Philip Roth: Operation Shylock

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 do believe me —”

“Oh, death is doing this, death — this isn’t you!”

“Oops — not me? Who then? Shall I guess? Can’t you think for one single moment about anybody but him? Is looking at me and thinking of him what gets you through our awful life? Is that what you imagine in the bed, is that how you are able, without vomiting, to satisfy my repellent desires — by pretending you’re in Jerusalem satisfying his? What’s the stumbling block? That his is real and mine is fake? That he is healthy and I am sick? That I will die and disappear and he will live on forever through all those wonderful books?”

Later in the morning, while he was sleeping off that tirade in their bed, she did as he had instructed and, in the barbecue pit on the back lawn, destroyed the unfinished manuscript of His Way . She knew that even if he awakened he was far too depleted to haul himself over to the window to watch her, and so, before dumping the contents of his briefcase straight into the flames, she quickly looked to read what she could of his exposé of me. Only there was nothing there. All the pages were blank.

And so too were the tapes on which he’d claimed to have been recording his Diasporism book while she was off working her hospital shift during those last months of his life in the Berkshires. Six weeks after his death, though she still feared that hearing his disembodied voice might unleash those paroxysms of grief that had nearly killed her in the days after she’d relinquished his body to be buried by the Jews, she found herself one night yearning so for his presence that she had sat down with the tape recorder at the kitchen table and discovered that the tapes were blank as well. Alone in that remote little mountainside house, vainly listening for his voice on one tape after another, sitting all night and into the morning playing side after side and hearing absolutely nothing — and remembering too those mystifyingly empty pages that she had burned to cinders that awful morning in New Jersey — she understood, as people will often fully perceive the suffering of their loved ones only after they are gone, that I was the barrier to everything. He had not been lying about that. I was the obstacle to the fulfillment of his most altruistic dreams, choking off the torrent of all the potential originally his. At the end of his life, despite everything that he had been ordained to tell the Jews to prevent their destruction, the thought of my implacable hostility had impeded him from telling them anything, just as the menace of his Mansonish hatred (if I understood this letter correctly) was now supposed to stifle me.