Exit Ghost (15 page)

But isn't one's pain quotient shocking enough without fictional amplification, without giving things an intensity that is ephemeral in life and sometimes even unseen? Not for some. For some very, very few that amplification, evolving uncertainly out of nothing, constitutes their only assurance, and the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most.

W
HEN AT LAST
I lifted the phone to take the message, there was the voice I'd overheard while leaving the hospital the previous Thursday, the youthful voice of the aged Amy Bellette. "Nathan Zuckerman," she said, "I learned your whereabouts from a note left in my mailbox by a colossal pest named Richard Kliman. I don't know if you want to bother to respond or whether you even remember me. We met in Massachusetts in 1956. In the winter. I'd been E. I. Lonoff's student at Athena College. I was working in Cambridge. You were a fledgling writer at the Quahsay Colony. We both stayed as the Lonoffs' guests that night. A snowy evening in the Berkshires a very long time ago. I'll understand if you
don't care to call back." She left her number and hung up.

Once again, not thinking, not even about Kliman's motive, which was inscrutable to me—what could he possibly expect to get out of putting Amy and me together? But I did not linger on Kliman, nor did I consider what could have prompted this frail woman who was either recovering or dying from brain cancer to contact me once she learned through Kliman that I was nearby. Nor did I stop to wonder why it should be so easy provoking a response in me when I wanted only to undo the error of trying to ameliorate things and return home to resume living as more than my incapacities.

I dialed her number as though it were the code to restoring the fullness that once encompassed us all; I dialed as though spinning a lifetime counterclockwise were an act as natural and ordinary as resetting the timer on the kitchen stove. My heartbeat was discernible again, not because I was anxiously anticipating being within arm's reach of Jamie Logan but from envisioning Amy's black hair and dark eyes and the confident look on her face in 1956—from remembering her fluency and her charm and her quick mind, crammed back then with Lonoff and literature.

While the phone rang I recalled watching at the luncheonette as she removed the faded red rainhat to reveal her disfigured skull and the battering that bad luck had provided. "Too late," I'd thought, and got up and paid for my coffee and left without intruding. "Leave her to her fortitude."

The setting was a standard-issue Hilton hotel room, bland and drained of anything personal, but my determination to reach her had transported me nearly fifty years back, when gazing upon an exotic girl with a foreign accent seemed to an untried boy the answer to everything. I dialed the number now as a divided being no more or less integrated than anyone else, as the fledgling she'd met in 1956
and
as the improbable onlooker (with the unforeseeable biography) that he had become by 2004. Yet never was I less free of that fledgling and his tangle of innocent idealism, precocious seriousness, excitable curiosity, and wanton desire, still comically ungratified, than while I waited for her to answer. When she did, I didn't know whom to picture at the other end of the line: Amy then or now. The voice conveyed the radiant freshness of a young girl about to break into a dance, but the head carved up by a surgeon's knife remained too grim an image to suppress.

"I saw you at a luncheonette on Madison and Ninety-sixth," Amy said. "I was too shy to speak. You're so important now."

"Am I? Not out where I live. How are you, Amy?" I asked, saying nothing about having been so stunned by the brutality of her transformation that I'd been too shy myself to approach her. "I remember very clearly that night we all met. The snowy night in i956. I didn't realize he was still married to his wife at the time of his death until I read the obituary. I thought he had married you."

"We never married. He couldn't do it. That was all right.
We were together for four years, mainly in Cambridge. We lived a year in Europe, we came home, he wrote and he wrote, he taught a little, he got sick, and he died."

"He was writing a novel," I said.

"In his late fifties writing a first novel. If the leukemia hadn't killed him, that novel would have."

"Why?"

"The subject. When Primo Levi killed himself everyone said it was because of his having been an inmate at Auschwitz. I thought it was because of his
writing
about Auschwitz, the labor of the last book, contemplating that horror with all that clarity. Getting up every morning to write that book would have killed anyone."

She was speaking of Levi's
The Drowned and the Saved.

"Manny was that miserable." It was the first time I'd ever called him Manny. In i956 I was Nathan, she was Amy, and he and Hope were Mr. and Mrs. Lonoff.

"Things combined to make him unhappy."

"So it was a hard time for you then," I said, "having gotten what the two of you wanted."

"It was a hard time because I was young enough to think that it was what he wanted, too. He knew it was nothing more than what he thought he wanted. Once he was rid of her and at last with me, everything changed—he was gloomy, he was remote, he was irascible. He was conscience-stricken, and it was terrible. When we were living in Oslo there were nights when I lay beside him, making no movement, rigid with anger. Sometimes I prayed he would die in his sleep. Then he became ill and it was
idyllic again. It was the way it had been when I was his student. Yes," she said, underscoring the fact she wouldn't hide, "that's what happened: in adversity it was strangely rapturous, and when there was no obstacle we were miserable."

"That's imaginable," I said, and I was thinking, Rapture. Yes, I remember rapture. It comes at a very high price.

"Imaginable," she replied, "but startling."

"No. Not at all. Please go on."

"The last few weeks were hideous: he was confused and slept most of the time. He would make noises sometimes and wave his hands in the air, but there was nothing he said that you could understand. A few days before he died he had a gigantic rage. We were in the bathroom. I was kneeling in front of him changing his diaper. 'This is like college hazing,' he said. 'Get out of this bathroom!' and he hit me. He'd never hit anyone in his life. I can't tell you how elated I was. He still had strength enough to strike me like that. He's not going to die! He's not going to die! For days he'd been barely conscious. Or he'd hallucinate. 'I'm on the floor,' he'd cry from bed. 'Pick me up from the floor.' The doctor came and gave him morphine. Then one morning he spoke. He had been unconscious all of the day before. He said, 'The end is so immense, it is its own poetry. It requires little rhetoric. Just state it plainly.' I didn't know if he was quoting somebody, remembering something from all his reading, or if this was the final message. I couldn't ask. It didn't matter. All I did was to hold his head and say it back to him. I couldn't help myself any longer. I cried terribly. But I said it. 'The end is so immense, it is its own poetry. It requires little rhetoric. Just state it plainly.' And Manny nodded as best he could, and I've looked for that quotation ever since, Nathan. I can't find it. Who said that, who wrote that? 'The end is so immense...'"

"It sounds like him. His aesthetic in a nutshell."

"And he said more. I had to keep my ear to his mouth to hear him. Barely audibly, he said, 'I want a shave and a haircut. I want to be clean.' I found a barber. It took him more than an hour because Manny couldn't hold his head up. When it was over I showed the barber to the door and gave him twenty dollars. When I got back to the bed Manny was dead. Dead but clean." Here she broke off, though only for an instant, and I had nothing to say anyway. I'd known he died, and now I knew how, and though we'd met but that once, it still came as a shock. "I had it, and I'm glad I did, the four years of it," she told me, "every day and night of it. I'd see his bald head shining under his reading lamp, I'd see him sitting there every evening after dinner, carefully underlining what he was reading and stopping to think and jotting down a sentence in his spiral notebook, and I'd think, There is only one such man."

A woman who's lived fifty years remembering four years—an entire life defined by that. "I have to tell you," I said, "Kliman's pestering me about him too."

"I figured as much when he was the one who led me to you. He wants to write the biography that I'd hoped nobody would. A biography, Nathan. I don't want that. It's
a second death. It puts another stop to a life by casting it in concrete for all time. The biography's the patent on the life—and who is this boy to hold that patent? Who is he to be Manny's judge? Who is he to fix him forever in people's minds? Doesn't he seem to you exceedingly shallow?"

"It doesn't matter what he seems or even what he is. That you don't want him is all that matters. What can you do to stop him?"

"Me?" She laughed weakly. "Why, nothing. The manuscripts of all the stories are at Harvard. He can go look at those, anyone can, though when I last checked, not a single person had asked to see them for thirty-two years. Fortunately nobody seems willing to talk to Mr. Kliman, nobody that I know of, anyway. I certainly won't see him, not again. But none of that need necessarily stop him. He can make it all up out of whole cloth, and one has no legal remedy. You can't libel the dead. And if he libels the living, if he manipulates the facts to suit himself, who has resources sufficient to sue him or the publisher he sells his trash to?"

"The Lonoff children. What about them?"

"That's a saga for another time. They never much liked the awestruck young girl who steals the renowned old man. Or the renowned old man who abandons the aging wife for the awestruck young girl. He would never have left if Hope hadn't forced the issue, but the children would have preferred that he remain with their mother till he was properly asphyxiated. His tenacity, his austerity, his achievement—it was as if he'd been selected to climb Mount Everest, then he got to the top and couldn't breathe. The daughter despised me most. A spotlessly virtuous person, dresses in burlap and reads only Thoreau—I could deal with her, but I never learned how not to be affronted by the Lady Sneerwells. They either sneered at me or ignored me. These were the good women of the tolerant, liberal community of Cambridge, Massachusetts, circa i960, when one of the routine pleasures of faculty wives was moral disapproval. Manny would say, 'You go through too much emotion over something inconsequential.' Manny was the master of the impersonal way of considering everything, but I wasn't able to acquire that skill, even from the man who taught me to read, to write, to think, to know what was worth knowing and what wasn't. 'Stop being so intimidated. These are comical people out of
School for Scandal'
He's the one who named the wife of our distinguished dean Lady Sneerwell. When we went out to a dinner party in Cambridge, it could be, for me, unendurable. That's why I wanted us to live abroad."

"And for him it wasn't unendurable."

"He was not bothered by such things. In public he could make light of the general prejudice. He had the substance for it. But I was just the pretty girl who'd been his student at Athena. I'd known worse as a child, far worse, of course, but back then I had a family encircling me."

"What became of Hope?" I asked.

"She's in some kind of facility in Boston. She has Alzheimer's disease," Amy said, confirming what I'd been told by Kliman. "She's over a hundred."

"Perhaps I can see you," I said. "May I take you to dinner? Could I possibly take you to dinner tonight?"

Her light, pleasant laugh belied what she was about to say. "Oh, I'm no longer the girl you were mooning over that night in 1956. The next morning, when all the hoopla took place—do you remember the high, hysterical hoopla of Hope pretending to run away from home to leave him to me? That's the morning you told me—do you recall?—that I bore 'some resemblance to Anne Frank.'"

"I recall that."

"I've had brain surgery, Nathan. You won't be dining with an ingénue."

"I'm not as I was either. Though you sound no less beguiling. I never learned where that accent originated. I never found out where you were from. It must have been Oslo. Where you knew worse was as a Jewish child under the Nazis in Oslo. That must have been why you and he went there to live."

"You sound like the biographer now."

"The biographer's enemy. The biographer's obstacle. This boy would get it all so wrong, it'd exceed even Manny's worst fears. I'll help," I said, "however I can," which undoubtedly was what she'd been hoping to hear when she was prompted to contact me in the first place.

So we made a date for that night, without a word spoken about the revelation with which Kliman hoped to launch a literary career.

Yet otherwise, we'd said so much. Two people, I thought, who met only once, and they go straight to the heart of it
and are not cautious with each other at all. There was something exciting about that, though what it told me was that she was probably no less steeped in isolation than I. Or maybe there was immediate intimacy between two total strangers just because they had known each other before. Before what? Before it all happened.

I gave myself fifteen minutes to walk from the hotel to the restaurant where I was to meet Amy at seven. Tony was there to welcome me and to accompany me to my table. "After all these years," he said cheerily, pulling back a chair for me.

"You're going to see more of me, Tony. I'm coming down to the city for a while."

"Good for you," he said. "After 9/11 some of our regulars, they took their kids and they moved to Long Island, they moved upstate, they moved to Vermont—they moved all over, they went everywhere. I respect what they did, but it was panic, you know. It died down quick but I gotta be truthful—we lost some wonderful customers after that thing. You alone, Mr. Zuckerman?"

"There'll be two of us," I said.