Exit Ghost (20 page)

"Now this is what he wrote about his being seventeen," I said to her, "but this is not what he told you about his life at seventeen."

My assertion flustered her. "Why would I lie to you?"

"I only wonder if you're confused. You're telling me that he told you this about himself and that you knew about it before he began writing the book."

"I only knew about it when the book began to drive him crazy. No, I never knew about it before. No one in his adult life knew."

"I don't understand, then, why he told you, why he didn't just say to you, 'It's driving me crazy because it's something I cannot fathom. It's driving me crazy because I have set myself to imagining what I cannot imagine.' He tried to be equal to a task he could not perform. He was imagining not what he did do but what he could never do. He wasn't the first."

"I know what he said to me, Nathan."

"Do you? Describe to me the circumstances in which Manny told you that the book he was writing, unlike anything he had ever written before, was drawn wholly from his personal history. Remember for me the time and the place. Remember the words that were spoken."

"This was all a hundred years ago. How can I possibly remember those things?"

"But if this was his biggest secret, and if it had preyed on his mind for so long—or even if it had been repressed for so long—then the articulation of it would have been like Raskolnikov's making his confession to Sonia. After all those years of his muffling the family explosion, his confession would have been unforgettable. Tell me, then. Tell me what his confession was like."

"Why do you attack me like this?"

"Amy, you're not under attack, certainly not by me. Listen, please," and this time when I sat, I chose deliberately to settle into Lonoff's easy chair ("What! Are
you
here?") and speak to her from it. "The source for Manny's tale of incest wasn't his life. It couldn't have been. The source was the life of Nathaniel Hawthorne."

"What?" she said loudly, as though I'd startled her from sleep. "Have I missed something? Who's talking about Hawthorne?"

"I am. With good reason."

"You're confusing me hopelessly."

"I don't mean to. Listen to me. You won't be confused. I mean to make everything clear to you."

"Oh, would my tumor love that."

"Listen, please," I said. "I cannot write Manny's biography,
but I can write the biography of that book. So can you. And that's what we're going to do. You know the fluctuations of a novelist's mind. He puts everything in motion. He makes everything shift and slide. It couldn't be clearer how this book came about. Manny was deeply read in the lives of writers, of the New England writers, particularly, on whose terrain he'd lived with Hope for over thirty years. Had he been born and reared in the Berkshires a hundred years earlier, Hawthorne and Melville would have been his neighbors. He was a student of their work. He read their correspondence so often, he knew portions by heart. Of course he knew what Melville had said of his friend Hawthorne. That Hawthorne had lived with a 'great secret.' And he knew what renegade scholars had drawn from that remark, and from others made by family and friends, about Hawthorne's reticence. Manny knew the cunning, scholarly, unprovable conjectures about Hawthorne and his sister Elizabeth, and so in searching for a story to encapsulate his own improbabilities—to examine all the surprising new emotions that had transformed him, as you say, into a man so utterly unlike himself—he laid claim to these conjectures about Hawthorne and his beautiful, enchanting older sister. For this wholly unautobiographical writer, blessed with his genius for complete transformation, the choice was almost inevitable. It's what opened his predicament out for him and enabled him to leave the personal behind. Fiction for him was never representation. It was rumination in narrative form. He thought, I'll make this my reality." While, in fact, I was thinking in much the same vein: I'll make this reality mine, Amy's, Kliman's, everyone's. And for the next hour I proceeded to, effulgently arguing its logic until I had come to believe it myself.

HE

Why would a woman like you marry anyone at twenty-five or twenty-four? In my era, it went without saying that you would have had a child by twenty-four or twenty-five—or twenty-two. But now ... tell me ... I don't know anything you know. I haven't been around.

SHE

Well, besides the obvious of having met someone I fell in love with, and who fell crazily in love with me, and someone who ... anyway, besides all that obvious stuff, if anything for exactly the opposite reason—because nobody would do such a thing in my era. If everyone did it when you were my age, I was the only person I knew from my
college class, the only person among my friends who moved to New York after Harvard who
(laughing)
—who got married when she was twenty-five. It seemed kind of a wild adventure we'd go on together.

HE

(Not quite believing her)
Is this true?

SHE

It is true.
(Laughing again)
"Why would I lie about it?

HE

What did your friends make of it when you did it?

SHE

People were ... no one was shocked. People were happy. But I was the first to do it. Daring to settle in. I like being a first.

HE

Yet you haven't any children.

SHE

No, not yet. Not now, anyway. I think we both want to establish ourselves a bit more before that happens.

HE

As writers.

SHE

Yes. Yes. That's part of the idea of going up there. We'll just work and work.

HE

As opposed to?

SHE

As opposed to working and being here and being confined in a city apartment, and running up against each other all the time, and seeing our friends all the time. I've been so nervous recently, I can't sit still. I can't work. I can't do anything. So I think if we can deal with that, I'll have a better shot at getting something done.

HE

But why did you choose this young man to marry? Is he the most exciting person you could find? You say you wanted an adventure. I've met him. I like him, he's been extremely considerate toward me in just these last twenty-four hours, but I would have thought Kliman would be more of an adventure. He was your lover in college—correct?

SHE

It would be impossible being married to Richard Kliman. He's a live wire. He's better in other capacities. Why Billy? He's smart, he was interesting, we could talk for hours, he didn't bore me. He's nice, and there seems to be an idea that a nice person can't be interesting. Of course I know all that he's not: he's not intense, he's not a fireball. But who wants a fireball? He can be gentle, he can be charming, and he adores me. He absolutely adores me.

HE

Do you adore him?

SHE

I love him very much. But he adores me in another way. He's moving to Massachusetts for a year because I want to. He doesn't want to. I probably wouldn't do that for him.

HE

But you have the money. Of course he does it for you. You two are living on your money, aren't you?

SHE

(She looks startled by his bluntness.)
What makes you think that?

HE

Well, you've published one story in
The New Yorker,
and as yet he's published nothing in a commercial magazine. Who's paying the rent? Your family is.

SHE

Well, it's my money now. It comes from my family but it's my money now.

HE

So he's living off your money.

SHE

You're saying that's why he's going off with me to Massachusetts?

HE

No, no. I'm saying that in an important way he is beholden to you.

SHE

I suppose.

HE

Don't you feel a certain advantage because you have the money and he doesn't?

SHE

I suppose, yes. A lot of men would be very uncomfortable with that.

HE

And a lot of them would be very comfortable with it.

SHE

Yes, a lot of them would love it.
(Laughing)
And he's not either of those.

HE

Is there a lot of money?

SHE

Money's not a problem.

HE

Lucky girl.

SHE

(Almost with wonderment, as though she is amazed whenever she remembers)
Yes. Very.

HE

Is this oil money?

SHE

Yes.

HE

Is your father a friend of George Bush's father?

SHE

Not friends. The elder Bush is somewhat older. There's business to be done.
(Emphatically)
They're not friends.

HE

They voted for them.

SHE

(Laughing)
If Bush's friends were the only ones who voted for him, we'd be much better off. Wouldn't we? It's that world. It's the same world. My father—and
(she confesses)
I suppose I—have the same financial interests as Bush and his father. But they're not friends—I wouldn't say that.

HE

They don't socialize?

SHE

There are parties both go to.

HE

The country club?

SHE

Yeah. Houston Country Club.

HE

Is that the club for the bluebloods?

SHE

Yes. For the nineteenth-century bluebloods. The older Houstonians. A lot of debutante balls take place there.
They're put on parade. There's a swirl of white. And the rest is dancing and drinking and puking.

HE

Did you go swimming at that country club when you were a girl?

SHE

I spent every day of the summer there swimming and playing tennis, except on Mondays, when it was closed. My friend and I helped the Australian pro pick up balls when he was giving a lesson. I was fourteen. My friend was two years older and far sassier, and she slept with him. The assistant pro was the cute son of one of the club members. He was captain of the tennis team at Tulane. I didn't sleep with him, but we did all the other stuff. A cold fish. I didn't enjoy it. Adolescent sex is awful. You don't understand it, and mostly you're trying to see if you can even do it, and it's not enjoyable at all. Once I threw up, fortunately all over him, when he kept thrusting himself too far down my throat.

HE

And you were still only a girl.

SHE

Girls weren't like this in the 1940s?

HE

Nothing like this. Louisa May Alcott would have been at home in my high school. Did you come out? Were you a debutante?

SHE

Oh, you're getting into my dirty secrets.
(Laughing heartily)
Yes, yes, yes. I did. It was awful. I hated every second of it. My mom was so bent on it. We fought through the entire thing. We fought through high school. But I did it for her.
(Laughs more gently now—the range of her laughter is considerable, yet another indication of how at ease she is in her skin.)
And she appreciated it. She did. It was probably the right thing. When I went off to college the first year, my Savannah-born mother told me, "Be nice to the eastern girls, Jamie Hallie."

HE

And did you fall in with the other debutantes at Harvard?

SHE

People hide their debutante luster at Harvard.

HE

Yes?

SHE

Yes. One doesn't talk about that. You keep your sordid secret to yourself.
(Both laugh)

HE

So you fell in with the other rich girls at Harvard.

SHE

Some of them.

HE

And? What was that like?

SHE

What do you want to know?

HE

I don't know anything. I went to another school in another era.

SHE

Honestly, I don't know what to say. They were my friends.

HE

Were they like Billy—interesting and never boring?

SHE

No. They were pretty, very well dressed, very superior. So they—we—thought.

HE

Superior to whom?

SHE

To the stringy-haired, not terribly well-dressed girls from Wisconsin who were great at science.
(Laughs)

HE

What were you great at? Where did you get the idea that you wanted to be a writer?

SHE

Early. I think I knew that back in high school. Plugged away at it.

HE

Are you any good?

SHE

I hope so. I always thought I was. I haven't had all that much luck.

HE

The
New Yorker
story.

SHE

That was great. I thought I'd jumped on, and then—
(trajectory gesture with one hand
) phooo...

HE

How long ago was that?

SHE

That was five years ago. A time of delight. I got married. I got my first story published in
The New Yorker.
But I've lost confidence, and I can't concentrate anymore. As you know, concentration is everything, or a large part of it. And that has made me feel desperate, which makes me less able to concentrate and gives me less confidence. I feel I've moved away from being a person who could do something.

HE

That's why you're talking to me.

SHE

How do you put the two together?