Exit Ghost (14 page)

What's changed that answer?

HE

Meeting a young woman like you.

SHE

What interests you so much about me?

HE

Your youth and your beauty. The speed with which we've entered into communication. The erotic environment you create out of words.

SHE

New York is full of beautiful young women.

HE

I've been without the companionship of a woman and all that goes with it for years now. This is a startling turn of events and not necessarily in my interest. Someone wrote—I don't remember who—"Great love later in life comes at cross-purposes to everything."

SHE

Great love? Can you explain yourself, please?

HE

It's a sickness. It's a fever. It's a kind of hypnosis. I can only explain it by saying that I want to be alone in a room with you. I want to be under your spell.

SHE

Well, I'm glad. I'm glad you're getting what you want. It's a good thing.

HE

It's heartbreaking.

SHE

Why?

HE

Why do you think? You're a writer. You want to be a writer. Why would a man of seventy-one find this heartbreaking?

SHE

(Delicately)
Because you have all this feeling again and you can't take it to its next step.

HE

That's correct.

SHE

But there's pleasure in this, isn't there?

HE

Of the heartbreaking variety.

SHE

(She's learned something)
Hmmm.
(After a long pause, with mock theatricality)
Oh, what is to be done?

HE

Do you have any suggestions?

SHE

No. I have no idea what's to be done. I'm going away because I can't think what to do about anything.

HE

You seem close to tears all the time.

SHE

(Laughing)
Well, it helps me not, I'll tell you that.

HE

(Laughs too, but remains silent. The flirtation is infernal, the man within the man in flames.)

SHE

Have you been out today? The whole city is close to tears. Yes, yes, I'm close to tears. It's momentous for me, you can imagine. Can you imagine how we felt last night when—

HE

I was here. I saw it. Did you notice that I was here?

SHE

And you obviously noticed I was here. Something seized you, though, before you met me. It wasn't me. You decided to come see our apartment. Something seized you—what was it? You know, the death threats don't explain to me the extreme thing that you've done with your life. However much you explain by saying I'm a writer who's had these threats made against my life, it is an extreme thing to have done, to go off and live the way you have. I have to keep wondering, What's the real story there? So there were these postcards. So what? The postcards are a pretext. You go away for a year, if it's the postcards, and you have friends and girlfriends, and in time the postcards stop and you come back. But a man who sequesters himself, secludes himself the way you did, does so for a much larger reason. People don't give up on life for a completely circumstantial and external reason like a death threat.

HE

What might that larger reason be?

SHE

Escaping pain.

HE

What pain?

SHE

The pain of being present.

HE

Aren't you describing yourself?

SHE

Perhaps. The pain of being present in the present moment. Yes, that could be said to describe very neatly the extreme thing I'm doing. But for you it wasn't merely the present moment. It was being present at all. It was being present in the presence of
anything.

HE

Did you ever read a short novel called
The Shadow-Line
?

SHE

By Conrad? No. I remember a boyfriend telling me about it once, but I never read it.

HE

The opening line goes, "Only the young have such moments." These are moments Conrad describes as "rash."
In the first few pages he lays everything out. "Rash moments"—the two words make up the entire sentence. He goes on, "I mean moments when the still young are inclined to commit rash actions, such as getting married suddenly or else throwing up a job for no reason." It goes like that. But these rash moments don't just happen in youth. Coming here last night was a rash moment. Daring to return is another. With age there are rash moments too. My first was leaving, my second is returning.

SHE

Billy thinks that he's indulging a rash moment on my part because if he doesn't, I'll get swamped with depression and fear. But he thinks that it's a rash moment. I never thought of myself as a desperate person. I hate to think that I'd be doing something desperate.

HE

I think you'll like it there. I'll miss you.

SHE

Well, it's your house. You can come up. You can have forgotten something and come up. We can have lunch.

HE

You can have forgotten something and come down.

SHE

Sure.

HE

Okay. You're less curt with me than you were last night.
The fact that I haven't followed Bush's lies shouldn't make me an antagonist.

SHE

Was I nasty?

HE

I didn't feel that you cared for me much. Unless I intimidated you.

SHE

Of course you did. I read all those books in college and all the ones since. You might not be aware of it, locked up alone in the Berkshires, but there are many like me, people my age, and older
(laughing)
and younger, for whom you fill an important need. We admire you.

HE

Well, I haven't seen myself in the public mirror for many years. I don't know that.

SHE

I just told you.

HE

I still don't know it. But it's wonderful to learn of your admiration, because I've quickly come to admire you.

SHE

(Astonished
) You've come to admire me? "Why?

HE

I hate to say this to you, but "someday you'll understand." (
She laughs
)

HE

You postmodernists laugh a lot.

SHE

I laugh because I find things funny.

HE

Are you laughing at me?

SHE

I'm laughing at the situation. You're speaking to me like you're my father. Someday I'll understand. Is the pleasure in the doing of it or only in the having done it? Writing, I mean. I'm changing the subject.

HE

In the doing of it. The pleasure of the having done it lasts a short time. There's pleasure in holding the bundle of pages in your hand, and there's pleasure when the first copy arrives. I pick it up and set it down a hundred times. I eat with it beside me. I've taken it to bed with me.

SHE

I know that. When my story was published, I slept with the copy of
The New Yorker
under my pillow.

HE

You're a very charming young woman.

SHE

Thank you, thank you.

HE

This is why I live in the country.

SHE

I understand.

HE

It's all a little distressing for me to come back to New York, and this is a little distressing too. I think I better go.

SHE

Okay. Perhaps we'll see each other alone and talk again.

HE

That would do it to me, my friend.

SHE

I would like to be your friend.

HE

Why?

SHE

Because I have no one like you.

HE

You don't know me.

SHE

I don't. I have no interactions like this.

HE

Must you use that language? You're a writer—give up "interactions."

SHE

(Laughing)
I have no conversations like this. I have no situations like this.

HE

I didn't mean to correct you. It's not my business. Excuse me.

SHE

I understand. If you want to get together and talk again, my number is your number. You can always call me.

HE

It's not as if I answered a rental ad. It's as if I answered the personals. "Exceedingly attractive, well-educated WMF occasionally available for intimate conversation..." I got more than a new apartment, didn't I?

SHE

Maybe a friend, too.

HE

But this is not a friendship I can have.

SHE

What can you have?

HE

Not much, it seems. Precious things having been taken
away has created a predicament that can't be overcome by hard work, et cetera. Do you follow me?

SHE

I don't quite understand. Do you just mean getting older, or is there something else in particular?

HE

(Laughing)
I suppose I just mean getting older.

SHE

I understand now.

HE

This is killing me, so I'm going to leave. I'm not going to follow my inclination and try to kiss you.

SHE

Okay.

HE

That wouldn't get us anywhere.

SHE

You're right. I'm glad you came by this afternoon, though. I'm very glad.

HE

Are you a seductress?

SHE

No, no, absolutely not.

HE

You have a husband, you have a lover, and now you want to have me as a friend. Do you collect men? Or do men collect you?

SHE

(Laughing)
I suppose I've collected men and that they've collected me.

HE

You're only thirty. Have you collected many men?

SHE

I don't know what's considered many.
(She laughs again)

HE

I mean since you left college, between commencement day and this afternoon, which has concluded with your collecting me with your seductive power ... But you're acting childishly now, as though you don't possess such power. Has nobody ever told you about your power?

SHE

I've been told. I was laughing because if you include yourself as a collected man, I wouldn't know how to count the men I've collected.

HE

You have collected me.

SHE

And yet you will not call me again. And you will not kiss me. We may not even see each other again, except with
my husband, when we exchange keys, so I don't see how I've collected you.

HE

Because a meeting like this for a man like me is devastating.

SHE

I certainly don't want to devastate you. I'm sorry if I have.

HE

I'm sorry I couldn't devastate
you.

SHE

You've given me pleasure.

HE

As I said, this is killing, so I'm going to have to go.

SHE

Thank you for coming by.

On the street, starting back on foot to the hotel, thinking of the scene just enacted—and if he feels himself to be an actor, coming from having rehearsed a scene from an unproduced play, it's because she seemed so like an actress to him, a highly intuitive, intelligent young actress who listens carefully and concentrates totally and responds quietly—he is reminded of the scene in
A Doll's House
when the dying, lovesick sophisticate Dr. Rank is summoned to spend a moment with her by Torvald Helmer's beautiful wife, the spoiled tease, flirtatious young Nora. The light fading, the room getting smaller, a cab
or two going by in the street, the city receding while everything around them becomes close and dark. These two people taking their time with each other, listening to each other. So sexual and so sad. Thick with each of their pasts, though neither knows much of the other's. The pace of it, all that silence and what might be in there. Each of them desperate for entirely different reasons. For him, however, the last desperate scene, most certainly with a cunningly gifted actress slyly passing herself off as a novice writer. A scene constituting the opening of
He and She,
a play of desire and temptation and flirtation and agony—agony all the time—an improvisation best aborted and left to die. Chekhov has a story called "He and She." Other than the title, he remembers nothing of the story (perhaps there is no such story), though from words of advice about such storytelling in a letter Chekhov wrote while still quite young, he can remember the key sentence even now. A letter by a greatly admired writer he read in his twenties is still fresh to him, while the time and place of appointments he made the day before he now forgets completely. "The center of gravity," wrote Chekhov in 1886, "should reside in two: he and she. " It should. It has. It won't ever again.

My bag was where I had left it, half packed on the hotel dresser when I had rushed off earlier for West 71st Street. A light flashing on my phone indicated that I had a message. But I still didn't know from whom because once I'd got back to the room, all I'd done was to sit at the undersized desk by the window looking down on the 53rd Street traffic, and once again, on hotel stationery, set down as
quickly as I could an exchange with Jamie that had not taken place. My chore book recorded what I did do and what I was scheduled to do as an aid to a failing memory; this scene of dialogue unspoken recorded what hadn't been done and was an aid to nothing, alleviated nothing, achieved nothing, and yet, just as on election night, it had seemed terribly necessary to write the instant I came through the door, the conversations she and I don't have more affecting even than the conversations we do have, and the imaginary "She" vividly at the middle of her character as the actual "she" will never be.