Exit Ghost by Philip Roth Page A

truthfully enough—and as though I'd fallen for his ploy.

    Kliman was jogging around the oval of the big green lawn and waved at me when I approached the Central Park bench where we were to meet. I waited for him, thinking
that once I had made the original mistake—of coming to New York for the collagen procedure—thinking things through had given way to meandering erratically into a renewal I'd had no idea I had the slightest longing for. To disrupt the basic unity of one's life and change the patterns of predictability at seventy-one? What could be more fraught with the likelihood of disorientation, frustration, even of collapse?
    Kliman said, "I had to get those shits out of my head. I thought a run would do it. Didn't work."
    He wasn't a genial, chubby Billy but well over two hundred pounds, easily six-three, a large, agile, imposing young man with a lot of dark hair and pale gray eyes that were the wonder that pale gray eyes are in the human animal. A beautiful fullback built to pile-drive. My first (untrustworthy) impression was of someone also constrained by a generalized bafflement—at only twenty-eight bowed by the unwillingness of the world to submit without objection to his strength and beauty and the pressing personal needs they served. That's what was in his face: the angry recognition of an unexpected, wholly ridiculous resistance. He had to have been a very different sort of lover for Jamie from the young man she married. Where Billy had the soft, skillful tact of an obliging brother, Kliman had retained much of the schoolyard menace. That's what I perceived when he phoned me at the hotel, and so it was: self-control was not his watchword. Soon enough, it turned out not to be mine.
    In running shorts, running shoes, and a damp sweatshirt, he sat dejectedly beside me, his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. Dripping with sweat—this is how he comes to meet someone who is a key component of his first big professional endeavor, someone he desperately wants to win over. Well, he's genuine, I thought, whatever else he may be, and, if an opportunist, not quite the slick, self-interested opportunist I had imagined from our first conversation.
    He wasn't finished expressing himself about the election. "That a right-wing administration motivated by insatiable greed and sustained by murderous lies and led by a privileged dope should answer America's infantile idea of morality—how do we live with something so grotesque? How do you manage to insulate yourself from stupidity so bottomless?"
    They were some six to eight years out of college, I thought, and so Kerry's loss to Bush was taking a prominent place in the cluster of extreme historical shocks that would mentally shape their American kinship, as Vietnam had publicly defined their parents' generation and as the Depression and the Second World War had organized the expectations of my parents and their friends. There had been the barely concealed chicanery that had given Bush the presidency in 2000; there had been the terrorist attacks of 2001 and the indelible memory of the doll-like people leaping from the high windows of the burning towers; and now there was this, a second triumph by the "ignoramus" they loathed as much for his undeveloped mental faculties as for his devious nuclear fairy tales, to
enlarge the common experience that would set them apart from their younger brothers and sisters as well as from people like me. To them Bush Junior's was never an administration but a regime that had seized power by judicial means. They were meant to be reclaiming their franchise in 2004, and horribly they didn't, leaving them with the feeling, along about eleven last night, not only of having lost but in some way or other of having been defrauded again.
    "You wanted to tell me Lonoff's unpardonable secret," I said.
    "I never said 'unpardonable.'"
    "You were suggesting that much."
    "Do you know about his childhood?" he asked me. "Do