Exit Ghost (25 page)

Lunch had arrived, and he took a moment to drink half his coffee but I remained silent, determined to ask no questions and just wait to see what he came up with next to steamroll me into believing he was a twenty-eight-year-old titan of literature and I should get out of his way.

"You're wondering how I met George," he said. "I met him when he came up to Harvard for a party at the
Lampoon.
He danced on a table with my girlfriend. She was the sexiest, so he picked her out. He was great. Gave a great speech. George Plimpton was a great man. People said that even dying he managed gracefully. Bullshit to that. He just didn't have a chance to put up a fight. He was a competitor. If it had happened to him during the day, he'd have had a shot at beating it. But at night, asleep? Blindsided."

I remembered then that in one of his books George had set himself to interviewing his literary friends about what he called their "death fantasies." When I got back home to my library I discovered that the book was
Shadow Box,
which opens with his description of his adventure in the ring with Archie Moore in 1959 and ends in 1974 in Zaire, where George had gone to cover the heavyweight championship fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman for
Sports Illustrated.
Plimpton was fifty when
Shadow Box
was published, in 1977, and probably somewhere in his late forties when he was researching and writing it,
and so it must have seemed a lark of an assignment to ask other writers to tell him how they imagined themselves meeting death—scenarios that, as he recounts them, were invariably comical or dramatic or bizarre. The columnist Art Buchwald told him that he "fancied himself dropping dead on the center court at Wimbledon during the men's final—at the age of ninety-three." In the bar of Kinshasa's Intercontinental Hotel a young Englishwoman who described herself as a "free-lance poet" informed George that "it would be terrific to be electrocuted while playing a bass guitar in a rock group." Mailer was also in Kinshasa to write about the championship fight, and he seemed fondest of the idea of being killed by an animal—if on land, a lion; if at sea, a whale. As for George, he saw himself dying at Yankee Stadium, "sometimes as a batter beaned by a villainous man with a beard, occasionally as an outfielder running into the monuments that once stood in deep center field."

Humorously and unusually—that's how George and his friends imagined themselves dying back before they believed they would, back when dying was just another idea to have fun with. "Oh, there's death too!" But the death of George Plimpton was neither humorous nor unusual. It was no fantasy either. He died not in pinstripes at Yankee Stadium but in pajamas in his sleep. He died as we all do: as a rank amateur.

I couldn't bear him. I couldn't bear his outsized boy's energy and smug self-certainty and the pride he took in
being an enthusiast and a raconteur. The crushing immediacy of him—surely George couldn't have borne it either. But if I intended to do whatever could be done to prevent Kliman from becoming Lonoff's biographer, I would have to suppress that ebbing and flowing inclination to get my car and go back to the Berkshires. I would have to wait to see what he came up with next that he imagined would advance his interests. Having, in recent years, all but forgotten how to negotiate antagonism head-on, I instructed myself not to underestimate an opponent's shrewdness because he masquerades as a garrulous geyser.

When he'd finished a second cup of coffee, he said abruptly, "Lonoff and his sister changes things, does it not?"

So Jamie had told him she'd told me. Yet another unsettling facet of Jamie. What, if anything, should I make of her serving as the conduit between Kliman and me? "It's nonsense," I said.

He reached down to slap the side of the briefcase.

"A novel is not evidence," I said, "a novel's a novel," and resumed eating.

Smiling, he reached down again, and this time he opened the briefcase, removed a thin manila envelope, unclasped it, and poured its contents out onto our table, in the midst of our dishes. We were sitting in the window of the luncheonette and could see people walking by on the street. At the moment I looked up, every one of them was talking on a cell phone. Why did those phones seem like the embodiment of everything I had to escape? They were an inevitable technological development, and yet, in their abundance, I saw the measure of how far I had fallen away from the community of contemporary souls. I don't belong here anymore, I thought. My membership has lapsed. Go.

I picked up the photos. There were four faded pictures of a tall, skinny Lonoff and a tall, skinny girl who Kliman would have me believe was his half-sister, Frieda. In one they were standing on the sidewalk in front of a nondescript wooden house on a street that looked to be baking in the sun. Frieda wore a thin white dress and her hair was in long, heavy braids. Lonoff leaned on her shoulder, feigning heat exhaustion, and Frieda was smiling broadly, a big-jawed girl showing the large teeth that gave her a sturdy livestock look. He was a handsome boy with a dark pompadour and a cast to his lean face that might have enabled him to pass for a young desert dweller, half Muslim, half Jew. In another picture the two were gazing up from a picnic blanket laughing at something indistinguishable that Lonoff was pointing to on one of the plates. In a third they were several years older. Lonoff was holding one arm high in the air, and Frieda, who had grown stouter, was pretending to be a dog, begging with her paws. Lonoff looked stern, giving her his command. In the fourth she must have been twenty and no longer the willing handmaid to her half-brother's whimsy but a tall, heavy-set, unsmiling young woman; by contrast, at seventeen, Lonoff looked ethereal and beyond the lure of temptation by anything other than the harmless muse of juvenilia. A case could be made that the photographs revealed nothing unusual other than to a mind as eager to be inflamed as Kliman's, and that the most one could reasonably conclude was that half-sister and half-brother enjoyed each other, were devoted to each other, appeared to understand each other, and, in the first quarter of the twentieth century, were sometimes photographed together by a parent or a neighbor or a friend.

"These pictures," I said. "There's nothing in these pictures."

"In the novel," he said, "Lonoff makes Frieda the instigator."

"There is no Lonoff and no Frieda in a novel."

"Spare me the lecture about the impenetrable line dividing fiction from reality. This is something Lonoff lived through. This is a tormented confession disguised as a novel."

"Unless it's a novel disguised as a tormented confession."

"Then why did it shatter him to write it?"

"Because writers can be shattered by writing. The primacy of the imaginative life can do that, and more."

"I've shown you the photographs," he said, as though what I'd seen were a set of filthy pictures, "and now I'll show you the manuscript, and then you dare to tell me that writing about a possibility that
wasn't
a reality was the force that drove this book."

"Look, you're coming off badly, Kliman. This news can't register wholly as a surprise on a
litterateur
like yourself."

Here he extracted the manuscript from his briefcase and placed it on the table, atop the photographs—between two and three hundred pages held together by a thick elastic band.

What a disaster. This reckless, hard-driving, shameless, opportunistic young man, whose way of absorbing a work of fiction was absolutely antithetical to Lonoff's, in possession of the first part of a novel that Lonoff never finished, felt he'd bungled, and might well never have published had he lived to complete it.

"Did Amy Bellette give this to you? Or did you take it from her?" I asked. "Did you steal it from under the poor woman's nose?"

His answer was just to push it toward me. "It's a photocopy. I had it run off especially for you."

He remained intent on gathering me in. I could be useful to him. Just to say he'd given me a copy could perhaps be useful to him. I wondered how feeble he thought I was, then wondered how feeble I had become up in my cabin on my own. Why was I even here at this table? None of what he told me had taken place between the two of us had really taken place—not the phone call, not the date for lunch, not the request to hear about Plimpton's memorial service, not the request to see the Lonoff manuscript. I remembered now precisely what
had
happened.
You smell bad, old man, you smell like death.
And I smelled again, the odor rising from my lap, very like the odor I'd encountered in the interior passages of Amy's building—
and all the while he who had shouted those insults at me continued calmly finishing off his sandwich only a few feet from where I ate mine. That I had allowed this meeting to occur left me feeling without any more protection than Amy, porous, diluted, weaker mentally than I could ever have imagined becoming.

And Kliman knew that. Kliman had fostered that. Kliman had gauged my condition right off: Who would have thought that Nathan Zuckerman couldn't take it? Yet he can't, he's kaput, a tiny isolated little being, an exhausted escapee now from the coarse-grained world, eviscerated by impotence and in the worst state of his life. Just keep him confused, don't temper the battering, and down the doddering old fucker will go. Reread
The Master Builder,
Zuckerman: make way for the young!

I watched him, up on his pinnacle, move in on me for the kill. And suddenly I saw him not as a person but as a door. I see a heavy wooden door where Kliman is sitting. Meaning what? A door to what? A door between what? Clarity and confusion? That could be. I never know whether he is telling the truth or I have forgotten something or he is making things up. A door between clarity and confusion, a door between Amy and Jamie, a door to George Plimpton's death, a door swinging open and shut just inches from my face. Is there more to him than that? All I know is the door.

"With your imprimatur," he told me, "I could do a lot for Lonoff."

I laughed at him. "You've callously preyed on a grievously ill woman with brain cancer. You've stolen these pages from her, by one means or another."

"I did no such thing."

"Of course you did. She wouldn't have given you just the first half. If she wanted you to have the book, she would have given you the whole thing. You stole what you were able to lay your hands on. The other half was out of sight or somewhere in the apartment where you couldn't grab it. Of course you stole it—who gives somebody half of a novel? And now," I said, before he could answer, "now you want to impose on a specimen like me?"

Unfazed, he said, "You can take care of yourself. You've written lots of books. You've had your share of adventures. And you can be ruthless too."

"I can," I said, hoping that was still true.

"George always spoke of you with great admiration, Mr. Zuckerman. He admired the fortitude that fired the talent. I share that admiration."

Simply as I could, I said, "Good. Then don't go anywhere near her, and don't try in any way to contact me." I laid some cash on the table to cover the cost of the meal and headed for the door.

It took seconds for Kliman to pack his things and come racing after me. "This is censorship. You, yourself a writer, are trying to block the publication of another writer's work."

"Not assisting you with this spurious book is not
blocking you in any way. If anything, by crawling into my hole to die, I'm getting out of your way."

"But it's not spurious. Amy Bellette herself recognizes the incest. It's she who first
told
me about it."

"Amy Bellette has had half of her brain removed."

"But she hadn't when I spoke to her. This is
before
the surgery. She hadn't been operated on then. She hadn't even been diagnosed with the tumor."

"But the tumor was there, was it not? She had a head full of cancer, did she not? Undiagnosed, to be sure, but she had that tumor invading her brain. Her
brain,
Kliman. She was passing out and she was vomiting and she was blinded by headaches and she was blinded by fear and the woman didn't know what she was saying to
anyone.
At that point she was
truly
out of her mind."

"But it's
obvious
that this is what happened."

"Obvious to no one but you."

"I cannot believe this!" he cried, walking beside me and showing me the baffled face of his fury. He was no longer in a mood to enjoy my contempt, and so down came the defenses against my judgment, and the rancorous beggar beneath the presumptuous bully at last made his entrance—unless that too was an act of guile and, from beginning to end, I was there only to play his old fool. "You of all people! The man had a penis, Mr. Zuckerman. His penis made them criminals in their world for over three years. Then came the scandal, and he hid from it for the next forty years. Then at the end he wrote this book. This book
that is his masterpiece! Art arising from the tormented conscience! The aesthetic triumph over shame!
He
didn't know it—he was too frightened and miserable to know it. And Amy was too frightened by his misery to know it. But how can
you
be frightened? You who know what makes people insatiable! You who know the howling hunger for more! Here is a great writer's reckoning with the crime that intimidated him every day of his life. Lonoff's final struggle with his impurity. His long-delayed effort to let in the repellent. You know all about that. Let the repellent in! That's your achievement, Mr. Zuckerman. Well, this is his. His effort to lift this burden is too heroic for you to turn your back on now. The portrait of himself is not a flattering one, believe me. The young boy rising from a forty-year sleep! It's extraordinary. This is Lonoff's
Scarlet Letter.
It's
Lolita
without Quilty and the stupid jokes. It's what Thomas Mann would have written if he'd been someone other than Thomas Mann. Hear me out!
Help
me out! At some point you must take seriously the incest! Your hiding from it makes no sense and does you no credit! Antagonism to me is blinding you to the truth, sir! Which is simply this: that it took his giving up the home with Hope and going through his hell with Amy for him to release from captivity the sorrows of young Lonoff. I beseech you: read the amazing result!"