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.
“Too much medication,” I said.
I decided not to call Jinx back and finish off the job. I’d got the idea.
When he came around next there was a mask of perspiration clinging to his forehead and his cheeks.
“Shall I get a doctor?” I asked. “Do you want me to call Miss Possesski?”
“I just want you, I just want you …” But tears appeared in his eyes and he couldn’t go on.
“What do you want?”
“What you stole.”
“Look, you’re a sick man. You’re in a lot of pain, aren’t you? You’re taking painkilling drugs that are bending your mind. You’re taking tremendous doses of those drugs, that’s the story, isn’t it? I know from experience what that’s like. I know how they can make you behave. Look, I don’t particularly want to send a Demerol addict to jail. But if that’s what it takes to get you to leave me alone, I don’t care how sick you are or how much pain you’re in or how loony the drugs are making you act, I will take it as my business to see that that happens. I’ll be absolutely merciless with you if I find that I have to be. But do I have to be? How much do you need to get out of here and to go somewhere with Miss Possesski and try to get some peace and quiet? Because this other thing is a stupid farce, it means nothing, it can come to nothing, you’re bound to fail. It’s very likely to end for you two in a stupid catastrophe brought on by yourselves. I’m willing to pay your way to wherever you want to go. Two round-trip first-class airplane tickets to anyplace your two hearts desire. Something toward expenses too, to tide you over until you sort things out. Doesn’t that seem reasonable? I press no charges. You go away. Please, let’s negotiate a settlement and put an end to this.”
“Easy as that.” He didn’t seem quite as bleary now as when he’d first come round, but there was still perspiration beading his upper lip and no color at all in his face. “‘Moishe Pipik Gets Paid Off. NBA Winner Wins Again.’”
“Would the Jewish police be a more humane solution? A payoff isn’t always without dignity in a mess like this. I’ll give you ten thousand bucks. That’s a lot of money. I have a publisher here” — and why hadn’t I thought of calling him! — “and I’ll arrange to have ten thousand dollars in cash in your hands by noon tomorrow —”
“‘Providing you are out of Jerusalem by nightfall.’”
“By nightfall tomorrow, yes.”
“I get ten and you get the balance.”
“There is no balance. That’s it.”
“No balance?” He began to laugh. “No balance?” All at once he was sitting up straight and seemed entirely resuscitated. Either the drugs had suddenly worn off or they had suddenly kicked in, but Pipik was himself again (whoever that might be). “You who studied arithmetic with Miss Duchin at Chancellor Avenue School, you tell me there is no balance when” — and here he began gesturing as though he were a Jewish comic, his two hands to the left, his two hands to the right, distinguishing this from that, that from this — “when the subtrahend is ten thousand and the minuend is one million? You got B’s in arithmetic all through Chancellor. Subtraction is one of the four fundamental operations of arithmetic. Let me refresh your recollection. It is the inverse of addition. The result of subtracting one number from another is called the difference. The symbol for this operation is our friend the minus sign. Any of this ring a bell? As in addition, only like qualities can be subtracted. Dollars from dollars, for instance, work very nicely. Dollars from dollars, Phil, is what subtraction was made for.”