The Ghost Writer (7 page)

“How else would you like to?”

Well, I had done it, escaped at last from wooden self-consciousness and egregious overearnestness—and sporadic at tempts to be witty in the Lonovian mode—and put to him a direct, simple question, the answer to which I wanted very much to hear.

“How else might I like to?” It thrilled me to see him standing there taking altogether seriously what I had asked. “Yes. How would you live now, if you had your way?” Rubbing at the small of his back, he replied, “1 would live in a villa outside Florence.”

“Yes? With whom?”

“A woman, of course.” He answered without hesitation, as though I were another grown man. So, as though I were one, I went ahead and asked, “How old would she be, this woman?” He smiled down at me. “We have both had too much to drink.”

I showed him that there was brandy enough still to swirl around in my snifter.

“For us,” he added, and not bothering this time to catch the trouser crease in his fingers, sat back down somewhat gracelessly in his chair.

“Please,” I said, “I don’t mean to keep you from reading. I’ll be fine alone.”

“Sometimes,” he said, “I like to imagine I’ve read my last book. And looked for the last time at my watch. How old would you think she should be?” he asked. “The woman in Florence. As a writer, what would be your guess?”

“I think you’ll have to ask me to guess that thirty years from now. I don’t know.”

“I say thirty-five. How does that strike you?”

“As right, if you say so.”

“She would be thirty-five and she would make life beautiful for me. She would make life comfortable and beautiful and new. She would drive me in the afternoon to San Gimignano, to the Uffizi, to Siena. In Siena we would visit the cathedral and drink coffee in the square. At the breakfast table she would wear long feminine nightgowns under her pretty robe. They would be things I had bought for her in a shop by the Ponte Vecchio. I would work in a cool stone room with French windows. There would be flowers in a vase. She would cut them and put them there. And so on, Nathan, in this vein.”

Most men want to be children again, or kings, or quarter backs, or multimillionaires. All Lonoff seemed to want was a thirty-five-year-old woman and a year abroad. I thought of Abravanel, that fruit gatherer, and the Israeli actress—“like lava”—who was Abravanel’s third wife. And of that rounded character Andrea Rumbough. In whose sea did Andrea bob now? “If that’s all…” I said.

“Go on. We’re having a drunken conversation.”

“If that’s all, it doesn’t sound too hard to arrange,” I heard myself telling him. “Oh, yes? What young woman that you know is out looking for a fifty-six-year-old bald man to accompany to Italy?”

“You’re not the stereotypical bald man of fifty-six. Italy with you wouldn’t be Italy with anyone.”

“What does that mean? I’m supposed to cash in the seven books for a piece of ass?”

The unforeseen plunge into street talk made me feel momentarily like the boutonnièred floorwalker. “That isn’t what I meant. Though of course that happens, such things are done…”

“Yes, in New York you must see a lot of it.”

“No one with seven books in New York City settles for one piece of ass. That’s what you get for a couplet.” I had spoken as though I knew what I was talking about. “All I meant was that you’re not exactly asking for a harem.”

“Like the fat lady said about the polka-dot dress, ‘It’s nice, but it’s not Lonoff.”

“Why not?”

“Why not?” he repeated, a little scornfully.

“I meant—why couldn’t it be?”

“Why should it be?”

“Because—you want it.”

His answer “Not a good enough reason.”

1 lacked the courage to ask “Why not?” again. If drunk, still only drunk Jews. So far and no further, I was sure. And I was right.

“No,” he said, “you don’t chuck a woman out after thirty-five years because you’d prefer to see a new face over your fruit juice.”

Thinking of his fiction, I had to wonder if he had ever let her in, or the children either, who, he had told me earlier, had provided him with diversion and brought a certain gaiety into his world for so long as they lived at home. In his seven volumes of stories I could not think of a single hero who was not a bachelor, a widower, an orphan, a foundling, or a reluctant fiancé.

“But mere’s more to it than that,” I said. “More to it than the new face… isn’t there?”

“What, the bed? I had the bed. I know my singularity,” said Lonoff, “and what I owe to it.” Here, abruptly, he concluded our drunken conversation. “I’ve got my reading. Let me show you before I go how to work the phonograph. We have an excellent classical record collection. You know about wiping the records? There is a cloth—”

He came heavily to his feet; slowly and heavily, like an elephant. All the obstinacy seemed to have gone out of him, whether owing to our exchange or to the pain in his back—or exhaustion with his singularity—I didn’t know. Maybe every day ended like this.

“Mr. Lonoff—Manny,” I said, “may I ask you something before you go, while we’re alone—about my stones? I don’t know if I entirely understood what you meant by ‘turbulence.’ At dinner. 1 don’t mean to hang on to one word, but any word from you—well, I’d like to be sure I understand it. That is, I’m thrilled just that you read them, and I’m still amazed even to have been invited, and now staying over—all that should be enough. It is enough. And the toast you made”—I felt my emotions getting out of hand, as I had, to my astonishment, while receiving my college diploma with my parents looking on—”I hope I can live up to it. I don’t take those words lightly. But about the stories themselves, what I’d like to know is what you think is wrong with them, what you think I might do—to be better?”

How benign was his smile! Even while kneading the lumbago. “Wrong?”

“Yes.”

“Look, I told Hope this morning: Zuckerman has the most compelling voice I’ve encountered in years, certainly for some body starting out.”

“Do I?”

“I don’t mean style”—raising a finger to make the distinction. “I mean voice: something that begins at around the back of the knees and reaches well above the head. Don’t worry too much about ‘wrong.’ Just keep going. You’ll get there.”

There. I tried to envision it, but couldn’t.. It was more than I could take being here.

I told Hope this morning.

Meanwhile, buttoning his jacket and smoothing down his tie—and checking his watch with the glance that ruined his wife’s every Sunday—he attended to the last item of business on the agenda. Working the record player. I had interrupted his train of thought.

“I want to show you what happens if the arm doesn’t go all the way back at the end of the record.”

“Sure,” I said, “absolutely.”

“It’s been acting up lately and nobody is able to fix it. Some days it somehow Fixes itself, and then out of the blue it’s on the blink again.”

I followed him over to the turntable, thinking less about his classical record collection than about my voice starting back of my knees.

“This is the volume, of course. This is the start button. This is the reject, you push it—”

And this, I realized, is the excruciating scrupulosity, the same maddening, meticulous attention to every last detail that makes you great, that keeps you going and got you through and now is dragging you down. Standing with E. I. Lonoff over the dis obedient arm of his record player, I understood the celebrated phenomenon for the first time: a man, his destiny, and his work—all one. What a terrible triumph!

“And,” he reminded me, “it would be best for the records, and for your own pleasure, if you remember to wipe them first.”

Oh, the fussiness, the fastidiousness! The floorwalker incarnate! To wrestle the blessing of his fiction out of that misfortune—“triumph” didn’t begin to describe it.

Suddenly I wanted to kiss him. I know this happens to men more often then is reported, but I was new to manhood (about five minutes into it, actually) and was bewildered by the strength of a feeling that I had rarely had toward my own father once I’d begun to shave. It seemed, at the moment, even stronger than what invariably came over me when I was left alone with those long-necked aerial friends of Betsy’s, who walked with their feet turned charmingly outward and looked (just like Betsy!) so appetizingly wan and light and liftable. But in this house of for bearance I was better at suppressing my amorous impulses than I had been lately, unchained in Manhattan.

II.   
NATHAN DEDALUS

W
HO
could sleep after that? I didn’t even turn the lamp off to try. For the longest time I just stared at E. I. Lonoff’s tidy desk: neat piles of typing paper, each stack a different pale color—for different drafts, I assumed. Finally I got up and sacrilege though it surely was, sat on his typing chair in my undershorts. No wonder his back hurt. It wasn’t a chair made for relaxing in, not if you were his size. Lightly I touched my fingers to his portable typewriter keys. Why a portable for a man who went nowhere? Why not a machine on the order of a cannonball, black and big and built to write for all time? Why not a comfortable padded executive’s chair to lean back in and think? Why not indeed.

Pinned to the bulletin board beside his desk—the cell’s only real embellishments—were a little wall calendar from the local bank and two annotated index cards. One card bore a fragmentary sentence ascribed to “Schumann, on Chopin’s Scherzo No. 2 in B flat minor. Op. 31.” It read, “...so overflowing with tenderness, boldness, love and contempt that it may be compared, not inappropriately, to a poem by Byron.” I didn’t know what to make of it there, or rather, what Lonoff made of it, until I remembered that Amy Bellette could play Chopin with great charm. Maybe it was she who had typed it out for him, scrupulous attribution and all—enclosing it, perhaps, with the gift of a record so that in the late afternoons he could listen to Chopin even when she was no longer around. Perhaps it was this very line she’d been musing upon when I first saw her on the study floor musing because the description seemed as pertinent to herself as to the music…

If displaced, what had become of her family? Murdered? Did that explain her “contempt”? But for whom the overflowing love, then? Him? If so, the contempt might well be for Hope. If so, if so.

It required no ingenuity to guess the appeal of the quotation typed on the other card. After what Lonoff had been telling me all evening, I could understand why he might want these three sentences hanging over his head while beneath them he sat turning his own sentences around. “We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.” Sentiments ascribed to a story I did not know by Henry James called “The Middle Years.” But “the madness of art”? I would have thought the madness of everything but art. The art was what was sane, no? Or was I missing something? Before the night was over I was to read “The Middle Years” twice through, as though preparing to be examined on it in the morning. But that was canon law to me then: ready to write a thousand words on “What does Henry James mean by ‘the madness of art’?” if the question should happen to turn up on my paper napkin at breakfast.

Photographs of Lonoff’s children were set out on a bookshelf behind the typing chair one male, two females, not a trace of the paternal genes in any of their bones. One of the girls, a fair, freckled maiden in horn-rimmed glasses, looked in fact, much as her shy, studious mother probably did back in her art-school days. Beside her photo in the twin frame was a postcard that had been mailed from Scotland to Massachusetts one August day nine years earlier, addressed to the writer alone. This perhaps accounted for its status as a memento to be preserved under glass. Much about his life indicated that communicating with his children had been no easier for him than having enough opinions for Manhattan in the thirties. “Dear Pop, We are now in Banffshire (Highlands) and I am standing amidst the wreck of Balvenie Castle, Dufftown, where Mary Stuart once stayed. Yesterday we biked to Cawdor (Thane of Cawdor, ca. 1050, Shakespeare’s Macbeth), where Duncan was murdered. See you soon. Love, Becky.”

Also directly behind his desk were several shelves of his works in foreign translation. Seating myself on the floor I tried translating from French and German sentences that I had read first in Lonoff’s English. With the more exotic tongues the most I could do was try to spot his characters’ names in the hundreds of indecipherable pages. Pechter. Marcus. Unman. Winkler. There they were, surrounded on all sides by Finnish. And which language was hers? Portuguese? Italian? Hungarian? In which did she overflow like a poem by Byron? On a large lined pad that I took from my briefcase, a bulging Bildungsroman briefcase—ten pounds of books, five obscure magazines, and easily enough paper to write the whole of my first novel if it should happen to come to me while riding back and forth on the bus—I began methodically to list everything on his bookshelves I had not read. There was more German philosophy than I had been expecting, and only halfway down the page I already seemed to have sentenced myself to a lifetime at hard labor. But, worthily, I kept going—to the accompaniment of the words with which he had commended me before going up to his reading. That, and the toast, had been echoing in my head for an hour. On a clean sheet of paper I finally wrote down what he’d said so as to see exactly what he’d meant. All he’d meant.

As it turned out, I wanted someone else to see as well, for soon I had forgotten the forthcoming ordeal with Heidegger and- Wittgenstein, and was seated with my pad at Lonoff’s desk, struggling to explain to my father—the foot-doctor father, the first of my fathers—the “voice” that, according to no less a vocalist than E. I. Lonoff, started back of my knees and reached above my head. The letter was overdue. Three weeks now he had been waiting for some enlightened sign of contrition for the offenses I had begun to commit against my greatest supporters. And for three weeks I had let him stew, if that is how you describe being yourself unable to think of little else upon awakening from bad dreams at 4 a.m.