Exit Ghost
Page 21
HE
Billy's still probably two hours away. Why don't you come to my hotel? I'm at the Hilton. Room 1418.
SHE
(Lightly laughing) When you left her, you said it was killing you and you didn't want to see her again.
HE
Now I do want to see her.
SHE
What changed?
HE
The degree of desperation changed. I'm more desperate. Are you?
SHE
I ... I...I'm feeling less. Why are you more desperate?
HE
Go ask desperation why it's more desperate.
SHE
I have to come clean with you. I think I know why you're more desperate. And I don't think that my coming to your hotel room is going to help. I have Richard here. He came over and told me about your meeting earlier. I have to tell you that I think you're making a big mistake. Richard's only trying to do his work as you do your work. He's extremely upset. You're obviously extremely upset. You're calling and inviting something into your life you don't want to invite—
HE
I'm inviting you to my room. To come to me here in my hotel room. Kliman is your lover.
SHE
No.
HE
He is.
SHE
(Emphatically) No.
HE
You said as much the other day.
SHE
I didn't. You either misunderstood or heard incorrectly. You've got it all wrong.
HE
So you can lie too. Well, good. I'm glad you can lie.
SHE
What makes you think I'm lying? You're saying because I was his lover in college, I must be his lover now?
HE
I said I was jealous of your lover. I took him for your lover. You're telling me he's not your lover.
SHE
No, he's not.
HE
So someone else is your lover. I don't know whether that's worse or better.
SHE
I'd prefer not to discuss my lover. You want to be my lover—is that what you're saying to me?
HE
Yes.
SHE
You want me to come over now, six o'clock. I'd be there by six thirty. I can come home with some groceries as late as nine and say I was out shopping. I'd have to pick up some groceries or you can go grocery shopping for me now—we can have a few more minutes together.
HE
What time are you coming?
SHE
I'm just working it out. You could go grocery shopping now. I could get Richard out of here. Get in a cab. I could be at your place by six thirty. I'd have to leave by eight thirty. We'd have two hours together. Does that sound like a good idea to you?
HE
Yes.
SHE
And then what?
HE
We'd have had two hours together.
SHE
I'm insane today, you know. (Laughing) You're taking advantage of an insane woman.
HE
I'm reaping the harvest of the election.
SHE
(Laughing) Yes, you are.
HE
They stole Ohio—I'm going to steal you.
SHE
I could use a little strong medicine today.
HE
Once upon a time, I sold strong medicine door-to-door.
SHE
This all makes me think of the bayous.
HE
What are you saying?
SHE
The bayous in Houston. We'd get to them by cutting through somebody's property and we'd find a rope swing and jump in. Swimming in that mysterious chocolate-milk-colored water filled with dead old trees, where you couldn't see your hand in the water it was so opaque, moss hanging from the trees and the water this muddy color—I don't know how I did it, except that it was one of the things my parents wouldn't have wanted me to be doing. My older sister took me along with her my first time. She was the daredevil, not me. She was the one driven totally crazy by my mother's staggering concern for appearances. She was the one not even my admonishing father could control, let alone my mom. I married Billy. The worst he was was Jewish.
HE
That's the worst I am, too.
SHE
Is it?
HE
Come, Jamie. Come to me.
SHE
(Lightly, quickly) Okay. "Where are you again?
HE
The Hilton. Room 1418.
SHE
Where's the Hilton? I don't know New York hotels.
HE
The Hilton is on Sixth Avenue, between 53rd and 54th. Across from the CBS building. Diagonally across from the Warwick Hotel.
SHE
It's that huge hotel that's not very beautiful.
HE
That's it. I thought I was going to be here only a few days. I came down to see my friend who's ill.
SHE
I know about your friend who's ill. We won't discuss any of that.
HE
What did Kliman tell you about her? Do you know what he's doing to a woman who's dying of brain cancer?
SHE
He's trying to get her story. Not even her story. The story of a person she loved whose work has been lost, whose reputation has vanished. Look, Richard, unfortunately, is his own bad press. But you oughtn't to be misled by that. Here is an energetic, compulsive, dedicated, interested person who has fastened onto this now very obscure writer who nobody reads anymore. He's compelled by him, he's excited by him, he thinks he's got some secret about him that could be instructive and interesting rather than simply scandalous. Yes, he has the insane rapaciousness of the biographical drive. Yes, he has the ruthless desire to get what he wants. Yes, he'll do anything. But if he's serious, why should he not? He's trying to restore this person to his true place in American literature, and he wants her help—to tell a story that hurts no one. No one. The people it involves have been dead for years and years.
HE
He has three living children. What about them? How would you like to find this out about your father?
SHE
When he was seventeen he had an affair with his half-sister—he was younger, he was fourteen when it began. If anything, he was the innocent, he was the younger child. There's no shame in that.
HE
You're so generous. Do you think your father and mother will be so generous when they read about Lonoff's youth?
SHE
My father and mother voted for George Bush on Tuesday. So the answer is no. (Laughing) If you worked for their approval, you'd never publish anything that my father and mother would look kindly on. None of your books would have been published, my friend.
HE
What about you? Would you look kindly on your father if you found this out about him?
SHE
It wouldn't be easy.
HE
Do you have an aunt?
SHE
I don't have an aunt. But I have a brother. I don't have children. But if I did, it's not something I would want my children to know about if that happened between my brother and me. But I think there are some things that are more important than—
HE
Please. Not art.
SHE
What have you given up your life for, then?
HE
I didn't know I was giving it up. I did what I did, and I didn't know. Do you understand what the papers will do with this? Do you understand what the reviewers will do with this? This has nothing to do with art and less with truth or even with comprehending transgression. It has to do with titillation. Lonoff, if he were around, would be sorry he ever wrote a word.
SHE
He's dead. He won't be sorry.
HE
He'll just be maligned. For no good reason, maliciously maligned by the moralist prigs, by the feminist scolds, by the sickening superiority of the lice of literature
. A lot of the reviewers who are nice people will consider his a great sexual crime. What are you laughing at now?
SHE
The condescension. You think if it hadn't been for the "feminist scolds" I'd even be considering coming to your hotel room in twenty minutes? Do you think a girl brought up like me would begin to have the guts to do such a thing? So you're reaping the benefits of the election and the feminists. George Bush and Betty Friedan. (Speaking tough, suddenly, like a moll in a movie) Listen, do you want me to come over—is that what you want? Or do you want to talk about Richard Kliman on the phone?
HE
I don't believe you. I don't believe you about Kliman. That's all I'm saying.
SHE
Fine. Fine. Does that matter for our two hours together? You can believe me or not believe me, and if you don't believe me and you don't want me to come over, that's fine. If you don't believe me and you do want me to come over, that's fine. If you believe me and you want me to come over, that's fine too. You tell me what you want.
HE
Are you all so extremely self-possessed these days, all you thirty-year-old young women, or is there only so long that the performance can be maintained?
SHE
Neither.
HE
So is it just the thirty-year-old women with literary aspirations?
SHE
No.
HE
Is it the thirty-year-old women who grew up in oil-rich Houston families? Is it the superprivileged young women?
SHE
No, it's me. You're talking to me.
HE
I adore you.
SHE
You don't know me.
HE
I adore you.
SHE
You're madly attracted to me.
HE
I adore you.
SHE
You don't adore me. You can't. It's impossible. The words are meaningless. You strike me as a person who was spoiling for adventure but didn't know it. You, who spurned all experience for eleven years, who closed himself off to everything other than writing and thinking—you who'd held his existence so very close to his vest, you had no idea. Only when he finds himself back in the big city does he discover that he wants to be back in life and that the only way to get there is through his unreasoned, unconsidered ... well, himself at the mercy of a completely unreasonable drive. I'm talking to a virtually inhumanly disciplined, rational person who has lost all sense of proportion and entered into a desperate story of unreasonable wishes. Yet that is what it is to be in life, isn't it? What it is to forge a life. You know your reason can reassert itself at any time—and if it does, there goes life and the instability that is life. Everyone's lot: instability. The only other possible motive you could have to think you adore me is that at the moment you're a writer without a book. Start another book and get into it and we'll see how much you adore Jamie Logan. Anyway, I'll be right over.
HE
Your agreeing to come to my hotel suggests to me that you're in big trouble yourself. Rash moments. This is yours.
SHE
Rash moments that lead to rash encounters. Rash moments that lead to perilous choices. You might not want to remind me of that too forcefully.
HE
I think I can rely on you to remind yourself all the way here in the taxicab.
SHE
Well, I've told you you're taking advantage of the election returns. So yes, you're right.
HE
You're crossing Conrad's shadow-line, first from childhood into maturity, then from maturity into something else.
SHE
Into insanity. I'll be there shortly.
HE
Good. Hurry. Into insanity. Off with your clothes and into the bayous. (He hangs up.) Into the chocolate-milk-colored water filled with dead old trees.
(Thus, with only a moment's more insanity on his part—a moment of insane excitement—he throws everything into his bag—except the unread manuscript and the used Lonoff books—and gets out as fast as he can. How can he not [as he likes to say]? He disintegrates. She's on her way and he leaves. Gone for good.)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
IN 1997 Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and Saul Bellow, among others. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times.
In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians' prize for "the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004."
Recently Roth received PEN's two most prestigious prizes: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award "for a body of work ... of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship" and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, given to a writer whose "scale of achievement over a sustained career ... places him or her in the highest rank of American literature."
Roth is the only living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. The last of the eight volumes is scheduled for publication in 2013.