Her sole regret was having failed to relinquish him to the Jews to bury like a Jew within twenty-four hours of his death. That was wrong, sinfully wrong, particularly for him. But caring for Philip as if for her own sick little boy in the isolation of that quiet little mountainside house, she had fallen more deeply in love with him than ever before and as a result had been unable to let him go without reenacting, in that posthumous honeymoon, the passion and the intimacy of their “good old days.” In her defense she could only say that once she understood — and she was herself so far gone that the realization had been awfully slow in coming — that no amount of sexual excitement could ever resurrect his corpse, she had acted with dispatch and had had him promptly buried, with traditional Jewish rites, in a local cemetery dating back to pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts. He had chosen the plot there himself. To be surrounded in death by all these old Yankee families, with their prototypical Yankee names, had seemed to him exactly as it should be for the man whose gravestone was to bear beneath his name the just, if forlorn, epithet “The Father of Diasporism.”
His aversion to me — or was it to my shadow? — had apparently reached its maniacal crescendo some months earlier, when they were living in New Jersey. After Mexico, she wrote, he had decided they would make their home there while he set to work on His Way, the scandalous exposé of me whose writing had taken possession of him and whose publication as a full-length book was to reveal me to the public as a sham and a charlatan. They took pointless drives around blighted Newark, where he was determined to unearth “documentation” that would disclose how I was not at all the person I pretended to be. Sitting with him in their car across the street from the hospital where I was born, and where drug-dealers now congregated not two minutes away, she wept and begged him to come to his senses while he fulminated for hours about my lies. One morning, as they ate breakfast in the kitchen of their Hackensack house, he explained that he had restrained himself long enough and that, against the opponent I had revealed myself to be in Jerusalem, he could be bridled no longer by the rules of fair play. He had made up his mind to confront my aged father that very day with “the truth about his fraudulent son.” “What truth?” she had cried. “The truth! That everything about him is a lie! That his success in life is based on a lie! That the role he plays in life is a lie! That misleading people about who he is is the only talent the little shit has! He’s the fake, that’s the irony — he’s the fucking double, a dishonest impostor and fucking hypocritical fake, and I intend to tell the world, starting today with his stupid old man!” And when she then refused to drive him to my father’s Elizabeth address (which he’d written on a piece of paper he’d kept in his wallet since their return from Mexico), he lunged at her with his fork, sharply stabbing the back of the hand that, just in the nick of time, she had thrown out to protect her eyes.
Now, not a day had passed since they’d moved to New Jersey — some days, not even an hour — when she had not plotted running away from him. But even when she looked down at the holes punched into her skin by the tines of his fork and at her blood seeping out of them, even then she could find neither the strength nor the weakness to abandon him to his illness and run for her life. Instead she began to scream at him that what was enraging him was the failure of the Mexican cure — the charlatan was the phony doctor in Mexico, all of whose claims had been filthy lies. At the root of his rage was the cancer. And that was when he told her that it was the writer who had given him the cancer — contending for three decades with the treachery of that writer was what had brought him, at only fifty-eight, face-to-face with death. And that was when even the self- sacrificing devotion of Nurse Possesski gave way and she announced that she could no longer live with someone who was out of his mind — she was leaving!
“For him!” he exclaimed in a triumphant voice, as though it were the cure for his cancer that she had finally revealed. “Leaving the one who loves you for that lying son of a bitch who fucks you every which way and then disappears!”
She said no, but of course it was true — the dream of being rescued was of being rescued by me; it was the very dream she’d enacted on the night she’d pushed Walesa’s six-pointed star beneath the door of my hotel room in Arab Jerusalem and pleaded to be given refuge by the original whose existence so inflamed the duplicate.
“I’m going! I’m getting out of here, Philip, before something worse happens! I cannot live with a savage child!”
But when she rose from the breakfast table, at long last primed to break the bonds of this inexplicable martyrdom, he sobbed hysterically, “Oh, Mommy, I’m sorry,” and tumbled to his knees on the kitchen floor. Pressing her bleeding hand against his mouth, he told her, “Forgive me — I promise I’ll never stab you again!” And then this man who was all malaise, this unshameable, intemperate, conniving madman driven as recklessly by ungovernable compulsion as by meticulous, minute-by-minute miscalculation, this mutilated victim who was all incompleteness and deficiency, whose every scheme was a fiasco and against whose hyperbole she was, as always, undefended, began to lick the wound he had inflicted. Grunting with contrition, growling showily with remorse, he lapped thirstily away at her with his tongue as though the blood oozing out of this woman’s veins were the very elixir for which he’d been searching to prolong the calamity that was his life.
Because by this time he didn’t weigh much over a hundred pounds, it wasn’t that difficult for someone with her strength to lift him off the floor and virtually carry him in her arms up the stairs to the bed. And while she sat beside him there, holding his trembling hands in hers, he revealed where he really came from and who he really was, a story irreconcilable with everything he had told her before. She refused to believe him and, in her letter to me, would not repeat even one detail of the things to which he pleaded guilty. He had to have been delirious, she wrote, because, if he wasn’t, then she would have had to have him either arrested or institutionalized. When, at last, there was nothing disgraceful that a man could do that was left for him to confess to, darkness had enveloped their street and it was time to feed him dinner with her throbbing bandaged hand. But first, using a sponge and a basin of warm water, she gently bathed him right there in the bed and, as she did every night, massaged his legs until he purred. What did it matter in the end who he was and what he had done, or who he thought he was and what he thought he had done or was capable of doing or was emboldened enough to have done or was ill enough to have imagined he had done or imagined he must have done to have made himself fatally ill? Pure or depraved, harmless or ruthless, would-be Jewish savior or thrill-seeking, duplicitous, perverted betrayer, he was suffering, and she was there to assuage that suffering as she had been from the start. This woman whom he had stabbed in the hand at breakfast (while aiming for her face) put him to sleep — without his even having to ask — with a sweetly milking, all-consuming blow job that blotted out all his words, or so she said, or so said whoever had told her what to say in that letter in order to warn me off ever writing a single sentence for publication about these coarse, barbaric irrationalists of mine, these two catastrophists sustained by their demonic conflict and the theatrical, maddening trivia of psychosis. Her letter’s message to me was this: Find your comedy elsewhere. You bow out, and we’ll bow out. He’ll be as good as dead. But dare to ridicule either one of us in a book, and we’ll never leave you alone again. You have met your match in Pipik and Jinx, both of whom are alive and well. And this message, of course, was the very antithesis of the assurance that the letter had been conceived to provide.