Operation Shylock

time.”

“And you just don’t bother to correct them.”

“Look, can I buy you lunch? You — here! What a shock to the system! But can we stop this sparring and sit down in this hotel and talk seriously together over lunch? Will you give me a chance to explain?”

“I want to know what you’re up to, buddy!”

“I want you to know,” he said gently and, like a Marcel Marceau at his corniest, with an exaggerated tamping-down gesture of his two hands, indicated that I ought to try to stop shouting and be reasonable like him. “I want you to know everything. I’ve dreamed all my life —”

“Oh no, not the ‘dreams,’” I told him, incensed now not only by the ingenue posturing, not only by how he persisted in coming on so altogether unlike the stentorian Diasporist Herzl he’d impersonated for me on the phone, but by the Hollywooded version of my face so nebbishly pleading with me to try to calm down. Odd, but for the moment that smoothed-out rectification of my worst features got my goat as much as anything did. What do we despise most in the appearance of somebody who looks like ourselves? For me, it was the earnest attractiveness. “Please, not the softly melting eyes of the nice Jewish boy. Your ‘dreams’! I know what you’ve been up to here, I know what’s been going on here between you and the press, so just can the harmless-shlimazl act now.”

“But your eyes melt a little too, you know. I know the things you’ve done for people. You hide your sweet side from the public — all the glowering photographs and I’m-nobody’s-sucker interviews. But behind the scenes, as I happen to know, you’re one very soft touch, Mr. Roth.”

“Look, what are you and who are you? Answer me!”

“Your greatest admirer.”

“Try again.”

“I can’t do better than that.”

“Try anyway. Who are you?”

“The person in the world who has read and loved your books like no one else. Not just once, not just twice — so many times I’m embarrassed to say.”

“Yes, that embarrasses you in front of me? What a sensitive boy.”

“You look at me as though I’m fawning, but it’s the truth — I know your books inside out. I know your life inside out. I could be your biographer. I am your biographer. The insults you’ve put up with, they drive me nuts just on your behalf. Portnoy’s Complaint, not even nominated for a National Book Award! The book of the decade and not even nominated! Well, you had no friend in Swados; he called the shots on that committee and had it in for you but good. So much animosity — I don’t get it. Podhoretz — I actually cannot speak the man’s name without tasting my gall in my mouth. And Gilman — that attack on When She Was Good, on the integrity of that book. Saying you wrote for Womrath’s Book Store — about that perfectly honorable little book! And Professor Epstein, there’s a genius. And those broads at Ms. And this exhibitionist Wolcott —”

I sank back into the chair behind me, and there in the hotel lobby, clammy and shivering under the rain- soaked clothes, I listened as he recalled every affront that had ever appeared in print, every assault that had ever been made on my writing and me — some, insults so small that, miraculously, even I had forgotten them, however much they might have exasperated me a quarter of a century earlier. It was as though the genie of grievance had escaped the bottle in which a writer’s resentments are pickled and preserved and had manifested itself in humanish form, spawned by the inbreeding of my overly licked oldest wounds and mockingly duplicating the man I am.

“ — Capote on the Carson show, coming on with that ‘Jewish Mafia’ shit, ‘From Columbia University to Columbia Pictures’ —”

“Enough,” I said, and pushed myself violently up out of the chair. “That is really enough!”

“It’s been no picnic, that’s all I’m trying to say. I know what a struggle living is for you, Philip. May I call you Philip?”

“Why not? That’s the name. What’s yours?”

With that sonny-boy smile I wanted to smash with a brick, he replied, “Sorry, truly sorry, but it’s the same. Come on, have some lunch. Maybe,” he said, pointing to my shoes, “you want to stop in the toilet and shake those out. You got drenched, man.”

“And you’re not wet at all,” I observed.

“Hitched a ride up the hill.”

Could it be? Hitched the ride I’d thought of hitching with Demjanjuk’s son?

“You were at the trial then,” I said.

“There every day,” he replied. “Go, go ahead, dry off,” he said, “I’ll get a table for us in the dining room. Maybe you can relax over lunch. We have a lot to talk about, you and me.”

In the bathroom I took a deliberately long time to dry myself off, thinking to give him every opportunity to call a taxi and make a clean getaway without ever having to confront me again. His had been a commendable, if nauseating, performance for someone who, despite his cleverly seizing the initiative, had to have been only a little less caught off guard in the lobby than I was; as the sweet-natured innocent, cravenly oscillating between bootlicking and tears, his had been a more startlingly original performance by far than my own mundane portrayal of the angry victim. Yet the impact of my materialization must surely have been more galvanic even for him than his had been for me and he had to be thinking hard now about the risk of pushing this thing further. I gave him all the time he needed to wise up and clear out and disappear for good, and then, with my hair combed and my shoes each emptied of about half a cup of water, I came back up into the lobby to phone a taxi to get me over to my lunch date with Aharon — I was half an hour late already — and immediately I spotted him just outside the entryway to the restaurant, ingratiating smile still intact, more handsomely me than even before.

“I was beginning to think Mr. Roth had taken a powder,” he said.

“And I was hoping the same about you.”

“Why,” he asked, “would I want to do a thing like that?”

“Because you’re involved in a deceptive practice. Because you’re breaking the law.”

“Which law? Israeli law, Connecticut state law, or international law?”

“The law that says that a person’s identity is his private property and can’t be appropriated by somebody else.”

“Ah, so you’ve been studying your Prosser.”

“Prosser?”

“Professor Prosser’s Handbook of the Law of Torts.”

“I haven’t been studying anything. All I need to know about a case like this common sense can tell me.”

“Well, still, take a look at Prosser. In 1960, in the California Law Review, Prosser published a long article, a reconsideration of the original 1890 Warren and Brandeis Harvard Law Review article in which they’d borrowed Judge Cooley’s phrase ‘the general right to be let alone’ and staked out the dimensions of the privacy interest. Prosser discusses privacy cases as having four separate branches and causes of action — one, intrusion upon seclusion; two, public disclosure of private facts; three, false light in the public eye; and four, appropriation of identity. The prima facie case is defined as follows: ‘One who appropriates to his own use or benefit the name or likeness of another is subject to liability to the other for invasion of his privacy.’ Let’s have lunch.”

The dining room was completely empty. There wasn’t even a waiter to show us in. At the table he chose for us, directly in the center of the room, he drew out my chair for me as though he were the waiter and stood politely behind it while I sat down. I couldn’t tell whether this was straight satire or seriously meant — yet more idolatry — and even wondered if, with my behind an inch from the seat, he might do what sadistic kids like to do in grade school and at the last moment pull the chair out from under me so that I landed on the floor. I grabbed an edge of the chair in either hand and pulled the seat safely under me