Exit Ghost (8 page)

Surprisingly, it took only weeks to break the matter-of-fact habit that informed much of my nonprofessional thinking and to feel completely at home knowing nothing of what was going on. I had banished my country, been myself banished from erotic contact with women, and was lost through battle fatigue to the world of love. I had issued an admonition. I was out from under my life and times. Or maybe just down to the nub. My cabin could as well have been adrift on the high seas as set twelve hundred feet up on a rural road in Massachusetts that was less than a three-hour drive east to the city of Boston and about the same distance south to New York.

The television set was on when I arrived, and Billy assured me the election was in the bag—he was in touch with a
friend at Democratic national headquarters, and their exit polls showed Kerry winning all the states he needed. Billy graciously accepted the wine and told me that Jamie had gone out to buy food and should be back at any minute. Once again he was expansively agreeable and exuded a jovial softness, as though he weren't yet and probably never would be expert at wielding authority. Is he a throwback, I wondered, or do they still exist like this, middle-class Jewish boys who continue to be branded with the family empathy that, despite the unmatchable satisfaction of its cradling sentiments, can leave one unprepared for the nastiness of less kindly souls? In the Manhattan literary milieu particularly, I would have expected something other than the brown eyes weighty with tenderness and the full angelic cheeks that lent him the air, if not still of a protected small boy, then of the generous young man wholly unable to inflict a wound or laugh with scorn or shirk the smallest responsibility. I speculated that Jamie might be a lot more than could be managed by the sweet selflessness of one whose every word and gesture was permeated with his decency. The trusting innocence, the mildness, the sympathetic understanding—what a setup for the rogue with an eye to stealing the wife whose infidelity would be unimaginable to him.

The phone rang just as Billy was preparing to open one of the bottles of wine, and he handed it across to me to uncork while he snatched up the phone and said, "What now?" After a moment he looked up to tell me, "New Hampshire's sewed up. D.C.?" Billy then asked the friend
who was phoning. To me again he said, "In D.C. they're going eight to one for Kerry. That's the key—the blacks are turning out en masse. Okay, great," Billy said into the phone, and upon hanging up told me happily, "So we live in a liberal democracy after all," and, to toast the mounting thrill, he poured each of us a big glass of wine. "These guys would have devastated the country," he said, "had they won a second term. We've had bad presidents and we've survived, but this one's the bottom. Serious cognitive deficiencies. Dogmatic. A tremendously limited ignoramus about to wreck a very great thing. There's a description in
Macbeth
that's perfect for him. We read aloud together, Jamie and I. We're doing the tragedies. It's in the scene in act three with Hecate and the witches. 'A wayward son,' Hecate says, 'spiteful and wrathful.' George Bush in six words. It's all so awful. If you're for your kids and God, you're a Republican—meanwhile, the people who are being screwed the most are his base. It's amazing they pulled it off for even one term. It's terrifying to think what they would have done with a second term. These are terrible, evil guys. But their arrogance and their lies finally caught up with them."

My mind still full of my own thoughts, I allowed a couple of minutes more for him to continue to watch the first election results trickle in before I asked, "How did you meet Jamie?"

"Miraculously."

"You were students together."

He smiled most appealingly, when, given my thoughts,
he would have done better pulling the dagger that had done in Duncan. "That makes it no less miraculous," he said.

I saw there was no need to stop myself from hurtling forward for fear of being found out. Clearly Billy couldn't begin to imagine that someone of my years might be asking about his young wife because his young wife was now all I could think about. There was my age to mislead him, and my eminence too. How could he possibly believe the worst about a writer he'd begun reading in high school? It was like meeting Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. How could the author of "The Song of Hiawatha" take a licentious interest in Jamie?

To be on the safe side, I asked first about him.

"Tell me about your family," I said.

"Oh, I'm the only reading person in the family, but that doesn't matter; they're good people. In Philly now for four generations. My great-grandfather started the family business. He was from Odessa. His name was Sam. His customers called him Uncle Sam the Umbrella Man. He made and repaired umbrellas. My grandfather expanded into luggage. In the teens and the twenties, train travel boomed and suddenly everybody needed a piece of luggage. And people were traveling by ship, transatlantic ships. It was the era of the wardrobe trunk—you know, the big, heavy trunks people took on long journeys that opened up vertically and had hangers and drawers in them."

"I know them well," I said. "And the others, the smaller black ones that opened up horizontally like a pirate's chest.
I had a trunk like that to go off to college with. Nearly everyone did. It was constructed of wood and the corners were sheathed in metal and the fancy ones were girdled with bands of embossed metal and the lock was brass and made to withstand an earthquake. You used to ship your trunk by Railway Express. You'd take it down to the train station and leave it with the clerk at the Railway Express desk. The guy at Newark's Penn Station in those days still wore the green eyeshade and kept his pencil tucked behind his ear. He'd weigh the trunk and you'd pay per pound and off your socks and underwear would go."

"Yes, every city of any size had a luggage store, and the department stores all had luggage departments. It's airline stewardesses," Billy told me, "who revolutionized how Americans felt about luggage in the fifties—people saw that it could be light and chic. That's about when my father went into the business and modernized the store and changed the name to Davidoff's Fashionable Luggage. Until then, the place was still known by the original name, Samuel Davidoff and Sons. About this time along came the luggage on wheels—and that, vastly abridged, is the story of the luggage business. The full version runs to a thousand pages."

"You're writing about the family business, are you?"

He nodded and he shrugged and he sighed.
"And
the family. I'm trying to, anyway. I more or less grew up in the store. I've heard a thousand stories from my grandfather. Every time I go to see him I fill another notebook. I've got
stories enough to last a lifetime. But it's all a matter of how, isn't it? I mean, how you tell them."

"And Jamie. How did she grow up?"

And so he told me, lavishly expatiating on her accomplishments: about Kinkaid, the exclusive private school in Houston from which she'd graduated valedictorian; about her stellar academic career at Harvard, where she graduated summa cum laude; about River Oaks, the wealthy Houston neighborhood where her family lived; about the Houston Country Club, where she played tennis and swam and had come out as a debutante against her will; about the conventional mother she tried so hard to accommodate and the difficult father she could never please; about the favorite haunts she took Billy to visit when they first went together to Houston for Christmas; about the places where she played as a child that he wanted her to show him and the menacing beauty of the ugly Houston bayous at dawn and Jamie's defiantly swimming in the murky water with a wild older sister, who, he informed me, pronounced the word "buy-ohs," like the old Houstonians.

I had simply asked him to tell me about her; what I'd gotten was a speech appropriate to the dedication of some grand edifice. There was nothing strange about such a staunchly tender performance—men who fall madly in love can make Xanadu of Buffalo if that's where their beloved was raised—and yet the ardor for Jamie and Jamie's Texas girlhood was so undisguised that it was as though he were telling me about somebody he had dreamed up in jail. Or
about the Jamie that
I
had dreamed up in jail. It was as it should be in a masterpiece of male devotion: his veneration for his wife was his strongest tie to life.

He was elegiac when recounting to me the route they jog together when they visit her folks.

"River Oaks, where they live—it's an anomaly in Houston. Old neighborhood with old houses, though there are some nice ones that have been torn down for McMansions. Jamie's is one of the few neighborhoods in Houston where there's still some feeling for the past. Beautiful houses, big oaks, magnolias, a few pines. Huge manicured gardens. Teams of gardeners. Mexican. Thursdays and Fridays the streets are lined with the pickup trucks of gardening companies and with armies of workers out clipping and manicuring and mowing and planting for the weekend, for the parties and gatherings that are going to go on. We jog through the older part of River Oaks, where the original oil families have had their big spreads for two and three generations. We jog past the older houses and run along kind of a busy street, and then we get to the bayou that runs from River Oaks down through a park where you can jog for miles and miles until you get to downtown. Or we run along the bayou and back. Just after dawn it's cool and it's wonderful. The quiet, discreet part of River Oaks, where people aren't consuming conspicuously and parking multiple Mercedeses in front of their McMansions, is a beautiful community. There's a rose garden we especially like, a community project, kept up and cared for by the residents. I love the mornings running past that rose garden with Jamie. Some of the old estates back up onto the bayou, and to get to where we can see the bayou and run by it, we have to get out of River Oaks. And so there's the rest of Houston. River Oaks is an insular, prosperous haven of uniformity, old-money families and new-money families at the top of the Houston caste system, and a lot of the rest of the city is hot and humid and flat and ugly—tattoo parlors next to office buildings, running-shoe stores in rickety houses, everything just jumbled together. The most beautiful thing in the city to me is the old cemetery with the old live-oak trees where some of Jamie's family are buried, right down by the bayous, almost downtown."

"Is Jamie's an old- or a new-money family?" I asked Billy.

"Old. The old money is oil money, and the new money is professional money."

"How old is the old money?"

"Well, not that old, because Houston's relatively young. But since the oil tycoons like Jamie's grandfather, whenever that would have been."

"And how did the old Houston money feel about your being a Jew?" I asked.

"Her parents weren't thrilled. The mother just cried. It was the father who took the cake. When Jamie came home to tell them we were engaged, he put his head in his hands, and that's what he did from then on, every time my name was mentioned. She'd e-mail him from back east and he deliberately wouldn't answer her for three, four weeks at a time. She'd check her e-mail hourly and he would not have answered her. An authentically coarse tyrant, this guy. A
travesty of a father. Selfish. Thoughtless. Big temper. Utterly irrational. Domineering. Venomous. No good boorish bastard through and through. Imagine: trying, by not answering her, to break his own daughter down, consciously and deliberately exploiting a daughter's decency to make her feel herself in the wrong. Wants to
crush
her. And, of course, to crush me too. I had never laid eyes on him, nor he on me, yet he wanted to harm me nonetheless. And who had ever purposefully set out to harm me before? To my knowledge, Mr. Zuckerman, no one. But this brute feels himself wholly entitled to do harm to a man his daughter happens to love! Now, Jamie is a good daughter, a very good daughter—she'd given her all trying to love this person who was persistently on the wrong side of the argument, tried as hard as she could however much she'd hated his bullying of her mother and his politics and his arrogant right-wing friends. After one three-week silence, he finally sends her a one-sentence e-mail: 'I love you, sweetheart, but I cannot accept that boy.' But Jamie Logan's got guts, dignity and guts, and even though the old man held the purse strings, even though he began to hint, not very subtly, that if she went through with marrying a Jew he would cut her off, she wouldn't break. She stuck it out, and eventually the bigoted son of a bitch had to either swallow his animus and accept me or lose his beloved summa-cum-laude child. A lesser girl of twenty-five, one lacking Jamie's courage, lacking Jamie's independence, would have capitulated. But Jamie is a lesser
nothing. Jamie is neither spoiled nor a fraud nor without a sense of honor and would never dream of submitting to what she could not stand. Jamie is the best. She said to me, 'I love you and I want you and I will not be a slave to his dough.' She as good as told him to take the money and shove it, and so in the end
she
crushed
him.
Oh, Mr. Zuckerman, it was a thing of beauty watching Jamie hold out. Though you would have thought that the father would have been used to it by the time she got around to me. 'It' being Jamie and Jews. Their country club lets in Jews now. That wouldn't have been the case in her grandparents' time, or even as recently as fifteen years ago, with her parents' generation. It's all pretty new. Like letting Jews and blacks into Kinkaid. That's relatively new. The Jewish girls were Jamie's study buddies. You can imagine how much the great hothead loved that. But they were talented and smart, and they didn't try to hide their bookishness to be popular. The brother of one of Jamie's Jewish girlfriends—Nelson Speilman, who attended St. John's, the other prestigious prep school in Houston—was her boyfriend for two years, until he went off to Princeton the year before she graduated from Kinkaid. Jamie was one of the dedicated studious ones in a very protected place where to be socially acceptable was everything. It's a school where the football team votes for the homecoming queen, and the girls can't be seen with a public school boy, only with Kinkaid or St. John's boys. The Kinkaid boys drive Broncos and hunt and watch sports, and all of them want
to go to UT, and there's a lot of drinking and a lot of parental looking-the-other-way at the drinking."