Exit Ghost (5 page)

Rob Massey was the fantasy caretaker, the caretaker everybody wants, Belinda the fantasy cleaning woman, the cleaning woman everyone wants, and though I no longer had Larry Hollis watching over me, I still had the two of them, and all the time I devoted to my writing, even the writing itself, was in part the result of their looking so well after everything else. And now I was letting them go.

"My health's fine. I've just got some work to do down here, and so I exchanged houses with them. I'll stay in touch with you, and if there's anything I should know, call me collect."

Good-naturedly, Rob said to me, "Nathan, nobody's called anybody collect for twenty years."

"Is that so? Well, you know what I mean. I'm going to tell them to keep Belinda on once a week and to turn to you two if anything goes wrong. I'll pay you directly, unless Jamie Logan or Billy Davidoff asks you to do something especially for them, and that you can work out together." It gave me a surprising pang to say Jamie's name and to think that I was not only losing her along with Rob and Belinda but arranging for the loss of her to befall me. It was as if I were losing the thing I loved best in the world.

I told them that after I'd moved into the West 71st Street apartment we'd make arrangements for them to drive my stuff down to the city and for one of them then to drive my car back and, while I was away, for them to keep the car in their garage and be sure to run it from
time to time. I had finished a book two months earlier and hadn't yet begun another one, so there were no manuscripts or notebooks to transport. Had there been a new book under way I probably wouldn't have contemplated the move at all; if I had, I certainly wouldn't have left the manuscript to anyone's care other than my own. What's more, had I to return for any reason to my house in the woods, I knew I would never head back to New York again, though not for Jamie's reasons, not because of the fear of terrorist danger, but because everything essential I had where I was, the unbroken stretches of tranquil time that my writing now required, the books I needed to satisfy my interests, and an environment in which I could best maintain my equilibrium and keep myself fit to work for as long as I could. All the city would add was everything I'd determined I no longer had use for: Here and Now.

Here and Now.

Then and Now.

The Beginning and the End of Now.

These were the lines that I jotted onto the scrap of paper where I'd previously written Amy's name and the phone number of my new New York apartment. Titles for something. Perhaps this. Or should I just come right out with it—call it
A Man in Diapers.
A book about knowing where to go for your agony and then going there for it.

The next morning I received a phone call from the urologist's office asking if everything was all right and if I'd
noticed any change in my condition—a fever, pain, anything out of the ordinary. I said I felt fine but reported that, as best I could tell, the incontinence hadn't lessened. The doctor's calm, comforting nurse advised me to continue to be patient and to wait to see if there was an improvement, which was not an unlikely possibility, even in some cases weeks after the procedure, and she reminded me that it required a second and sometimes a third procedure to achieve the desired effect and that one could safely undergo the procedure once a month for three months. "By giving you a narrower opening, the chances are good that we will have reduced or controlled the dripping. Please don't fail to contact us and let the doctor know exactly what's going on. Whatever happens, we'd like you to call us here within a week. Do that for us, Mr. Zuckerman, please."

The urge was overwhelming now to cut loose from the shallow, soft-headed fantasy of regeneration, get my car from the garage around the corner, and speed north for home, where I could quickly put my thoughts back where they belonged, under the transforming exigencies of prose fiction, which allow for no sweet dreams. What you do not have, you live without—you're seventy-one, and that's the deal. The vainglorious days of self-assertion are over. Thinking otherwise is ridiculous. There was no need to learn anything more about Amy Bellette or Jamie Logan, nor was there any need to learn anything about myself. That too was ridiculous. The drama of self-discovery was long over. I had not lived as a child all these years, and I
knew more than was useful on the subject as it was. Until well into my sixties, I'd not looked away, drifted off, turned my back, I'd tried my best to show no fear, but whatever work might remain could be completed without knowing or hearing more about Al Qaeda, terrorism, the war in Iraq, or the possible reelection of Bush. It was not advisable to collide with all this indignant, highly emotional crisis-brooding—I'd been more than susceptible to my own obsessive brand during the Vietnam years—and if I moved back to the city it wouldn't be long before I was blanketed by it and by the not necessarily enlightening loquaciousness that accompanied such brooding and that, at the end of a nightlong spell submerged in its emptiness, could leave you seething like a lunatic, shattered and stupid, and that surely had contributed to Jamie Logan's decision to take flight.

Or was the history of the past few years sufficient in itself to lead her to expect a second gruesome Al Qaeda attack that would carry her off along with Billy and thousands more? I had no way of judging if she'd concluded correctly or was half demented by the situation (as perhaps the rational, patient young husband believed), or if her foresight was to be substantiated by bin Laden, or if by staying I'd be inflicting on myself a blow more devastating than the disorientation visited on Rip Van Winkle. As a onetime creature of intense responsiveness who'd over the preceding decade tautened himself into a low-keyed solitary, I'd got out of the habit of giving in to every impulse that crossed my nerve endings, and yet, in just
my few days back, I had arrived at what might turn out to be the most thoughtless snap decision I'd ever made.

The hotel phone rang. A man who introduced himself as a friend of Jamie Logan's and Billy Davidoff's. Knew Jamie from Harvard, where she was two years ahead of him. A freelance journalist. Richard Kliman. Wrote on literary and cultural subjects. Articles in the
Times
Sunday magazine,
Vanity Fair, New York,
and
Esquire.
Was I free today? Could he take me to lunch?

"What do you want?" I asked.

"I'm writing about an old acquaintance of yours."

I was no longer skilled in indulging journalists, if I ever had been, nor was I heartened at being so easily located, touching as it did on the immediate circumstances that had first exiled me from New York.

Without explanation, I hung up. Kliman called back within seconds. "We were cut off," he said.

"I cut us off."

"Mr. Zuckerman, I'm writing a biography of E. I. Lonoff. I asked Jamie for your number because I know you met Lonoff and corresponded with him back in the 1950s. I know that as a young writer you were his great admirer. I'm now just a few years older than you were then. I'm not the prodigy you were—this is my first book, and it's not fiction. But I'm trying to do no more or less than you did. I know what I'm not, but I also know what I am. I'm trying to give it everything I have. If you'd like to call and ask Jamie to confirm my credentials—"

No, I'd like to call and ask Jamie why she had informed Mr. Kliman of my whereabouts.

"The last thing Lonoff wanted was a biographer," I said. "He had no ambition to be talked about. Or read about. He wanted anonymity, a harmless enough preference achieved automatically by most and surely a desire easy enough to respect. Look, he's been dead for over forty years. Nobody reads him. Nobody remembers him. Next to nothing is known about him. Any biographical treatment would be largely imaginary—in other words, a travesty."

"But
you
read him," Kliman responded. "You even mentioned his work to us when you came to have lunch at the Signet Society with a bunch of students back in my sophomore year. You told us which stories of his to read. I was there. Jamie was a member and she invited me to come along. Do you remember the Signet Society, the arts club where you had lunch at a big communal table, and afterward we went into the living room—remember that? The evening before, you'd read from your work in Memorial Hall, and one of the students invited you, and you agreed to come for lunch before you left the next day."

"No, I don't remember," I said, though I did—the reading because it was the last I'd given before my prostatectomy and the last ever, and I even remembered the lunch, when Kliman spoke of it, because of the dark-haired girl who'd sat looking at me from across the table. That must have been Jamie Logan at twenty. She'd pretended on West 71st Street that we'd never met, but we had, and I'd noticed her then. What struck me as unusual? Was it merely that she was the prettiest of them all? That could have done it, of course—that and the self-assured reserve suggested by a serene silence that might as easily have indicated that she was just too shy at the time to speak up, though not so shy that she couldn't stare and invite being stared back at in turn.

"You're still interested in him," Kliman was saying. "I know because only the other day you bought the cloth-bound Scribner's edition of the stories. At the Strand. A friend of mine works at the Strand. She told me. She was thrilled to see you there."

"A tactically stupid remark to make to a recluse, Kliman."

"I'm not a tactician. I'm an enthusiast."

"How old are you?"

"Twenty-eight," he said.

"What's your game?" I asked.

"What motivates me? I'd say the spirit of inquiry. I'm driven by my curiosity, Mr. Zuckerman. That's not necessarily something that makes me popular. It already hasn't made me popular with you. But to answer the question, that's the drive that's strongest."

Was he naively obnoxious or obnoxiously naive or just young or just cunning? "Stronger than the drive to kick off a career?" I asked. "To make a splash?"

"Yes, sir. Lonoff is an enigma to me. I'm trying to puzzle him out. I want to do him justice. I thought you could help. It's important to speak to people who knew him.
Some still live, fortunately. I need people who knew him to corroborate my idea of him or, if they see fit to, to challenge it. Lonoff was in hiding, not just as a man but as a writer. The hiding was the catalyst for his genius. The wound and the bow. Lonoff kept a great secret from his early years. It's only coincidental that he lived in Hawthorne country, but it's been argued that Nathaniel Hawthorne lived with a great secret too, and one not that dissimilar. You know what I'm talking about."

"I have no idea."

"Hawthorne's son wrote that Melville had been convinced in his later years that all his life Hawthorne had 'concealed some great secret.' Well, I'm more than convinced that was true of E. I. Lonoff. It helps to explain many things. His work among them."

"Why does his work need explaining?"

"As you said, nobody reads him."

"Nobody reads anyone when you think about it. On the other hand, as I needn't bother to tell you, there's a huge popular appetite for secrets. As for the biographical 'explanation,' generally it makes matters worse by adding components that aren't there and would make no aesthetic difference if they were."

"I know what you're telling me," he said, clearly prepared to shake off what I was telling him, "but I can't be that cynical and do the job decently. The disappearance of Lonoff's fiction is a cultural scandal. One of many, but one I can try to address."

"So," I said, "you've taken it upon yourself to undo the
scandal by revealing the great secret from his early years that explains everything. I assume the great secret is sexual."

Dryly he said, "That's very astute of you, sir."

I would have hung up again, but I was the curious one now, curious to see how dogged and smug he intended to be. Without its ever turning outright belligerent, the unfaltering forward march of the voice made clear he was prepared to do battle. It was, unexpectedly, a passing rendition of me at about that stage, as though Kliman were mimicking (or, as now seemed more to the point, deliberately mocking) my mode of forging ahead when
I
started out. There it was: the tactless severity of vital male youth, not a single doubt about his coherence, blind with self-confidence and the virtue of knowing what matters most. The ruthless sense of necessity. The annihilating impulse in the face of an obstacle. Those grand grandstand days when you shrink from nothing and you're only right. Everything is a target; you're on the attack; and you, and you alone, are right.

The invulnerable boy who thinks he's a man and is seething to play a big role. Well, let him play it. He'll find out.

"I wish you weren't entirely antagonistic," he said, though it didn't sound now as if he cared. "I wish you'd give me the chance to explain to you the significance of his story as I see it and how it explains what happened to his writing when he left Hope and went off with Amy Bellette."

His saying "when he left Hope" galled me. I understood him—the uncompromising tenacity, the bluntness, the indomitable virus of superiority (he was going to be kind enough to explain things to me)—but that didn't mean I had to trust him. Other than hearsay and gossip, what could he know about "when he left Hope"?

"That needs no explaining either," I said.

"A thoroughly documented critical biography could go a long way toward resurrecting Lonoff and restoring his rightful place in twentieth-century literature. But his children won't talk to me, his wife is the oldest person in America with Alzheimer's and
can't
talk to me, and Amy Bellette no longer bothers to answer my letters. I've also sent you letters you haven't answered."

"I don't remember any."

"They were sent in care of your publisher, the proper method, I thought, of contacting someone known to be as private as you. The envelopes came back with a sticker attached: 'Return to sender. Unsolicited mail no longer accepted.'"

"That's a service any publisher will provide. I learned about it first from Lonoff. When I was your age."