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In keeping with my wildly fluctuating behavior in New York, I now wondered what the writing of Lonoff's biography could possibly have to do with me. After my visit to his house in 1956, I'd never again been in his presence, and the one letter I sent him after that visit he had not answered, thus stifling any dream I may have had of his serving as master to my apprenticeship. As regards either a biography or a biographer, I had no responsibility to E. I. Lonoff or his heirs. It was seeing Amy Bellette after so many years—especially seeing her infirm and disfigured, evicted from the dwelling of her own body—and after that going out to buy his books and rereading them at the hotel, that had set in motion the response that Kliman would elicit with his allusions to a sinister Lonoff "secret." Surely if I had been at home and received a letter out of the blue from some Kliman or other, more or less inveigling me for the same reasons, I wouldn't have bothered to reply, let alone have threatened to all but destroy him should he dare to pursue this project further. Left merely to his own devices, Kliman wasn't likely to succeed in his grandiose plans; probably the greatest encouragement he'd had so far wasn't from a literary agent or a publishing house but from my strenuous opposition. And now here I was with Jamie, ending our silence by asking, "Whom am I dealing with? Will you tell me? Who is this boy?"

Suspiciously she said, "What do you want to know?"

"How does he come to imagine himself adequate to this job? Have you known him for long?"

"Since he was eighteen. Since his freshman year. I've known him ten years."

"Where is he from?"

"He's from Los Angeles. His father is a lawyer. An entertainment lawyer, a notoriously aggressive one. His mother is entirely different from his father. She's a professor of, I think, Egyptology, at UCLA. She meditates for a couple of hours every morning. She claims to be able to make a green ball of light levitate in front of her at the end of her meditations on a good day."

"How did you meet her?"

"Through him, of course. Whenever they'd come to town they'd take his friends out to dinner. Just as when my parents came to town, he was among my friends, and he would go out to dinner with us."

"So he grew up in a professional household."

"Well, he grew up with a headstrong, aggressive father and an intellectual and quiet mother. He's smart. He's very smart. He's very sharp. Yes, he's got his own aggressiveness, which clearly has put you off. But he's no dummy.
There's no reason why he shouldn't be able to write a book—other than why anybody shouldn't be able to write a book."

"Why is that?"

"Because it's hard."

She was studiously saying no more than she was saying, trying to impress me with her unimpressibility and determined not to submit but merely to answer. She was strongly disinclined to appear to be a pushover because of the differences in status and age. Despite her obvious complacency about her effect on men, she hadn't seemed to realize as yet that she had already triumphed and the pushover was me.

"What was he like to you?" I asked.

"When?"

"When you were friends."

"We had a wonderful time together. We had fathers comparably bullheaded to contend with, so we had plenty of survival stories to swap. That's how we got so devoted so quickly—they provided us with delightful tales of horror and mirth. Richard's robust and energetic and always up for trying new things, and he's fearless. He holds nothing back. He's adventurous and he's fearless and he's free."

"Aren't you a little over the top?"

"I'm accurately answering your questions."

"Fearless of what, may I ask?"

"Of contempt. Of disapproval. He doesn't have the limitations that other people have about being in the group
of people they feel comfortable with. There's nothing hesitant about him. He's a succession of decisive deeds."

"And he gets along with the notoriously aggressive father?"

"Oh, I think they fight. They're both fighting men, so they fight. I don't think it's taken so seriously, as if I were to fight with my mother. They'll fight like dogs on the phone and the next night they're back on the phone as though nothing had ever happened. That's the way it is with them."

"Tell me more."

"What more do you want to know?"

"Whatever you're not telling me." Of course I wanted to know only about her. "Did you ever visit him in Los Angeles?"

"Yes."

"And?"

"He lives in a big house in Beverly Hills. It's, in my book, extremely ugly. It's large, it's ostentatious. Not at all cozy. His mother collects, I guess you'd call it ancient art—sculpture, little objects. And there are display cases, niches in the wall that are too large—the way everything there is too large—for what they hold. It's a place without any warmth. Too many columns. Too much marble. A huge pool in the back yard. Extremely landscaped. Very manicured. That's not his world. He went to college in the Northeast. He's come to New York. He's chosen to live in New York and work in the literary world and not become super-rich and live in a marble palace in L.A. and
hound people for a living. He's got the skills to be a professional hound—he learned them from his father—but that's not what he wants."

"The parents are still married?"

"Shockingly, yes. I don't know what they have in common. She meditates and then goes off to work all day. He's at work all the time. They share the house together, I guess. I never saw them talk about anything with each other."

"Is he in touch with them?"

"I suppose so. He doesn't talk about them."

"He wouldn't call his parents on election night."

"I suppose not. Though I'm sure his parents would be much more pleasant to talk to on election night than mine. They're good L.A. liberals."

"And his friends in New York?"

Here she sighed, the first irritated sign of impatience. Till then she'd been completely unrattled and calculatingly aloof. "He's gotten occupied with a group of men he met at the gym. They're young professionals, probably between twenty-five and forty. They all play basketball together and he hangs out with them a lot. Lawyers. Media people. Some of our mutual friends from college work at magazines and in publishing. He's got a good friend who started a video game company."

"I think he should go in with that friend. I think he should be in video games. Let him be fearless there. Because he thinks this is a game. He thinks 'Lonoff' is the
name
of a game."

"You're wrong," she said, and betrayed herself with a quick smile for having so flatly let me know that. "He comes across to you like his father, this bullying man, but he's much more his mother. He's an intellectual. He's thoughtful. Yes, he's got extraordinary energy. Dynamic and exciting and strong and obstinate and sometimes scary, too. But he's not a thoughtless opportunist out for himself."

"I would have said that's just what he was."

"What kind of opportunist goes after a literary biography of a writer who by now is virtually unknown? If he were an opportunist, he'd follow in his father's footsteps. He wouldn't write a biography of a writer nobody under fifty has heard of."

"You're selling him. You're idealizing him."

"Not at all. I know him a lot better than you do and I'm trying to correct you. You need a corrective."

"He's not serious. There's no sobriety in him. It's all audacity, defiance, and highjinks. There's no gravity."

"Perhaps he doesn't have the restraint other people have or the finesse, but he's not without sobriety."

"And integrity. Is he at all corrupted by integrity? I don't think scheming is foreign to Kliman. Is integrity lurking anywhere?"

"You're not describing him, Mr. Zuckerman—you're burlesquing him. It's true that he doesn't always get why he shouldn't behave the way he does. But he has his principles. Look, Richard's not alone—he lives in a careerist world, a world where if you're not careerist you feel like a failure. A world that's all about reputation. You're an older
person coming back, and you don't know what it is to be young now. You're from the 1950s and he's from now. You're Nathan Zuckerman. It's probably been a long time since you had contact with people who aren't established in their professional lives. You don't know what it is not to be safe in a reputation in a world where reputation is everything. But if you're not a Zen master in this careerist world, if you're a part of it and struggling to be recognized, are you, ipso facto, the evil enemy? Admittedly, Richard is not perhaps the most profound person I know, but there's no reason why, in the world of his experience, he would anticipate that his headlong pursuit of what he's pursuing should be offensive to anyone."

"I would say, on the subject of his profundity, that he's not half as profound as your husband. And that your husband is not a tenth as careerist as Kliman, and doesn't feel like a failure because of it."

"He doesn't feel like a success either. But basically that's true."

"Lucky girl."

"Very lucky. I love my husband very much." All the faultless display of self-assurance had done in under ten minutes was to deepen my desire and make her far and away the biggest problem of my life. The velocity of the attraction allows for no resignation and contains no resignation—there is only room for the greed of desire.

"Surely you would agree that Kliman, at the least, is a very disagreeable person."

"I wouldn't agree," she replied.

"And the secret? The pursuit of the secret? Lonoff's great secret?"

Without altering her rhythmic stroking of the cat, she replied, "Incest."

"And how does Kliman know this?"

"He has documentation. He's been in touch with some people. Beyond that, I don't know."

"But I was with Lonoff. I met Lonoff. I've read all of Lonoff more than once. This is impossible to believe."

With just a whisper of superiority, she said, "It's always impossible to believe."

"It's nonsense," I insisted. "Incest with whom?"

"A half-sister," Jamie said.

"Like Lord Byron and Augusta."

"Not at all like them," she answered—and sharply this time—and proceeded to exhibit her (or Kliman's) erudition on the subject. "Byron and his half-sister barely knew each other as children. They were only lovers when they were adults and she was the mother of three children. The sole similarity is that Lonoff's half-sister was also older. She was from the father's first marriage. The girl's mother died when she was small, the father quickly remarried, and Lonoff was born. She was then three years old. They grew up together. They were raised as brother and sister."

"Three years old. That means she was born in 1898. She must be gone a long time now."

"She had children. The youngest son is still alive. He
must be eighty or more. In Israel. She left America to live in Palestine after they were discovered. The parents took her there to escape the disgrace. Lonoff stayed behind and set off on his own. He was seventeen by then."

The story I knew of Lonoff's origins was similar only up to a point. The parents had emigrated from Russia's Jewish Pale to Boston but in time found American society repellently materialistic, and when Lonoff was seventeen, they moved on to pre-Mandate Palestine. It was true that Lonoff had remained behind, but not because he was abandoned as a deviant wrongdoer of a son; he was a fully grown American boy and preferred to become an American-speaking American man rather than a Hebrew-speaking Palestinian Jew. I'd never heard anything about a sister or any other sibling, but then, since he was devoted to preventing his fiction from being speciously misinterpreted as a gloss on his life, Lonoff had never revealed more than the most rudimentary facts of his biography to anyone, except perhaps to his wife, Hope, or to Amy.

"When did this affair begin?" I asked.

"He was fourteen."

"Who told Kliman about it—the son in Israel?"

"Richard would have told you who told him, if you'd let him," she said. "He'd have told you all of this himself. He would have known the answers to every one of your questions."

"And told how many besides me? How many besides you?"

"I don't see what crime he's committing by telling whoever he wants to tell. You wanted me to tell you. That's why you called and came here. Have I now committed a crime? I'm sorry that the thought of an incestuous Lonoff tortures you. It's hard for me to believe that the man who wrote your books would rather he be sanctified."

"It's a long way from reckless accusation to sanctification. Kliman can't possibly prove anything about intimate events that he claims happened close to one hundred years ago."

"Richard's not reckless. I told you: he is adventurous. He's drawn to daring ventures. What's wrong with that?"

Daring ventures. I had gorged on them.

I said, "Has Kliman spoken to the son in Israel, to Lonoff's nephew?"

"Several times."

"And he corroborates the story. He's given him a record of the copulations. Is there a log that young Lonoff kept?"

"The son denies everything, of course. The last time he and Richard spoke, he threatened to come to the U.S. and initiate a lawsuit should Richard make public any such characterization of his mother."

"And Kliman maintains that he's lying for the obvious reasons, or that he just doesn't know—what mother would confide such a secret to her son? Look, too little can be known for him to conclude anything about incest. There's the not-so that reveals the so—that's fiction; and then there's the not-so that just isn't so—that's Kliman."

Jamie promptly stood, sliding the one cat off her lap
and dislodging the other from her feet. "I don't see that this conversation is going in a helpful direction. I shouldn't have intervened. I shouldn't have invited you here to try to do Richard's bidding for him. I have sat obediently and answered your questions. I didn't raise a single objection while you took your deposition. I answered you honestly and have been nothing but respectful, if not downright slavish. I'm sorry if anything I've said or how I've said it has rubbed you the wrong way. But without intending to, that's what I've done."