“I was beginning to think Mr. Roth had taken a powder,” he said.
“And I was hoping the same about you.”
“Why,” he asked, “would I want to do a thing like that?”
“Because you’re involved in a deceptive practice. Because you’re breaking the law.”
“Which law? Israeli law, Connecticut state law, or international law?”
“The law that says that a person’s identity is his private property and can’t be appropriated by somebody else.”
“Ah, so you’ve been studying your Prosser.”
“Prosser?”
“Professor Prosser’s Handbook of the Law of Torts.”
“I haven’t been studying anything. All I need to know about a case like this common sense can tell me.”
“Well, still, take a look at Prosser. In 1960, in the California Law Review, Prosser published a long article, a reconsideration of the original 1890 Warren and Brandeis Harvard Law Review article in which they’d borrowed Judge Cooley’s phrase ‘the general right to be let alone’ and staked out the dimensions of the privacy interest. Prosser discusses privacy cases as having four separate branches and causes of action — one, intrusion upon seclusion; two, public disclosure of private facts; three, false light in the public eye; and four, appropriation of identity. The prima facie case is defined as follows: ‘One who appropriates to his own use or benefit the name or likeness of another is subject to liability to the other for invasion of his privacy.’ Let’s have lunch.”
The dining room was completely empty. There wasn’t even a waiter to show us in. At the table he chose for us, directly in the center of the room, he drew out my chair for me as though he were the waiter and stood politely behind it while I sat down. I couldn’t tell whether this was straight satire or seriously meant — yet more idolatry — and even wondered if, with my behind an inch from the seat, he might do what sadistic kids like to do in grade school and at the last moment pull the chair out from under me so that I landed on the floor. I grabbed an edge of the chair in either hand and pulled the seat safely under me as I sat.
“Hey,” he said, laughing, “you don’t entirely trust me,” and came around to take the chair across the table.
An indication of how stunned I’d been out in the lobby — and had remained even off by myself in the bathroom, where I had somehow got round to believing that victory was achieved and he was about to run off, never to dare to return — was that only when we were sitting opposite each other did I notice that he was dressed identically to me: not similarly, identically. Same washed-out button-down, openneck Oxford blue shirt, same well-worn tan V-neck cashmere sweater, same cuffless khaki trousers, same gray Brooks Brothers herringbone sports jacket threadbare at the elbows — a perfect replica of the colorless uniform that I had long ago devised to simplify life’s sartorial problem and that I had probably recycled not even ten times since I’d been a penniless freshman instructor at the University of Chicago in the mid-fifties. I’d realized, while packing my suitcase for Israel, that I was just about ragged enough for my periodic overhaul — and so too, I saw, was he. There was a nub of tiny threadlets where the middle front button had come off his jacket — I noticed because for some time now I’d been exhibiting a similar nub of threadlets where the middle button had yet again vanished from my jacket. And with that, everything inexplicable became even more inexplicable, as though what we were missing were our navels.
“What do you make of Demjanjuk?” he asked.
Were we going to chat? About Demjanjuk no less?
“Don’t we have other, more pressing concerns, you and I? Don’t we have the prima facie case of identity appropriation to talk about, as outlined in point four by Professor Prosser?”
“But all that sort of pales, don’t you think, beside what you saw in that courtroom this morning?”
“How would you know what I saw this morning?”
“Because I saw you seeing it. I was in the balcony. Upstairs with the press and the television. You couldn’t take your eyes off him. Nobody can the first time. Is he or isn’t he, was he or wasn’t he? — the first time, that’s all that goes round in anyone’s head.”
“But if you’d spotted me from the balcony, what was all that emotion about back in the lobby? You already knew I was here.”
“You minimize your meaning, Philip. Still doing battle against being a personage. You don’t entirely take in who you are.”
“So you’re taking it in for me — is that the story?”
When, in response, he lowered his face — as though I’d impertinently raised a subject we’d already agreed to consider off bounds — I saw that his hair had seriously thinned out and was striated gray in a pattern closely mirroring my own. Indeed, all those differences between our features that had been so reassuringly glaring at first sight were dismayingly evaporating the more accustomed to his appearance I became. Penitentially tilted forward like that, his balding head looked astonishingly like mine.
I repeated my question. “Is that the story? Since I apparently don’t ‘take in’ what a personage I am, you have kindly taken it upon yourself to go about as this great personage for me?”
“Like to see a menu, Philip? Or would you like a drink?”
There was still no waiter anywhere, and it occurred to me that this dining room was not even open yet for business. I reminded myself then that the escape hatch of the “dream” was no longer available to me. Because I am sitting in a dining room where there is no food to be obtained; because across from me there sits a man who, I must admit, is nearly my duplicate in every way, down to the button missing from his jacket and the silver-gray filaments of hair, that he has just pointedly displayed to me; because, instead of adjusting manfully to the predicament and intuitively taking control, I am being pushed to within an inch of I don’t know what intemperate act by this stupidly evolving, unendurable farce, apparently all this only means that I am wide awake. What is being manufactured here is not a dream, however weightless and incorporeal life happens to feel at this moment and however alarmingly I may sense myself as a speck of being embodying nothing but its own speckness, a tiny existence even more repugnant than his.
“I’m talking to you,” I said.
“I know. Amazing. And I’m talking to you. And not just in my head. More amazing.”
“I meant I would like an answer from you. A serious answer.”
“Okay, I’ll answer seriously. I’ll be blunt, too. Your prestige has been a little wasted on you. There’s a lot you haven’t done with it that you could have done — a lot of good. That is not a criticism, just a statement of fact. It’s enough for you to write — God knows a writer like you doesn’t owe anyone any more than that. Of course not every writer is equipped to be a public figure.”