  "But Bush won't. Cheney won't. Rumsfeld won't. Wolfowitz won't. That Rice woman won't. The war won't recede. Nor will their arrogance. This useless, stupid war! And soon they'll work up another useless, stupid war. And another and another until everyone on earth will want to blow us up."

  "Well, chances are slight of your being blown up at my place," I said, having phoned a moment earlier intending to rescind the agreement that would have furnished her the haven of my place. But I didn't want the phone call to end. She needn't say anything inviting or provocative. She had merely to speak into my ear to furnish a pleasure I hadn't known for years.

  "I met your friend," I said.

  "You thoroughly befuddled my friend."

  "How would you know? I only just left him."

  "He phoned from the park."

  "As a child at the beach, I once watched while an ambitious swimmer drowned far out at sea," I told her. "Nobody had known he was in trouble until it was too late. With a cell phone, he could have dialed for help, just like Kliman, the instant the tide began to pull him away from shore."

  "What do you have against him? Why do you belittle him? What do you even know of him?" Jamie asked. "He's in awe of you, Mr. Zuckerman."

  "I honestly felt the fervor running in another direction."

  "It was an important encounter for him," she said. "There's nothing in his life these days but Lonoff. He wants to resurrect a writer he considers great and whose work is lost."

  "To resurrect him how is the question."

  "Richard is a serious man."

  "Why do you act as his advocate?"

  "I 'act as his advocate' because I know him."

  I preferred not to think too graphically about why she was arguing the cause of the serious man who had been a boyfriend at college and with whom (I could imagine all too easily) the link had remained sexual even after her marriage to devoted Billy ... who was not there, by the way; who at this moment was a hundred miles north of New York while his wife was alone in their apartment across from the church, suffering Bush's reelection.

  There could be nothing better to round out the folly of my coming back for the reasons I did—and then thinking that I should remain for an entire year—than my trying to get to see Jamie before Billy returned.

  "So you know about the scandal," I said.

  "What scandal?"

  "The Lonoff scandal. Kliman hasn't told you?"

  "Of course not."

  "But of course he has—you especially, boasting of what he alone knows and of the great uses to be made of his discovery."

  This time she didn't bother with the denial.

  "You know the whole story," I said.

  "If you didn't want the whole story from Richard, why should you want it from me?"

  "May I come by?"

  "When?"

  "Now."

  She left me dazed by quietly saying, "If you wish."

  I began to pack my things to leave New York. I tried to fill my mind with all that I had to do at home in the coming weeks, to think of the relief to be found in my daily routines and in giving up on any further medical procedures. Never again would I create a circumstance where piercing regret, in its thirst for recompense, would be permitted to determine my next step. Then I set out for West 7ist Street, yielded immediately to the ruthlessness of a desperate infatuation guaranteed to be anything but harmless to a man bearing between his legs a spigot of wrinkled flesh where once he'd had the fully functioning sexual organ, complete with bladder sphincter control, of a robust adult male. The once rigid instrument of procreation was now like the end of a pipe you see sticking out of a field somewhere, a meaningless piece of pipe that spurts and gushes intermittently, spitting forth water to no
end, until a day arrives when somebody remembers to give the valve the extra turn that shuts the damn sluice down.

  She'd been reading the New York Times for every bit of news about the election. The pages of the paper were strewn across the orange-gold intricacies of the softly worn Persian carpet, and her face bore traces of real misery.

  "It's too bad Billy couldn't be here today," I said. "It's not good to be alone with so much disappointment."

  She shrugged helplessly. "We thought there'd be jubilation."

  While I was on my way, she'd prepared coffee for us and we sat across from each other in a pair of black leather Eames chairs by the window, sipping from our cups in silence. Expressing our uncertainty in silence. Accepting the unpredictability of what was to come in silence. Hiding our confusion in silence. I hadn't noticed on my previous visits that there were two orange cats in residence until one pounced weightlessly onto her lap and lay there being stroked by Jamie while I, observing, continued to say nothing. The other appeared from nowhere to straddle her bare feet, creating the pleasant illusion (in me) that it was her feet and not himself that he had set to purring. One was longhaired and one was shorthaired, and the sight of them astonished me. They were what the two kittens Larry Hollis had given me would have grown up to look like had I kept them for more than three days.

  Though she was wearing a faded blue sweatshirt and loose-fitting gray workout pants, I was no less transfixed by her beauty. And we were alone, and so, far from feeling like some personage able to inspire awe, I felt myself stripped of my status by her hold over me, all the more so since she herself appeared so depleted by Kerry's defeat and the fearsome uncertainties it aroused.

  In keeping with my wildly fluctuating behavior in New York, I now wondered what the writing of Lonoff's biography could possibly have to do with me. After my visit to his house in 1956, I'd never again been in his presence, and the one letter I sent him after that visit he had not answered, thus stifling any dream I may have had of his serving as master to my apprenticeship. As regards either a biography or a biographer, I had no responsibility to E. I. Lonoff or his heirs. It was seeing Amy Bellette after so many years—especially seeing her infirm and disfigured, evicted from the dwelling of her own body—and after that going out to buy his books and rereading them at the hotel, that had set in motion the response that Kliman would elicit with his allusions to a sinister Lonoff "secret." Surely if I had been at home and received a letter out of the blue from some Kliman or other, more or less inveigling me for the same reasons, I wouldn't have bothered to reply, let alone have threatened to all but destroy him should he dare to pursue this project further. Left merely to his own devices, Kliman wasn't likely to succeed in his grandiose plans; probably the greatest encouragement he'd had so far wasn't from a literary agent or a publishing house but from my strenuous opposition. And now here I was with Jamie, ending our silence by asking, "Whom am I dealing with? Will you tell me? Who is this boy?"

  Suspiciously she said, "What do you want to know?"

  "How does he come to imagine himself adequate to this job? Have you known him for long?"

  "Since he was eighteen. Since his freshman year. I've known him ten years."

  "Where is he from?"

  "He's from Los Angeles. His father is a lawyer. An entertainment lawyer, a notoriously aggressive one. His mother is entirely different from his father. She's a professor of, I think, Egyptology, at UCLA. She meditates for a couple of hours every morning. She claims to be able to make a green ball of light levitate in front of her at the end of her meditations on a good day."

  "How did you meet her?"

  "Through him, of course. Whenever they'd come to town they'd take his friends out to dinner. Just as when my parents came to town, he was among my friends, and he would go out to dinner with us."

  "So he grew up in a professional household."

  "Well, he grew up with a headstrong, aggressive father and an intellectual and quiet mother. He's smart. He's very smart. He's very sharp. Yes, he's got his own aggressiveness, which clearly has put you off. But he's no dummy. There's no reason why he shouldn't be able to write a book—other than why anybody shouldn't be able to write a book."

  "Why is that?"

  "Because it's hard."

  She was studiously saying no more than she was saying, trying to impress me with her unimpressibility and determined not to submit but merely to answer. She was strongly disinclined to appear to be a pushover because of the differences in status and age. Despite her obvious complacency about her effect on men, she hadn't seemed to realize as yet that she had already triumphed and the pushover was me.

  "What was he like to you?" I asked.

  "When?"

  "When you were friends."

  "We had a wonderful time together. We had fathers comparably bullheaded to contend with, so we had plenty of survival stories to swap. That's how we got so devoted so quickly—they provided us with delightful tales of horror and mirth. Richard's robust and energetic and always up for trying new things, and he's fearless. He holds nothing back. He's adventurous and he's fearless and he's free."

  "Aren't you a little over the top?"

  "I'm accurately answering your questions."

  "Fearless of what, may I ask?"

  "Of contempt. Of disapproval. He doesn't have the limitations that other people have about being in the group of people they feel comfortable with. There's nothing hesitant about him. He's a succession of decisive deeds."

  "And he gets along with the notoriously aggressive father?"

  "Oh, I think they fight. They're both fighting men, so they fight. I don't think it's taken so seriously, as if I were to fight with my mother. They'll fight like dogs on the phone and the next night they're back on the phone as though nothing had ever happened. That's the way it is with them."

  "Tell me more."

  "What more do you want to know?"

  "Whatever you're not telling me." Of course I wanted to know only about her. "Did you ever visit him in Los Angeles?"

  "Yes."

  "And?"

  "He lives in a big house in Beverly Hills. It's, in my book, extremely ugly. It's large, it's ostentatious. Not at all cozy. His mother collects, I guess you'd call it ancient art—sculpture, little objects. And there are display cases, niches in the wall that are too large—the way everything there is too large—for what they hold. It's a place without any warmth. Too many columns. Too much marble. A huge pool in the back yard. Extremely landscaped. Very manicured. That's not his world. He went to college in the Northeast. He's come to New York. He's chosen to live in New York and work in the literary world and not become super-rich and live in a marble palace in L.A. and hound people for a living. He's got the skills to be a professional hound—he learned them from his father—but that's not what he wants."

  "The parents are still married?"

  "Shockingly, yes. I don't know what they have in common. She meditates and then goes off to work all day. He's at work all the time. They share the house together, I guess. I never saw them talk about anything with each other."

  "Is he in touch with them?"

  "I suppose so. He doesn't talk about them."

  "He wouldn't call his parents on election night."

  "I suppose not. Though I'm sure his parents would be much more pleasant to talk to on election night than mine. They're good L.A. liberals."

  "And his friends in New York?"

  Here she sighed, the first irritated sign of impatience. Till then she'd been completely unrattled and calculatingly aloof. "He's gotten occupied with a group of men he met at the gym. They're young professionals, probably between twenty-five and forty. They all play basketball together and he hangs out with them a lot. Lawyers. Media people. Some of our mutual friends from college work at magazines and in publishing. He's got a good friend who started a video game company."

  "I think he should go in with that friend. I think he should be in video games. Let him be fearless the
re. Because he thinks this is a game. He thinks 'Lonoff' is the name of a game."

  "You're wrong," she said, and betrayed herself with a quick smile for having so flatly let me know that. "He comes across to you like his father, this bullying man, but he's much more his mother. He's an intellectual. He's thoughtful. Yes, he's got extraordinary energy. Dynamic and exciting and strong and obstinate and sometimes scary, too. But he's not a thoughtless opportunist out for himself."

  "I would have said that's just what he was."

  "What kind of opportunist goes after a literary biography of a writer who by now is virtually unknown? If he were an opportunist, he'd follow in his father's footsteps. He wouldn't write a biography of a writer nobody under fifty has heard of."

  "You're selling him. You're idealizing him."

  "Not at all. I know him a lot better than you do and I'm trying to correct you. You need a corrective."

  "He's not serious. There's no sobriety in him. It's all audacity, defiance, and highjinks. There's no gravity."

  "Perhaps he doesn't have the restraint other people have or the finesse, but he's not without sobriety."

  "And integrity. Is he at all corrupted by integrity? I don't think scheming is foreign to Kliman. Is integrity lurking anywhere?"

  "You're not describing him, Mr. Zuckerman—you're burlesquing him. It's true that he doesn't always get why he shouldn't behave the way he does. But he has his principles. Look, Richard's not alone—he lives in a careerist world, a world where if you're not careerist you feel like a failure. A world that's all about reputation. You're an older person coming back, and you don't know what it is to be young now. You're from the 1950s and he's from now. You're Nathan Zuckerman. It's probably been a long time since you had contact with people who aren't established in their professional lives. You don't know what it is not to be safe in a reputation in a world where reputation is everything. But if you're not a Zen master in this careerist world, if you're a part of it and struggling to be recognized, are you, ipso facto, the evil enemy? Admittedly, Richard is not perhaps the most profound person I know, but there's no reason why, in the world of his experience, he would anticipate that his headlong pursuit of what he's pursuing should be offensive to anyone."