Exit Ghost

by Philip Roth

  "It was just about a year ago, last November," Kliman said. "At Saint John the Divine. Huge place and it's jammed—every seat taken. Two thousand people. Maybe more. Begins with a gospel group. George had seen them somewhere and loved them, and so there they were. Leader very tall, good-looking black guy, groovin' on the pomp and circumstance, and as soon as they start in singing, he starts his shouting. 'It's a celebration! It's a celebration!' and I thought, Oh Christ, here we go, somebody dies and it's a celebration. 'It's a celebration! Everybody say it's a celebration. Tell your neighbor it's a celebration!' So all the white folk begin to nod their heads out of time with the music, and, I tell you, it doesn't look too good for George. Then the minister gives the minister speech, and the speakers step up one by one. First George's sister talks about the museum he made of his room in the house on Long Island, where he kept all his animal skins and dead birds, and how passionate a boy he was about all these things, and the delivery is stunning. Totally affectless she is, has that strange absolute absence of strangeness that only the purest-bred old-fashioned Wasp can pull off. Then a guy from Texas named Victor Emanuel, probably in his fifties, maybe a little older, an authority on birds, he and George fast friends through their powerful interest in birds. Knew all the birds. This guy talks very plainly, about bird-ing with George and the birding trips they took together, and all of it being uttered in the house of the Lord—though the only ones who care to mention the Lord are the minister and the gospel singers. On that subject everybody else is mum, man, like it has nothing to do with them. They just happen to be there. Then Norman Mailer. Overwhelming. I'd never seen Norman Mailer off the screen before. Guy's eighty now, both knees shot, walks with two canes, can't take a stride of more than six inches alone, but he refuses help going up to the pulpit, won't even use one of the canes. Climbs this tall pulpit all by himself. Everybody pulling for him step by step. The conquistador is here and the high drama begins. The Twilight of the Gods. He surveys the assemblage. Looks down the length of the nave and out to Amsterdam Avenue and across the U.S. to the Pacific. Reminds me of Father Mapple in Moby-Dick. I expected him to begin "Shipmates!" and preach upon the lesson Jonah teaches. But no, he too speaks very simply about George. This is no longer the Mailer in quest of a quarrel, yet his thumbprint is on every word. He speaks about a friendship with George that flourished only in recent years—tells us how the two of them and their wives had traveled together to wherever they were performing in a play they'd written together, and of how close the two couples had become, and I'm thinking, Well, it's been a long time coming, America, but there on the pulpit is Norman Mailer speaking as a husband in praise of coupledom. Fundamentalist creeps, you have met your match."

  There was no stopping him. What had happened between us so far he had set out to obliterate with a big performance designed to quell me, and it was doing its job: I felt myself—despite myself—growing progressively smaller the more flamboyant the display of Kliman's self-delight. Mailer is no longer in quest of a quarrel and can barely walk. Amy is no longer beautiful or in possession of all of her brain. I no longer have the totality of my mental functions or my virility or my continence. George Plimpton is no longer alive. E. I. Lonoff no longer has his great secret, if such a secret there ever was. All of us are now "no-longers" while the excited mind of Richard Kliman believes that his heart, his knees, his cerebrum, his prostate, his bladder sphincter, his everything is indestructible and that he, and he alone, is not in the hands of his cells. Believing this is no soaring achievement for those who are twenty-eight, certainly not if they know themselves to be beckoned by greatness. They are not "no-longers," losing faculties, losing control, shamefully dispossessed from themselves, marked by deprivation and experiencing the organic rebellion staged by the body against the elderly; they are "not-yets," with no idea how quickly things turn out another way.

  He had a battered briefcase at his feet that I believed contained the half of Lonoff's manuscript. Maybe it contained as well the photographs that Amy had given him while under the influence of the tumor. No, extricating Amy wasn't going to be simple. Any effort at persuasion wasn't going to discourage Kliman; it would only further validate his significance to himself. I tried to figure out if a lawyer might help or if money might help or a combination of both—threatening him with legal action and then paying him off. Maybe he could be blackmailed. Maybe, it occurred to me, Jamie wasn't fleeing bin Laden—maybe she was fleeing him.

  SHE

  Richard, I'm married.

  HE

  I know that. Billy's the guy to marry and I'm the guy to fuck. You tell me why all the time. "It's so thick. The base is so thick. The head is so beautiful. This is just the kind I like."

  SHE

  Leave me alone. You have to leave me alone. This has to be over.

  HE

  You don't want to come anymore? You don't want the intense sensations anymore? You don't want that ever again?

  SHE

  We're not going to have this discussion. We don't talk to each other like this anymore.

  HE

  You want to come now, right now?

  SHE

  No. You stop it. It's over. If you ever talk to me like this again, we won't talk ever again.

  HE

  I'm talking to you now. I want you to suck the beautiful head.

  SHE

  Get the fuck away from me. Get out of my apartment.

  HE

  The brutal lover makes you come and the obedient lover does not.

  SHE

  That's not what we're talking about. I'm married to Billy. I'm not with you. Billy's my husband. You and I are over. What you're saying doesn't matter.

  HE

  Yield.

  SHE

  No. You yield. Leave.

  HE

  That's not the way it works between us.

  SHE

  That's the way it works now.

  HE

  You love to yield.

  SHE

  Shut the fuck up. Stop it. Just stop it.

  HE

  I thought you were so articulate. You are when we play our games. You say all kinds of devilish things when we play call girl and client. You make all sorts of delicious sounds when we play at Jamie being taken by force. Is this all you can say now—"Shut the fuck up" and "Stop it"?

  SHE

  I'm telling you this is over, and it's over. Leave my house.

  HE

  I'm not leaving.

  SHE

  Then I'm leaving.

  HE

  Where are you going?

  SHE

  Away.

  HE

  Come on, sweetie. You've got the prettiest cunt in the world. Let's play the strange games. Say the devilish things.

  SHE

  Get away from me. Get out of here right now. Billy's coming home. Get out. Get out of my house or I'll call the police.

  HE

  Wait'll the police see you in just that top and those shorts. They won't leave either. You've got the prettiest cunt and the basest instincts.

  SHE

  Whatever I say you're just going to talk about my cunt? You try to say something to someone and they don't hear you.

  HE

  This makes me hot.

  SHE

  This makes me angry. I'm leaving this house right now.

  HE

  Here. Look.

  SHE

  No!

  (But he doesn't stop, and so she flees.)

  People in the coffee shop might easily have thought Kliman was my son from the way I let him go on in his self-delighted and domineering way, and also because, at strategic moments, he reached out to touch me—my arm, my hand, my shoulder—in order to drive home his point.

  "Nobody let you down that day," he told me. "Most interesting of all was a journalist named McDonell. He said something like, 'I'm dedicated to being lighthearted, because it's the only way I can keep myself together up here.' Told many illu
strative stories about George. Spoke out of real love. I don't mean the others didn't speak with love. But you felt from McDonell an intense male love. And admiration. And the understanding of what George was. I think he was the one who told the story about George and his T-shirt, though maybe it was the bird guy. Anyway, they went to look for some bird in Arizona. They went out into the desert around dusk. That's when this bird is supposed to be around. They couldn't find it. Suddenly George pulled off his T-shirt and threw it high in the air. And bats swooped in and swarmed the T-shirt and followed it all the way down to the ground. So George began to toss it up in the air, over and over, as high as he could. And more and more bats swarmed around it, and George cried, 'They think it's a giant moth!' It reminded me of Henderson the Rain King, at the end, where Henderson gets off the plane in Labrador or Newfoundland, I forget which, and he begins to dance around on this ice cap with all his African rain king exuberance, with that rare strain of privileged, wealthy, Wasp exuberance that you see in one out of ten thousand of them. And that was George's triumph. It's what George was. The Exuberant Wasp. I wish I could remember more of what this wonderful guy said, because he was the one who carried the message. But then that damn singing started up again. 'Oh magnify the Lord! Magnify the Lord!' and every time I heard 'magnify the Lord,' under my breath I said, 'He's not here, and everyone knows he's not here except you. Here is the last place he'd be.' Every size and shape of black woman was in that singing group. The ones with the enormous cans, and the little balding gnarled ones looking a hundred years old, and the thinnish, longish, elegant, pretty girls, shy girls some of them, the ones who, when you see them, you know what terror there was in the fields when the master came around looking for his fun. And the big ones who are confident and the big ones who are angry, and about half a dozen sleek black guys singing along too, and I kept thinking of slavery, Mr. Zuckerman. I don't think I've ever thought of slavery so much when I've been with blacks before. Because it was so white an assemblage they were entertaining, it seemed like minstrelsy to me. I saw the last faint remnants of slavery there in that Christianity. Back of them at the head of the apse there was a gold cross huge enough to crucify King Kong. And I have to tell you—two things I hate most about America are slavery and the cross, especially the way they were intertwined and the slave owners justified owning their Negroes by what God told them in their holy book. But that's extraneous, my hating that shit. The speakers started up again. Nine in all."

  Lunch had arrived, and he took a moment to drink half his coffee but I remained silent, determined to ask no questions and just wait to see what he came up with next to steamroll me into believing he was a twenty-eight-year-old titan of literature and I should get out of his way.

  "You're wondering how I met George," he said. "I met him when he came up to Harvard for a party at the Lampoon. He danced on a table with my girlfriend. She was the sexiest, so he picked her out. He was great. Gave a great speech. George Plimpton was a great man. People said that even dying he managed gracefully. Bullshit to that. He just didn't have a chance to put up a fight. He was a competitor. If it had happened to him during the day, he'd have had a shot at beating it. But at night, asleep? Blindsided."

  I remembered then that in one of his books George had set himself to interviewing his literary friends about what he called their "death fantasies." When I got back home to my library I discovered that the book was Shadow Box, which opens with his description of his adventure in the ring with Archie Moore in 1959 and ends in 1974 in Zaire, where George had gone to cover the heavyweight championship fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman for Sports Illustrated. Plimpton was fifty when Shadow Box was published, in 1977, and probably somewhere in his late forties when he was researching and writing it, and so it must have seemed a lark of an assignment to ask other writers to tell him how they imagined themselves meeting death—scenarios that, as he recounts them, were invariably comical or dramatic or bizarre. The columnist Art Buchwald told him that he "fancied himself dropping dead on the center court at Wimbledon during the men's final—at the age of ninety-three." In the bar of Kinshasa's Intercontinental Hotel a young Englishwoman who described herself as a "free-lance poet" informed George that "it would be terrific to be electrocuted while playing a bass guitar in a rock group." Mailer was also in Kinshasa to write about the championship fight, and he seemed fondest of the idea of being killed by an animal—if on land, a lion; if at sea, a whale. As for George, he saw himself dying at Yankee Stadium, "sometimes as a batter beaned by a villainous man with a beard, occasionally as an outfielder running into the monuments that once stood in deep center field."

  Humorously and unusually—that's how George and his friends imagined themselves dying back before they believed they would, back when dying was just another idea to have fun with. "Oh, there's death too!" But the death of George Plimpton was neither humorous nor unusual. It was no fantasy either. He died not in pinstripes at Yankee Stadium but in pajamas in his sleep. He died as we all do: as a rank amateur.

  I couldn't bear him. I couldn't bear his outsized boy's energy and smug self-certainty and the pride he took in being an enthusiast and a raconteur. The crushing immediacy of him—surely George couldn't have borne it either. But if I intended to do whatever could be done to prevent Kliman from becoming Lonoff's biographer, I would have to suppress that ebbing and flowing inclination to get my car and go back to the Berkshires. I would have to wait to see what he came up with next that he imagined would advance his interests. Having, in recent years, all but forgotten how to negotiate antagonism head-on, I instructed myself not to underestimate an opponent's shrewdness because he masquerades as a garrulous geyser.

  When he'd finished a second cup of coffee, he said abruptly, "Lonoff and his sister changes things, does it not?"

  So Jamie had told him she'd told me. Yet another unsettling facet of Jamie. What, if anything, should I make of her serving as the conduit between Kliman and me? "It's nonsense," I said.

  He reached down to slap the side of the briefcase.

  "A novel is not evidence," I said, "a novel's a novel," and resumed eating.

  Smiling, he reached down again, and this time he opened the briefcase, removed a thin manila envelope, unclasped it, and poured its contents out onto our table, in the midst of our dishes. We were sitting in the window of the luncheonette and could see people walking by on the street. At the moment I looked up, every one of them was talking on a cell phone. Why did those phones seem like the embodiment of everything I had to escape? They were an inevitable technological development, and yet, in their abundance, I saw the measure of how far I had fallen away from the community of contemporary souls. I don't belong here anymore, I thought. My membership has lapsed. Go.

  I picked up the photos. There were four faded pictures of a tall, skinny Lonoff and a tall, skinny girl who Kliman would have me believe was his half-sister, Frieda. In one they were standing on the sidewalk in front of a nondescript wooden house on a street that looked to be baking in the sun. Frieda wore a thin white dress and her hair was in long, heavy braids. Lonoff leaned on her shoulder, feigning heat exhaustion, and Frieda was smiling broadly, a big-jawed girl showing the large teeth that gave her a sturdy livestock look. He was a handsome boy with a dark pompadour and a cast to his lean face that might have enabled him to pass for a young desert dweller, half Muslim, half Jew. In another picture the two were gazing up from a picnic blanket laughing at something indistinguishable that Lonoff was pointing to on one of the plates. In a third they were several years older. Lonoff was holding one arm high in the air, and Frieda, who had grown stouter, was pretending to be a dog, begging with her paws. Lonoff looked stern, giving her his command. In the fourth she must have been twenty and no longer the willing handmaid to her half-brother's whimsy but a tall, heavy-set, unsmiling young woman; by contrast, at seventeen, Lonoff looked ethereal and beyond the lure of temptation by anything other than the harmless muse of juvenilia. A case could be made that the
photographs revealed nothing unusual other than to a mind as eager to be inflamed as Kliman's, and that the most one could reasonably conclude was that half-sister and half-brother enjoyed each other, were devoted to each other, appeared to understand each other, and, in the first quarter of the twentieth century, were sometimes photographed together by a parent or a neighbor or a friend.

  "These pictures," I said. "There's nothing in these pictures."

  "In the novel," he said, "Lonoff makes Frieda the instigator."

  "There is no Lonoff and no Frieda in a novel."

  "Spare me the lecture about the impenetrable line dividing fiction from reality. This is something Lonoff lived through. This is a tormented confession disguised as a novel."

  "Unless it's a novel disguised as a tormented confession."

  "Then why did it shatter him to write it?"

  "Because writers can be shattered by writing. The primacy of the imaginative life can do that, and more."

  "I've shown you the photographs," he said, as though what I'd seen were a set of filthy pictures, "and now I'll show you the manuscript, and then you dare to tell me that writing about a possibility that wasn't a reality was the force that drove this book."