Exit Ghost (17 page)

"Physical failings," I replied, "make nothing easier. I will do what I can." I had several hundred dollars in my billfold that I could leave for her now, and at the hotel I'd write a check to mail off in the morning, though I'd have to remember, on leaving, to be sure that hers wasn't the mailbox with no lock. If it was, I'd see that she received the funds another way.

"Thank you," said Lonoff as I followed the yellow dress into the apartment, a narrow railroad flat whose two interior rooms—a study and, behind an arched entryway, a kitchen—were windowless. At the front, above the First Avenue traffic and the restaurant, was a small living room with two gated windows, and at the back a still smaller room with but one gated window, the room itself big enough for just a night table and a narrow bed. Three windows. In the Lonoff Berkshire farmhouse there must have been two dozen that you never had to lock.

The bedroom looked out on an air shaft and down to a tiny back alley, where the restaurant's garbage cans were stored. A toilet, I discovered, was in a closet-sized room on the other side of a door beside the kitchen sink. A smallish bathtub raised on claw feet rested on the kitchen floor, fitted with barely inches to spare between the refrigerator and the stove. Since the front of the apartment was noisy because of the buses, trucks, and cars barreling up
First Avenue, and the back of the apartment was noisy because of the incessant racket from the restaurant kitchen, whose rear door remained open for ventilation year round, Amy took us to sit in the relative quiet of her dark study, amid piles of papers and books that crammed the shelves lining the walls and sat stacked around the base of the Formica-topped kitchen table that doubled as a desk. The lamp on the desk furnished the room's only light. It was a wide, tall, semitransparent brownish bottle wired for a bulb and topped by a shade ridged like a fan and shaped like a broad sun hat. I'd last seen it forty-eight years ago. It was Lonoff's homely desk lamp. Off to the side I saw another relic from his study, the large, dull brown horsehair easy chair, molded over the decades to the contour of his substantial torso—and, it seemed to me, to the imprint of his thought and the shape of his stoicism—the same time-worn chair from which he'd first intimidated me with the simplest questions about my youthful pursuits. I thought, "What! Are
you
here?" and then remembered where that very line appears in Eliot's "Little Gidding," at the point where the poet, walking the streets before dawn, meets the "compound ghost," who tells him what pain he will encounter. "For last year's words belong to last year's language / And next year's words await another voice." How does Eliot's ghost begin? Sardonically. "Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age." Reserved for age. Reserved for age. Beyond that I cannot go. A frightful prophecy follows that I don't remember. I'll look it up when I get home.

Silently, I addressed an observation to Lonoff that had only just come to me: "You are no longer my senior by thirty-odd years. I am yours now by ten."

"Did you eat anything?" she asked.

"I'm not hungry," I told her. "I'm too startled by being with you." I was so affected by a visitation so unimaginable that I could say no more. However imprecise or elusive my thinking could become these days, my recollection of Amy, whom I'd met but once long ago, was still sharp and marked by the sense I had in 1956 that she was somebody of unusual importance. Back then, I'd gone so far as to work out an elaborately detailed scenario that endowed her with the horrific data of the European biography of Anne Frank, but an Anne Frank who, for my purposes, had survived Europe and the Second World War to recreate herself, pseudonymously, as an orphaned college girl in New England, a foreign student from Holland, a pupil and then a lover of E. I. Lonoff, to whom one day, in her twenty-second year—after she'd gone off by herself to Manhattan to see the first production of
The Diary of Anne Frank—
-she had confided her true identity. Of course I had none of the young man's motives to continue to elaborate that flamboyant fiction. The feelings that had exploited my imagination to that end in my mid-twenties had long since disappeared, along with the moral imperatives pressed upon me then by eminent elders of the Jewish community. Their denunciation of my first published stories as sinister manifestations of "Jewish self-hatred" had not been without its sting despite the galling righteousness of their Jewish self-love, which I opposed with all my loathing—and opposed by transforming Lonoff's Amy into the martyred Anne, whom, with only an ounce of irony, I imagined myself wanting to marry. As the sprightly, youthful Jewish saint, Amy became my fictional fortification against the excoriating indictment.

"Would you like a drink?" she asked. "Would you like a beer?"

I wouldn't have minded something stiffer, but I no longer took more than a glass of wine with dinner because alcohol intensified my mental lapses. "No, I'm fine. Did
you
get something to eat?"

"I don't eat," she said.
I don't.
That had become a great refrain of mine as well.

"Are you all right?" I asked.

"I was. I was fine for months. But they just told me the damn thing's returned. That's what happens—destiny's behind your back and one day pops out and cries 'Boo!' When I had the first tumor, before I even knew I had it, I did things I wouldn't like to repeat. Kicked my neighbor's dog. Little dog, out in the hallway yapping all the time and nipping at your shoes, pain-in-the-ass dog who shouldn't be out there anyway, and I reared back and gave it a good kick. I began writing to
The New York Times.
I had a fit at the public library. I went completely nuts. I went to the library to see an exhibit about E. E. Cummings. I loved his poetry when I first came here as a student: 'i sing of Olaf glad and big.' When I left the Cummings exhibit, I saw that in the corridor, arranged along
the walls, there was a much bigger, more dramatic exhibit called Landmarks of Modern Literature. Large portrait photographs hanging above glass cases displaying first editions in their original jackets, and it was all terribly stupid politically correct crap. Ordinarily, I would have kept walking, and on the subway home talked to Manny about it. He was the firebrand of tact—tact, wit, patience. The human folly never surprised him. Even dead, he soothes me so."

"After forty years? Was there no one else in forty years who became important enough to soothe you?"

"Could there have been?"

"Could there not have been?"

"After
him?"

"You were thirty when he died. To have your entire life defined by one episode ... You were still a young woman." I stopped myself from saying "Was everything that followed crushed by those few years?" because the answer was obvious by now. Everything, every last thing.

"Inconsequential" was her reply to what I did say.

"So what have you done, then?"

"Done? What a word. Done. I've translated books: from Norwegian into English, from English into Norwegian, from Swedish into English, from English into Swedish. That's what I've done. But mostly what I do is drift. I've just drifted and drifted and now I'm seventy-five. That's how I got to be seventy-five: continually drifting. But you haven't drifted. Your life has been an arrow. You've worked."

"And that's how I got to be seventy-one. This way or
that, arrow or drifter, you still reach the end. Did you never go to that villa in Florence with someone else?"

"How do you know about the villa in Florence?"

"Because he talked about it with me that night. Abstractly, only as something he'd thought about. And then," I confessed, "I overheard the two of you. I took the liberty of overhearing your conversation with him that night."

"How did you manage that?"

"I was sleeping just below you. You wouldn't remember that. He'd made up the day bed in his study for me. I stood on his desk and put my ear to the ceiling. You said, 'Oh, Manny, we could be so happy in Florence.'"

Learning this made her enormously happy. "Oh, my. You were such a bad boy. What else? What else? To have a witness to something so long gone—what a gift! Tell me what you heard, bad boy! Tell me everything!"

Tell me, she was saying to me, tell me, please, about this intimate moment with this irreplaceable person I love who is dead, tell me on the day I've learned of the return of the tumor that is hurtling me toward my own death and in celebration of which I've donned my yellow dress!

"I wish I could," I said. "But I don't remember much more. I remember Florence because he had talked about it too—the villa in Florence and the young woman there with him who would make life beautiful and new."

" 'Beautiful and new'—he said that?"

"I think so. Did you ever go to Florence?"

"We two? Never. I went myself. I went there and I stayed there after he died. I cut the flowers for his vase. I
wrote in my journal. I took the walks. I rented a car and took the drives. For several years, each June, I'd go to a
pensione
there and take my translation work with me, and perform all the rites."

"And you never dared it with someone else."

"Why would I?"

"How can one live so long in a memory?"

"It's never been that. I speak to him all the time."

"And he to you?"

"Oh, yes. We've circumvented very nicely the predicament of his being extinct. We're so unlike everyone else now and so like each other."

The emotional impact of hearing this made me look at her probingly to see if she had said what she intended to say or was deliberately being immoderate or if her words had been spoken, as it were, accidentally by the brain that was missing a piece. All I saw was someone unprotected by anyone. All I saw was what Kliman saw.

"What would he think of your living like this?" I asked her. "Wouldn't he have wanted you to find someone? What would he have thought of your living alone all these years?" Then I added, "What does he tell you about it?"

"He never mentions it."

"What does he think of your living here, now, in this place?"

"Oh, we don't bother about that."

"What then?"

"Books I read. We talk about books."

"Nothing else?"

"Things that happen. I told him about the library."

"What did he say?"

"He said what he always said. He laughed. He said, 'You take such matters too seriously.'"

"What does he say about the brain tumor?"

"I mustn't be frightened. It's not good, but I mustn't be frightened."

"You believe what he tells you?"

"When we talk, there's no more pain for a while."

"Just the love."

"Yes. Absolutely."

"So what did you tell him about the library? Tell me the rest about the library."

"Oh, I stormed up and down that corridor, fuming at the photographs of these writers who'd written the great landmarks of modern literature. I lost my temper. I began to shout. Two guards rushed up, and in no time I was out on the library steps. They must have thought I was a madwoman who'd strayed in off the street. I thought so too. A mad, evil woman with her evil thoughts. That's when I was beginning to talk a mile a minute. I still do. I do it even when I'm by myself. I didn't know yet about the tumor, you see. I said that already. But it was already there at the back of my head, turning me inside out. All my life, whenever I couldn't find my way, I've always been able to ask myself, What would Manny do? What would Manny do with this ridiculous state of affairs? All my life he's
been here to guide me. I was in love with a great man. That lasts. But then came the tumor, and I couldn't hear him, not above the incessant roar."

"There are noises?"

"No. I should have said 'a cloud.' It's a cloud. In your head you have a thundercloud."

"What was the terribly stupid politically correct crap?"

She laughed, the face, finely wrinkled and without a vestige of the beauty once inscribed there—the face laughed, but because of the half-shaved skull with the new-grown fuzz and that demonic scar, the laugh itself was shot through with all the wrong meanings. "You can guess. They had Gertrude Stein in the exhibit but not Ernest Hemingway. They had Edna St. Vincent Millay but not William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens or Robert Lowell. Just nonsense. It started in the colleges and now it's everywhere. Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison, but not Faulkner."

"What did you shout?" I asked.

"I shouted, 'Where is E. I. Lonoff? How dare you leave out E. I. Lonoff!' I'd intended to say, 'How dare you leave out William Faulkner!' but Manny's was the name that came out. I drew quite a crowd."

"And how did you discover the tumor was there?"

"I was getting headaches. Headaches so terrible they made me vomit. You'll help me get rid of this Kliman, won't you?"

"I will try."

"The thing's come back. Did I tell you that?"

"Yes," I said.

"Somebody has to protect Manny from this man. Any biography he writes will be the resentment of an inferior person writ large. The Nietzschean prophecy come true: art killed by resentment. Before I knew I had the tumor, he paid me a visit. It was just after the library fiasco. I was already talking a mile a minute. I served him tea and he was so proper and he seemed, to my tumor, to speak so brilliantly about Manny's stories—to my tumor, he seemed a purely literary being, an earnest, Harvard-educated young man who wanted nothing more than to restore Manny's reputation. My tumor found Kliman
winning."

"Well, you should have found the dog winning and kicked Kliman. How did you get a diagnosis?" I asked.

"I passed out. I was putting the kettle on the stove one day, and I switched on the gas, and the next thing I knew there were two policemen standing over me in the emergency room of Lenox Hill Hospital. The super smelled the gas, and he found me there"—she pointed behind us to the kitchen with the bathtub in it—"on the floor, and they thought I'd tried to kill myself.
That
made me angry.
Everything
made me angry. I was once a nice, sweet girl, was I not?"