The Ghost Writer (4 page)

“You were wonderful,” I told her afterward. “Yes? Did you like my little solo? It’s not actually a solo—it lasts only about fifteen seconds. But I do think it’s awfully charming.”

“Oh, I thought it was terrific,” I said, “it seemed like more than fifteen seconds to me.”

A year later our artistic and amatory alliance came to an end when I confessed that the mutual friend had not been the first girl to be dragged onto the floor while Betsy was safely off dancing her heart out and I had nighttime hours with nothing to do and nobody to stop me. I had been at this for some time now and, I admitted, it was no way to be treating her. Bold honesty, of course, produced far more terrible results than if I had only confessed to seducing the wily seductress and left it at that; nobody had asked me about anybody else. But carried away by the idea that if I were a perfidious brute, I at least would be a truthful perfidious brute, I was crueler than was either necessary or intended. In a fit of penitential gloom, I fled from New York to Quahsay, where eventually I managed to absolve myself of the sin of lust and the crime of betrayal by watching from behind the blade of the snowplow as it cleared the Colony roads for my solitary and euphoric walks—walks during which I did not hesitate to embrace trees and kneel down and kiss the glistening snow, so bursting was I with a sense of gratitude and freedom and renewal.

Of all this, I told the Lonoffs only the charming part about how we had met and also that now, sadly, my girlfriend and I were trying a temporary separation. Otherwise, I portrayed her in such uxorious detail that, along with the unnerving sense that I might be laying it on a little thick for this old married couple, I wound up in wonder at the idiot I had been to relinquish her love. Describing all her sterling qualities, I had, in fact, brought myself nearly to the point of grief, as though instead of wailing with pain and telling me to leave and never come back, the unhappy dancer had died in my arms on our wedding day.

Hope Lonoff said, “I knew that she was a dancer from the
Saturday Review
.”

The
Saturday
Review
had published an article on America’s young, unknown writers, photographs and thumbnail sketches of “A Dozen to Keep Your Eye On,” selected by the editors of the major literary quarterlies. I had been photographed playing with Nijinsky, our cat. I had confessed to the interviewer that my “friend” was with the New York City Ballet, and when asked to name the three living writers I admired most, I had listed E. I. Lonoff first.

I was disturbed now to think that this must have been the first Lonoff had heard of me—though, admittedly, while answering the interviewer’s impossible questions, I had been hoping that, my comment might bring my work to his attention. The morning the magazine appeared on the newsstands I must have read the bit about “N. Zuckerman” fifty times over. I tried to put in my self-prescribed six hours at the typewriter but got nowhere, what with picking up the article and looking at my picture every five minutes. I don’t know what I expected to see revealed there— the future probably, the titles of my first ten books—but I do remember thinking that this photograph of an intense and serious young writer playing so gently with a kitty cat, and said to be living in a five-flight Village walk-up with a young ballerina, might inspire any number of thrilling women to want to try to take her place.

“I would never have allowed that to appear,” I said, “if I had realized how it was all going to come out. They interviewed me for an hour and then what they used of what I said was nonsense.”

“Don’t apologize,” said Lonoff.

“Don’t indeed,” said his wife, smiling at me. “What’s wrong with having your picture in the paper?”

“I didn’t mean the picture—though that, too. I never knew they were going to use the one of me with the cat. I expected they’d use the one at the typewriter. I should have realized they couldn’t show everybody at a typewriter. The girl who came around to take the pictures”—and whom I had tried unsuccessfully to throw onto the floor—”said she’d just take the picture of the cat for Betsy and me.”

“Don’t apologize,” Lonoff repeated, “unless you know for sure you’re not going to do it again next time. Otherwise, just do it and forget it. Don’t make a production out of it.” Hope said, “He only means he understands, Nathan. He has the highest respect for what you are. We don’t have visitors unless they’re people Manny respects. He has no tolerance for people without substance.”

“Enough,” said Lonoff.

“I just don’t want Nathan to resent you for superiority feelings you don’t have.”

“My wife would have been happier with a less exacting companion.”

“But you
are
less exacting,” she said, “with everyone but yourself. Nathan, you don’t have to defend yourself. Why shouldn’t you enjoy your first bit of recognition? Who deserves it more than a gifted young man like yourself? Think of all the worthless people held up for our esteem every day: movie stars, politicians, athletes. Because you happen to be a writer doesn’t mean you have to deny yourself the ordinary human pleasure of being praised and applauded.”

“Ordinary human pleasures have nothing to do with it. Ordinary human pleasures be damned. The young man wants to be an artist.”

“Sweetheart,” she replied, “you must sound to Nathan so—so unyielding. And you’re really not that way at all. You’re the most forgiving and understanding and modest person I have ever known. Too modest.”

“Let’s forget how I sound and have dessert.”

“But you are the kindest person. He is, Nathan. You’ve met Amy, haven’t you?”

“Miss Bellette?”

“Do you know all he’s done for her? She wrote him a letter when she was sixteen years old. In care of his publisher. The most charming, lively letter—so daring, so brash. She told him her story, and instead of forgetting it, he wrote her back. He has always written people back—a polite note even to the fools.”

“What was her story?” I asked.

“Displaced,” said Lonoff. “Refugee.” That seemed.to him to suffice, though not to .the wagon-train wife, who surprised me now by the way that she pressed on. Was it the little bit of wine that had gone to her head? Or was there not something seething in her?

“She said she was a highly intelligent, creative, and charming sixteen-year-old who was now living with a not very intelligent, creative, or charming family in Bristol, England. She even included her IQ,” Hope said. “No, no, that was the second letter. Anyway, she said she wanted a new start in life and she thought the man whose wonderful story she’d read in her school anthology—”

“It wasn’t an anthology, but you might as well keep going.”

Hope tried her luck with a self-effacing smile, but the wattage was awfully dim. “I think I can talk about this without help. I’m only relating the facts, and calmly enough, I had thought. Because the story was in a magazine, and not in an anthology, doesn’t mean that I have lost control of myself. Furthermore, Amy is not the subject, not by any means. The subject is your extraordinary kindness and charity. Your concern for anyone in need—anyone except yourself, and your needs.”

“Only my ‘self,’ as you like to call it, happens not to exist in the everyday sense of the word. Consequently, you may stop lavishing praise upon it. And worrying about its ‘needs.’”

“But your self does exist. It has a perfect right to exist—and in the everyday sense!”

“Enough,” he suggested again.

With that, she rose to begin to clear the dishes for dessert, and all at once a wineglass struck the wall. Hope had thrown it “Chuck me out,” she cried, “I want you to chuck me out. Don’t tell me you can’t, because you must! I want you to! I’ll finish the dishes, then chuck me out, tonight! I beg of you—I’d rather live and die alone, I’d rather endure that than another moment of your bravery! I cannot take any more moral fiber in the race of life’s disappointments! Not yours and not mine! I cannot bear having a loyal, dignified husband who has no illusions about himself one second morel”

My heart, of course, was pounding away, though not entirely because the sound of glass breaking and the sight of a disappointed woman, miserably weeping, was new to me. It was about a month old. On our last morning together Betsy had broken every dish of the pretty little Bloomingdale’s set that we owned in common, and then, while I hesitated about leaving my apartment without making my position clear, she started in on the glassware. The hatred for me I had inspired by telling the whole truth had me particularly confused. If only I had lied, I thought—if only I had said that the friend who had intimated I might not be trustworthy was a troublemaking bitch, jealous of Betsy’s success and not a little crazy, none of this would be happening. But then, if I had lied to her, I would have lied to her. Except that what I would have said about the friend would in essence have been true! I didn’t get it Nor did Betsy when I tried to calm her down and explain what a swell fellow I actually was to have been so candid about it all. It was here, in fact, that she set about destroying the slender drinking glasses, a set of six from Sweden that-we had bought to replace the jelly jars on a joyous quasi-connubial outing some months earlier at Bonniers (bought along with the handsome Scandinavian throw rug onto which, in due course, I had tried to drag the photographer from the Saturday Review).

Hope Lonoff had now slumped back into her chair, the better to plead with her husband across the table. Her face was patched with blotches where she had been digging at the soft, creased skin in a fit of self-abasement. The frantic, agitated movement of her fingers alarmed me more even than the misery in her voice, and I wondered if I shouldn’t reach over and pick up the serving fork from the table before she turned the prongs into her bosom and gave Lonoff’s “self” the freedom to pursue what she thought it needed. But as I was only a guest—as I was “only” just about anything you could think of—I left all cutlery where it was and waited for the worst.

Take her, Manny. If you want her, take her,” she cried, “and men you won’t be so miserable, and everything in the world won’t be so bleak. She’s not a student any more—she’s a woman! You are entitled to her—you rescued her from oblivion, you are more than entitled: it’s the only thing that makes sense! Tell her to accept that job, tell her to stay! She should! And I’ll move away! Because I cannot live another moment as your jailer! Your nobility is eating away the last thing that is left! You are a monument and can take it and take it—but I’m down to nothing, darling, and I can’t. Chuck me out! Please, now, before your goodness and your wisdom kill us both!”

Lonoff and I sat talking together in the living room after dinner, each sipping with admirable temperance at the tablespoonful of cognac he had divided between two large snifters. I had so far experienced brandy only as a stopgap household remedy for toothache: a piece of absorbent cotton, soaked in the stuff, would be pressed against my throbbing gum until my parents could get me to the dentist. I accepted Lonoff’s offer, however, as though it accorded with my oldest post-prandial custom. The comedy thickened when my host, another big drinker, went to look for the right glasses. After a systematic search he finally found them at the rear of the bottom cabinet in the foyer breakfront. “A gift,” he explained, “I thought they were still in the box,” and took two into the kitchen to wash away dust that seemed to have been accumulating since the time of Napoleon, whose name was on the sealed brandy bottle. While he was at it he decided to wash the four other glasses in the set, and put them back in hiding in the breakfront before rejoining me to begin our merrymaking at the hearth.

Not much later—in all, maybe twenty minutes after he had refused to respond in any way to her plea to be replaced by Amy Bellette—Hope could be heard in the kitchen, washing the dishes that Lonoff and I had silently cleared from the table following her departure. She seemed to have gotten down from their bed room by a back stairway—probably so as not to disturb our conversation.

While helping him to clear up, I had not known what to do about her broken wineglass or about the saucer she inadvertently had knocked to the floor when she rushed from the table. My duty as ingénue was clearly to spare the stout man in the business suit from bending over, especially as he was E. I. Lonoff; on the other hand, I was still trying to get through by pretending that nothing shocking had happened in my presence. To keep the tantrum in perspective, he might even prefer that the broken bits be left where they were for Hope to clean up later, provided she did not first commit suicide in their room.

Even as my sense of moral niceties and my youthful cowardice battled it out with my naiveté”, Lonoff, groaning slightly from the effort, brushed the glass into a dustpan and retrieved the saucer from beneath the dining table. It had broken neatly in two, and after inspecting the edges he observed, “She can glue it.”

In the kitchen he left the dish for her to repair on a long wooden counter where pink and white geraniums were growing in clay pots beneath the windows. The kitchen was a bright, pretty room, a little cheerier and livelier looking than the rest of the house. Besides the geraniums flowering abundantly here even in winter, tall reeds and dried flowers were stuck all about in pitchers and vases and little odd-shaped bottles. The windowed wall cupboards were bright and homey and reassuring: food staples labeled with unimpeachable brand names—enough Bumble Bee tuna for an Eskimo family to survive on in their igloo till spring—and jars of tomatoes, beans, pears, crabapples, and the like, which seemed to have been put up by Hope herself. Pots and pans with shining copper bottoms hung in rows from a pegboard beside the stove, and along the wall above the breakfast table were half a dozen pictures in plain wooden frames, which turned out to be short nature poems signed “H.L.,” copied in delicate calligraphy and decorated with watercolor designs. It did indeed look to be the headquarters of a woman who, in her own unostentatious way, could glue anything and do anything, except figure out how to make her husband happy.

We talked about literature and I was in heaven—also in a sweat from the spotlight he was giving me to bask in. Every book new to me I was sure he must have annotated with his reading pen long ago, yet his interest was pointedly in hearing my thoughts, not his own. The effect of his concentrated attention was to make me heap insight onto precocious insight, and then to hang upon his every sigh and grimace, investing what was only a little bout of after-dinner dyspepsia with the direst implications about my taste and my intelligence. Though I worried that I was trying too hard to sound like the kind of deep thinker for whom he had no love, I still couldn’t stop myself, under the spell now not just of the man and his accomplishment but of the warm wood fire, of the brandy snifter balanced in my hand (if not yet the brandy), and of the snow falling heavily beyond the cushioned window seats, as dependably beautiful and mystifying as ever. Then there were the great novelists, whose spellbinding names I chanted as I laid my cross-cultural comparisons and brand-new eclectic enthusiasms at his feet—Zuckerman, with Lonoff, discussing Kafka: I couldn’t quite get it, let alone get over it. And then there was his dinner-table toast. It still gave me a temperature of a hundred and five each time I remembered it. To myself I swore that I would struggle for the rest of my life to deserve it. And wasn’t that why he’d proposed it, this pitiless new master of mine?