there until she had exhausted herself on my pillow. That she was clutching that cloth star while she wept disgusted and infuriated me.
Down in the street the masked Arabs were gone. I didn’t seem to have been born to stop them either.
When I couldn’t any longer stand the sight of her with the star, I came over to the bed and pulled it out of her hands, and then I unzipped my suitcase and shoved it in with my things. I still have it. I am looking at it while I write.
“It’s an implant,” she said.
“What is? What are you saying?”
“It isn’t ‘his.’ It’s a plastic implant.”
“Oh? Tell me more.”
“Everything’s been cut out of him. He couldn’t stand how it left him. So he had the procedure. Plastic rods are in there. Inside the penis is a penile implant. Why do you laugh? How can you laugh! You’re laughing at somebody’s terrible suffering!”
“I’m not at all — I’m laughing at all the lies. Poland, Walesa, Kahane, even the cancer’s a lie — Demjanjuk’s son is a lie. And this prick he’s so proud of, come clean, in what Amsterdam doodad shop did you two find that nutty joke? It’s Hellzapoppin’ with Possesski and Pipik, it’s a gag a minute with you two madcap kids — who wouldn’t laugh? The prick was great, I have to admit, but I think I’ll always love best the Poles at the Warsaw railroad station ecstatically welcoming back their Jews. Diasporism! Diasporism is a plot for a Marx Brothers movie — Groucho selling Jews to Chancellor Kohl! I lived eleven years in London — not in bigoted, backwater, pope-ridden Poland but in civilized, secularized, worldly-wise England. When the first hundred thousand Jews come rolling into Waterloo Station with all their belongings in tow, I really want to be there to see it. Invite me, won’t you? When the first hundred thousand Diasporist evacuees voluntarily surrender their criminal Zionist homeland to the suffering Palestinians and disembark on England’s green and pleasant land, I want to see with my very own eyes the welcoming committee of English goyim waiting on the platform with their champagne. ‘They’re here! More Jews! Jolly good!’ No, fewer Jews is my sense of how Europe prefers things, as few of them as possible. Diasporism, my dear, seriously misses the point about the depths of the antipathy. But then, that shouldn’t come as news to a charter member of A-S.A. That poor old Smilesburger was nearly suckered by Diasporism’s founding father out of a million bucks — Well, I don’t think this Smilesburger is all there either.”
“What Mr. Smilesburger does with his money,” she shot back, her face rapidly melting down into the defeated grimace of a thwarted child, “is up to Mr. Smilesburger!”
“Then tell Mr. Smilesburger to stop the check, why don’t you? Go play the interceding woman with him. It’s not going to work here, so go try it with him. Tell him he gave the check to the wrong Philip Roth.”
“I’m crashing,” she moaned, “damn it, I’m crashing” and she grabbed the phone from the tin-topped table squeezed in by the wall at the inside corner of the bed and asked the clerk at the hotel switchboard for the King David Hotel. All roads lead back to him. I decided too late to wrestle the phone away from her. Among all the other things contributing to the disorganization of my thinking was the immediacy of her sensuality on that bed.
“It’s me,” she said when the connection was made. “… With him. … Yes I am. … His room! … No! … No! Not with them! … I can’t go on, Phil. I’m on the damn brink. Kahane is crazy, you said so, not me. … No! … I am crashing, Philip, I am going to crash!” Here she thrust the phone at me. “You stop him! You must!”
Because for some reason the phone was wired into the wall furthest from the door, the cord had to be pulled across the width of the bed and I had to lean directly across her to speak into the mouthpiece. Maybe that was why I spoke into the mouthpiece. There could be no other reason. To anyone watching us through that one big window, it would have been she and I who looked like coconspirators now. Propinquity and piquancy seemed as if one word derived from the single explosive root syllable Jinx.
“On to yet another hilarious idea, I hear,” said I into the telephone.
The reply was calm, amused, his voice my own restrained mild voice! “Of yours,” he said.
“Repeat that.”
“Your idea,” he said, and I hung up.
But no sooner was I off the phone than it was ringing again.
“Let it be,” I told her.
“Okay, that’s it,” she said, “that’s gotta be it.”
“Right. Just let it ring.”
The return trip to the chair beside the desk was one long temptation-ridden journey, rich with pleas to the baser yearnings for caution and common sense, a great deal of convulsive conflict compressed into a very short space, a kind of synthesis of my whole adult life. Seating myself as far as I could get in that room from this rash, precipitate complicity of ours, I said, “Leaving aside for the moment who you are, who is this antic fellow who goes around as me?” I signaled with a finger that she was not to touch the ringing phone. “Concentrate on my question. Answer me. Who is he?”
“My patient. I told you that.”
“Another lie.”
“Everything can’t be a lie. Stop saying that. It doesn’t help anyone. You protect yourself from the truth by calling everything you won’t believe a lie. Everything that’s too much for you, you say, ‘That’s a lie.’ But that’s denial, Mr. Roth, of what living is! These lies of yours are my damn life! The phone is no lie!” And she lifted the phone and cried into the mouthpiece, “I won’t! It’s over! I’m not coming back!” But what she heard through the receiver sucked the angry blood engorging her face all the way back down to her feet as though she’d been upended and “hourglass” were no mere metaphor with which to describe her shape. Very meekly she offered me the phone.
“The police,” she said, horrified and uttering “police” as she must once have heard patients freshly apprised of their chances repeat the oncologist’s “terminal.” “Don’t,” she begged me, “he won’t survive it!”
The Jerusalem police were responding to my call. Because the rock runners were gone I had now been put through to them — or maybe all phone lines had indeed been tied up earlier, unlikely as that still seemed to me. I described to the police what I’d seen from my window. They asked me to describe what was going on there now. I told them that the street was empty. They asked my name and I gave it to them. I gave them my U.S. passport number. I did not go on to tell them that someone bearing a duplicate passport, a counterfeit of mine, was at that very moment conspiring at the King David Hotel to kidnap and torture John Demjanjuk’s son. Let him try it, I thought. If she’s not lying, if he’s resolved, like his antihero Jonathan Pollard, to be a Jewish savior regardless of the cost — or even if the motive is merely personal, if he’s just determined to take a leading role in my life like the boy who shot Reagan to wow Jodie Foster — let the fantasies evolve grandiosely without my interference, this time let him overstep something more than just my boundaries and collide head- on with the Jerusalem police. I could not myself arrange a more satisfying conclusion to this stupid drama of no importance. Two minutes into it they’ll nab him in his bid for historical significance and that will be the end of Moishe Pipik.
She had closed her eyes and crossed her arms and laid them protectively over her breasts while I hung just inches above her talking to the police. And she remained like that, absolutely mummified, while I traversed the room and sat back down in my chair once again, thinking, as I looked at the bed, that she could have been waiting to be removed by the undertaker. And that made me think of my first wife, who, some twenty years earlier, at just about Jinx’s age, had been killed in a car crash in New York. We had embarked on a disastrous three-year marriage after she had falsified the results of a pregnancy test in the aftermath of our lurid love affair and then threatened suicide if I didn’t marry her. Six years after my leaving the marriage against her will, I’d still been unable to win her consent to a divorce, and when she was abruptly killed in 1968, I wandered around Central Park, the site of her fatal accident, reciting to myself a ferociously apt little couplet by John Dryden, the one that goes, “Here lies my wife: here let her lie!/Now she’s at rest; and so am I.”
Jinx was taller than her by half a foot and substantial physically in a rather more riveting way, but seeing her laid out in repose, as though for burial, I was struck by a racial resemblance to the square- headed northern good looks of my long-dead enemy. What if it was she risen from the dead to take her revenge … if she was the
