Philip Roth - Operation Shylock

About a quarter of a mile up a hill from the parking lot, there was a big hotel that I remembered seeing on the drive in, and, desperate, I finally stepped out of the crowd and into the rainstorm and made a dash for the hotel. Minutes later, my clothes soaked and my shoes filled with water, I was standing in the hotel lobby looking for a phone to call a taxi, when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to find facing me the other Philip Roth.

“I can’t speak,” he said. “It’s you. You came!”

But the one who couldn’t speak was I. I was breathless, and only in part because of running uphill against the lashing force of that storm. I suppose until that moment I’d never wholeheartedly believed in his existence, at least as anything more substantial than that pompous voice on the telephone and some transparently ridiculous newspaper blather. Seeing him materialize voluminously in space, measurable as a customer in a clothing shop, palpable as a prizefighter up in the ring, was as frightening as seeing a vaporous ghost — and simultaneously electrifying, as though after immersion in that torrential storm, I’d been doused, for good measure, like a cartoon-strip character, full in the face with an antihallucinogenic bucket of cold water. As jolted by the spellbinding reality of his unreality as by its immensely disorienting antithesis, I was at a loss to remember the plans I’d made for how to act and what to say when I’d set out to hunt him down in the taxi that morning — in the mental simulation of our face-off I had failed to remember that the face-off would not, when it came to pass, be a mental simulation. He was crying. He had taken me in his arms, sopping wet though I was, and begun to cry, and not undramatically either — as though one or the other of us had just returned intact from crossing Central Park alone at night. Tears of joyous relief — and I had imagined that confronted with the materialization of me , he would recoil in fear and capitulate.

“Philip Roth! The real Philip Roth — after all these years!” His body trembled with emotion, tremendous emotion even in the two hands that tightly grasped my back.

It required a series of violent thrusts with my elbows to unlock his hold on me. “And you,” I said, shoving him a little as I stepped away, “you must be the fake Philip Roth.”

He laughed. But still cried! Not even in my mental simulation had I loathed him quite as I did seeing those stupid, unaccountable tears.

“Fake, oh, compared to you, absolutely fake — compared to you, nothing, no one, a cipher. I can’t tell you what it’s like for me! In Israel! In Jerusalem! I don’t know what to say! I don’t know where to begin! The books! Those books! I go back to Letting Go , my favorite to this day! Libby Herz and the psychiatrist! Paul Herz and that coat! I go back to ‘The Love Vessel’ in the old Dial! The work you’ve done! The potshots you’ve taken! Your women! Ann! Barbara! Claire! Such terrific women! I’m sorry, but imagine yourself in my place. For me — to meet you — in Jerusalem! What brings you here?”

To this dazzling little question, so ingenuously put, I heard myself reply, “Passing through.”

“I’m looking at myself,” he said, ecstatically, “except it’s you.”

He was exaggerating, something he may have been inclined to do. I saw before me a face that I would not very likely have taken for my own had I found it looking back at me that morning from the mirror. Someone else, a stranger, someone who had seen only my photograph or some newspaper caricature of me, might possibly have been taken in by the resemblance, especially if the face called itself by my name, but I couldn’t believe that there was anyone who would say, “Don’t fool me, you’re really that writer,” had it gone about its business as Mr. Nusbaum’s or Dr. Schwartz’s. It was actually a conventionally better-looking face, a little less mismade than my own, with a more strongly defined chin and not so large a nose, one that, also, didn’t flatten Jewishly like mine at the tip. It occurred to me that he looked like the after to my before in the plastic surgeon’s advertisement.

“What’s your game, my friend?”

“No game,” he replied, surprised and wounded by my angry tone. “And I’m no fake. I was using ‘real’ ironically.”

“Well, I’m not so pretty as you and I’m not so ironical as you and I was using ‘fake’ unerringly.”

“Hey, take it easy, you don’t know your strength. Don’t call names, okay?”

“You go around pretending to be me.”

This brought that smile back — “You go around pretending to be me,” he loathsomely replied.

“You exploit the physical resemblance,” I went on, “by telling people that you are the writer, the author of my books.”

“I don’t have to tell them anything. They take me for the author of those books right off. It happens all the 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 —”