Operation Shylock: A Confession (25 page)

“I want that check. Now.”

“Pipik, pipe down.”

“Cut the Pipik crap!”

“Then
listen
. This is
interesting
. Once every six months or so we went out in two carloads to visit Meema Gitcha for the weekend. Her husband had been a hatter in Danbury. He used to work at Fishman’s in Newark with my grandfather, who was also a hatter for a while, but when the hat factories left for Connecticut, Gitcha and her family moved up with them to Danbury. About ten years later, Gitcha’s husband, working in off-hours, taking a stock of finished hats to the shipping room, was trapped and died in an accident in the elevator. Gitcha was on her own and so two, three times a year, we all went north to see her. A five-hour car ride in those days. Aunts, uncles, cousins, my grandmother, all packed in together, coming and going. It was somehow the most Jewishy-Yiddishy event of my childhood—we
could
have been driving all the way back to the folkland of Galicia
traveling up to Danbury on those trips. Meema Gitcha’s was a household with a lot of melancholy and confusion—poor lighting, food always cooking, illness in the wings, some new tragedy always imminent—relatives very different from the lively, healthy, Americanized contingent stuffed into the new Studebakers. Meema Gitcha never got over her husband’s accident. She was always sure we were going to be killed in a car crash on the way up, and when we weren’t, she was sure we would be killed in a crash on the way down, and so the custom was that as soon as we got home on Sunday night, the very moment we stepped through the door, before anybody even went to the bathroom or got out of his coat, Meema Gitcha had to be phoned and reassured that we were still alive. But, of course, in those days, in our world, a long-distance phone call was unheard of—other than in an emergency, nobody would dream of making one. Nonetheless, when we got home from Meema Gitcha’s, no matter how late it was, my mother got on the phone and, as though what she was doing was entirely on the up and up, dialed the operator and asked to place a long-distance call to Meema Gitcha’s Connecticut number and to speak there person-to-person with Moishe Pipik. Even while my mother was holding the phone, my brother and I used to put our ears up next to hers on the receiver because it was tremendously exciting to hear the goyisch operator trying to get her tongue around ‘Moishe Pipik.’ She always got it wrong, and my mother, who was wonderful at this and celebrated for it in the family, my mother very calmly, very precisely, would say, ‘No, operator, no—person-to-person to Moí-she … Pí-pik. Mr. Moishe …
Pipik.’
And when finally the operator got it marginally right, we would hear the voice of Meema Gitcha jumping in at the other end—‘Moishe Pipik? He’s not here! He left half an hour ago!’ and immediately, bang, she’d hang up before the phone company caught on to what we were doing and threw the whole bunch of us in jail.”

Something about the story—could just have been its length—seemed to have sedated him a little, and he lay there on the bed as though for the moment he were no threat to anyone, including even himself. His eyes were closed when he said, very wearily, “What does
this have to do with what you have done to me? Anything? Have you no imagination for what you did to me today?”

I thought then that he was like some errant son of mine, like the child I’d never had, some ne’er-do-well infantile grown-up who bears the family name and the facial features of a larger-than-life dad and doesn’t much like feeling suffocated by him and has gone everywhere to learn to breathe and, after decades on his motorcycle, having succeeded at nothing but strumming on an electric guitar, appears at the doorstep of the old manse to vent the impotence of a lifetime and then, following twenty-four hours of frenzied indictment and frightening tears, ends up back in his boyhood bedroom, momentarily drained of recrimination, while the father sits kindly beside him, mentally ticking off all his offspring’s deficiencies, thinking, “At your age I had already…,” and aloud, trying in vain, with funny stories, to amuse this beast of prey into a change of heart, at least until he’ll accept the check he came for and go away to some place where he can repair automobiles.

The check. The check was no hallucination and the check was gone. It was all no hallucination. This is worse than Halcion—this is happening.

“You’re thinking Pipik was our fall guy,” I said, “the scapegoat’s scapegoat—but, no, Pipik was protean, a hundred different things. Very human in that regard. Moishe Pipik was someone who didn’t exist and couldn’t possibly exist, and yet we were claiming he was so real he could answer the telephone. To a seven-year-old child this was all hilarious. But then Meema Gitcha would say, ‘He left half an hour ago,’ and I was suddenly as stupid as the operator and I believed her. I could
see
him leaving. He wanted to stay and talk more with Meema Gitcha. Going to visit her reassured him of something. That he wasn’t entirely alone, I suppose. There weren’t that many Jews in Danbury. How had poor little Moishe Pipik got there in the first place? Oddly, Gitcha could be a very reassuring bulk of a person for all that there was nothing that didn’t worry her. But the worries she attacked like a dragon slayer—maybe that was it. I imagined them speaking in Yiddish, Meema Gitcha and Moishe Pipik. He was a refugee boy who
wore an Old Country refugee cap, and she gave him food to eat out of the cooking pots and her dead husband’s old coat to wear. Sometimes she slipped him a dollar. But whenever he happened to come around to see her after the New Jersey relatives had been visiting for the weekend, and he sat at the table telling her his problems, she would sit there eyeing the kitchen clock, and then suddenly she would jump up and say, ‘Go, Moishe! Look at the time! God forbid you should be here when they call!’ And in the midst of everything,
in mitn drinen
, you know, he grabbed his cap and he ran. Pipik ran and he ran and he ran and he never stopped running until fifty years later he finally reached Jerusalem and all that running had made him
so
tired and
so
lonely that all he could do when he got to Jerusalem was to find a bed, any bed, even somebody else’s bed. …”

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.”

What
was
he? Was he fifty-one percent smart or was he fifty-one percent stupid? Was he fifty-one percent crazy or was he fifty-one percent sane? Was he fifty-one percent reckless or was he fifty-one percent cunning? In every case it was a very close call.