Philip Roth - Operation Shylock

“What happened to Donna? Is she white? I didn’t catch this show. Who plays you? Ron Liebman or George Segal? Or is it you playing them for me?”

“I don’t know many writers,” he replied. “Is this the way they all think? That out there everybody is playing? Man! You listened too religiously to that kiddie program when you were a little boy — you and Sandy may have loved it too much. Saturday mornings. Remember? Nineteen forty also. Eleven a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Da -dum- da-dadada, dum -da-dadada, dum- dada-da-dum.”

He was humming the tune that used to introduce “Let’s Pretend,” a fairy-tale half hour that little unmediaized American children adored back in the thirties and forties, my brother and I but two of the millions.

“Maybe,” he said, “your perception of reality got arrested at the ‘Let’s Pretend’ level.”

To this I did not even bother to reply.

“Oh, that’s a cliché, is it? Am I boring you? Well,” he said, “now that you’re pushing sixty and ‘Let’s Pretend’ isn’t on the air anymore, someone should bore you long enough to explain that, one, the world is real, two, the stakes are high, and, three, nobody is pretending anymore except you . I have been inside your head for so long now and yet not until this moment have I understood what a writer is all about: you guys think it’s all make-believe.”

“I don’t think any of it is make-believe, Pipik. I think — I know — that you are a real liar and a real fake. It’s the stories that purport to be about ‘it,’ it’s the struggle to describe ‘it,’ where the make-believe comes in. Five-year-old children may take the stories for real, but by the time you’re pushing sixty, deciphering the pathology of story making comes to be just another middle-age specialty. By the time you’re pushing sixty, the representations of ‘it’ are ‘it.’ They’re everything. Follow me?”

“Nothing hard to follow except your relevance. Cynicism increases with age because the bullshit piles up on your head. What’s that got to do with us?”

I heard myself ask aloud, “Am I conversing with this person, am I truly trying to make sense with him? Why?”

“Why not! Why should you converse with Aharon Appelfeld,” he said, holding up and shaking Aharon’s book, “and not with me!”

“A thousand reasons.”

He was all at once in a jealous rage because I talked seriously to Aharon but not to him. “Name one!” he cried.

Because, I thought, of Aharon’s and my distinctly radical twoness , a condition with which you appear to have no affinity at all; because we are anything but the duplicates that everyone is supposed to believe you and me to be; because Aharon and I each embody the reverse of the other’s experience; because each recognizes in the other the Jewish man he is not ; because of the all but incompatible orientations that shape our very different lives and very different books and that result from antithetical twentieth-century Jewish biographies; because we are the heirs jointly of a drastically bifurcated legacy — because of the sum of all these Jewish antinomies , yes, we have much to talk about and are intimate friends.

“Name one!” he challenged for a second time but on this subject I simply remained silent and, sensibly for a change, kept my thinking to myself. “You recognize Appelfeld for the person he claims to be; why do you refuse that with me? All you do is resist me. Resist me, ignore me, insult me, defame me, rant and rave at me — and steal from me . Why must there be this bad blood? Why you should see me as a rival — I cannot understand it. Why is this relationship so belligerent from your end? Why must it be destructive when together we could achieve so much? We could have a creative relationship, we could be partners — copersonalities working in tandem rather than stupidly divided in two!”

“Look, I’ve got more personalities than I can use already. All you are is one too many. This is the end of the line. I don’t want to go into business with you. I just want you to go away.”

“We could at least be friends.”

He sounded so forlorn I had to laugh. “Never. Profound, unbridgeable, unmistakable differences that far outweigh the superficial similarity — no, we can’t be friends, either. This is it.”

He looked, to my astonishment, about to burst into tears because of what I’d said. Or maybe it was just the ebb tide of those drugs. “Look, you never told me what happened to Donna,” I said. “Entertain us a little more, and then, what do you say, let’s bring this little error to an end. What became of Highland Park High’s fifteen-year- old dominatrix? How’d that show wind up?”

But this, of course, riled him again.

“Shows! You really think I watch PI shows? There isn’t one that depicts what’s real, not one . If I had a choice between watching “Magnum, P.I.” and “Sixty Minutes,” I’d watch “Sixty Minutes” any time. Shall I tell you something? Donna turned out to be Jewish. Her mother, I found out later, was the reason why she left. I won’t go into that, you don’t care. But I did, I got involved in those cases — they were my life before I got sick. I would try to find out what the reasons were they left and try to get them to stay. I would try to help them. That was very rewarding. Unfortunately this Dominican with Donna — his name was Hector — Donna had a problem with him —”

“He had this power over her,” I said, “and to this day she’s trying to contact him.”

“That happens to be the case. That’s true. She was charged with receiving stolen property, resisting arrest, eluding police too — she’s in a detention center.”

“And the day she’s released from the detention center, she’ll run away again,” I said. “Great story. Everybody can identify, as they say. Beginning with you. She doesn’t want to be Dr. and Mrs. Jew’s Donna anymore, she wants to be Hector’s Dominican Pepper. All this autobiographical fantasy, is it nationwide? Is it worldwide? Maybe this stuff everybody is watching has inspired half the human population with the yearning for a massive transfer of souls, maybe that’s what you embody — the longings for metempsychosis inspired in mankind by all those TV shows.”

“Idiot!” he shouted. “It’s staring you right in the face what I embody!”

It is, I thought: exactly nothing. There is no meaning here at all. That’s the meaning. I can stop there. I could have started there. Nothing could look more like it meant something than this, and nothing could mean less.

“So, what happened finally to Hector?” I asked him, hoping now that if I could lead him to the end of something, of anything, it might present an opportunity to get him up from my bed and out of the room without my having to call down to the desk for assistance. I never felt less inclined than at that moment to see this poor possessed scoundrel wind up in trouble. Not only was he meaningless but, having observed him for nearly an hour, I was hard-pressed to believe any longer that he was violent. In this way we weren’t dissimilar: the violence was all verbal. I had, in fact, actively to prevent myself from despising him less than was warranted, given the maddening mix-up he’d made of my life and the repercussions of this encounter, which I was sure were going to dog me in unpleasant ways in the future.

“Hector?” he said. “Hector made bail, he’s out on bail.” Unexpectedly he began to laugh, but a laugh that was as hopeless and weary as any sound emitted by him yet. “You and Hector. I never saw the parallel till now. As if I don’t have enough grief from you, with all the ways you want to fuck me over, I’ve got Hector waiting in the wings. He called me, he spoke to me, he threatened my life — Hector told me he was going to kill me. This is just before I went into the hospital. I’ve arrested a lot of people, you realize, put a lot of people in prison. They phone me, they track me down, and I don’t hide. If somebody wants to get even with me, there’s nothing I can do. But I don’t look over my shoulder. I told Hector what I tell them all. ‘I’m listed in the book, man. Philip Roth. Come and get me.’”