Philip Roth - Operation Shylock

Something about the story — could just have been its length — seemed to have sedated him a little, and he lay there on the bed as though for the moment he were no threat to anyone, including even himself. His eyes were closed when he said, very wearily, “What does this have to do with what you have done to me? Anything? Have you no imagination for what you did to me today?”

I thought then that he was like some errant son of mine, like the child I’d never had, some ne’er-do-well infantile grown-up who bears the family name and the facial features of a larger-than-life dad and doesn’t much like feeling suffocated by him and has gone everywhere to learn to breathe and, after decades on his motorcycle, having succeeded at nothing but strumming on an electric guitar, appears at the doorstep of the old manse to vent the impotence of a lifetime and then, following twenty-four hours of frenzied indictment and frightening tears, ends up back in his boyhood bedroom, momentarily drained of recrimination, while the father sits kindly beside him, mentally ticking off all his offspring’s deficiencies, thinking, “At your age I had already…,” and aloud, trying in vain, with funny stories, to amuse this beast of prey into a change of heart, at least until he’ll accept the check he came for and go away to some place where he can repair automobiles.

The check. The check was no hallucination and the check was gone. It was all no hallucination. This is worse than Halcion — this is happening.

“You’re thinking Pipik was our fall guy,” I said, “the scapegoat’s scapegoat — but, no, Pipik was protean, a hundred different things. Very human in that regard. Moishe Pipik was someone who didn’t exist and couldn’t possibly exist, and yet we were claiming he was so real he could answer the telephone. To a seven-year-old child this was all hilarious. But then Meema Gitcha would say, ‘He left half an hour ago,’ and I was suddenly as stupid as the operator and I believed her. I could see him leaving. He wanted to stay and talk more with Meema Gitcha. Going to visit her reassured him of something. That he wasn’t entirely alone, I suppose. There weren’t that many Jews in Danbury. How had poor little Moishe Pipik got there in the first place? Oddly, Gitcha could be a very reassuring bulk of a person for all that there was nothing that didn’t worry her. But the worries she attacked like a dragon slayer — maybe that was it. I imagined them speaking in Yiddish, Meema Gitcha and Moishe Pipik. He was a refugee boy who wore an Old Country refugee cap, and she gave him food to eat out of the cooking pots and her dead husband’s old coat to wear. Sometimes she slipped him a dollar. But whenever he happened to come around to see her after the New Jersey relatives had been visiting for the weekend, and he sat at the table telling her his problems, she would sit there eyeing the kitchen clock, and then suddenly she would jump up and say, ‘Go, Moishe! Look at the time! God forbid you should be here when they call!’ And in the midst of everything, in mitn drinen , you know, he grabbed his cap and he ran. Pipik ran and he ran and he ran and he never stopped running until fifty years later he finally reached Jerusalem and all that running had made him so tired and so lonely that all he could do when he got to Jerusalem was to find a bed, any bed, even somebody else’s bed. …”

I had put my sonny boy to sleep, with my story anesthetized him. I remained in the chair by the window wishing that it had killed him. When I was younger my Jewish betters used to accuse me of writing short stories that endangered Jewish lives — would that I could! A narrative as deadly as a gun!

I took a look at him, a good long hungry look of the kind I hadn’t quite been able to take while he was looking back at me. Poor bastard. The resemblance was striking. As his trousers were gathered up on his legs because of the way he had fallen to sleep, I could see that he even had my spindly ankles — or I his. The minutes passed quietly. I’d done it. Worn him down. Knocked him out. It was the first peaceful moment I’d known all day. So this, I thought, is what I look like sleeping. I hadn’t seen myself as quite so long in a bed though maybe it was just that this bed was short. Anyway, this is what the women see when they awaken to contemplate the wisdom of what they have done and with whom. This is what I would look like if I were to die tonight in that bed. This is my corpse. I am sitting here alive even though I am dead. I am sitting here after my death. Maybe it’s before my birth. I am sitting here and, like Meema Gitcha’s Moishe Pipik, I do not exist. I left half an hour ago. I am here sitting shivah for myself.

This is stranger even than I thought.

No, not that tack. No, just a different person similarly embodied, the physical analogue to what in poetry would be a near rhyme. Nothing more revelatory than that.

I lifted the phone on the table beside me and very, very quietly asked the switchboard operator to get me the King David Hotel.

“Philip Roth, please,” I said, when the operator came on at the King David.

The phone in their room was answered by Jinx.

I whispered her name.

“Honey! Where are you? I’m going crazy!”

Weakly I replied, “Still here.”

“Where?”

“His room.”

“God! Didn’t you find it?”

“Nowhere.”

“Then that’s it — leave!”

“I’m waiting for him.”

“Don’t! No!”

“My million, damn it!”

“But you sound awful — you sound worse . You took too much again. You can’t take that much.”

“I took what it takes.”

“But it’s too much . How bad is it? Is it very bad?”

“I’m resting.”

“You sound ghastly! You’re in pain! Come back! Philip, come back! He’ll turn everything around! It’ll be you who stole from him! He’s a vicious, ruthless egomaniac who’ll say anything to win!”

This deserved a laugh. “Him? Frighten me?”

“He frightens me! Come back!”

“Him? He’s shitting his pants with fear of me . He thinks it’s all a dream. I’ll show him what a dream is. He won’t know what hit him when I’ve finished scrambling his fucking brains.”

“Hon, this is suicide.”

“I love you, Jinx.”

“Really? Am I anything at all to you anymore?”

“What are you wearing?” I whispered, keeping my eye on the bed.

“What?”

“What do you have on?”

“Just my jeans. My bra.”

“The jeans.”

“Not now.”

“The jeans.”

“This is crazy. If he comes back …”

“The jeans.”

“They are. They are.”

“Off?”

“I’m pulling them off.”

“Around your ankles. Leave them around your ankles.”

“They are.”

“The panties.”

“You too.”

“Yes,” I said, “oh, yes.”

“Yes? Is it out?”

“I’m on his bed.”

“You crazy man.”

“On his bed. I’ve got it out. Oh, it’s out, all right.”

“Is it big?”

“It’s big.”

“Very big?”

“Very big.”

“My nipples are hard as a fucking rock. My tits are spilling out. Oh, hon, they’re spilling over —”

“All of it. Say all of it.”

“I’m nobody’s cunt but your cunt —”

“Ever?”

“Nobody’s.”

“All of it.”

“I worship your stiff cock.”

“All of it.”

“My lips around your stiff stiff cock —”

On the bed Pipik had opened his eyes and I hung up the phone.

“Feel better?” I asked.

He looked at me as if a man deep in a coma and, seemingly seeing nothing, closed his eyes again.