Exit Ghost (23 page)

Say why it kills you.

HE

Because I'm crazy about you.

SHE

Well ... I just wanted to hear it.

HE

(Long pause, pain more on his side than hers; curiosity reigns on hers)
So. That concludes our interview for the job of she-who-leaves-her-husband-for-the-much-much-older-man. I'll call you.

SHE

You'll call me?

HE

I'll call you and let you know how you did.

SHE

Okay.

HE

Are you free for the job?

SHE

If the job gets offered to me, I'll have to figure out whether or not I can arrange my life so that I can do the job well. Then
I'll
get back to
you.

HE

This isn't fair. I've lost my authority.

SHE

How does it feel?

HE

I came here with so much authority. I'm leaving with none.

SHE

Does it feel good?

HE

A man disoriented by everything that once he knew so very well is now a lost man to boot. I'm going.

SHE

It never gets better for you alone with me.

HE

It can't.

SHE

The better it gets, the worse it gets.

HE

That's the situation. Yes.

(He gets up and he leaves. Outside, on the steps of her apartment building and looking across to the church, he remembers something:
The Return of the Native,
the title of the Hardy novel with the reddleman in it. He has a good memory for books? No, not even for books. Only now does he re
call the tragic heroine's name that had always beguiled him: Eustacia Vye. He does not move for the street, yet works strongly to suppress the desire to turn back and lift his hand to ring the bell and tell her, "
The Return of the Native,
Eustacia Vye," and in that way get back upstairs alone with her. They never kiss, he never touches her, nothing: this is his last love scene. His memory failed him only that once. During all that conversation, only once. Twice: when she asked how long he'd been alone. Or had she asked that question the day before? Or hadn't she asked that question at all? Well, she needn't know any more of the forgetfulness than what she'd seen so far. So they never kiss and he never touches her—so what? He takes that hard? So what? His last love scene? Let it be. Never mind. Remorse must wait.)

I
WAS AWAKENED
by the phone ringing. I had fallen asleep on the bed, clothed and with my underlined copy of
The Shadow-Line
beside me. I thought, "Amy, Jamie, Billy, Rob," but failed to include Kliman in the list of those who might find reason to call me at the hotel. Having spent until almost five a.m. at the desk writing, I felt like a man after a night of too much drinking. And I'd had a dream, I now remembered, a very small dream airy with childish hopefulness. I am on the phone to my mother. "Ma, can you do me a favor?" She laughs at my naivete. "Sweetheart, there's nothing I wouldn't do for you. What is it, darling?" she asks. "Can we have incest?" "Oh, Nathan," she says, laughing again, "I'm a rotting old
corpse. I'm in the grave." "Still, I'd like to commit incest with you. You're my mother. My only mother." "Whatever you want, darling." Then she is in front of me, and she is not a corpse in a grave. Her presence thrills me. She's the slender, pretty, vivacious twenty-three-year-old brunette my father married, she has the lightness of a young girl and that soft voice that is never severe, while I am the age I am now—and
I
am the one in the ground forever. She takes my hand as though I'm still a little boy with the most innocent aims and goals, we leave the cemetery for my bedroom, and the dream ends with my desire gaining strength and the room of large bare windows flooded with light. The last triumphant words she says are "My dear one, my dear one—birth! birth! birth!" Was there ever a mother more tender and kind?

"Hi," Kliman said. "Shall I wait down here?" "For what?" "Lunch." "What are you talking about?" "Today. At noon. You said I could take you to lunch today at noon." "I said no such thing." "You certainly did, Mr. Zuckerman. You wanted me to tell you about George Plimpton's memorial service." "George Plimpton is dead?" "Yes. We talked about this." "George died? When did he die?" "Just over a year ago." "He was how old?" "He was seventy-six. He had a fatal heart attack in his sleep." "And you told me this when?" "On the phone," Kliman said.

No need to report that I remembered no such phone call. Yet to have forgotten it seemed impossible—as impossible as George's dying. I'd met George Plimpton in the late 1950s when, after my discharge from the army, I
first came to New York to live, for seventy bucks a month, in a two-room subterranean apartment and began publishing in his new literary quarterly the stories that I'd been writing at night while I was in the service; till then they'd been turned down everywhere I'd submitted them. I was twenty-four when George invited me to lunch to meet the
The Paris Review's
other editors, young men in their late twenties and early thirties, for the most part, like him mainly from wealthy, old-line families who'd sent their sons to exclusive preparatory schools and then on to Harvard, which, in those early postwar years, as in prior decades, was mainly a bastion for educating the offspring of the socially elite. There they'd all got to know one another, if they hadn't met previously during the summer on the tennis courts or at the yacht clubs of Newport or Southampton or Edgartown. My familiarity with their world or the world of their immediate forebears was limited to the fiction I'd read by Henry James and Edith Wharton as a student at the University of Chicago, books I'd been taught to admire but that had for me as little bearing on American life as
Pilgrim's Progress
or
Paradise Lost.
Before meeting George and his colleagues I'd no idea what such people looked like or sounded like other than from hearing FDR over the radio and in the newsreels as a child—and to such a child, the son of a Jewish podiatrist educated in night school, FDR was not a representative of either class or caste but rather a politician and statesman unique unto himself, a democratic hero perceived by the preponderance of America's Jews, including my large extended family, as a blessing and a gift. George's unlikely manner of speaking might have seemed to me a comical exaggeration of a swell's, one perhaps even outright preposterous if encountered in a less forthright, gifted, intelligent, and graceful young man, steeped as it was in the Anglified enunciation and cadences of the monied Protestant hierarchy that had reigned over Boston and New York society while my own poor ancestors were being ruled by rabbis in the ghettos of Eastern Europe. George afforded my first glimpse of privilege and its vast rewards—he seemingly had nothing to escape, no flaw to hide or injustice to defy or defect to compensate for or weakness to overcome or obstacle to circumvent, appearing instead to have learned everything and to be open to everything altogether effortlessly. I'd never imagined getting anywhere without the unstinting persistence in which my hardworking family had diligently schooled me; George would have known from the outset all he was automatically destined for.

At parties at his comfortable East 72nd Street apartment, I met virtually every other young writer in New York and some of the famous established ones, and gazed longingly at the limbs of the glamorous young women who flocked around him, American debutantes, European models, and princesses whose families had been exiled in Paris since the Treaty of Versailles. In the early days I saw more of a few lesser associates of the magazine, whose writing worries and love struggles disclosed an undercurrent of hardship I could better understand, those like me for whom Difficulty had the status of a god. Yet I was there at Stillman's seedy Eighth Avenue gym to marvel at his courage on that afternoon he dared to go the three short, vigorous rounds with boxing's then light-heavyweight champion of the world, Archie Moore, a bout that left him with a broken, bloodied nose and the material for an account in
Sports Illustrated.
And I was a guest at a friend's apartment on Central Park South where George married for the first time, in the 1960s, and for several summers I sat with a hundred or so others on the dark, wide beach at Water Mill, Long Island, when George presided over his lavish annual Fourth of July fireworks display, thereby remaining a daredevil of a boy even as he pursued the interests of a playful, debonair, deeply inquisitive man of the world, a journalist, editor, and occasional film and television performer. It was little more than a year earlier (and, I now realized, only weeks before he died) that George had phoned me and, speaking nearly as formally to me as to someone he'd never met, and yet, as was his nature, as warmly as if we'd had dinner together only the night before—and by then we hadn't seen each other for a decade at least—asked if I'd come down to New York to make some introductory remarks at a fundraising gala for
The Paris Review.
I could remember that phone conversation perfectly, not only because of the good feeling exchanged but because it launched me into spending my evenings over the next couple of weeks rereading his famous works of "participatory journalism"—the books in which he assaults the mystery of his charmed life by recording his mishaps and failures as a bumbling amateur athlete up against the mighty pros—
and the several collections of shorter pieces, in which he wrote as himself, as the urbane, witty gentleman of easy intelligence and aristocratic bearing that made him anything but a bumbler to anyone who knew him.

There, his charm (as in the accounts of taking his nine-year-old daughter to a Harvard-Yale game or the poet Marianne Moore to Yankee Stadium), his lyricism (as in the evocative hymn to fireworks), his filial gravity (as in the eulogy to his father) attest to the skills of an elegant essayist able to write rings around the disadvantaged George Plimpton he concocted for the sports books, where, repeatedly cast by his ineptness in the role of the virginal victim, he goes to the most extreme lengths to acquire the semblance of humiliation and is able fleetingly to relish the masochistic ignominy of being out of his league. In his parody of Truman Capote writing of his face-lift in the style of Ernest Hemingway he was the equal of Mark Twain in his lambasting satire of James Fenimore Cooper; indeed, watching others perform foolishly rather than purportedly watching himself perform foolishly, he was at his subtle best. Yes, I remembered the good feeling permeating our call that night a year before and the pleasure I'd had rereading his books afterward, but I could not remember any call from Kliman about having lunch to discuss George's death.

Nor could I believe in George's death. The idea was excessive in every way that George wasn't, and incongruent with his curiosity's robust engagement with the "great variety of life"—a phrase he used when he was happily imagining himself as an African riverbird eyeing everything with wings and paws and hooves and feathers and scales and hide that was drawn to the rushing waters. Kliman must have meant to say something else about George Plimpton, because if I had been asked, "Who among your contemporaries will be the last to die? Who among your contemporaries is least likely to die? Who among your contemporaries will not only elude death but write with wit, precision, and modesty of his amused bafflement at successfully pulling off eternal life?" the only answer possible would have been "George Plimpton." Like the ninety-four-year-old count in
A Farewell to Arms
with whom Frederic Henry plays a game of billiards—to whom Frederic Henry, on parting, says, "I hope you live forever," and who replies, "I have"—George Plimpton was on his way to living forever from the time he was born. George had no more intention of dying than, say, Tom Sawyer; his not-dying was an assumption inseparable from his competitive encounters with the greatest of athletes. I am pitching against the New York Yankees, I am running plays for the Detroit Lions, I am in the ring with Archie Moore in order to report with authority what it is to survive everything that is superior to you and lined up to crush you.

There was more underlying those books, of course, and George was never more graciously attentive than the evening many years ago when I speculated over dinner with
him on his hidden motives. It was the issue of social class that seemed to me the deepest inspiration for his writing so singularly about sports, cagily venturing into situations where he plays at being bereft of his class advantages (except for the upper-crust manners, which, in a world wholly alien, if not hostile, to good breeding, he knowingly employs for the comic effect of their unsuitability). "Me" is his self-mocking double—the working journalist—unburdened of the privileged George that he inescapably was, that he masterfully was and so enjoyed being. To be sure, his advantages—as embodied in what he modestly called his "Eastern Seaboard cosmopolitan accent" but which was more the accent of the Eastern Seaboard's disappearing ruling class—made him the butt of the jokes of the professional athletes with whom he competed as an amateur. Yet he did not attempt in
Paper Lion
or in
Out of My League
anything like what the modern era's first astonishingly percipient "participatory journalist"—the other George with a gentleman's accent, who missed not a one of the social differences, gross or minute, that he saw everywhere he went—painstakingly describes himself doing in
Down and Out in Paris and London.
Like Orwell, Plimpton tried to look straight at the thing and describe plainly what he saw and how it worked and so grasp hold of it for the reader. He did not, however, take on the lowliest jobs in the dirty, overheated restaurant kitchens of Paris, to be reduced in those turbulent pigsties to the status of a brutalized slave and to learn an object lesson in poverty, nor did he attempt, as Orwell subsequently did when he went
on the road as a tramp in England, to see what it was to touch bottom. Instead, he entered a world no less glamorous than his own, the world of the ruling class of America's transcendent popular culture, the world of professional sports.
Down and Out in the Major Leagues. Down and Out in the NFL. Down and Out in the NBA.
Courting embarrassment and losing his dignity and flaunting his inadequacies with the pros, George in fact succeeded in maximizing his glamour rather than repudiating it, a ploy for which I admired him and that was at the heart of my enjoyment of the books. Books advertised as pitting the ungainly amateur against the impregnable professional were in actuality about a well-coordinated, excellently equipped athlete born into America's oldest elite playing at being a bumbler of an athlete with the majestically equipped athletes of America's newest elite, the superstars of sports. In
Out of My League
the easygoing master of self-possession goes so far as to envy the poise of the Yankee batboy; in
Paper Lion
he pretends that he hardly knew how to hold a football when he was quarterbacking the Detroit Lions, though I clearly remember touch football games on the Westchester lawn of one of his closest friends, in which George threw spirals as accurate as any a pass receiver could hope for in
any
league. Hemingway had it wrong when he described George's adventures with professional athletes as "the dark side of the moon of Walter Mitty." It was the bright side of being born George Plimpton, who uniquely managed to make a tremendously enjoyable vocation of leaving his old world of glamorous privilege to partake vicariously of the new world of glamorous privilege, the only American world that could possibly equal his own in the prestige his once had. Therein lay George's true brilliance, his ability to move across the class line of scrimmage, making himself, as he put it, "a laughingstock," without becoming, like George Orwell barely surviving among "the dregs" as an abject Paris dishwasher and a hungry, penniless London tramp, punishingly and horribly—and in deadly earnest—a déclassé. George escaped his glamour without losing his glamour, only further enhancing it in autobiographical books seemingly driven by self-deprecation. Climbing into the ring with Archie Moore he was simply practicing noblesse oblige in its most exquisite form—a form, moreover, that he had invented. When people say to themselves "I want to be happy," they could as well be saying "I want to be George Plimpton": one achieves, one is productive, and there's pleasure and ease in all of it.