Exit Ghost

by Philip Roth

  Help to Jamie, he meant. Anything for Jamie. So much devotion, and such pleasure in providing it. What does Billy want? Whatever Jamie wants. What pleases Billy? Whatever pleases Jamie. What absorbs attentive Billy? Jamie! Jamie! Delighting Jamie! Should that worshipful accord unbelievably never lose its power, lucky pair! But should she one day spurn his close attention, withhold her approbation, resist arousal by his passion, miserable, vulnerable, tenderized man! He'll never spend a day without her without thinking of her fifty times. She'll ride roughshod over her successors forever. He'll think about her till he dies. He'll think about her while he dies.

  It was eight-thirty. If Billy was to be there for another hour, he wouldn't be arriving at West 71st Street until around twelve. I could phone her under the pretext of arranging the date for the exchange of residences that I no longer wanted. I could call and tell the truth, say to her, "I want to see you—it's unbearable not to be able to see you." Until midnight this young woman in whose proximity I'd been just three times, and fleetingly, would be sitting at home with her cats—or with the cats and Kliman.

  Call off the experiment in self-torture. Get the car and go. Your great exploration is over.

  The second message was from Kliman. He asked if I would talk to Amy Bellette for him: she had made promises before having surgery, and now she refused to honor them. He had a copy of the first half of the existing manuscript of Lonoff's novel, and no good was going to be served by his not being allowed to read the rest, as she had assured him he would be only two months earlier. She'd given him Lonoff family photos. She'd given him her blessing. "If you can, Mr. Zuckerman, please help. She's not the person she was. It's the surgery. It's all they removed, the damage that's been done. There's a huge mental deficit where there wasn't before. But maybe she'd listen to you."

  Kliman? Too implausible. You smell, you smell, old man, and then he calls up and, without even apologizing, asks me for my help? After I've told him I will do everything to destroy him? Is he this audaciously manipulative, or is he just this messy, or is Kliman one of those people who attach themselves to someone they can't let go of? One of those whom, no matter what you say to rebuff them, you can't drive away. No matter what you do, they will not give up trying to get from you what they want. And whatever they do, no matter what horrifying things they say, the habit of their lives is never to recognize that they have irredeemably crossed the line. Yes, a big, virile, handsome boy with the certitude of his good looks, quite unafraid to give offense and then come back as though nothing happened.

  Or was there further contact between us that I've forgotten? But when? "Maybe she'd listen to you." But why does he imagine that Amy Bellette would listen to me when he knows that we met only once? And does he know even that? As far as Kliman is concerned, we never met. Unless I told him. Maybe she told him. She must have—she must have told him that too!

  I put Amy's number beside the phone and dialed it. When she answered, I addressed to her words something like those that I'd wanted to address to Jamie Logan. "I want to come to see you. I'd like to come to see you now."

  "Where were you?" she asked.

  "I went to the wrong restaurant. I'm sorry. Tell me where you live. I want to talk to you."

  "I live in a terrible place," she said.

  "Tell me where you are, please."

  She did, and I left by taxi for her First Avenue address because I had to find out whether what they were saying about Lonoff was true. Don't ask why I had to. I didn't know. And the nonsensical character of my quest didn't stop me. Nothing that was nonsensical was stopping me. An aging man, his battles behind him, who suddenly feels the urge ... to what? Once around with the passions wasn't enough? Once around with the unknowable wasn't enough? Into the mutability again?

  It wasn't as bad as I'd been imagining on the way there, though it seemed hardly right for such a woman, the surviving consort of this brilliant writer, to be calling this building her home. There was a spaghetti joint at street level and beside that an Irish bar and no lock on the building's entry door or the inside door leading to the stairwell. Heavily dented metal garbage cans were shoved into a dark alcove beneath the first flight of stairs. When I'd rung her bell, alongside the bank of mailboxes, I saw that one of the boxes was missing its lock and its slotted door hung ajar. I wasn't sure that the bell I pressed worked and was surprised when, from above, I heard Amy's voice calling to me, "Careful. Loose treads on the stairs."

  A few naked bulbs screwed into ceiling fixtures lit the stairway well enough, but the hallways leading off it were dark. The odor permeating the interior passages of the building could have been from the urine of cats or rats or from both.

  She was waiting on the third landing, her half-shaved head and her single gray braid the first I saw of this old woman, who was now even more pitiful to behold in a long, shapeless lemon-colored dress meant to exude gaiety than in the hospital gown she'd redesigned for her street wear. Yet she looked to be oblivious of her appearance and almost childishly happy to see me. She extended a hand for me to shake, but instead I found myself kissing her on both cheeks, a delight I would have devoted a strenuous effort to winning back in 1956. Everything about kissing her seemed a miracle, the greatest being that, despite the physical evidence to the contrary, she was, alas, herself and no impostor. That she had survived all her ordeals to meet me in these dismal surroundings—that was a grave miracle, almost making it seem as though my seeing her, my completing a meeting, a moment with a young woman who had held such a strong attraction for me almost fifty years ago, was my unknown reason for coming to New York, why I'd come and why I'd impetuously decided to stay. Coming back to someone after that span of time, and after I've had cancer and she's had cancer, our clever young brains both the worse for wear—maybe that's why I was close to trembling and why she had donned a long yellow dress in fashion, if ever, half a century before. Each of us so in need of this figure from the past. Time—the power and the force of time—and that old yellow dress over her defenseless frame overshadowed by death! Suppose I were to turn now and see Lonoff himself walking up the stairs? What would I say to him? "I still admire you"? "I just reread you"? "I'm once again a boy with you"? What he would say—I could hear him saying it—was "Look after her. The prospect of her suffering is unendurable." In death he was more corpulent than in life. He'd put on weight in the grave. "I understand," he continued, quickly adopting a tone of benign sarcasm, "that you are no longer such a great lover. That should make it easier."

  "Physical failings," I replied, "make nothing easier. I will do what I can." I had several hundred dollars in my billfold that I could leave for her now, and at the hotel I'd write a check to mail off in the morning, though I'd have to remember, on leaving, to be sure that hers wasn't the mailbox with no lock. If it was, I'd see that she received the funds another way.

  "Thank you," said Lonoff as I followed the yellow dress into the apartment, a narrow railroad flat whose two interior rooms—a study and, behind an arched entryway, a kitchen—were windowless. At the front, above the First Avenue traffic and the restaurant, was a small living room with two gated windows, and at the back a still smaller room with but one gated window, the room itself big enough for just a night table and a narrow bed. Three windows. In the Lonoff Berkshire farmhouse there must have been two dozen that you never had to lock.

  The bedroom looked out on an air shaft and down to a tiny back alley, where the restaurant's garbage cans were stored. A toilet, I discovered, was in a closet-sized room on the other side of a door beside the kitchen sink. A smallish bathtub raised on claw feet rested on the kitchen floor, fitted with barely inches to spare between the refrigerator and the stove. Since the front of the apartment was noisy because of the buses, trucks, and cars barreling up First Avenue, and the back of the apartment was noisy because of the incessant racket from the restaurant kitchen, whose rear door remained open for ventilation year round, Amy took us to sit in the relative quiet of her dark study, amid pi
les of papers and books that crammed the shelves lining the walls and sat stacked around the base of the Formica-topped kitchen table that doubled as a desk. The lamp on the desk furnished the room's only light. It was a wide, tall, semitransparent brownish bottle wired for a bulb and topped by a shade ridged like a fan and shaped like a broad sun hat. I'd last seen it forty-eight years ago. It was Lonoff's homely desk lamp. Off to the side I saw another relic from his study, the large, dull brown horsehair easy chair, molded over the decades to the contour of his substantial torso—and, it seemed to me, to the imprint of his thought and the shape of his stoicism—the same time-worn chair from which he'd first intimidated me with the simplest questions about my youthful pursuits. I thought, "What! Are you here?" and then remembered where that very line appears in Eliot's "Little Gidding," at the point where the poet, walking the streets before dawn, meets the "compound ghost," who tells him what pain he will encounter. "For last year's words belong to last year's language / And next year's words await another voice." How does Eliot's ghost begin? Sardonically. "Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age." Reserved for age. Reserved for age. Beyond that I cannot go. A frightful prophecy follows that I don't remember. I'll look it up when I get home.

  Silently, I addressed an observation to Lonoff that had only just come to me: "You are no longer my senior by thirty-odd years. I am yours now by ten."

  "Did you eat anything?" she asked.

  "I'm not hungry," I told her. "I'm too startled by being with you." I was so affected by a visitation so unimaginable that I could say no more. However imprecise or elusive my thinking could become these days, my recollection of Amy, whom I'd met but once long ago, was still sharp and marked by the sense I had in 1956 that she was somebody of unusual importance. Back then, I'd gone so far as to work out an elaborately detailed scenario that endowed her with the horrific data of the European biography of Anne Frank, but an Anne Frank who, for my purposes, had survived Europe and the Second World War to recreate herself, pseudonymously, as an orphaned college girl in New England, a foreign student from Holland, a pupil and then a lover of E. I. Lonoff, to whom one day, in her twenty-second year—after she'd gone off by herself to Manhattan to see the first production of The Diary of Anne Frank—-she had confided her true identity. Of course I had none of the young man's motives to continue to elaborate that flamboyant fiction. The feelings that had exploited my imagination to that end in my mid-twenties had long since disappeared, along with the moral imperatives pressed upon me then by eminent elders of the Jewish community. Their denunciation of my first published stories as sinister manifestations of "Jewish self-hatred" had not been without its sting despite the galling righteousness of their Jewish self-love, which I opposed with all my loathing—and opposed by transforming Lonoff's Amy into the martyred Anne, whom, with only an ounce of irony, I imagined myself wanting to marry. As the sprightly, youthful Jewish saint, Amy became my fictional fortification against the excoriating indictment.

  "Would you like a drink?" she asked. "Would you like a beer?"

  I wouldn't have minded something stiffer, but I no longer took more than a glass of wine with dinner because alcohol intensified my mental lapses. "No, I'm fine. Did you get something to eat?"

  "I don't eat," she said. I don't. That had become a great refrain of mine as well.

  "Are you all right?" I asked.

  "I was. I was fine for months. But they just told me the damn thing's returned. That's what happens—destiny's behind your back and one day pops out and cries 'Boo!' When I had the first tumor, before I even knew I had it, I did things I wouldn't like to repeat. Kicked my neighbor's dog. Little dog, out in the hallway yapping all the time and nipping at your shoes, pain-in-the-ass dog who shouldn't be out there anyway, and I reared back and gave it a good kick. I began writing to The New York Times. I had a fit at the public library. I went completely nuts. I went to the library to see an exhibit about E. E. Cummings. I loved his poetry when I first came here as a student: 'i sing of Olaf glad and big.' When I left the Cummings exhibit, I saw that in the corridor, arranged along the walls, there was a much bigger, more dramatic exhibit called Landmarks of Modern Literature. Large portrait photographs hanging above glass cases displaying first editions in their original jackets, and it was all terribly stupid politically correct crap. Ordinarily, I would have kept walking, and on the subway home talked to Manny about it. He was the firebrand of tact—tact, wit, patience. The human folly never surprised him. Even dead, he soothes me so."

  "After forty years? Was there no one else in forty years who became important enough to soothe you?"

  "Could there have been?"

  "Could there not have been?"

  "After him?"

  "You were thirty when he died. To have your entire life defined by one episode ... You were still a young woman." I stopped myself from saying "Was everything that followed crushed by those few years?" because the answer was obvious by now. Everything, every last thing.

  "Inconsequential" was her reply to what I did say.

  "So what have you done, then?"

  "Done? What a word. Done. I've translated books: from Norwegian into English, from English into Norwegian, from Swedish into English, from English into Swedish. That's what I've done. But mostly what I do is drift. I've just drifted and drifted and now I'm seventy-five. That's how I got to be seventy-five: continually drifting. But you haven't drifted. Your life has been an arrow. You've worked."

  "And that's how I got to be seventy-one. This way or that, arrow or drifter, you still reach the end. Did you never go to that villa in Florence with someone else?"

  "How do you know about the villa in Florence?"

  "Because he talked about it with me that night. Abstractly, only as something he'd thought about. And then," I confessed, "I overheard the two of you. I took the liberty of overhearing your conversation with him that night."

  "How did you manage that?"

  "I was sleeping just below you. You wouldn't remember that. He'd made up the day bed in his study for me. I stood on his desk and put my ear to the ceiling. You said, 'Oh, Manny, we could be so happy in Florence.'"

  Learning this made her enormously happy. "Oh, my. You were such a bad boy. What else? What else? To have a witness to something so long gone—what a gift! Tell me what you heard, bad boy! Tell me everything!"

  Tell me, she was saying to me, tell me, please, about this intimate moment with this irreplaceable person I love who is dead, tell me on the day I've learned of the return of the tumor that is hurtling me toward my own death and in celebration of which I've donned my yellow dress!

  "I wish I could," I said. "But I don't remember much more. I remember Florence because he had talked about it too—the villa in Florence and the young woman there with him who would make life beautiful and new."

  " 'Beautiful and new'—he said that?"

  "I think so. Did you ever go to Florence?"

  "We two? Never. I went myself. I went there and I stayed there after he died. I cut the flowers for his vase. I wrote in my journal. I took the walks. I rented a car and took the drives. For several years, each June, I'd go to a pensione there and take my translation work with me, and perform all the rites."

  "And you never dared it with someone else."

  "Why would I?"

  "How can one live so long in a memory?"

  "It's never been that. I speak to him all the time."

  "And he to you?"

  "Oh, yes. We've circumvented very nicely the predicament of his being extinct. We're so unlike everyone else now and so like each other."

  The emotional impact of hearing this made me look at her probingly to see if she had said what she intended to say or was deliberately being immoderate or if her words had been spoken, as it were, accidentally by the brain that was missing a piece. All I saw was someone unprotected by anyone. All I saw was what Kliman saw.

  "What would he think of your living like this?" I asked her. "Wouldn't he have wanted you to
find someone? What would he have thought of your living alone all these years?" Then I added, "What does he tell you about it?"

  "He never mentions it."

  "What does he think of your living here, now, in this place?"

  "Oh, we don't bother about that."

  "What then?"

  "Books I read. We talk about books."

  "Nothing else?"

  "Things that happen. I told him about the library."

  "What did he say?"

  "He said what he always said. He laughed. He said, 'You take such matters too seriously.'"

  "What does he say about the brain tumor?"

  "I mustn't be frightened. It's not good, but I mustn't be frightened."

  "You believe what he tells you?"

  "When we talk, there's no more pain for a while."

  "Just the love."

  "Yes. Absolutely."

  "So what did you tell him about the library? Tell me the rest about the library."

  "Oh, I stormed up and down that corridor, fuming at the photographs of these writers who'd written the great landmarks of modern literature. I lost my temper. I began to shout. Two guards rushed up, and in no time I was out on the library steps. They must have thought I was a madwoman who'd strayed in off the street. I thought so too. A mad, evil woman with her evil thoughts. That's when I was beginning to talk a mile a minute. I still do. I do it even when I'm by myself. I didn't know yet about the tumor, you see. I said that already. But it was already there at the back of my head, turning me inside out. All my life, whenever I couldn't find my way, I've always been able to ask myself, What would Manny do? What would Manny do with this ridiculous state of affairs? All my life he's been here to guide me. I was in love with a great man. That lasts. But then came the tumor, and I couldn't hear him, not above the incessant roar."