Exit Ghost (24 page)

Nobody on such casual good terms with the mighty and the accomplished and the renowned, nobody so in love with the excitement of deeds and words, for whom the suffering that is mortality seemed so remote, nobody with as many admirers as George had, with as many attributes as George had, nobody who could speak to anyone and everyone as easily as George did ... On I went, thinking that the closest George would ever come to dying would be to simulate it in an article for
Sports Illustrated.

***

I got up from the bed and, on the desk where I'd been writing for most of the night, found my chore book and began to leaf backward through the pages, looking for a notation about an appointment with Kliman and meanwhile telling him, "I can't go to lunch with you."

"But I have it. I brought it with me. You're welcome to see it."

"See what?"

"The first half of the novel. Lonoff's manuscript."

"I'm not interested."

"But you're the one who told me to bring it with me."

"I did no such thing. Goodbye."

The hotel stationery covered on both sides with recollections of my evening with Amy and the pages of repartee from
He and She—all
that writing I'd done between getting back from Amy's and falling asleep fully clothed and dreaming about my mother—was still there on the desk. In the five minutes before Kliman called again, I was able to review my notes to find out what I'd said to Amy about Kliman and the biography. I'd promised her I'd stop him from writing it. I'd impressed upon her that Lonoff's inspiration for his novel had been taken not from his own life but from highly dubious scholarly speculation about the life of Nathaniel Hawthorne. I'd given her some money ... I read over what I'd said and done but was not immediately clear about my overall intention, if I'd even had one.

When Kliman rang from the lobby, I wondered if it could have been he who'd sent those death threats to me
and to the reviewer eleven years back. His doing that then was wholly unlikely—and yet what if it were so? What if the malicious prank of a college freshman with a craving for mischief had launched me into how and where I've lived during the past decade? Ridiculous if true, and for the moment I couldn't help but be convinced it
was
true, because of its absurdity. The ludicrousness of that decision to go out to the country and never return—as ludicrous as my belief that Richard Kliman was the one who'd pushed me to make it.

"I'll be down in a few minutes," I told him, "and we'll go to lunch." And I'll frustrate your every ambition. I'll ruin you.

I thought this because I had to. I couldn't just talk about it, I couldn't just write about it—before I left Manhattan for home, I had to master Kliman, if nothing else. Mastering him was my last obligation to literature.

How could George be dead? I kept coming back to that. George's having died a year ago made everything absurd. How could that happen to
him?
And how did what happened happen to me for these past eleven years? Never to see George again—never to see anyone again! I did this because of that? I did that because of this? I defined my life around that accident or that person or that ridiculously minor event? How outlandish I seemed, and all because, without my knowing it, George Plimpton had died. Suddenly my way of being had no justification, and George was my—what is the word I'm looking for? The antonym of doppelganger. Suddenly George Plimpton stood for all
that I had squandered by removing myself as forcefully as I had and retreating onto Lonoff's mountain, to seek asylum there from the great variety of life. "It's our time," George said to me, his singular voice ringing with its spirited confidence. "It's our humanity. We have to be a part of it too."

Kliman took me to a coffee shop just down the street on Sixth Avenue, and no sooner had we ordered than he began telling me about George's memorial service. Used to systematically regulating my day's routine and apportioning every hour as I saw fit, I now found myself—in clothes I hadn't removed for almost thirty hours and, I realized, wearing a pad inside my plastic briefs that I hadn't changed since the night before—seated at lunch across from an unpredictable force bent on dominating me. Wasn't that why I was getting the full brunt before I'd even gotten my orange juice—to have demonstrated to me that, contrary to my warning and threats, I was not his equal, let alone his superior, and that he was beyond my control and attached to no restraints? I thought, The Jews can't stop making these. Eddie Cantor. Jerry Lewis. Abbie Hoffman. Lenny Bruce. The Jew at his most buoyant, capable of a calm relationship with nothing and no one. I would have supposed the type had all but disappeared from his generation and that mild, reasonable Billy Davidoff was closer to the current norm—and for all I knew, Kliman
was
the last of the agitators and affronters. I had been out of contact with anyone like him for a long time. I had
been out of contact with a lot of things for a long time, and not just with the resistance of vital beings but with having either to endlessly enact the role of myself or to parry fantasies of the author extrapolated from fiction by the most naive readers—a stale labor from whose tedium I had also disengaged. For I had been something of an affronter once too. It was the affronter whom George Plimpton had first published when no one else would. But nothing like that now, I thought. No, it's not watching George in the ring at Stillman's Gym with Archie Moore in 1959, but me in the ring of an unknown Manhattan with this club-fisted kid in 2004.

"It was just about a year ago, last November," Kliman said. "At Saint John the Divine. Huge place and it's jammed—every seat taken. Two thousand people. Maybe more. Begins with a gospel group. George had seen them somewhere and loved them, and so there they were. Leader very tall, good-looking black guy, groovin' on the pomp and circumstance, and as soon as they start in singing, he starts his shouting. 'It's a celebration! It's a celebration!' and I thought, Oh Christ, here we go, somebody dies and it's a celebration. 'It's a celebration! Everybody say it's a celebration. Tell your neighbor it's a celebration!' So all the white folk begin to nod their heads out of time with the music, and, I tell you, it doesn't look too good for George. Then the minister gives the minister speech, and the speakers step up one by one. First George's sister talks about the museum he made of his room in the house on Long Island, where he kept all his animal skins and dead
birds, and how passionate a boy he was about all these things, and the delivery is stunning. Totally affectless she is, has that strange absolute absence of strangeness that only the purest-bred old-fashioned Wasp can pull off. Then a guy from Texas named Victor Emanuel, probably in his fifties, maybe a little older, an authority on birds, he and George fast friends through their powerful interest in birds. Knew all the birds. This guy talks very plainly, about bird-ing with George and the birding trips they took together, and all of it being uttered in the house of the Lord—though the only ones who care to mention the Lord are the minister and the gospel singers. On that subject everybody else is mum, man, like it has nothing to do with
them.
They just happen to
be
there. Then Norman Mailer. Overwhelming. I'd never seen Norman Mailer off the screen before. Guy's eighty now, both knees shot, walks with two canes, can't take a stride of more than six inches alone, but he refuses help going up to the pulpit, won't even use one of the canes. Climbs this tall pulpit all by himself. Everybody pulling for him step by step. The conquistador is here and the high drama begins. The Twilight of the Gods. He surveys the assemblage. Looks down the length of the nave and out to Amsterdam Avenue and across the U.S. to the Pacific. Reminds me of Father Mapple in
Moby-Dick.
I expected him to begin "Shipmates!" and preach upon the lesson Jonah teaches. But no, he too speaks very simply about George. This is no longer the Mailer in quest of a quarrel, yet his thumbprint is on every word. He speaks about a friendship with George
that flourished only in recent years—tells us how the two of them and their wives had traveled together to wherever they were performing in a play they'd written together, and of how close the two couples had become, and I'm thinking, Well, it's been a long time coming, America, but there on the pulpit is Norman Mailer speaking as a husband in praise of coupledom. Fundamentalist creeps, you have met your match."

There was no stopping him. What had happened between us so far he had set out to obliterate with a big performance designed to quell me, and it was doing its job: I felt myself—despite myself—growing progressively smaller the more flamboyant the display of Kliman's self-delight. Mailer is no longer in quest of a quarrel and can barely walk. Amy is no longer beautiful or in possession of all of her brain. I no longer have the totality of my mental functions or my virility or my continence. George Plimpton is no longer alive. E. I. Lonoff no longer has his great secret, if such a secret there ever was. All of us are now "no-longers" while the excited mind of Richard Kliman believes that his heart, his knees, his cerebrum, his prostate, his bladder sphincter, his
everything
is indestructible and that he, and he alone, is not in the hands of his cells. Believing this is no soaring achievement for those who are twenty-eight, certainly not if they know themselves to be beckoned by greatness. They are not "no-longers," losing faculties, losing control, shamefully dispossessed from themselves, marked by deprivation and experiencing the organic rebellion staged by the body against the elderly; they are "not-yets," with no idea how quickly things turn out another way.

He had a battered briefcase at his feet that I believed contained the half of Lonoff's manuscript. Maybe it contained as well the photographs that Amy had given him while under the influence of the tumor. No, extricating Amy wasn't going to be simple. Any effort at persuasion wasn't going to discourage Kliman; it would only further validate his significance to himself. I tried to figure out if a lawyer might help or if money might help or a combination of both—threatening him with legal action and then paying him off. Maybe he could be blackmailed. Maybe, it occurred to me, Jamie wasn't fleeing bin Laden—maybe she was fleeing him.

SHE

Richard, I'm married.

HE

I know that. Billy's the guy to marry and I'm the guy to fuck. You tell me why all the time. "It's so thick. The base is so thick. The head is so beautiful. This is just the kind I like."

SHE

Leave me alone. You have to leave me alone. This has to be over.

HE

You don't want to come anymore? You don't want the intense sensations anymore? You don't want that ever again?

SHE

We're not going to have this discussion. We don't talk to each other like this anymore.

HE

You want to come now, right now?

SHE

No. You stop it. It's over. If you ever talk to me like this again, we won't talk ever again.

HE

I'm talking to you now. I want you to suck the beautiful head.

SHE

Get the fuck away from me. Get out of my apartment.

HE

The brutal lover makes you come and the obedient lover does not.

SHE

That's not what we're talking about. I'm married to Billy. I'm not with you. Billy's my husband. You and I are over. What you're saying doesn't matter.

HE

Yield.

SHE

No. You yield. Leave.

HE

That's not the way it works between us.

SHE

That's the way it works now.

HE

You love to yield.

SHE

Shut the fuck up. Stop it. Just stop it.

HE

I thought you were so articulate. You are when we play our games. You say all kinds of devilish things when we play call girl and client. You make all sorts of delicious sounds when we play at Jamie being taken by force. Is this all you can say now—"Shut the fuck up" and "Stop it"?

SHE

I'm telling you this is over, and it's over. Leave my house.

HE

I'm not leaving.

SHE

Then I'm leaving.

HE

Where are you going?

SHE

Away.

HE

Come on, sweetie. You've got the prettiest cunt in the world. Let's play the strange games. Say the devilish things.

SHE

Get away from me. Get out of here right now. Billy's coming home. Get out. Get out of my house or I'll call the police.

HE

Wait'll the police see you in just that top and those shorts. They won't leave either. You've got the prettiest cunt and the basest instincts.

SHE

Whatever I say you're just going to talk about my cunt? You try to say something to someone and they don't hear you.

HE

This makes me hot.

SHE

This makes me angry. I'm leaving this house right now.

HE

Here. Look.

SHE

No!
(But he doesn't stop, and so she flees.)

People in the coffee shop might easily have thought Kliman was my son from the way I let him go on in his self-delighted and domineering way, and also because, at strategic moments, he reached out to touch me—my arm, my hand, my shoulder—in order to drive home his point.

"Nobody let you down that day," he told me. "Most interesting of all was a journalist named McDonell. He said something like, 'I'm dedicated to being lighthearted, because it's the only way I can keep myself together up here.' Told many illustrative stories about George. Spoke out of real love. I don't mean the others didn't speak with love. But you felt from McDonell an intense male love. And admiration. And the understanding of what George was. I think he was the one who told the story about George and his T-shirt, though maybe it was the bird guy. Anyway, they went to look for some bird in Arizona. They went out into the desert around dusk. That's when this bird is supposed to be around. They couldn't find it. Suddenly George pulled off his T-shirt and threw it high in the air. And bats swooped in and swarmed the T-shirt and followed it all the way down to the ground. So George began to toss it up in the air, over and over, as high as he could. And more and more bats swarmed around it, and George cried, 'They think it's a giant moth!' It reminded me of
Henderson the Rain King,
at the end, where Henderson gets off the plane in Labrador or Newfoundland, I forget which, and he begins to dance around on this ice cap with all his African rain king exuberance, with that rare strain of privileged, wealthy, Wasp exuberance that
you see in one out of ten thousand of them. And that was George's triumph. It's what George
was.
The Exuberant Wasp. I wish I could remember more of what this wonderful guy said, because he was the one who carried the message. But then that damn singing started up again. 'Oh magnify the Lord! Magnify the Lord!' and every time I heard 'magnify the Lord,' under my breath I said, 'He's not here, and everyone knows he's not here except you. Here is the
last
place he'd be.' Every size and shape of black woman was in that singing group. The ones with the enormous cans, and the little balding gnarled ones looking a hundred years old, and the thinnish, longish, elegant, pretty girls, shy girls some of them, the ones who, when you see them, you know what terror there was in the fields when the master came around looking for his fun. And the big ones who are confident and the big ones who are angry, and about half a dozen sleek black guys singing along too, and I kept thinking of slavery, Mr. Zuckerman. I don't think I've ever thought of slavery so much when I've been with blacks before. Because it was so white an assemblage they were entertaining, it seemed like minstrelsy to me. I saw the last faint remnants of slavery there in that Christianity. Back of them at the head of the apse there was a gold cross huge enough to crucify King Kong. And I have to tell you—two things I hate most about America are slavery and the cross, especially the way they were intertwined and the slave owners justified owning their Negroes by what God told them in their holy
book. But that's extraneous, my hating that shit. The speakers started up again. Nine in all."