As it happened, there was nothing I read in that letter, extreme though it was, that I couldn’t bring myself to believe about him. However, what made me more suspicious than even the handwriting was the alarming confession, halfway through, that Wanda Jane made about herself. It was simply too shocking to believe that the woman whom Smilesburger labeled “Phallika” in deference to her natural juiciness had performed the act of necrophilia that she reported almost as blithely as if she were remembering her first French kiss at the age of thirteen. His maniacal power over her couldn’t possibly have been so grotesque as that. Surely what I was reading was a description not of something she had done but of something that he wanted me to think she had done, a fantasy specifically devised to inform his eternal rival of just how dazzlingly unbreakable a hammer-lock he had on her life — intended, moreover, to so contaminate her memory for me as to render her eternally taboo. It was malicious pornography and could not have happened. What she had inscribed here, as though with the point of a pin, attesting to his hold on her and to her worshipful, ghoulish adoration of him, was what her dictator had dictated in the hope of keeping her and me from ever coupling again, not merely after his death but during his life, which — as I was forced to deduce from this quintessentially Pipikish ploy — had by no means come to its sorry end.
So he lived — he was back. Far from assuring me that he was gone, never again to return to plague me, this letter — admittedly, as perhaps only I would interpret it — proclaimed with his usual sadistic ingenuity the resurgence of Pipik’s powers and the resumption of his role as my succubus. He and no one else had written this letter to plunge me back into that paranoiac no-man’s-land where there is no demarcation between improbability and certainty and where the reality of what menaces you is all the more portentous for being inestimable and obscure. He had imagined her here as he would have her be: a ministering instrument serving him in extremis and, after his death, worshiping his virility in a most unimaginable way. I could even explain the unvarnished self-portrait he presented of a dying man perpetually on the verge of all-out insanity as the most conclusive evidence he could think to offer of the miraculous devotion he could inspire in her regardless of how fiendishly he might behave. No, it didn’t surprise me that he would make not the slightest effort to conceal the depths of his untruthfulness or to disguise or soften in any way the vulgar, terrifying charlatan to whom she was enslaved. To the contrary, why should he not exaggerate his awfulness, misrepresent himself as even more monstrous than he was, if his intention was to frighten me off her forever?
And I was frightened. I had almost forgotten how readily I could be undone by the bold audacity of his lies until that letter arrived, ostensibly from Wanda Jane, asking me to believe that my all too indestructible nemesis was no more. What better measure of my dread of his reappearing than the masochistic perversity with which I quickly transformed the welcome news of his death into the confirmation of his continued existence? Why not take a cue instead from what had happened in Jerusalem and recognize in everything hyperbolical the most telling proof of the letter’s authenticity? Of course she’s telling the truth — there is nothing here at all inconsistent with what you already know of them, least of all what is most repugnant. And why go to the trouble even to imagine a letter like this if, instead of taking heart from the news of having outlasted him, instead of being fortified by your victory over him, you self-destructively build into the letter egregious ambiguities that you then exploit to undermine the very equanimity you are out to achieve?
Answer: Because what I have learned from what I’ve gone through with them — and with George, with Smilesburger, with Supposnik, with all of them — is that any letter less dismayingly ambiguous (or any more easily decipherable) that failed to belie itself in even the minutest way, any letter whose message inspired my wholehearted belief and purged, if only temporarily, the uncertainties most bedeviling to me, wouldn’t convince me of anything other than the power over my imagination of that altogether human desire to be convinced by lies.
So here then is the substance of the letter I came up with to spur me on to tell the whole of this story, as I have, without the fear of being impeded by his reprisal. Someone else might have found a more effective way to quiet his own anxiety. But, Moishe Pipik’s dissent notwithstanding, I am not someone else.
When it became apparent that Philip had probably less than a year to live, they had moved up from Mexico — where, in desperation, he had imprudently put his faith in a last-ditch course of drug therapy outlawed in the United States — and sublet a furnished little house in Hackensack, New Jersey, half an hour north of my hometown of Newark. That was another catastrophe, and six months later they had moved on to the Berkshires, only some forty miles north of where I have been living for the last twenty years. In a small farmhouse they rented on a remote dirt road halfway up a wooded mountainside, he set about, with his waning strength, to dictate into a tape recorder what was to have been his grand treatise on Diasporism, while Wanda Jane got work as an emergency-room nurse in a nearby hospital. And it was here that they found some respite at last from the melodrama that had forged their indissoluble union. Life became calm. Harmony was restored. Love was rekindled. A miracle.
Death came suddenly four months later, on Thursday, January17, 1991, just hours after the first Iraqi Scud missiles exploded in residential Tel Aviv. Ever since he’d been working with the tapes, his physical degeneration had become all but imperceptible, and to Wanda it had seemed as though the cancer might once again have gone into remission, perhaps even as a consequence of the progress that he made each day on the book and that he talked about so hopefully each evening when she came home from the hospital to bathe him and make dinner. But when the pictures flashed over CNN of the wounded on stretchers being hurriedly carried from the badly damaged apartment buildings, he was beyond consoling. The shock of the bombardment made him cry like a child. It was too late now, he told her, for Diasporism to save the Jews. He could bear neither to witness the slaughter of Tel Aviv’s Jews nor to contemplate the consequences of the nuclear counterattack that he was certain the Israelis would launch before dawn, and, brokenhearted, Philip died that night.
For two days, wearing her nightgown and watching CNN, Wanda remained beside the body in the bed. She comforted him with the news that no Israeli strike of any sort was going to be launched in retaliation; she told him about the Patriot missile installations, manned by American servicemen, protecting the Israelis against renewed attacks; she described to him the precautions that the Israelis were taking against the threat of Iraqi germ warfare — “They are not slaughtering Jews,” she assured him, “they’re going to be all right!” But no encouragement she was able to offer could bring him back to life. In the hope that it might resuscitate the rest of him, she made love to his penile implant. Oddly enough, it was the one bodily part, she wrote to me, “that looked alive and felt like him.” She confessed without so much as a trace of shame that the erection that had outlived him had given her solace for two days and two nights. “We fucked and we talked and we watched TV. It was like the good old days.” And then she added, “Anybody who thinks that was wrong doesn’t know what real love is. I was far nuttier as a little Catholic taking Communion than having sex with my dead Jew.”