Operation Shylock: A Confession (27 page)

I thought, He’s got it all down pat from TV. If only I’d watched more “L.A. Law” and read less Dostoyevsky I’d know what’s going on here, I’d know in two minutes what show it is exactly. Maybe motifs from fifteen shows, with a dozen detective movies thrown in. The joke is that more than likely there’s a terrifically popular network program that everyone stays home for on Friday nights, and not only is it about a private investigator who specializes in missing kids but it’s a Jewish private investigator, and the episode about the high school girl (sweet cheerleader, square parents, mind of her own) and
the addict-pimp abductor (dirty dancer, folkloric grandmother, pitted skin) was probably the last one seen by Pipik before he’d hopped on the plane for Tel Aviv to play me. Maybe it was the in-flight movie on El Al. Probably everybody in America over three years of age knows about how detectives shit in their cars and call the cars vehicles, probably everybody over three in America knows exactly what is meant by a sexual device and only the aging author of
Portnoy’s Complaint
has to ask. What fun it must be for him putting me on like this. But is the masquerading relentless for the sake of the shakedown, or is the shakedown a pretext for the performance and all the real fun in the act? What if this isn’t simply a con but his parody of my vocation, what’s now known to mankind as a “roast.” Yes, suppose this Pipik of mine is none other than the Satiric Spirit in the flesh, and the whole thing a send-up, a satire of authorship! How could I have missed it? Yes, yes, the Spirit of Satire is of course who he is, here to poke fun at me and other outmoded devotees of what is important and what is real, here to divert us all from the Jewish savagery that doesn’t bear thinking about, come with his road show to Jerusalem to make everyone miserable laugh.

“What are the sexual devices?” I asked him.

“She had a vibrator. There was a blackjack in the car. I forget what else we had.”

“What’s the blackjack, a kind of dildo? 1 suppose dildos are a dime a dozen on prime time by now. What the Hula-Hoop used to be.”

“They use blackjacks for S & M. For beating and punishing and things like that.”

“What happened to Donna? Is she white? I didn’t catch this show. Who plays you? Ron Liebman or George Segal? Or is it you playing them for me?”

“I don’t know many writers,” he replied. “Is this the way they all think? That out there everybody is
playing?
Man! You listened too religiously to that kiddie program when you were a little boy—you and Sandy may have loved it too much. Saturday mornings. Remember? Nineteen forty also. Eleven a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Da
-dum-
da-dadada,
dum
-da-dadada,
dum-
dada-da-dum.”

He was humming the tune that used to introduce “Let’s Pretend,”
a fairy-tale half hour that little unmediaized American children adored back in the thirties and forties, my brother and I but two of the millions.

“Maybe,” he said, “your perception of reality got arrested at the ‘Let’s Pretend’ level.”

To this I did not even bother to reply.

“Oh, that’s a cliché, is it? Am I boring you? Well,” he said, “now that you’re pushing sixty and ‘Let’s Pretend’ isn’t on the air anymore, someone
should
bore you long enough to explain that, one, the world is real, two, the stakes are high, and, three, nobody is pretending anymore except
you
. I have been inside your head for so long now and yet not until this moment have I understood what a writer is all about: you guys think it’s
all
make-believe.”

“I don’t think
any
of it is make-believe, Pipik. I think—I
know—
that you are a real liar and a real fake. It’s the stories that purport to be about ‘it,’ it’s the struggle to describe ‘it,’ where the make-believe comes in. Five-year-old children may take the stories for real, but by the time you’re pushing sixty, deciphering the pathology of story making comes to be just another middle-age specialty. By the time you’re pushing sixty, the representations of ‘it’
are
‘it.’ They’re everything. Follow me?”

“Nothing hard to follow except your relevance. Cynicism increases with age because the bullshit piles up on your head. What’s that got to do with us?”

I heard myself ask aloud, “Am I conversing with this person, am I truly trying to make
sense
with him?
Why?”

“Why
not!
Why should you converse with Aharon Appelfeld,” he said, holding up and shaking Aharon’s book, “and not with me!”

“A thousand reasons.”

He was all at once in a jealous rage because I talked seriously to Aharon but not to him. “Name
one!”
he cried.

Because, I thought, of Aharon’s and my distinctly radical
twoness
, a condition with which you appear to have no affinity at all; because we are anything
but
the duplicates that everyone is supposed to believe you and me to be; because Aharon and I each embody the
reverse
of the other’s experience; because each recognizes in the other the Jewish man he is
not
; because of the all but incompatible orientations that shape our very different lives and very different books and that result from
antithetical
twentieth-century Jewish biographies; because we are the heirs jointly of a drastically
bifurcated
legacy—because of the sum of all these Jewish
antinomies
, yes, we have much to talk about and are intimate friends.

“Name
one!”
he challenged for a second time but on this subject I simply remained silent and, sensibly for a change, kept my thinking to myself. “You recognize Appelfeld for the person he claims to be; why do you refuse that with me? All you
do
is resist me. Resist me, ignore me, insult me, defame me, rant and rave at me—
and steal from me
. Why must there be this bad blood? Why
you
should see
me
as a rival—I cannot understand it. Why is this relationship so belligerent from your end? Why must it be destructive when together we could achieve so much? We could have a creative relationship, we could be partners—copersonalities working in tandem rather than stupidly divided in two!”

“Look, I’ve got more personalities than I can use already. All you are is one too many. This is the end of the line. I don’t want to go into business with you. I just want you to go away.”

“We could at least be friends.”

He sounded so forlorn I had to laugh. “Never. Profound, unbridgeable, unmistakable differences that far outweigh the superficial similarity—no, we can’t be friends, either. This is it.”

He looked, to my astonishment, about to burst into tears because of what I’d said. Or maybe it was just the ebb tide of those drugs. “Look, you never told me what happened to Donna,” I said. “Entertain us a little more, and then, what do you say, let’s bring this little error to an end. What became of Highland Park High’s fifteen-year- old dominatrix? How’d that show wind up?”

But this, of course, riled him again.

“Shows! You really think I watch PI shows? There isn’t one that depicts what’s real, not
one
. If I had a choice between watching “Magnum, P.I.” and “Sixty Minutes,” I’d watch “Sixty Minutes” any
time. Shall I tell you something? Donna turned out to be Jewish. Her mother, I found out later, was the reason why she left. I won’t go into that, you don’t care. But I did, I got involved in those cases—they were my life before I got sick. I would try to find out what the reasons were they left and try to get them to stay. I would try to help them. That was very rewarding. Unfortunately this Dominican with Donna—his name was Hector—Donna had a problem with him—”

“He had this power over her,” I said, “and to this day she’s trying to contact him.”

“That happens to be the case. That’s true. She was charged with receiving stolen property, resisting arrest, eluding police too—she’s in a detention center.”

“And the day she’s released from the detention center, she’ll run away again,” I said. “Great story. Everybody can identify, as they say. Beginning with you. She doesn’t want to be Dr. and Mrs. Jew’s Donna anymore, she wants to be Hector’s Dominican Pepper. All this autobiographical fantasy, is it nationwide? Is it worldwide? Maybe this stuff everybody is watching has inspired half the human population with the yearning for a massive transfer of souls, maybe that’s what
you
embody—the longings for metempsychosis inspired in mankind by all those TV shows.”

“Idiot!” he shouted. “It’s staring you right in the
face
what I embody!”

It is, I thought: exactly nothing. There is no meaning here at all.
That’s
the meaning. I can stop there. I could have started there. Nothing could look more like it meant something than this, and nothing could mean less.

“So, what happened finally to Hector?” I asked him, hoping now that if I could lead him to the end of something, of anything, it might present an opportunity to get him up from my bed and out of the room without my having to call down to the desk for assistance. I never felt less inclined than at that moment to see this poor possessed scoundrel wind up in trouble. Not only was he meaningless but, having observed him for nearly an hour, I was hard-pressed to believe any longer that he was violent. In this way we
weren’t
dissimilar: the
violence was all verbal. I had, in fact, actively to prevent myself from despising him less than was warranted, given the maddening mix-up he’d made of my life and the repercussions of this encounter, which I was sure were going to dog me in unpleasant ways in the future.

“Hector?” he said. “Hector made bail, he’s out on bail.” Unexpectedly he began to laugh, but a laugh that was as hopeless and weary as any sound emitted by him yet. “You and Hector. I never saw the parallel till now. As if I don’t have enough grief from you, with all the ways you want to fuck me over, I’ve got Hector waiting in the wings. He called me, he spoke to me, he threatened my life—Hector told me he was going to kill me. This is just before I went into the hospital. I’ve arrested a lot of people, you realize, put a lot of people in prison. They phone me, they track me down, and I don’t hide. If somebody wants to get even with me, there’s nothing I can do. But I don’t look over my shoulder. I told Hector what I tell them all. ‘I’m listed in the book, man. Philip Roth. Come and get me.’”

With this I raised my arms over my head, I howled, I clapped my hands together, once, then again, until I found myself applauding him. “Bravo! You’re wonderful! What a finish! What a flourish! On the phone, the dedicated Jewish savior, the Jewish statesman, Theodor Herzl turned inside out. Then face-to-face outside the trial, a zany fan blushing with adoration. And now this, the masterstroke—the detective who doesn’t look over his shoulder. ‘I’m in the book, man. Philip Roth. Come and get me.’ The
book!”
From out of my depths roared all the laughter that I should have been laughing from the day I first heard that this preposterous mouthpiece claimed to exist.

But he was suddenly screaming from the bed, “I want the check! I want my check! You’ve stolen a million dollars!”

“I lost it, Pipik. I lost it on the highway from Ramallah. The check is gone.”

Aghast, he stared straight at me, at the person in all the world who most reminded him of himself, the person he saw as the rest of him, the completion of him, the one who’d come to be his very reason for being, his mirror image, his meal ticket, his hidden potential, his public persona, his alibi, his future, the one in whom he sought refuge
from himself, the other whom he called himself, the person in whose service he had repudiated his own identity, the breakthrough to the other half of his life … and he saw instead, laughing at him uncontrollably from behind the mask of his very own face, his worst enemy, the one to whom the only bond is hatred. But how could Pipik have failed to know that I would have to hate him no less than he hated me? Did he honestly expect that when we met I’d fall in love and set up shop and have a creative relationship with him like Macbeth and his wife?

“I lost it. It’s a great story, too, nearly rivals yours for unbelievability. The check is gone,” I told him again. “A million bucks blowing away across the desert sands, probably halfway down to Mecca by now. And with that million you could have convened that first Diasporist Congress in Basel. You could have shipped the first lucky Jews back to Poland. You could have established a chapter of A-S.A. right in Vatican City. Meetings in the basement of St. Peter’s Church. Full house every night. ‘My name is Eugenio Pacelli. I’m a recovering anti-Semite.’ Pipik, who sent you to me in my hour of need? Who made me this wonderful gift? Know what Heine liked to say? There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.
You
prove it. It’s Aristophanes they should be worshiping over at the Wailing Wall—if he were the God of Israel I’d be in shul three times a day!”

I was laughing the way people cry at funerals in the countries where they let go and really have at it. They rend their clothes. They rake their faces with their nails. They howl. They swoon. They faint. They grab at the coffin with their twisted hands and fling themselves shrieking into the hole. Well, this is how I was laughing, if you can picture it. To judge from Pipik’s face—our face!—it was something to behold. Why
isn’t
God Aristophanes? Would we be any further from the truth?

“Surrender yourself to what is real,” were my first words to him when I could talk again. “I speak from experience—surrender to reality, Pipik. There’s nothing in the world quite like it.”

I suppose I should have laughed even more uproariously at what happened next; as a newly anointed convert to the Old Comedy, I
should have bounded to my feet, cried aloud, “Hallelujah!” and sung the praises of He Who Created Us, He Who Formed Us from the Mud, the One and Only Comic Almighty, OUR SOVEREIGN REDEEMER, ARISTOPHANES, but for reasons all too profane (total mental paralysis) I could only dumbly gape at the sight of nothing less than the highly entertaining Aristophanic erection that Pipik had produced, as though it were a rabbit, from his fly, an oversized pole right out of
Lysistrata
that, to my further astonishment, he proceeded to crank in a rotary motion, to position, with one hand cupped over the knobby doll-like head, as if he were moving the floor shift on a prewar car. Then he was lunging with it across the bed.