Exit Ghost (2 page)

He'd brought the cats on a Thursday. I kept them through Sunday. During that time I did virtually no work on my book. Instead I spent my time throwing the cats their toys or stroking them, together or in turn in my lap, or just sitting and looking at them eating, or playing, or grooming themselves, or sleeping. I kept their litter box in a corner of the kitchen and at night put them in the living room and shut my bedroom door behind me. When I awoke in the morning the first thing I did was rush to the door to see them. There they would be, just beside the door, waiting for me to open it.

On Monday morning I phoned Larry and said, "Please come and take the cats."

"You hate them."

"To the contrary. If they stay, I'll never write another word. I can't have these cats in the house with me."

"Why not? What the hell is wrong with you?"

"They're too delightful."

"Good. Great. That's the idea."

"Come and take them, Larry. If you like, I'll return them to the ophthalmologist's receptionist myself. But I can't have them here any longer."

"What is this? An act of defiance? A display of bravado? I'm a disciplined man myself, but you put me to shame. I didn't bring two people to live with you, God forbid. I brought two cats. Tiny
kittens."

"I accepted them graciously, did I not? I've given them a try, have I not? Please take them away."

"I won't."

"I never asked for them, you know."

"That doesn't prove anything to me. You ask for nothing."

"Give me the phone number of the ophthalmologist's receptionist."

"No."

"All right. I'll take care of it myself."

"You're crazy," he said.

"Larry, I can't be made into a new being by two kittens."

"But that's exactly what is happening. Exactly what you won't
allow
to happen. I cannot understand it—a man of your intelligence turning himself into this kind of person. It's beyond me."

"There are many inexplicable things in life. You shouldn't trouble yourself over my tiny opacity."

"All right. You win. I'll come, I'll get the cats. But I'm not finished with you, Zuckerman."

"I have no reason to believe that you are finished or that you can be finished. You're a little crazy too, you know."

"The hell I am!"

"Hollis, please, I'm too old to work myself over anymore. Come get the cats."

Just before the fourth daughter was to be married in New York City—to a young Irish-American attorney who, like Larry, had attended Fordham Law School—he was diagnosed with cancer. The same day the family went down to New York to assemble for the wedding, Larry's oncologist put him into the university hospital in Farmington, Connecticut. His first night in the hospital, after the nurse had taken his vital signs and given him a sleeping pill, he removed another hundred or so sleeping pills secreted in his shaving kit and, using the water in the glass by his bedside, swallowed them in the privacy of his darkened room. Early the next morning, Marylynne received the phone call from the hospital informing her that her husband had committed suicide. A few hours later, at her insistence—she hadn't been his wife all those years for nothing—the family went ahead with the wedding, and the wedding luncheon, and only then returned to the Berkshires to plan his funeral.

Later I learned that Larry had arranged with the doctor beforehand to be hospitalized that day rather than the Monday of the following week, which he could easily have done. In that way the family would be together in one place when they got the news that he was dead; moreover, by killing himself in the hospital, where there were professionals on hand to attend to his corpse, he had spared Marylynne and the children all that he could of the grotesqueries attendant upon suicide.

He was sixty-eight years old when he died and, with the exception of the plan recorded in his "Things to Do" diary to one day have a son named Larry Hollis Jr., he had, amazingly, achieved every last goal that he had imagined for himself when he was orphaned at ten. He had managed to wait long enough to see his youngest daughter married and into a new life and still wind up able to avoid what he most dreaded—his children witnessing the excruciating agonies of a dying parent that he had witnessed when his father and his mother each slowly succumbed to cancer. He had even left a message for me. He had even thought to look after me. In the mail the Monday after the Sunday when we all learned of his death, I received this letter: "Nathan, my boy, I don't like leaving you like this. In this whole wide world, you cannot be alone. You cannot be without contact with anything. You must promise me that you will not go on living as you were when I found you. Your loyal friend, Larry."

So was that why I remained in the urologist's waiting room—because one year earlier, almost to the day, Larry had sent me that note and then killed himself? I don't know, and it wouldn't have mattered if I did. I sat there because I sat there, flipping through magazines of the kind I hadn't seen for years—looking at photos of famous actors, famous
models, famous dress designers, famous chefs and business tycoons, learning about where I could go to buy the most expensive, the cheapest, the hippest, the tightest, the softest, the funniest, the tastiest, the tackiest of just about anything produced for America's consumption, and waiting for my doctor's appointment.

I'd arrived the afternoon before. I'd reserved a room at the Hilton, and after unpacking my bag, I went out to Sixth Avenue to take in the city. But where was I to begin? Revisiting the streets where I'd once lived? The neighborhood places where I used to eat my lunch? The newsstand where I bought my paper and the bookstores where I used to browse? Should I retrace the long walks I used to take at the end of my workday? Or since I no longer see that many of them, should I seek out other members of my species? During the years I'd been gone there'd been phone calls and letters, but my house in the Berkshires is small and I hadn't encouraged visitors, and so, in time, personal contact became infrequent. Editors I'd worked with over the years had left their publishing houses or retired. Many of the writers I'd known had, like me, left town. Women I'd known had changed jobs or married or moved away. The first two people I thought to drop in on had died. I knew that they had died, that their distinctive faces and familiar voices were no more—and yet, out in front of the hotel, deciding how and where to reenter for an hour or two the life left behind, contemplating the simplest ways of putting a foot back in, I had a moment not unlike Rip Van Winkle's when, after having slept for
twenty years, he came out of the mountains and walked back to his village believing he'd merely been gone overnight. Only when he unexpectedly felt the long grizzled beard that grew from his chin did he grasp how much time had passed and in turn learned that he was no longer a colonial subject of the British Crown but a citizen of the newly established United States. I couldn't have felt any more out of it myself had I turned up on the corner of Sixth Avenue and West 54th with Rip's rusty gun in my hand and his ancient clothes on my back and an army of the curious crowding around to look me over, this eviscerated stranger walking in their midst, a relic of bygone days amid the noises and buildings and workers and traffic.

I started toward the subway to take a train downtown to Ground Zero. Begin there, where the biggest thing of all occurred; but because I've withdrawn as witness and participant both, I never made it to the subway. That would have been wholly out of character for the character I'd become. Instead, after crossing the park, I found myself in the familiar rooms of the Metropolitan Museum, wiling away the afternoon like someone who had no catching up to do.

The next day when I left the doctor's office, I had an appointment to return the following morning for the collagen injection. There'd been a cancellation, and he could fit me in. The doctor would prefer it, his nurse told me, if, after the hospital procedure, I stayed overnight in my hotel rather than return immediately to the Berkshires—
complications rarely occurred in the aftermath of the procedure, but remaining nearby till the next morning was a worthwhile precaution. Barring any mishap, by then I could leave for home and resume my usual activities. The doctor himself expected a considerable improvement, not excluding the possibility of the injection's restoring close to complete bladder control. On occasion the collagen "traveled," he explained, and he'd have to go in a second or third time before getting it to adhere permanently to the neck of the bladder; then again, one injection could suffice.

Fine, I said, and instead of reaching a decision only after I'd had a chance to think everything over back home, I surprised myself by seizing at the opening in his schedule, and not even when I was out of the encouraging environment of his office and in the elevator to the main floor was I able to summon up an ounce of wariness to restrain my sense of rejuvenation. I closed my eyes in the elevator and saw myself swimming in the college pool at the end of the day, carefree and without fear of embarrassment.

It was ludicrous to feel so triumphant, and perhaps a measure less of the transformation promised than of the toll taken by the discipline of seclusion and by the decision to excise from life everything that stood between me and my task—the toll of which till then I'd remained oblivious (willed obliviousness being a primary component of the discipline). In the country there was nothing tempting my hope. I had made peace with my hope. But
when I came to New York, in only hours New York did what it does to people—awakened the possibilities. Hope breaks out.

One floor below the urology department, the elevator stopped and a frail, elderly woman got on. The cane she carried, along with a faded red rainhat pulled low over her skull, gave her an eccentric, yokelish look, but when I heard her speaking quietly with the doctor who'd boarded the elevator with her—a man in his mid-forties who was lightly guiding her by the arm—when I heard the foreign tinge to her English, I took a second look, wondering whether she was someone I'd once known. The voice was as distinctive as the accent, especially as it wasn't a voice one would associate with her wraithlike looks but a young person's voice, incongruously girlish and innocent of hardship. I know that voice, I thought. I know the accent. I know the woman. On the main floor, I was crossing the hospital lobby just behind them, heading for the street, when I happened to overhear the elderly woman's name spoken by the doctor. That was why I followed her out the hospital door and to a luncheonette a few blocks south on Madison. I did indeed know her.

It was ten-thirty, and only four or five customers were still eating breakfast. She took a seat in a booth. I found an empty table for myself. She didn't seem to be aware of my having followed her or even of my presence a few feet away. Her name was Amy Bellette. I'd met her only once. I'd never forgotten her.

Amy Bellette was wearing no coat, just the red rainhat
and a pale cardigan sweater and what registered as a thin cotton summer dress until I realized that it was in fact a pale blue hospital gown whose clips had been replaced at the back with buttons and around whose waist she wore a ropelike belt. Either she's impoverished or she's crazy, I thought.

A waiter took her order, and after he walked away she opened her purse and took out a book and while reading it casually reached up and removed the hat and set it down beside her. The side of her head facing me was shaved bald, or had been not too long ago—fuzz was growing there—and a sinuous surgical scar cut a serpentine line across her skull, a raw, well-defined scar that curved from behind her ear up to the edge of her brow. All her hair of any length was on the other side of her head, graying hair knotted loosely in a braid and along which the fingers of her right hand were absent-mindedly moving—freely playing with the hair as the hand of any child reading a book might do. Her age? Seventy-five. She was twenty-seven when we met in 1956.

I ordered coffee, sipped it, lingered over it, finished it, and without looking her way, got up and left the luncheonette and the astonishing reappearance and pathetic reconstitution of Amy Bellette, one whose existence—so rich with promise and expectation when I first encountered her—had obviously gone very wrong.

The procedure the next morning took fifteen minutes. So simple! A wonder! Medical magic! I saw myself once again
swimming laps in the college pool, clad in only an ordinary bathing suit and leaving no stream of urine in my wake. I saw myself going blithely about without carrying along a supply of the absorbent cotton pads that for nine years now I had worn day and night cradled in the crotch of my plastic briefs. A painless fifteen-minute procedure and life seemed limitless again. I was a man no longer powerless over something so elementary as managing to piss in a pot. To possess control over one's bladder—who among the whole and healthy ever considers the freedom that bestows or the anxious vulnerability its loss can impose on even the most confident among us? I who'd never thought along these lines before, who from the age of twelve was bent on singularity and welcomed whatever was unusual in me—I could now be like everyone else.

As though the ever-hovering shadow of humiliation isn't, in fact, what
binds
one to everyone else.

Well before noon I was back in my hotel. I had plenty to keep me busy while I waited out the day before returning home. The previous afternoon—after deciding to leave Amy Bellette undisturbed—I'd gone down to the Strand, the venerable used-book store south of Union Square, and for under a hundred dollars I'd been able to purchase original editions of the six volumes of E. I. Lonoff's short stories. The books happened also to be in my library at home, but I'd bought them anyway and carried them back to the hotel in order to skip chronologically through the various volumes during the hours I would have to remain in New York.

When you undertake an experiment like this after spending twenty or thirty years away from a writer's work, you can't be sure what you're going to turn up, about either the datedness of the once admired writer or the naivete of the enthusiast you once were. But by midnight I was no less convinced than I was in the 1950s that the narrow range of Lonoff's prose and the restricted scope of his interests and the unyielding restraint he employed, rather than collapsing inward a story's implications and diminishing its impact, produced instead the enigmatic reverberations of a gong, reverberations that left one marveling at how so much gravity and so much levity could be joined, in so small a space, to a skepticism so far-reaching. It was precisely the limitation of means that made of each little story not something stultifying but a feat of magic, as if a folk tale or a fairy tale or a Mother Goose rhyme were inwardly illuminated by the mind of Pascal.