Exit Ghost (3 page)

He was as good as I had thought. He was better. It was as though there were some color previously missing or withheld from our literary spectrum and Lonoff alone had it. Lonoff
was
that color, a twentieth-century American writer unlike any other, and he had been out of print for decades. I wondered if his achievement would have been so completely forgotten if he had finished his novel and lived to see it published. I wondered if he
had
been working on a novel at the end of his life. If not, how was one to understand the silence preceding his death, those five years that coincided with the breakup of his marriage to Hope and the new life undertaken alongside Amy Bellette? I could still remember the mordant, uncomplaining way he had described to me, a worshipful young acolyte eager to emulate him, the monotony of an existence that was composed of painstakingly writing his stories throughout the day, reading studiously, with a notebook at his side, in the evening, and, nearly mute from mental fatigue, sharing meals and a bed with a loyal, wretchedly lonely wife of thirty-five years. (For discipline is imposed not just on oneself but on those in one's orbit.) One might have imagined a regeneration of intensity—and, with it, of productivity—in an original writer of such imposing fortitude, still not quite into his sixties, who had arranged finally to escape this imprisoning regimen (or whose wife had forced him, by her angry, precipitate departure) and to take as his mate a charming, intelligent, adoring young woman half his age. One might have imagined that after tearing himself away from the rural landscape and the married life that together held him in check—that made the artistic enterprise for him so ruthlessly rock-bottom a sacrifice—E. I. Lonoff wouldn't have had to be quite so severely punished for his waywardness, needn't have had to be reduced to so annihilating a silence just for daring to believe that he might be permitted to rewrite fifty times over his paragraph a day while living in something other than a cage.

What
was
the story of those five years? Once something did happen to that sedate, reclusive writer who—assisted by the forlorn irony that pervaded his view of the world—had bravely resigned himself to nothing's ever happening
to him, what then ensued? Amy Bellette would know—
she
was what had happened to him. If somewhere there was the manuscript of a Lonoff novel, finished or unfinished, she'd know about that, too. Unless the entire estate had passed on to Hope and the three children, the manuscript would be in her hands. And should the novel legally belong to the immediate family that had survived the author and not to her, Amy, who'd have been at his side while the book was being written, would have read every page of every draft and would know how well or how poorly the new venture had gone. Even if his death had cut short its completion, why hadn't finished sections of it been published in the literary quarterlies that used to regularly run his stories? Was it because the novel was no good that no one had seen to its publication? And if so, was that failure the consequence of his having left behind everything that he had counted on to chain him to his talent, of his having at long last gained the freedom and found the pleasure against which captivity had been designed to protect him? Or could he never subdue the shame of subverting his suffering at Hope's expense? But wasn't it Hope who had done the subverting
for
him—by doing the leaving? In so resolute and experienced a writer—one for whom realizing his distinctly laconic brand of vernacular fluency had been a perpetual ordeal to be surmounted only by the most diligent application of patience and will—why a five-year block? Why should so ordinary a renovation—the middle-age life change, commonly thought to be replenishing, of taking a new mate and setting up house in a new locale—cripple a man with the forbearance of a Lonoff?

If that's what had crippled him.

By the time I was ready for sleep, I knew how off the mark these questions might be in helping to understand what it was that stifled Lonoff in his final years. If, between the ages of fifty-six and sixty-one, he had failed at writing a novel, it was probably because (as he may always have suspected) the novelist's passion for amplification was just another form of excess that ran counter to his own special gift for condensation and reduction. A novelist's passion for amplification probably explained my having spent my day raising such questions in the first place.

What it didn't explain was my failing to introduce myself to Amy Bellette in that coffee shop and to find out from her, if not everything there was to know, whatever she was willing to tell.

The three children were grown and gone by the time I met Lonoff and Hope in 1956, and though the grinding discipline of his daily writing life was in no way altered by their dispersal—no more than by the disappearance of passion that dogs connubial life—Hope's response to her isolation in the remote Berkshire farmhouse was vividly on display in just the few hours I was there. Having valiantly tried to remain calm and sociable during
dinner on the evening I arrived, she'd eventually broken down and, after hurling a wine glass at the wall, had run from the table in tears, leaving Lonoff to explain to me—or, as it happened, to feel unobliged to explain—what was going on. At breakfast the following morning, where Amy and I both were present and where the incendiary houseguest with her enchantingly serene, self-possessed demeanor—with the clarity of her mind, with her playacting, with her mystery, with the sparklingness of her comedy—was being especially delightful, Hope's stoic facade had given way again, but this time when she left the table it was to pack a bag and to put on her coat and, despite the freezing weather and the snowy roads, to walk out the front door, announcing that she was leaving the post of great writer's neglected wife to none other than Lonoff's former student and (from all indications) his paramour. "This is officially your house!" she'd notified the young victor, and left for Boston. "You will now be the person he is not living with!"

I left only an hour later and never saw any of them again. It was by a fluke that I'd been there for the blowup at all. From a nearby writers' colony where I'd been staying, I had sent Lonoff a packet of my first published short stories, along with an earnest introductory letter, and in this way managed to wangle the dinner invitation that had turned into an overnight stay only because bad weather had prevented me from departing till the next day. In the late forties, into the fifties, and until his death
from leukemia in 1961, Lonoff was probably America's most esteemed short story writer—if not that to the country at large, then among many in the intellectual and academic elites—the author of six collections whose mingling of comedy and darkness had desentimentalized totally the standard hard-luck saga of the immigrant Jew; his fiction read like an unfolding of disjointed dreams, yet without sacrificing the factuality of time and place to surreal fakery or magic-realist gimmickry. The annual output of stories had never been great, and in his last five years, when he was supposedly working on a novel, his first, and the book that admirers claimed would win him international recognition and the Nobel Prize that should already have been his, he published no stories at all. Those were the years when he made his home with Amy in Cambridge and was affiliated loosely with Harvard. He had never married Amy; apparently, during those five years, he had never legally been free to marry anyone. And then he was dead.

The evening before I was to leave for home, I went to eat at a small Italian restaurant not far from the hotel. The ownership hadn't changed since I'd last eaten there back in the early nineties, and to my surprise I was greeted by name by the youngest of the family, Tony, who seated me at the corner table I'd always liked best because it was the quietest in the place.

You depart while others, unamazingly enough, stay behind to continue doing what they've always done—and, upon returning, you are surprised and momentarily thrilled to see that they are still there, and, too, reassured by there being somebody who is spending his whole life in the same little place and who has no desire to go.

"You moved away, Mr. Zuckerman," Tony said. "We don't ever see you."

"I moved up north. I live in the mountains now."

"It must be beautiful there. Nice and quiet to write."

"It is," I said. "How's the family?"

"Everybody's good. Celia, though, she passed. Remember my aunt? Who was at the register?"

"Sure I do. I'm sorry to hear Celia's gone. Celia wasn't that old."

"No, not at all. But last year she got sick, and she went like that. But you look good," he said. "You want something to drink? Chianti, right?"

Though Tony's hair had gone the same steel gray as his grandfather Pierluigi's—as revealed in the oil painting of the restaurant's immigrant founder, handsome as an actor in his chef's apron, that still hung just beside the coat-check room—and though Tony's frame had grown big and soft since I'd last seen him, in his early thirties, back when he was the only lean and bony member remaining in his well-fed restaurant clan, back some hundred thousand bowls of pasta ago, the menu itself hadn't changed, the specialties hadn't changed, the bread in the bread basket hadn't changed, and when the dessert cart was navigated
past my table by the head waiter, I saw that the head waiter hadn't changed nor had the desserts. You would think that my relationship to all of this could not have shifted one iota, that once I had my drink in my hand and was chewing on a chunk of Italian bread of the kind that I'd eaten here dozens of times before I'd feel pleasantly at home, and yet I didn't. I felt like an impostor, pretending to be the man Tony had once known and suddenly craving to be him. But by living mostly in solitude for eleven years, I had got rid of him. I had gone off to flee a genuine menace; in the end, I stayed away to be rid of what no longer remained of interest and, as who doesn't dream of being, to be rid of the lingering consequences of a life's mistakes (for me, repeated marital failure, furtive adultery, the emotional boomerang of erotic attachment). Presumably by taking action rather than just dreaming of it, I had got rid of myself in the process.

I'd brought something to read, just as I used to do when I ate at Pierluigi's by myself. Living alone, I'd become habituated to reading with my meals, but on this night I set the paper down on the table and instead looked around at those eating their dinner in New York City on the evening of October 28, 2004. One of city life's notable satisfactions: strangers fostering the chimera of human accord by eating together in a good little restaurant. And I was one among them. Late in the day to find so commonplace an experience momentous, but I did.

Only with my coffee did I open the paper, the current issue of
The New York Review of Books.
I hadn't seen a copy since leaving New York. I hadn't wanted to see one, though I'd been a subscriber since the paper's inauguration in the early sixties and, in its first years, an occasional contributor. In passing a newsstand on the way to Pierluigi's I had caught a glimpse of the top of the front page, where above a set of David Levine caricatures of the presidential candidates there was printed an unfurled banner on which yellow lettering announced "Special Election Issue"—and beneath that, above a list of some dozen contributors, the words "The Election and America's Future"—and I had paid the newsdealer four dollars and fifty cents and carried the paper off with me to the restaurant. But now I was sorry I'd bought it, and even when curiosity got the best of me, instead of starting with the table of contents and the opening pages of the election symposium, I began my reimmersion by tiptoeing in at the back, reading the classified advertisements. "beautiful photographer/art educator, loving mother..." "complex, thoughtful, desirous and desirable woman, legally married..." "energetic, fun-loving, fit, established man of many interests..." "green-eyed, funny, kooky, curvaceous..." I skipped to "Real Estate," and in the brief "Rentals" column—above the much longer "International Rentals" column, where the residences available were mainly in Paris and London—I came upon an ad so pointedly addressed to me that I felt myself being urged on, as though with a whip, by chance, sheer chance that seemed brimming with intention.

RELIABLE
writing couple in early thirties wishes to swap homey, book-lined 3-room Upper West Side apartment for quiet rural retreat one hundred miles from New York. New England preferred. Immediate exchange, ideally for one year...

Without waiting—as precipitously as I had gone ahead with the collagen injection I'd intended to think about back home before committing myself to having it, as precipitously as I'd bought
The New York Review—I
went down the stairway alongside the kitchen to where I remembered a pay phone hung on the wall across from the men's room. I'd copied the phone number onto a piece of scrap paper on which I'd written the name "Amy Bellette." Quickly I dialed and told the man who answered that I was responding to his ad to exchange residences for a year. I owned a small house in rural western Massachusetts, located on a dirt road atop a mountain and across from a large marshy swamp that was a bird and wildlife refuge. New York was a hundred and twenty-eight miles away, my nearest neighbors were half a mile away, and it was eight miles down the mountain to a college town where you could find a supermarket, a bookstore, a wine shop, a good campus library, and a convivial bar with edible food. If that sounded like what he had in mind, I'd be interested in stopping by, I said, and seeing the apartment and discussing a swap. I was only blocks away from the Upper West Side; if it wasn't an inconvenience I could be there in minutes.

The man laughed. "You sound like you want to move in tonight."

"If you'll move out tonight," I told him, and I meant it.

Before returning to my table, I stopped off in the men's room and ducked into the single stall, where I lowered my trousers to learn whether the procedure had begun to work. To blot out what I saw I shut my eyes, and to blot out what I felt I cursed aloud. "A fucking dream!" by which I meant the dream of being suddenly like everyone else.