“Answer me please with the truth. Why did he send you here in this dress? With this star? How does a person like him come about? The chicanery is inexhaustible.”
“I ran! I told him, ‘I cannot listen anymore. I cannot watch you destroy everything!’ I ran away!”
“To me.”
“You must give him back the check!”
“I lost the check. I don’t have the check. I told him that. Something untoward happened. Certainly the girlfriend of your boyfriend can understand that. The check is gone.”
“But your keeping the money is what’s making him wild! Why did you accept Mr. Smilesburger’s money when you knew it wasn’t meant for you!”
I pushed the cloth star into her hand. “Take this with you and get out of here.”
“But Demjanjuk’s son!”
“Miss, I was not born to Bess and Herman Roth in Newark’s Beth Israel Hospital to protect this man Demjanjuk’s son.”
“Then protect Philip!”
“That is what I’m doing.”
“But it’s to prove himself to you that he’s doing what he’s doing. He’s out of his mind for your admiration. You are the hero, like it or not!”
“Please, with a dick like his he doesn’t need me for a hero. He was nice enough to come here to show it to me. Did you know that? He’s not particularly pestered by inhibitions, is he?”
“No,” she muttered, “oh, no,” and here she caved in and dropped to the edge of the bed in tears.
“Nope,” I said, “uh-uh, you two aren’t taking turns — get up and get out.”
But she was crying so pathetically that all I could do was to return to the easy chair by the window and sit there until she had exhausted herself on my pillow. That she was clutching that cloth star while she wept disgusted and infuriated me.
Down in the street the masked Arabs were gone. I didn’t seem to have been born to stop them either.
When I couldn’t any longer stand the sight of her with the star, I came over to the bed and pulled it out of her hands, and then I unzipped my suitcase and shoved it in with my things. I still have it. I am looking at it while I write.
“It’s an implant,” she said.
“What is? What are you saying?”
“It isn’t ‘his.’ It’s a plastic implant.”
“Oh? Tell me more.”
“Everything’s been cut out of him. He couldn’t stand how it left him. So he had the procedure. Plastic rods are in there. Inside the penis is a penile implant. Why do you laugh? How can you laugh! You’re laughing at somebody’s terrible suffering!”
“I’m not at all — I’m laughing at all the lies. Poland, Walesa, Kahane, even the cancer’s a lie — Demjanjuk’s son is a lie. And this prick he’s so proud of, come clean, in what Amsterdam doodad shop did you two find that nutty joke? It’s Hellzapoppin’ with Possesski and Pipik, it’s a gag a minute with you two madcap kids — who wouldn’t laugh? The prick was great, I have to admit, but I think I’ll always love best the Poles at the Warsaw railroad station ecstatically welcoming back their Jews. Diasporism! Diasporism is a plot for a Marx Brothers movie — Groucho selling Jews to Chancellor Kohl! I lived eleven years in London — not in bigoted, backwater, pope-ridden Poland but in civilized, secularized, worldly-wise England. When the first hundred thousand Jews come rolling into Waterloo Station with all their belongings in tow, I really want to be there to see it. Invite me, won’t you? When the first hundred thousand Diasporist evacuees voluntarily surrender their criminal Zionist homeland to the suffering Palestinians and disembark on England’s green and pleasant land, I want to see with my very own eyes the welcoming committee of English goyim waiting on the platform with their champagne. ‘They’re here! More Jews! Jolly good!’ No, fewer Jews is my sense of how Europe prefers things, as few of them as possible. Diasporism, my dear, seriously misses the point about the depths of the antipathy. But then, that shouldn’t come as news to a charter member of A-S.A. That poor old Smilesburger was nearly suckered by Diasporism’s founding father out of a million bucks — Well, I don’t think this Smilesburger is all there either.”
“What Mr. Smilesburger does with his money,” she shot back, her face rapidly melting down into the defeated grimace of a thwarted child, “is up to Mr. Smilesburger!”
“Then tell Mr. Smilesburger to stop the check, why don’t you? Go play the interceding woman with him. It’s not going to work here, so go try it with him. Tell him he gave the check to the wrong Philip Roth.”
“I’m crashing,” she moaned, “damn it, I’m crashing” and she grabbed the phone from the tin-topped table squeezed in by the wall at the inside corner of the bed and asked the clerk at the hotel switchboard for the King David Hotel. All roads lead back to him. I decided too late to wrestle the phone away from her. Among all the other things contributing to the disorganization of my thinking was the immediacy of her sensuality on that bed.
“It’s me,” she said when the connection was made. “… With him. … Yes I am. … His room! … No! … No! Not with them! … I can’t go on, Phil. I’m on the damn brink. Kahane is crazy, you said so, not me. … No! … I am crashing, Philip, I am going to crash!” Here she thrust the phone at me. “You stop him! You must!”
Because for some reason the phone was wired into the wall furthest from the door, the cord had to be pulled across the width of the bed and I had to lean directly across her to speak into the mouthpiece. Maybe that was why I spoke into the mouthpiece. There could be no other reason. To anyone watching us through that one big window, it would have been she and I who looked like coconspirators now. Propinquity and piquancy seemed as if one word derived from the single explosive root syllable Jinx.
“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.