Exit Ghost (16 page)

But she never came. I'd neglected to bring her phone number with me, so I couldn't call to find out if there was anything wrong. I thought perhaps she was too ashamed to let me see up close a debilitated old woman with a head half shaved and a disfiguring scar. Or maybe she had thought better of trying to get me to intervene on her behalf with Kliman and revealing to me, as she would have
to, the putative episodes of Lonoff's early life that she, as guardian of the memory of this meticulously private man, dreaded being made public.

I waited for over an hour—holding off ordering anything but a glass of wine on the chance that she might still show up—before it occurred to me that this was not the restaurant where we had agreed to meet. I'd come to Pierluigi's automatically, certain that I'd suggested our eating there, and now I couldn't remember whether I had asked Amy to suggest a restaurant that she might like. If I had, clearly I couldn't recall which restaurant it was. And the thought that she might have been sitting there alone all this time imagining that I had stood her up—because of how she'd described her appearance—made me rush downstairs to the telephone to call my hotel and learn if there were any messages. There was one: "I waited an hour and left. I understand."

Earlier in the day I had stopped at a drugstore to buy the toilet articles that I'd forgotten to bring from home. When I'd paid, I asked the salesclerk, "Could you put these in a box for me?" She looked at me blankly. "We don't have boxes," she said. "I meant a bag," I said, "in a bag, please." A tiny error, but unsettling anyway. I was misspeaking like this almost daily now, and despite the entries I dutifully made in my chore book, despite a persistent attempt to remain concentrated on what I was doing or planning to do, I was forgetting things frequently. While talking on the telephone, I'd begun to notice that well-intentioned people sometimes tried to be obliging by
finishing or filling in my thoughts before I'd realized that I'd hesitated or paused in search of the next word, or that they would genially overlook the error when I produced (as I had for my cleaning woman Belinda only the other day) an unintended coinage like "heartbed" for "heartfelt," or when I addressed an acquaintance down in Athena by someone else's name, or when someone's name slipped my mind as I was addressing the person and I had to struggle silently to find it. Nor did vigilance seem much help against what felt less like the erosion of memory than like a slide into senselessness, as though something diabolical residing in my brain but with a mind of its own—the imp of amnesia, the demon of forgetfulness, against whose powers of destruction I could bring no effective counterforce—were prompting me to suffer these lapses solely for the fun of watching me degenerate, the ultimate gleeful goal to turn someone whose acuity as a writer was sustained by memory and verbal precision into a pointless man.

(That is why, uncharacteristically, I'm working here as rapidly as I can while I can, though unable to proceed anywhere near as rapidly as I should because of the very mental impediment that I'm struggling to outflank. Nothing is certain any longer except that this will likely be my last attempt to persist in groping for words to combine into the sentences and paragraphs of a book. Because permanent groping is what it is now, a groping that goes well beyond the anxious groping for fluency that writing is to begin with. During the last year of working on the novel
recently sent off to my publisher, I discovered that I had to labor every day against the threat of incoherence. When I had finished—when, after four drafts, that is, I could go no further—I couldn't tell whether it was the reading of the completed manuscript that was itself marred by a disordered mind or whether my reading was accurate and the disordered mind was what was itself mirrored in the writing. As usual, I sent the manuscript to my shrewdest reader, ages ago a fellow student with me at the University of Chicago, whose intuition I trust absolutely. When he gave me his report on the phone, I knew that he had laid aside his customary candor and, out of kindness, was dissembling when he declared that he wasn't this book's best audience and apologized for having nothing useful to say, on the grounds that he found himself so out of touch with a protagonist toward whom I was altogether sympathetic that he'd been unable to sustain the interest to be helpful.

I did not press him, nor was I even puzzled. I understood the tactic that concealed his thoughts, though knowing as well as I do the critical attributes of my friend, and that his observations were never accidental, I would have had to be extremely naive to be untroubled by it. Instead of suggesting that I embark on a fifth draft—because of his having surmised from the fourth that making the substantial changes he'd had in mind was to lay an exorbitant demand on what remained intact of
my
attributes—he thought it best to blame a nonexistent limitation of his own, such as lack of imaginative sympathy, rather than what he had concluded was now missing in me. If I had
interpreted his response correctly—if, as I believed, his reading painfully replicated mine—what was I to do with a book that I had worked on for close to three years and considered at once unsatisfactory yet finished? Having never before confronted this predicament—having been able in the past to summon the inventiveness and marshal the energy to battle through to a resolution—I thought of what two American writers of the highest rank had done when they sensed a decline in their powers or a weakness in a piece of work that stubbornly resisted remedying. I could do as Hemingway did—and not just near the end of his life, when the monumental strength and the active existence and the enjoyment of violent conflict were displaced by the bludgeonings of physical pain, alcoholic decay, mental fatigue, and suicidal depression, but in the grand years, when his force was bottomless, his belligerence radiant, and the preeminence of his prose established throughout the world—and put the manuscript aside, either to attempt to rewrite it later or to leave it unpublished for good. Or I could do what Faulkner did and doggedly submit the completed manuscript for publication, permitting the book that he'd labored over unstintingly, and that he could take no further, to reach the public as it was and to yield whatever satisfactions it could.

I needed a strategy by which to endure and go on—as who doesn't?—and, for better or worse, mistakenly or not, the latter was the one I chose, though only vaguely believing that it would have the less damaging effect on my ability to forge ahead, into the twilight of my talent, without an excess of disgrace. And that was before the struggle got as bad as it is now and the deterioration had advanced to the point where even the most uncertain safeguard is nowhere to be found—where it's a matter not just of my no longer being able, after a day or two, to remember the details of the previous chapter but, improbably, of being unable, after only a few minutes, to remember much of the previous page.

By the time I'd decided to seek medical help in New York, the leakage I'd been experiencing wasn't just from my penis, nor was the failure of function restricted to the bladder's sphincter—nor was the crisis waiting to alter me next one that I could continue to hope would isolate the loss in the body alone. This time it was my mind, and this time my foreboding was being given more than a moment's notice, though, for all I knew, not much more.)

I excused myself to Tony and left the restaurant without eating and returned to the hotel. But at the room I couldn't find Amy's number anywhere. I was sure I'd written it on a scrap of notepaper on the night table, but it was neither there nor on the bed itself nor on top of the bureau nor down on the carpet, which I examined with the fingertips of one hand as I slowly traversed it on my knees. I looked under the bed, but it wasn't there either. I checked the pockets of all the clothes I'd brought with me, even those I hadn't worn. Thoroughly I combed the room, searching places where it couldn't possibly be, like the mini-bar, until it occurred to me to take out my wallet, and there was the scrap of paper with the phone number—where it had been all along. I hadn't forgotten to take it with me to Pierluigi's, I'd forgotten that I'd taken it.

My phone light was blinking. Thinking this call might be a second, longer message from Amy, I picked up the phone and listened. It was Billy Davidoff calling from my own house. "Nathan Zuckerman, it's a wonderful place. Small, but suits us perfectly. I've taken photos—I hope you don't mind. Jamie will be delighted by the house, the pond, the swamp across the way—by everything, the whole setting. And Rob Massey is a jewel. Let's complete the formalities as soon as possible. We'll draw up whatever document's required. Rob says he's going to drive your things down when you're installed, but if there's anything you need right away, I can bring it with me tonight. I'll be here another hour if you want to call back. Speak to you later. And thanks. Living here is going to be a great help."

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."