Philip Roth - Operation Shylock

“On to yet another hilarious idea, I hear,” said I into the telephone.

The reply was calm, amused, his voice my own restrained mild voice! “Of yours,” he said.

“Repeat that.”

“Your idea,” he said, and I hung up.

But no sooner was I off the phone than it was ringing again.

“Let it be,” I told her.

“Okay, that’s it,” she said, “that’s gotta be it.”

“Right. Just let it ring.”

The return trip to the chair beside the desk was one long temptation-ridden journey, rich with pleas to the baser yearnings for caution and common sense, a great deal of convulsive conflict compressed into a very short space, a kind of synthesis of my whole adult life. Seating myself as far as I could get in that room from this rash, precipitate complicity of ours, I said, “Leaving aside for the moment who you are, who is this antic fellow who goes around as me?” I signaled with a finger that she was not to touch the ringing phone. “Concentrate on my question. Answer me. Who is he?”

“My patient. I told you that.”

“Another lie.”

“Everything can’t be a lie. Stop saying that. It doesn’t help anyone. You protect yourself from the truth by calling everything you won’t believe a lie. Everything that’s too much for you, you say, ‘That’s a lie.’ But that’s denial, Mr. Roth, of what living is! These lies of yours are my damn life! The phone is no lie!” And she lifted the phone and cried into the mouthpiece, “I won’t! It’s over! I’m not coming back!” But what she heard through the receiver sucked the angry blood engorging her face all the way back down to her feet as though she’d been upended and “hourglass” were no mere metaphor with which to describe her shape. Very meekly she offered me the phone.

“The police,” she said, horrified and uttering “police” as she must once have heard patients freshly apprised of their chances repeat the oncologist’s “terminal.” “Don’t,” she begged me, “he won’t survive it!”

The Jerusalem police were responding to my call. Because the rock runners were gone I had now been put through to them — or maybe all phone lines had indeed been tied up earlier, unlikely as that still seemed to me. I described to the police what I’d seen from my window. They asked me to describe what was going on there now. I told them that the street was empty. They asked my name and I gave it to them. I gave them my U.S. passport number. I did not go on to tell them that someone bearing a duplicate passport, a counterfeit of mine, was at that very moment conspiring at the King David Hotel to kidnap and torture John Demjanjuk’s son. Let him try it, I thought. If she’s not lying, if he’s resolved, like his antihero Jonathan Pollard, to be a Jewish savior regardless of the cost — or even if the motive is merely personal, if he’s just determined to take a leading role in my life like the boy who shot Reagan to wow Jodie Foster — let the fantasies evolve grandiosely without my interference, this time let him overstep something more than just my boundaries and collide head- on with the Jerusalem police. I could not myself arrange a more satisfying conclusion to this stupid drama of no importance. Two minutes into it they’ll nab him in his bid for historical significance and that will be the end of Moishe Pipik.

She had closed her eyes and crossed her arms and laid them protectively over her breasts while I hung just inches above her talking to the police. And she remained like that, absolutely mummified, while I traversed the room and sat back down in my chair once again, thinking, as I looked at the bed, that she could have been waiting to be removed by the undertaker. And that made me think of my first wife, who, some twenty years earlier, at just about Jinx’s age, had been killed in a car crash in New York. We had embarked on a disastrous three-year marriage after she had falsified the results of a pregnancy test in the aftermath of our lurid love affair and then threatened suicide if I didn’t marry her. Six years after my leaving the marriage against her will, I’d still been unable to win her consent to a divorce, and when she was abruptly killed in 1968, I wandered around Central Park, the site of her fatal accident, reciting to myself a ferociously apt little couplet by John Dryden, the one that goes, “Here lies my wife: here let her lie!/Now she’s at rest; and so am I.”

Jinx was taller than her by half a foot and substantial physically in a rather more riveting way, but seeing her laid out in repose, as though for burial, I was struck by a racial resemblance to the square- headed northern good looks of my long-dead enemy. What if it was she risen from the dead to take her revenge … if she was the 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.