Operation Shylock

child!”

But when she rose from the breakfast table, at long last primed to break the bonds of this inexplicable martyrdom, he sobbed hysterically, “Oh, Mommy, I’m sorry,” and tumbled to his knees on the kitchen floor. Pressing her bleeding hand against his mouth, he told her, “Forgive me — I promise I’ll never stab you again!” And then this man who was all malaise, this unshameable, intemperate, conniving madman driven as recklessly by ungovernable compulsion as by meticulous, minute-by-minute miscalculation, this mutilated victim who was all incompleteness and deficiency, whose every scheme was a fiasco and against whose hyperbole she was, as always, undefended, began to lick the wound he had inflicted. Grunting with contrition, growling showily with remorse, he lapped thirstily away at her with his tongue as though the blood oozing out of this woman’s veins were the very elixir for which he’d been searching to prolong the calamity that was his life.

Because by this time he didn’t weigh much over a hundred pounds, it wasn’t that difficult for someone with her strength to lift him off the floor and virtually carry him in her arms up the stairs to the bed. And while she sat beside him there, holding his trembling hands in hers, he revealed where he really came from and who he really was, a story irreconcilable with everything he had told her before. She refused to believe him and, in her letter to me, would not repeat even one detail of the things to which he pleaded guilty. He had to have been delirious, she wrote, because, if he wasn’t, then she would have had to have him either arrested or institutionalized. When, at last, there was nothing disgraceful that a man could do that was left for him to confess to, darkness had enveloped their street and it was time to feed him dinner with her throbbing bandaged hand. But first, using a sponge and a basin of warm water, she gently bathed him right there in the bed and, as she did every night, massaged his legs until he purred. What did it matter in the end who he was and what he had done, or who he thought he was and what he thought he had done or was capable of doing or was emboldened enough to have done or was ill enough to have imagined he had done or imagined he must have done to have made himself fatally ill? Pure or depraved, harmless or ruthless, would-be Jewish savior or thrill-seeking, duplicitous, perverted betrayer, he was suffering, and she was there to assuage that suffering as she had been from the start. This woman whom he had stabbed in the hand at breakfast (while aiming for her face) put him to sleep — without his even having to ask — with a sweetly milking, all-consuming blow job that blotted out all his words, or so she said, or so said whoever had told her what to say in that letter in order to warn me off ever writing a single sentence for publication about these coarse, barbaric irrationalists of mine, these two catastrophists sustained by their demonic conflict and the theatrical, maddening trivia of psychosis. Her letter’s message to me was this: Find your comedy elsewhere. You bow out, and we’ll bow out. He’ll be as good as dead. But dare to ridicule either one of us in a book, and we’ll never leave you alone again. You have met your match in Pipik and Jinx, both of whom are alive and well. And this message, of course, was the very antithesis of the assurance that the letter had been conceived to provide.

The morning after the reconciliation, everything that worked to drain away her courage started up once again, even though it seemed at first that the shock even to him of the savagery with that fork might have at last reined in his desperation. He addressed her, on that morning after, “in a soothing voice like yours,” she wrote, a voice contained, modulated, expressive of all that she longed for and sometimes secretly dreamed of finding by taking the unthinkable revenge of fleeing to the sanctuary of me.

He informed her that they were leaving New Jersey. She was to go out to the backyard and burn in the barbecue pit the four first-draft chapters of His Way. That abhorrent obsession was over. They were going.

She was ecstatic — now she could stay on at her task of keeping him alive (as if, she admitted, she could ever have left him to die in agony by himself). Making a life with his namesake was a fairy tale anyway. I, as he’d reminded her, had wanted her “only for sex” while what he wanted from her, with all the scorching intensity that only the dying can feel, alone and resourceless on their island of fear, was “everything,” she wrote, “everything” that she had in her to give to a patient.

They were leaving New Jersey to move to the Berkshires, where he would write the book on Diasporism that would be his legacy to the Jews.

Since dyslexic Wanda had never read a page I or any other novelist had written, it wasn’t until they’d settled down in western Massachusetts that she learned it was where I’d located the home of the wearily heroic E. I. Lonoff, whose example of Flaubertian anchoritism confirms the highest literary ideals of writer-worshiping Nathan Zuckerman, the young novice of The Ghost Writer. However, if she could not understand how, having begun by stealing my identity, Pipik was now bent on further compounding the theft by turning into parody (his way) the self-obliterating dedication of the selfless Lonoff, she did know that I made my home less than an hour south, in Connecticut’s northwestern hills. And the provocation my proximity was bound to be was enough to reawaken her dread, and with that, of course, the inextinguishable fantasies of breaking free that the edifying encounter with me had inspired. (I should never have found her irresistible, I thought. It didn’t take a genius to foresee this.)

“Oh, darling,” she cried, “forget him, I beg you. We’ll burn His Way and forget he ever existed! You can’t leave where he was born to go to live where he’s living now! You can’t keep following him like this! Our time together is too precious for that! Being anywhere near this man drives you nuts! You’ll only fill up with poison again! Being there will just make you crazy again!”

“Being near him now can only make me sane,” he told her, as senseless on the subject as ever. “Being near him can only make me strong. Being near him is the antidote — it’s how I am going to beat this thing. Being near him is the cure.”

“As far from him as we can!” she pleaded.

“As close to him as we can,” he replied.

“Tempting fate!” she cried.

“Not at all,” he answered. “See him if you want to.”

“I didn’t mean me and fate — I meant you. First you tell me he gave you the cancer, now you tell me he’s the cure! But he has nothing to do with it either way. Forget him! Forgive him!”

“But I do forgive him. I forgive him for who he is, I forgive myself for who I am, I even forgive you for who you are. I repeat to you — see him if you wish. See him again, seduce him again —”

“I don’t want to! You’re my man, Philip, my only man! I wouldn’t be here otherwise!”

“Did you say — did I hear you right? Did you actually say ‘You’re my Manson, Philip’?”

“My man! Man! You’re my M-A-N!”

“No. You said ‘Manson.’ Why did you say Manson?”

“I did not say Manson.”

“You said I was your Charles Manson, and I would like to know why.”

“But I didn’t!”

“Didn’t what? Say Charles or say Manson? If you didn’t say Charles but only Manson, did you mean merely to say man-son, did you only mean I was your infantile, helpless creep, your ‘savage child,’ as you told me yesterday, did you mean only to insult me like that again first thing today, or did you mean what you meant — that you live with me like those zombie girls who worshiped Manson’s tattooed dick? Do I terrorize you like Charles Manson? Do I Svengali you and enslave you and scare you into submission — is that the reason you remain loyal to a man who is already half a corpse?”

“But that’s what’s doing this to you — death!”

“It’s you who’s doing this to me. You said I was your Charles Manson!”

And here she screamed, “You are! Yesterday! All those horrible, horrible stories! You are! You’re worse!”

“I see,” he replied in my soothing voice, the voice that only minutes earlier had awakened so much hope in her. “So this is what comes of the fork. You haven’t forgiven me at all. You ask me to forgive him for his diabolical hatred of me, and I do, but you cannot find it in your heart to forgive four little pinpricks on the back of your hand. I tell horrible stories, horrible, horrible stories, and you believe me.”

“I didn’t believe you! I definitely did not believe you.”

“So, you don’t believe me. But you never believe me. I can’t win, even with you. I tell you the truth and you don’t believe me, I tell you lies and you