Exit Ghost

by Philip Roth

  "Look, you're coming off badly, Kliman. This news can't register wholly as a surprise on a litterateur like yourself."

  Here he extracted the manuscript from his briefcase and placed it on the table, atop the photographs—between two and three hundred pages held together by a thick elastic band.

  What a disaster. This reckless, hard-driving, shameless, opportunistic young man, whose way of absorbing a work of fiction was absolutely antithetical to Lonoff's, in possession of the first part of a novel that Lonoff never finished, felt he'd bungled, and might well never have published had he lived to complete it.

  "Did Amy Bellette give this to you? Or did you take it from her?" I asked. "Did you steal it from under the poor woman's nose?"

  His answer was just to push it toward me. "It's a photocopy. I had it run off especially for you."

  He remained intent on gathering me in. I could be useful to him. Just to say he'd given me a copy could perhaps be useful to him. I wondered how feeble he thought I was, then wondered how feeble I had become up in my cabin on my own. Why was I even here at this table? None of what he told me had taken place between the two of us had really taken place—not the phone call, not the date for lunch, not the request to hear about Plimpton's memorial service, not the request to see the Lonoff manuscript. I remembered now precisely what had happened. You smell bad, old man, you smell like death. And I smelled again, the odor rising from my lap, very like the odor I'd encountered in the interior passages of Amy's building— and all the while he who had shouted those insults at me continued calmly finishing off his sandwich only a few feet from where I ate mine. That I had allowed this meeting to occur left me feeling without any more protection than Amy, porous, diluted, weaker mentally than I could ever have imagined becoming.

  And Kliman knew that. Kliman had fostered that. Kliman had gauged my condition right off: Who would have thought that Nathan Zuckerman couldn't take it? Yet he can't, he's kaput, a tiny isolated little being, an exhausted escapee now from the coarse-grained world, eviscerated by impotence and in the worst state of his life. Just keep him confused, don't temper the battering, and down the doddering old fucker will go. Reread The Master Builder, Zuckerman: make way for the young!

  I watched him, up on his pinnacle, move in on me for the kill. And suddenly I saw him not as a person but as a door. I see a heavy wooden door where Kliman is sitting. Meaning what? A door to what? A door between what? Clarity and confusion? That could be. I never know whether he is telling the truth or I have forgotten something or he is making things up. A door between clarity and confusion, a door between Amy and Jamie, a door to George Plimpton's death, a door swinging open and shut just inches from my face. Is there more to him than that? All I know is the door.

  "With your imprimatur," he told me, "I could do a lot for Lonoff."

  I laughed at him. "You've callously preyed on a grievously ill woman with brain cancer. You've stolen these pages from her, by one means or another."

  "I did no such thing."

  "Of course you did. She wouldn't have given you just the first half. If she wanted you to have the book, she would have given you the whole thing. You stole what you were able to lay your hands on. The other half was out of sight or somewhere in the apartment where you couldn't grab it. Of course you stole it—who gives somebody half of a novel? And now," I said, before he could answer, "now you want to impose on a specimen like me?"

  Unfazed, he said, "You can take care of yourself. You've written lots of books. You've had your share of adventures. And you can be ruthless too."

  "I can," I said, hoping that was still true.

  "George always spoke of you with great admiration, Mr. Zuckerman. He admired the fortitude that fired the talent. I share that admiration."

  Simply as I could, I said, "Good. Then don't go anywhere near her, and don't try in any way to contact me." I laid some cash on the table to cover the cost of the meal and headed for the door.

  It took seconds for Kliman to pack his things and come racing after me. "This is censorship. You, yourself a writer, are trying to block the publication of another writer's work."

  "Not assisting you with this spurious book is not blocking you in any way. If anything, by crawling into my hole to die, I'm getting out of your way."

  "But it's not spurious. Amy Bellette herself recognizes the incest. It's she who first told me about it."

  "Amy Bellette has had half of her brain removed."

  "But she hadn't when I spoke to her. This is before the surgery. She hadn't been operated on then. She hadn't even been diagnosed with the tumor."

  "But the tumor was there, was it not? She had a head full of cancer, did she not? Undiagnosed, to be sure, but she had that tumor invading her brain. Her brain, Kliman. She was passing out and she was vomiting and she was blinded by headaches and she was blinded by fear and the woman didn't know what she was saying to anyone. At that point she was truly out of her mind."

  "But it's obvious that this is what happened."

  "Obvious to no one but you."

  "I cannot believe this!" he cried, walking beside me and showing me the baffled face of his fury. He was no longer in a mood to enjoy my contempt, and so down came the defenses against my judgment, and the rancorous beggar beneath the presumptuous bully at last made his entrance—unless that too was an act of guile and, from beginning to end, I was there only to play his old fool. "You of all people! The man had a penis, Mr. Zuckerman. His penis made them criminals in their world for over three years. Then came the scandal, and he hid from it for the next forty years. Then at the end he wrote this book. This book that is his masterpiece! Art arising from the tormented conscience! The aesthetic triumph over shame! He didn't know it—he was too frightened and miserable to know it. And Amy was too frightened by his misery to know it. But how can you be frightened? You who know what makes people insatiable! You who know the howling hunger for more! Here is a great writer's reckoning with the crime that intimidated him every day of his life. Lonoff's final struggle with his impurity. His long-delayed effort to let in the repellent. You know all about that. Let the repellent in! That's your achievement, Mr. Zuckerman. Well, this is his. His effort to lift this burden is too heroic for you to turn your back on now. The portrait of himself is not a flattering one, believe me. The young boy rising from a forty-year sleep! It's extraordinary. This is Lonoff's Scarlet Letter. It's Lolita without Quilty and the stupid jokes. It's what Thomas Mann would have written if he'd been someone other than Thomas Mann. Hear me out! Help me out! At some point you must take seriously the incest! Your hiding from it makes no sense and does you no credit! Antagonism to me is blinding you to the truth, sir! Which is simply this: that it took his giving up the home with Hope and going through his hell with Amy for him to release from captivity the sorrows of young Lonoff. I beseech you: read the amazing result!"

  He was now in front of me, walking rapidly backward, thrusting the photocopy of the manuscript into my chest. I stopped where I was, hands at my sides and my mouth shut. I should have greeted him with silence from the start. I should—thought I for the hundredth time—never have left home in the first place. The years I'd been gone, the fort I'd constructed against the intruders drawn to my work, the armored layers of suspicion—and yet here I was, looking into those beautiful eyes aglitter with their rabid gray sheen. A literary lunatic. Another one. Like me, like Lonoff, like all whose most violent passion is for a book. Why couldn't it have been gentle Billy Davidoff wanting to write the Lonoff biography? Why couldn't deeply disrespectful, ardent Kliman be gentle Billy, and gentle Billy be deeply disrespectful, ardent Kliman, and why couldn't Jamie Logan, instead of being theirs, be mine? Why did I have to get cancer of the prostate? Why did I have to get those death threats? Why must strength's abatement be so quick and cruel? Oh, to wish what is into what is not, other than on the page!

  Suddenly, his exasperation reached its crescendo, but rather than hurling the manuscript at my head—as I fully expected, ins
tinctively raising my arms to protect my face—he dropped it onto the pavement, onto the New York sidewalk only inches in front of my feet, and fled into the traffic, darting between the streaming cars that I could only hope to see shatter the rampaging would-be biographer to bits.

  At the hotel, after discarding my urine-soaked underclothes and washing myself at the sink, I phoned Amy. I wanted to know where Kliman's manuscript had come from. I had it in the room with me. I had picked it up and taken it with me. I had waited till Kliman was out of sight and then snatched it off the pavement and carried it back to the hotel. What else could I do? I had no interest in reading it. I could participate no further in this frenzy. I'd survived frenzy enough back when I was younger and clearheaded and a lot more wily and resilient than I was now. I didn't want to know what Lonoff had made of himself and his sister and their great misadventure, or to continue to argue what I still believed—that no such misadventure had ever occurred. However much the man had fascinated me when I was first starting out—and even though just the other day I had gone off to buy all his books, copies of books that I'd owned for decades—I wanted to be rid of the manuscript and completely free of Richard Kliman and everything about him that I could not assess and that was alien to everything I took seriously. Even if the forceful exertions all somehow looked like an act, like the reckless, loathsome, boyish stunt of someone superficial pretending to have a mind and a reverence for letters, he seemed to me no less my nemesis than Lonoff's. I foresaw only defeat should I persist in colliding with this impostor's aims and the vitality and ambition and tenacity and anger that fueled them. After I spoke with Amy and arranged to get those pages back into her hands, I'd phone Jamie and Billy and tell them the deal was off. And I'd leave New York without returning to the urologist. I hadn't that fortitude Kliman so admired, at least not for any further interventions. The urologist could change nothing, as I could change nothing. I may have accumulated over four decades the prestige of writing book after book, but I had reached the end of my effectiveness nonetheless. I had reached the end of my protectiveness as well, and had known as much when I ceased being able to protect myself other than by disappearing. I couldn't stop that kid, even by taking Amy back to the Berkshires or posting a guard at her door.

  Nor could I stop him, when he was finished with Lonoff, from turning his blazing attention on me. Once I was dead, who could protect the story of my life from Richard Kliman? Wasn't Lonoff his literary steppingstone to me? And what would my "incest" be? How will I have failed to be the model human being? Mygreat, unseemly secret. Surely there was one. Surely there was more than one. An astonishing thing it is, too, that one's prowess and achievement, such as they have been, should find their consummation in the retribution of biographical inquisition. The man in control of the words, the man making up the stories all his life, winds up, after death, remembered, if at all, for a story made up about him, his covert brand of baseness discovered and described with uncompromising candor, clarity, self-certainty, with grave concern for the most delicate issues of morality, and with no small measure of delight.

  So I was next. Why had it taken till now to realize the obvious? Unless I had realized it all along.

  ***

  There was no answer at Amy's apartment. I phoned Jamie and Billy. The machine picked up after only one ring. I said, "This is Nathan Zuckerman. I'm calling from my hotel. The number—"

  Here Jamie herself answered. I should have hung up. I shouldn't have phoned. I should do this and I shouldn't have done that and now I should do the other thing! But I had no control over my thoughts once I was accosted by the stimulus of her voice. Instead of proceeding to extricate myself from the disaster of believing I could alter my condition—the condition of having been unalterably altered—I did the opposite, my thoughts rooted not in what I was but in what I was not: the thoughts of one still capable of making an onslaught on life.

  "I'd like to talk to you," I said.

  "Yes."

  "I'd like to talk to you here."

  During the pause that followed, I dealt as best I could with the ridiculous words the past was pressing me to speak.

  "I don't think I can do that," she said.

  "I was hoping that you could," I said.

  "It's an interesting idea, Mr. Zuckerman, but no."

  What could I, an exhausted "no-longer" with neither the confidence for the seduction nor the capacity for the performance, say to make her waver? All I had left were the instincts: to want, to crave, to have. And the stupid strengthening of my determination to act. At last, to act!

  "Come to my hotel," I said.

  "I'm quite thrown," she said. "I never expected this call."

  "I didn't either."

  "Why did you make it?" she asked. "Something has got into me since we were together at your place."

  "But it's something that I can't satisfy, I'm afraid."

  "Please come."

  "Please stop. It doesn't take much to make me go off the rails. You think I'm combative? Bristling Jamie? Aggressive Jamie? I'm a combative bundle of nerves. You think Richard Kliman is my lover? You think that still? That I would have nothing to do with him sexually should be abundantly clear to you by now. You've imagined a woman who isn't me. Can't you realize what a relief it was when I met Billy and someone wasn't screaming all the time when I didn't accede to his wishes?"

  What could I say to draw her on? What could I possibly say that she would be susceptible to?

  "Are you alone?" I asked.

  "No."

  "Who is there?"

  "Richard. He's in the other room. He's been telling me what happened with you. That's all we're doing here. He's talking. I'm listening. That's it. The rest is your illusion. What a wounded person you are to imagine otherwise."

  "Please, Jamie, come." Out of all the resources of language, those words were the richest I could light upon to repeat.

  "I'm foolish," she said, "so please stop."

  I saw myself, heard myself, was appropriately sardonic about myself and disgusted with myself and revolted by the degree of my desperation, but years ago the sexual union with women had been broken so abruptly by the prostate surgery that now, with Jamie, I could not prevent myself from pretending otherwise and acting in behalf of an ego I no longer possessed.

  "I phoned you," I said, "to say something else entirely. I did not call with this in mind. I thought I had freed myself of all this."

  "Is that possible?" She sounded as if she were asking not about me but about herself.

  "Come, Jamie. I feel you can teach me something that it's too late for me to learn."

  "That's a hallucination. It all is. No, I can't come, Mr. Zuckerman." And then, to be kind, or merely to get herself off the hook, or even perhaps because a part of her meant it, she added, "Another time," as though I had all the days that she did to hang around and wait.

  And so I fled the forces that once had sustained my own force and challenged my strength and aroused my enthusiasms and my passions and my power of resistance and my need to take everything, big or small, to heart and to make everything of significance. I did not stay and fight as of old but fled Lonoff's manuscript and all the emotion it had stirred up, and all the emotion it would stir up when I came upon Kliman's notes in the margin and found there the deadly literal-mindedness and vulgarity that attributes everything to its source in a wholly stupid way. I could not meet contention's demands, wanted no part of its perplexities, and—as if this were work by a writer I had been indifferent to all my life—I dumped the manuscript unread into the hotel room wastebasket, got the car, and was home just after dark. In flight you hurriedly make a choice of what you take with you, and I chose to leave behind not only the manuscript but the six Lonoff books I'd got at the Strand. The set I had at home, bought fifty years earlier, was sufficient to see me through the rest of my life.

  The upheaval of New York had taken little more than a week. There is no more worldly in-the-world place than New York, full
of all those people on their cell phones going to restaurants, having affairs, getting jobs, reading the news, being consumed with political emotion, and I'd thought to come back in from where I'd been, to resume residence there reembodied, to take on all the things I'd decided to relinquish—love, desire, quarrels, professional conflict, the whole messy legacy of the past—and instead, as in a speeded-up old movie, I passed through for the briefest moment, only to pull out to come back here. All that happened is that things almost happened, yet I returned as though from some massive happening. I attempted nothing really, for a few days just stood there, replete with frustration, buffeted by the merciless encounter between the no-longers and the not-yets. That was humbling enough.

  Now I was back where I needed never be in collision with anyone or be coveting anything or go about being someone, convincing people of this or that and seeking a role in the drama of my times. Kliman would pursue Lonoff's secret with all his crude intensity, and Amy Bellette would be as powerless to stop him as she'd been as a girl to prevent the murder of her mother, her father, and her brother, or to stop the tumor from killing her now. I would send her a check that very day and another on the first of every month, but she would be dead within the year anyhow. Kliman would persist and perhaps make himself of literary importance for a few months by writing the superfluous exposé revealing Lonoff's alleged wrongdoing as the key to everything. He might even steal Jamie away from Billy, if she was sufficiently troubled or deluded or bored to seek her escape in his obnoxious swagger. And along the way, like Amy, like Lonoff, like Plimpton, like everyone in the cemetery who had braved the feat and the task, I would die too, though not before I sat down at the desk by the window, looking out through the gray light of a November morning, across a snow-dusted road onto the silent, wind-flurried waters of the swamp, already icing up at the edge of the foundering stalks of the skeletal bed of plumeless reeds, and, from that safe haven, with all of them in New York having vanished from sight—and before my ebbing memory receded completely—wrote the final scene of He and She.