Exit Ghost by Philip Roth Read Free Book Online

like a lunatic, shattered and stupid, and that surely had contributed to Jamie Logan's decision to take flight.
    Or was the history of the past few years sufficient in itself to lead her to expect a second gruesome Al Qaeda attack that would carry her off along with Billy and thousands more? I had no way of judging if she'd concluded correctly or was half demented by the situation (as perhaps the rational, patient young husband believed), or if her foresight was to be substantiated by bin Laden, or if by staying I'd be inflicting on myself a blow more devastating than the disorientation visited on Rip Van Winkle. As a onetime creature of intense responsiveness who'd over the preceding decade tautened himself into a low-keyed solitary, I'd got out of the habit of giving in to every impulse that crossed my nerve endings, and yet, in just
my few days back, I had arrived at what might turn out to be the most thoughtless snap decision I'd ever made.

    The hotel phone rang. A man who introduced himself as a friend of Jamie Logan's and Billy Davidoff's. Knew Jamie from Harvard, where she was two years ahead of him. A freelance journalist. Richard Kliman. Wrote on literary and cultural subjects. Articles in the
Times
Sunday magazine,
Vanity Fair, New York,
and
Esquire.
Was I free today? Could he take me to lunch?
    "What do you want?" I asked.
    "I'm writing about an old acquaintance of yours."
    I was no longer skilled in indulging journalists, if I ever had been, nor was I heartened at being so easily located, touching as it did on the immediate circumstances that had first exiled me from New York.
    Without explanation, I hung up. Kliman called back within seconds. "We were cut off," he said.
    "I cut us off."
    "Mr. Zuckerman, I'm writing a biography of E. I. Lonoff. I asked Jamie for your number because I know you met Lonoff and corresponded with him back in the 1950s. I know that as a young writer you were his great admirer. I'm now just a few years older than you were then. I'm not the prodigy you were—this is my first book, and it's not fiction. But I'm trying to do no more or less than you did. I know what I'm not, but I also know what I am. I'm trying to give it everything I have. If you'd like to call and ask Jamie to confirm my credentials—"
    No, I'd like to call and ask Jamie why she had informed Mr. Kliman of my whereabouts.
    "The last thing Lonoff wanted was a biographer," I said. "He had no ambition to be talked about. Or read about. He wanted anonymity, a harmless enough preference achieved automatically by most and surely a desire easy enough to respect. Look, he's been dead for over forty years. Nobody reads him. Nobody remembers him. Next to nothing is known about him. Any biographical treatment would be largely imaginary—in other words, a travesty."
    "But
you
read him," Kliman responded. "You even mentioned his work to us when you came to have lunch at the Signet Society with a bunch of students back in my sophomore year. You told us which stories of his to read. I was there. Jamie was a member and she invited me to come along. Do you remember the Signet Society, the arts club where you had lunch at a big communal table, and afterward we went into the living room—remember that? The evening before, you'd read from your work in Memorial Hall, and one of the students invited you, and you agreed to come for lunch before you left the next day."
    "No, I don't remember," I said, though I did—the reading because it was the last I'd given before my prostatectomy and the last ever, and I even remembered the lunch, when Kliman spoke of it, because of the dark-haired girl who'd sat looking at me from across the table. That must have been Jamie Logan at twenty. She'd pretended on West 71st Street that we'd never met, but we had, and I'd noticed her then. What struck me as unusual? Was it merely that she was the prettiest of them all? That could have done it, of course—that and the self-assured reserve