Operation Shylock

master-mind who’d trained and disguised him, taught him my mannerisms and how I speak … plotted out the intricacies of the identity theft with the same demoniacal resolve with which she’d dished up to the Second Avenue pharmacist that false urine specimen. … These were the thoughts lapping at the semiconscious brain of a fitfully dozing man struggling still to remain alert. The woman in the black dress stretched across the bed was no more the ghost of my first wife’s corpse than Pipik was the ghost of me, yet there was now a dreamlike distortion muddling my mind against which I was only intermittently able to mobilize my rational defenses. I felt drugged by too many incomprehensible events and, after twenty-four hours of going without sleep, I was shadowboxing none too deftly with an inchoate, dimming consciousness.

“Wanda Jane ‘Jinx’ Possesski — open your eyes, Wanda Jane, and tell me the truth. It is time.”

“You’re going?”

“Open your eyes.”

“Put me in your bag and take me with you,” she moaned. “Get me out of here.”

“Who are you?”

“Oh, you know,” she said wearily, her eyes still closed, “the fucked-up shiksa. Nothing new.”

I waited to hear more. She wasn’t laughing when she said, once again, “Take me with you, Philip Roth.”

It is my first wife. I must be saved and you must save me. I am drowning and you did it. I am the fucked-up shiksa. Take me with you.

We slept this time round for more than just a few minutes, she in the bed, I in the chair, arguing as of old with the resurrected wife. “Can’t you even return from death without screaming about the morality of your position versus the immorality of mine? Is alimony all you think about even there? What is the source of the eternal claim on my income? On what possible grounds did you conclude that somebody owed you his life?”

Then I was put ashore again in the tangible world where she wasn’t, back with my flesh and Wanda Jane’s in the fairy tale of material existence.

“Wake up.”

“Oh, yes … I’m here.”

“Fucked-up how?”

“How else? Family.” She opened her eyes. “Low-class. Beer-drinking. Fighting. Stupid people.” Dreamily she said, “I didn’t like them.”

Neither did she. Hated them. I was the last best chance. Take me with you, I’m pregnant, you must.

“Raised Catholic,” I said.

She positioned herself up on her elbows and melodramatically blinked. “My God,” she asked, “which one are you?”

“The only one.”

“Wanna put your million on it?”

“I want to know who you are. I want to know finally what is going on — I want the truth!”

“Father Polish,” she said lightly, ticking off the facts, “mother Irish, Irish grandmother a real doozy, Catholic schools — church until I was probably twelve years old.”

“Then?”

She smiled at the earnest “Then,” an intimate smile that was no more, really, than a slow curling at the corner of the mouth, something that could only be measured in millimeters but that was, in my book, the very epitome of sexual magic.

I ignored it, if you can describe failing still to get up and leave as ignoring anything.

“‘Then?’ Then I learned how to roll a joint,” she said. “I ran away from home to California. I got involved with drugs and all that hippie stuff. Fourteen. Hitchhiked. It wasn’t uncommon.”

“And then?”

“‘And then?’ Well, out there I remember going through a Hare Krishna event in San Francisco. I liked that a lot. It was very passionate. People were dancing. People were very taken over by the emotion of it. I didn’t get involved in that. I got involved with the Jesus people. Just before that I had been going back to Mass. I guess I was interested in getting involved in some sort of religion. What exactly are you trying to figure out again?”

“What do you think I’m trying to figure out? Him.”

“Gee, and I thought you were interested in little me.”

“The Jesus people. You got involved.”

“Well …”

“Go ahead.”

“Well, there was a pastor, a very passionate little guy. … There was always a passionate guy. … I looked like a waif, I guess. I was dressed like a hippie. I guess I was wearing a long skirt, I had long hair. Little peasant outfit. You’ve seen ’em. Well, this guy gave an altar call at the end of the service, the first one I ever went to, and he asked whoever wanted to accept Jesus into his heart to stand up. The spiel is if you want peace, if you want happiness, accept Jesus into your heart as your personal savior. I was sitting in the front row with my girlfriend. I stood up. Halfway through standing, I realized that I was the only one standing. He came down from the altar and prayed over me that I would receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Looking back on it, I think I just hyperventilated. But I had some sort of rush, some sort of profound feeling. And I did begin to speak in some sort of language. I’m sure it was made up. It’s supposed to be communication with God. Without bothering with language. Your eyes are closed. I did feel a tingling. Sort of detached from what was going on around me. In my own world. Being able to forget who I was and what I was doing. And just do this. It went on for a couple of minutes. He put his hand on my head and I was thrilled. I think I was just vulnerable to anything.”

“Why?”

“Usual reasons. Everybody’s reason. Because of who my parents were. I got very little attention at home. None. So walking into a place where suddenly I’m a star, everybody loves me and wants me, how could I resist? I was a Christian for twelve years. Age of fifteen to the age of twenty-seven. One of those hippies who found the Lord. It became my life. I hadn’t been going to school. I had dropped out of school, and actually I went back to grammar school, I finished grammar school at sixteen in San Francisco. I had these breasts even back then and there I was with them, sitting at a grammar school desk next to all those little kids.”

“Your cross,” I said, “carried before instead of aft.”

“Sometimes it sure seems that way. The doctors were always rubbing up against me when we worked together. Anyway, I’d failed all my life in school and suddenly, tits and all, I started doing okay. And I read the Bible. I liked all that death-to-self stuff. I felt like shit already and it sort of confirmed my feeling of shit. I’m worthless, I’m nothing. God is Everything. It can be very passionate. Just imagine that somebody loved you enough to die for you. That’s big-time love.”

“You took it personally.”

“Oh, absolutely. That’s me all over. Yes, yes. I loved to pray. I would be very passionate and I would pray and I would love God and I would be ecstatic. I remember training myself not to look at anything when I was walking on the street. I would only look straight ahead. I didn’t want to be distracted from contemplating God. But that can’t last. It’s too hard. That would sort of dissipate — then I’d be overcome with guilt.”

Where had she disposed of all the “like”s and the “okay”s and the “you know”s? Where was the tarty, tough-talking nurse from the day before? Her tones were as soft now as those of a well-behaved ten- year-old child, the pitter-patter, innocent treble of a sweet and intelligent little ten-year-old who has just discovered the pleasures of being informative. She might have weighed seventy pounds, a freshly eloquent prepubescent, home helping her mother bake a cake, so unjaded was the voice with which she’d warmed to all this attention. She might have been chattering away while helping her father wash the car on a Sunday afternoon. I supposed I was hearing the voice of the abundantly breasted hippie at the grammar school desk who’d found Jesus.

“Why guilt?” I asked her.

“Because I wasn’t being as in love with God as He deserved. My guilt was that I was interested in things of this world. Especially as I got older.”

I saw the two of us drying the dishes in Youngstown, Ohio. Was she my daughter or my wife? This was now the nonsensical background to the ambiguous foreground. My mind, at this stage, was an uncontrollable thing, but then it was a marvel to me that I could continue to remain awake and that she and I — and he — could still be at it