Free Exit Ghost by Philip Roth Page A

to feel completely at home knowing nothing of what was going on. I had banished my country, been myself banished from erotic contact with women, and was lost through battle fatigue to the world of love. I had issued an admonition. I was out from under my life and times. Or maybe just down to the nub. My cabin could as well have been adrift on the high seas as set twelve hundred feet up on a rural road in Massachusetts that was less than a three-hour drive east to the city of Boston and about the same distance south to New York.

    The television set was on when I arrived, and Billy assured me the election was in the bag—he was in touch with a
friend at Democratic national headquarters, and their exit polls showed Kerry winning all the states he needed. Billy graciously accepted the wine and told me that Jamie had gone out to buy food and should be back at any minute. Once again he was expansively agreeable and exuded a jovial softness, as though he weren't yet and probably never would be expert at wielding authority. Is he a throwback, I wondered, or do they still exist like this, middle-class Jewish boys who continue to be branded with the family empathy that, despite the unmatchable satisfaction of its cradling sentiments, can leave one unprepared for the nastiness of less kindly souls? In the Manhattan literary milieu particularly, I would have expected something other than the brown eyes weighty with tenderness and the full angelic cheeks that lent him the air, if not still of a protected small boy, then of the generous young man wholly unable to inflict a wound or laugh with scorn or shirk the smallest responsibility. I speculated that Jamie might be a lot more than could be managed by the sweet selflessness of one whose every word and gesture was permeated with his decency. The trusting innocence, the mildness, the sympathetic understanding—what a setup for the rogue with an eye to stealing the wife whose infidelity would be unimaginable to him.
    The phone rang just as Billy was preparing to open one of the bottles of wine, and he handed it across to me to uncork while he snatched up the phone and said, "What now?" After a moment he looked up to tell me, "New Hampshire's sewed up. D.C.?" Billy then asked the friend
who was phoning. To me again he said, "In D.C. they're going eight to one for Kerry. That's the key—the blacks are turning out en masse. Okay, great," Billy said into the phone, and upon hanging up told me happily, "So we live in a liberal democracy after all," and, to toast the mounting thrill, he poured each of us a big glass of wine. "These guys would have devastated the country," he said, "had they won a second term. We've had bad presidents and we've survived, but this one's the bottom. Serious cognitive deficiencies. Dogmatic. A tremendously limited ignoramus about to wreck a very great thing. There's a description in
Macbeth
that's perfect for him. We read aloud together, Jamie and I. We're doing the tragedies. It's in the scene in act three with Hecate and the witches. 'A wayward son,' Hecate says, 'spiteful and wrathful.' George Bush in six words. It's all so awful. If you're for your kids and God, you're a Republican—meanwhile, the people who are being screwed the most are his base. It's amazing they pulled it off for even one term. It's terrifying to think what they would have done with a second term. These are terrible, evil guys. But their arrogance and their lies finally caught up with them."
    My mind still full of my own thoughts, I allowed a couple of minutes more for him to continue to watch the first election results trickle in before I asked, "How did you meet Jamie?"
    "Miraculously."
    "You were students together."
    He smiled most appealingly, when, given my thoughts,
he would have done better pulling the dagger that had done in Duncan. "That makes it no less miraculous," he said.
    I saw there was no need to stop myself from hurtling forward for fear of being found out.