Exit Ghost by Philip Roth Read Free Book Online Page B

significance of his story as I see it and how it explains what happened to his writing when he left Hope and went off with Amy Bellette."
    His saying "when he left Hope" galled me. I understood him—the uncompromising tenacity, the bluntness, the indomitable virus of superiority (he was going to be kind enough to explain things to me)—but that didn't mean I had to trust him. Other than hearsay and gossip, what could he know about "when he left Hope"?
    "That needs no explaining either," I said.
    "A thoroughly documented critical biography could go a long way toward resurrecting Lonoff and restoring his rightful place in twentieth-century literature. But his children won't talk to me, his wife is the oldest person in America with Alzheimer's and
can't
talk to me, and Amy Bellette no longer bothers to answer my letters. I've also sent you letters you haven't answered."
    "I don't remember any."
    "They were sent in care of your publisher, the proper method, I thought, of contacting someone known to be as private as you. The envelopes came back with a sticker attached: 'Return to sender. Unsolicited mail no longer accepted.'"
    "That's a service any publisher will provide. I learned about it first from Lonoff. When I was your age."
    "On that sticker that you use, that's Lonoff's language—his formulation?"
    It
was
Lonoff's language—I couldn't have improved on it—but I didn't answer.
    "I've found out a lot about Miss Bellette. I want to verify it. I need a credible source. You're certainly that. Are you in touch with her?"
    "No."
    "She lives in Manhattan. She works as a translator. She
has brain cancer. If the cancer gets worse before I get to speak with her again, everything she knows will be lost. She could tell me more than anyone."
    "To what end tell you more?"
    "Look, old men hate young men. That goes without saying."
    So offhand, the cryptic flash of wisdom he suddenly displays. Is this generational dispute something he read about or something someone told him about or something that he knows from his own prior experience, or did the awareness of it arrive out of the blue? "I'm just trying to be responsible," Kliman added, and now it was the word "responsible" that galled me.
    "Isn't Amy Bellette why you're in New York?" he asked. "That's what you told Billy and Jamie, that you were here to attend to a friend with cancer."
    "This time when you're cut off," I said, "don't call back."
    Billy phoned fifteen minutes later to apologize for any indiscretion he or Jamie had committed. He hadn't known that our meeting was to be treated as confidential, and he was sorry for the discomfort they may have caused. Kliman, who had just phoned them to report how badly things had gone with me, was a college boyfriend of Jamie's she was friendly with still, and she had meant no harm in telling him who it was that had answered their ad. Billy said that—wrongly, as he now understood it—neither he nor Jamie had foreseen my objections to talking to the biographer of E. I. Lonoff, a writer I was known by all of them to admire. He assured me that they wouldn't again
make the mistake of speaking about the arrangement we'd reached, though I had to realize that once I moved into their place, it wouldn't be long before their network of friends and acquaintances knew who was there, and, likewise, once they'd moved into my place...
    He was polite and thorough, he made sense, and so I said, "No harm done." Of course Kliman had been a boyfriend of Jamie's. Another reason I couldn't bear him.
The
reason.
    "Richard can be insistent," Billy said. "But," he repeated, "we do want to apologize for telling him where you're staying. That was thoughtless."
    "No harm done," I repeated, and once again told myself to get in the car and drive home. New York was full of people motivated by "the spirit of inquiry," and not all of them ethically up to the job. If I were to take over the 71st Street apartment—and the telephone