Exit Ghost (6 page)

"On that sticker that you use, that's Lonoff's language—his formulation?"

It
was
Lonoff's language—I couldn't have improved on it—but I didn't answer.

"I've found out a lot about Miss Bellette. I want to verify it. I need a credible source. You're certainly that. Are you in touch with her?"

"No."

"She lives in Manhattan. She works as a translator. She
has brain cancer. If the cancer gets worse before I get to speak with her again, everything she knows will be lost. She could tell me more than anyone."

"To what end tell you more?"

"Look, old men hate young men. That goes without saying."

So offhand, the cryptic flash of wisdom he suddenly displays. Is this generational dispute something he read about or something someone told him about or something that he knows from his own prior experience, or did the awareness of it arrive out of the blue? "I'm just trying to be responsible," Kliman added, and now it was the word "responsible" that galled me.

"Isn't Amy Bellette why you're in New York?" he asked. "That's what you told Billy and Jamie, that you were here to attend to a friend with cancer."

"This time when you're cut off," I said, "don't call back."

Billy phoned fifteen minutes later to apologize for any indiscretion he or Jamie had committed. He hadn't known that our meeting was to be treated as confidential, and he was sorry for the discomfort they may have caused. Kliman, who had just phoned them to report how badly things had gone with me, was a college boyfriend of Jamie's she was friendly with still, and she had meant no harm in telling him who it was that had answered their ad. Billy said that—wrongly, as he now understood it—neither he nor Jamie had foreseen my objections to talking to the biographer of E. I. Lonoff, a writer I was known by all of them to admire. He assured me that they wouldn't again
make the mistake of speaking about the arrangement we'd reached, though I had to realize that once I moved into their place, it wouldn't be long before their network of friends and acquaintances knew who was there, and, likewise, once they'd moved into my place...

He was polite and thorough, he made sense, and so I said, "No harm done." Of course Kliman had been a boyfriend of Jamie's. Another reason I couldn't bear him.
The
reason.

"Richard can be insistent," Billy said. "But," he repeated, "we do want to apologize for telling him where you're staying. That was thoughtless."

"No harm done," I repeated, and once again told myself to get in the car and drive home. New York was full of people motivated by "the spirit of inquiry," and not all of them ethically up to the job. If I were to take over the 71st Street apartment—and the telephone there—I would unavoidably find myself in the sort of circumstances that were superfluous to me and that, as I had just demonstrated, I no longer had the wherewithal to finesse. Not that my curiosity hadn't been aroused by what Kliman was insinuating about Lonoff. Not that I wasn't surprised by the unlikeliness of my coming upon Lonoff's Amy for the first time in close to fifty years, and by my following her from the hospital to that luncheonette, and by Kliman's then calling to tell me about Amy's brain cancer and to try to tantalize me with his insider's knowledge of Lonoff's Hawthorne-like "secret." For one who had cultivated seclusion and bound himself to repetitiveness and thrown
in his lot with monotony, who had banished everything deemed by him nonessential (purportedly in the service of his work, more likely at the mercy of a failing), it was like being overwhelmed by some rare astronomical event, as though an eclipse of the sun had taken place in the way eclipses had occurred throughout the prescientific eons: without resident earthlings anticipating their imminence.

Precipitously stepping into a new future, I had retreated unwittingly into the past—a retrograde trajectory not that uncommon, but uncanny anyhow.

"We want to invite you to spend election night with us," Billy said. "It'll just be Jamie and me. We're going to be at home to watch the results. We can have dinner here. Stay afterward for as long as you like. Why don't you come?"

"Tuesday night?"

He laughed. "Still the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November."

"I will be there," I said, "I accept," thinking not of the election but of Billy's wife and Kliman's former girlfriend and of the pleasure I could no longer provide a woman, even should the opportunity present itself. Old men hate young men? Young men fill them with envy and hatred? Why shouldn't they? The preposterous was seeping in fast from every quarter, and my heart pounded away with lunatic eagerness, as if the medical procedure to remedy incontinence had something to do with reversing impotence, which of course it did not—as though, however sexually disabled, however sexually unpracticed I was after eleven
years away, the drive excited by meeting Jamie had madly reasserted itself as the animating force. As though in the presence of this young woman there was hope.

Through a single, brief meeting with Billy and Jamie I was not merely dropping back into a world of ambitious literary youth that was of no interest to me but opening myself to the irritants, stimulants, temptations, and dangers of the present moment. In my case, the specific danger threatening me back when I decided to leave the city for good—the danger of fatal attack—didn't emanate from the menace of Islamic terrorism but from death threats that I'd begun to receive and that the FBI determined to be issuing from a single source. Each was written on a picture postcard bearing a postmark from somewhere in northern New Jersey, the region where I'd been raised. The same location never appeared on a postmark twice, though the figure pictured on the front of the card was invariably the current pope, John Paul II, either blessing the crowd at St. Peter's or kneeling at prayer or sitting resplendent in brocaded white robes. The first postcard read:

Dear Jew Bastard, We are part of a new international organization to counter the growth of the racist, filth-laden philosophy Zionism. As yet another Jew parasitizing "goy" countries and their inhabitants, you have been marked down to be targeted. Because of the location of your Jew York apartment, it has fallen to this "department" to do the "targeting." This notice marks the beginning.

The second card bearing John Paul's picture carried the same salutation and message, the text's only alteration in the conclusion: "notice number two, jew !"

Now, I had received communications as vile and ominous in the past, but never more than a couple a year, and most years none at all. Also, on the streets of New York, strangers would intermittently gravitate toward me and initiate a difficult encounter because of something in my fiction that enticed them or that infuriated them or that enticed them because it infuriated them or that infuriated them because it enticed them. I'd been through more than one such unsettling intrusion because of the conception of their author that the books had inspired in minds easily swayed into fantasy by fiction. But this was being
targeted:
not only did these postcards arrive weekly for months on end, but during this same period a reviewer living in the Midwest who'd once written a laudatory review of a book of mine in
The New York Times Book Review
also received a threatening postcard picturing the pope, his addressed to him at the college where he taught, in care of the "Department of Sycophancy and English." No salutation. Just this, written in a tiny hand:

Only a cheap little asskissing two-bit fucking "English professor" would have stooped to calling this Jew bastard's latest pile of dogshit "his richest and most rewarding." What a tragedy that scum like you get away with wrenching young minds out of shape. AK-47 fire. That remedy would restore American higher education to what it once was. Or help to.

It was my New York lawyer who put me in touch with the FBI. As a result, I was visited at my apartment on East 91st Street by an agent named M. J. Sweeney, a small, sprightly southerner in her early forties, who took all of the cards (which she sent on to Washington, along with the one received by the reviewer, for examination and analysis) and who advised me of the precautions I should observe, as though she were instructing me in the basic rules of a sport or game I was unfamiliar with. I wasn't to leave a building without first scrutinizing the street in both directions and across the way for anyone suspicious-looking. On the street, if approached by people I didn't know, I was to keep my eyes on their hands instead of their faces to be sure they didn't reach for a weapon. There were more suggestions like these, and I immediately set out to follow them, but not with much conviction that they would furnish serious protection against someone dedicated to gunning me down. The words "AK-47 fire," which had appeared first in the reviewer's postcard, now began to turn up in the messages addressed to me. Some weeks, "AK-47 fire," written with a black felt-tip marker in characters two inches high, constituted the entire message.

M.J. and I spoke each time a new postcard arrived, and I would photocopy both sides before putting the original in an envelope and mailing it off to her. When I called one day to tell her that my latest book had been nominated for a prize and I was expected to attend the award ceremony in a midtown Manhattan hotel, she asked, "What
kind of security do they have?" "I would think very little." "It's open to the public?" "It's not
not
open to the public," I said; "I can't imagine anybody determined to get in having trouble. I'd guess there'll be around a thousand people." "Well, watch yourself," she said. "You sound as if you don't think I ought to show up." "I can't speak for the FBI," M.J. said. "The FBI cannot advise you on this." "Should I happen to win, if I have to go up on the stage to accept the prize, I'd make an easy target, would I not?" "If I were speaking as a friend," she replied, "I'd say you would." "If you were speaking as a friend, what would you suggest I do?" "Does it mean a lot to you to be there?" "It means nothing." "Well, if it were me to whom it meant nothing," M.J. said, "and I'd just got twenty-some death threats in the mail, I wouldn't go anywhere near the place."

The next morning I rented a car and drove to western Massachusetts, and within forty-eight hours I'd bought my cabin, two large rooms with a big stone fireplace in one and a wood stove in the other and between them a small kitchen with a window looking out back onto a grove of twisted old apple trees to a good-sized oval swimming pond and a big storm-damaged willow tree. The twelve acres were situated across from a picturesque swamp where waterfowl were plentiful and a couple hundred feet back from a dirt road that you followed for close to three miles before you reached the blacktop that wound five more miles down the mountain to Athena. Athena was where E. I. Lonoff was teaching when I met him in 1956, along with his wife and Amy Bellette. The Lonoff house, built
in 1790 and passed down over the years through his wife's family, was a ten-minute drive from the house I'd just bought. It was because this locale had been Lonoff's place of refuge that I had instinctively chosen it as my own—because of that and because I was twenty-three years old when I'd met him, and never forgotten it.

I'd learned to use a rifle in the army, and so I bought a .22 at a local gun shop and spent a few afternoons firing alone in the woods until I got the hang of it again. I kept the rifle in a closet next to my bed and a box of ammunition beside it on the closet floor. I arranged to have a security system installed that connected to the local state troopers' barracks, and to have outdoor spotlights fixed at the corners of my roof so that the grounds wouldn't be pitch-black if I got home after dark. Then I called M.J. and told her what I'd done. "Maybe I'm worse off out here in the woods, but so far I'm feeling less exposed and anxious than I felt in the city. I'm keeping my apartment for the time being, but I'm going to live up here for now, till there are no more death threats coming my way." "Does anybody know where you are?" "So far only you. I've arranged for my mail to be forwarded elsewhere." "Well," M.J. said, "it wouldn't have been my first recommendation, but you must do whatever makes you feel safe." "I'll be in and out of the city, but I'll be living here." "Good luck," she said, then went on to tell me she'd now have to transfer my file to the Boston office. After she said goodbye and hung up, I agonized all night long over what I had done, convinced that all the while I'd been receiving
the death threats, it had been M. J. Sweeney who had been the barrier between me and my correspondent's AK-47.

When the death threats eventually stopped coming by mail I didn't forsake the cabin. By then it had turned into a home, and there I lived those eleven years writing books, staying fit, getting cancer, taking the radical cure, and, off by myself, without my quite knowing it or my keeping track, advancing in age by the day. The habit of solitude, of solitude without anguish, had taken hold of me, and with it the pleasures of being unanswerable and being free—paradoxically, free above all of oneself. For days on end of only work, I would feel sweetened by luxurious contentment. Loneliness, raving loneliness, was sporadic and amenable to strategy: should it sweep over me during the day, I'd leave my desk and go for a five-mile walk in the woods or along the river, and when it insinuated itself at night, I'd temporarily put aside the book I was reading and listen to something requiring the whole of my attention—something, say, like a Bartok quartet. Thus did I restore stability and make the loneliness bearable. All in all, being without any need to play a role was preferable to the friction and agitation and conflict and pointlessness and disgust that, as a person ages, can render less than desirable the manifold relations that make for a rich, full life. I stayed away because over the years I conquered a way of life that I (and not just I) would have thought impossible, and there's pride taken in that. I may have left New York because I was fearful, but by paring and paring and paring away, I found in my solitude a species of freedom that was to my liking much of the time.