The Ghost Writer Read online

  Well, that loosened me up. Excitedly, I began talking about my month at Quahsay, how much I loved the serenity and beauty of the place, how I loved walking the trails there at the end of the day and reading in my room at night—rereading Lonoff of late, but that I kept to myself. From his toast it was obvious that I had not lost as much ground as I feared by confessing to the lure of clever, pretty college girls, and I did not want to risk offending him anew by seeming to fawn. The fawning, supersensitive Willis, I remembered, had been given less than sixty seconds on the phone.

  I told the Lonoffs about the joy of awakening each morning knowing there were all those empty hours ahead to be filled only with work. Never as a student or a soldier or a door-to-door salesman did I have regular stretches of uninterrupted time to devote to writing, nor had I ever lived before in such quiet and seclusion, or with my few basic needs so unobtrusively satisfied as they were by the Quahsay housekeeping staff. It all seemed to me a marvelous, a miraculous gift. Just a few evenings before, after a day-long snowstorm, I had accompanied the Colony handyman when he set out after dinner on the snowplow to clear the trails that twisted for miles through the Quahsay woods. I described for the Lonoffs my exhilaration at watching the snow crest in the headlights of the truck and then fall away into the forest; the bite of the cold and the smack of the tire chains had seemed to me all I could ever want at the end of a long day at my Olivetti. I supposed I was being professionally innocent despite myself, but I couldn’t stop going on about my hours on the snowplow after the hours at my desk: it wasn’t just that I wanted to convince Lonoff of my pure and incorruptible spirit—my problem was that 1 wanted to believe it myself. My problem was that I wanted to be wholly worthy of his thrilling toast. “I could live like that forever,” I announced.

  “Don’t try it,” he said. “If your life consists of reading and writing and looking at the snow, you’ll wind up like me. Fantasy for thirty years.”

  Lonoff made “Fantasy” sound like a breakfast cereal.

  Here for the first time his wife spoke up—though given the self-effacing delivery, “spoke down” would be more exact. She was a smallish woman with gentle gray eyes and soft white hair and a multitude of fine lines crisscrossing her pale skin. Though she could well have been, as the amused literati had it, Lonoffs “high-born Yankee heiress”—and an excellent example of the species at its most maidenly—what she looked like now was some frontier survivor, the wife of a New England farmer who long ago rode out of these mountains to make a new start in the West. To me the lined face and the shadowy, timorous manner bore witness to a grinding history of agonized childbearing and escapes from the Indians, of famine and fevers and wagon-train austerities—I just couldn’t believe that she could look so worn down from living alongside E. I. Lonoff while he wrote short stories for thirty years. I was to learn later that aside from two terms at a Boston art school and a few-months in New York—and the year in London trying to get Lonoff to Westminster Abbey—-Hope had strayed no farther than had the locally prominent lawyers and clergymen who were her forebears, and-whose legacy by now came to nothing more tangible man one of the Berkshires’ “best” names and the house that went with it.

  She had met Lonoff when he came at the age of seventeen to work for a chicken farmer in Lenox. He himself had been raised just outside Boston, though until he was five lived in Russia. After his father, a jeweler, nearly died from injuries suffered in the Zhitomir pogrom, Lonoff ‘s parents emigrated to primitive Palestine. There typhus carried them both away, and their son was cared for by family friends in a Jewish farming settlement. At seven he was shipped alone from Jaffa to wealthy relatives of his father’s in Brookline; at seventeen he chose vagabondage over college at the relatives’ expense; and then at twenty he chose Hope—the rootless Levantine Valentino taking as his mate a cultivated young provincial woman, bound to the finer things by breeding and temperament, and to a settled place by old granite gravestones, church-meetinghouse plaques, and a long mountain road bearing the name Whittlesey: somebody from somewhere, for all the good that was to do him.

  Despite everything that gave Hope Lonoff the obedient air of an aging geisha when she dared to speak or to move, I still wondered if she was not going to remind him that his life had consisted of something more than reading and writing and looking at snow: it had also consisted of her and the children. But mere was not the hint of a reprimand m her unchallenging voice when she said, “You shouldn’t express such a low opinion of your achievement. It’s not becoming.” Even more delicately, she added, “And it’s not true.”

  Lonoff lifted his chin. “I was not measuring my achievement. I have neither too high nor too low an estimate of my work. I believe I know exactly wherein my value and originality lie. I know where I can go and just how far, without making a mockery of the thing we all love. I was only suggesting—surmising is more like it—that an unruly personal life will probably better serve a writer like Nathan than walking in the woods and startling the deer. His work has turbulence—that should be nourished, and not in the woods. All I was trying to say is that he oughtn’t to stifle what is clearly his gift.”

  Tm sorry,” replied his wife. “I didn’t understand. I thought you were expressing distaste for your own work.”

  “Work” she pronounced in the accent of her region, without the “r.”

  “I was expressing distaste,” said Lonoff, employing that pedantic tone he’d taken with Amy on the subject of her patience, and with me, describing his light-reading problem, “but not for the work. 1 was expressing distaste for the range of my imagination.”

  With a self-effacing smile designed to atone on the spot for her audacity, Hope said, “Your imagination or your experience?”

  “I long ago gave up illusions about myself and experience.”

  She pretended to be brushing the crumbs from around the bread board, that and no more—while with unforeseen, somewhat inexplicable insistence, she softly confessed, “I never quite know what that means.”

  “It means I know who I am. I know the kind of man I am and the kind of writer. I have my own kind of bravery, and please, let’s leave it at that.”

  She decided to. I remembered my food and began to eat again.

  “Do you have a girl friend?” Lonoff asked me.

  I explained the situation—to the extent that I was willing to.

  Betsy had found out about me and a girl she had known since ballet school. The two of us had kissed over a glass of Gallo in the Kitchen, playfully she had shown me the tip of her wine-stained tongue, and I, quick to take heart, had pulled her out of her chair and down beside the sink. This took place one evening when Betsy was off dancing at the City Center and the friend had stopped by to pick up a record and investigate a flirtation we’d begun some months earlier, when Betsy was away touring with the company. On my knees, I struggled to unclothe her; not resisting all that strenuously, she, on her knees, told me what a bastard I was to be doing this to Betsy. I refrained from suggesting that she might be less than honorable herself; trading insults while in heat wasn’t my brand of aphrodisiac, and I was afraid of a fiasco if I should try it and get carried away. So, shouldering the burden of perfidy for two, I pinned her pelvis to the kitchen linoleum, while she continued, through moist smiling lips, to inform me of my character flaws. I was then at the stage of my erotic development when nothing excited me as much as having intercourse on the floor.

  Betsy was a romantic, excitable, high-strung girl who could be left quivering by the backfire of a car—so when the friend intimated over the phone to her a few days later that I wasn’t to be trusted, it nearly destroyed her. It was a bad time for her, anyway. Yet another of her rivals had been cast as a cygnet in Swan Lake, and so, four years after having been enlisted by Balanchine as a seventeen-year-old of great promise, she had yet to rise out of the corps and if didn’t look to her now as though she ever would. And how she worked to be the best! Her art was everything, a point of view no less begu
iling to me than the large painted gypsy-girl eyes and the small unpainted she-monkey face, and those elegant, charming tableaux she could achieve even when engaged hi something so aesthetically un promising as, half asleep in the middle of the night, taking a lonely pee in my bathroom. When we were first introduced in New York, I knew nothing about ballet and had never seen a real dancer on the stage, let alone off. An Army friend who’d grown up next door to Betsy in Riverdale had gotten us tickets for a Tchaikovsky extravaganza and then arranged for a girl who was dancing in it to have coffee with us around the corner from the City Center that afternoon. Fresh from rehearsal and enchantingly full of herself, Betsy amused us by recounting the horrors of her self-sacrificing vocation—a cross, as she described it, between the life of a boxer and the life of a nun. And the worrying! She had begun studying at the age of eight and had been worrying ever since about her height and her weight and her ears and her rivals and her injuries and her chances-right now she was in absolute terror about tonight. I myself couldn’t see that she had reason to be anxious about anything (least of all those ears), so entranced was I already by the dedication and the glamour. At the theater I unfortunately couldn’t remember—once the music had begun and the dozens of dancers rushed on stage—whether earlier she had told us that she was one of the girls in lavender with a pink flower in their hair or one of the girls in pink with a lavender flower in their hair, and so I spent most of the evening just trying to find her. Each time I thought that the legs and arms I was watching were Betsy’s, I became so elated I wanted to cheer—but then another pack of ten came streaking across the stage and I thought, No, there, that’s her.

  “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, E
ngland. 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).