CHAPTER
Forty-Five
AFTER HIS FINAL BREAK WITH SUSAN ROGERS IN EARLY 2005—a time when he was feeling especially enfeebled and gloomy—Roth suspected he was “too old to seriously consider attracting the women who attracted him.” One woman friend, who was “only” (as Roth would have it) about twenty years younger than he, never forgot the dispirited way he suggested she come live with him in Connecticut. “It will be nice to have some companionship,” he said. “One could go her own way when one needed to, and there might be little visits to my bed every now and then.” The woman found it a chilly proposition, and politely declined.
David Plante was then infatuated with one of his more gifted Columbia students—a young man who’d begun to publish in prestigious magazines and would soon finish an acclaimed novel. Plante thought he’d put the fellow “in his place” by inviting him to dinner with Philip Roth, who in turn might be able to shed light on whether or not the young man was gay. As it happened their guest arrived with a former girlfriend, Brigit,* who struck Roth as quite pretty, albeit in a nebulous “virginal mode” that particular night. Roth, of course, was in pain—it was March 23, 2005, less than two months before his second major back surgery—but receptive enough, with the help of Vicodin, to retain a basic dossier on the woman: a twenty-nine-year-old graduate of an Ivy League college, she’d grown up in privileged circumstances on the Upper West Side; her Jewish father worked on Wall Street, and her gentile mother had been a gifted artist before dying of cancer a few years back. The young woman was still starkly burdened with grief. “This would be a good place to commit suicide,” she said to Roth, standing beside a grimy, alley-view window in Plante’s apartment. “Let’s do it,” he replied.
Six months later Roth was pain-free; remembering the young woman, he asked Plante to arrange a dinner for the three of them at Russian Samovar. When Plante arrived, he spotted Roth and Brigit in a back booth, leaning toward each other, and walked around the block a few times. “Leave after dessert,” Roth murmured to him at some point, and afterward Roth and Brigit sat talking for another two or three hours. “I can’t let you go,” he said on the sidewalk, and joined her in a taxi back to her Village apartment. “In the taxi,” Roth remembered, “she grew a little shy of me and she began to talk self-consciously about all the things there were to learn and I said, ‘Don’t worry—I’ll teach you.’ ” When the taxi pulled up to the curb, Roth stayed put (“Don’t fuck it up,” he thought; “don’t go for her”), and promised to call her soon.
OCTOBER WAS the happiest month for Roth. His dinner with Brigit at Russian Samovar was on October 4, and, less than three weeks later, Philip Roth Day was celebrated in Newark: a historical plaque was unveiled at 81 Summit Avenue (“This was the first childhood home of Philip Roth, one of America’s greatest writers of the 20th and 21st centuries”†), and the corner of Summit and Keer was named Philip Roth Plaza. The next morning, around seven thirty (“I had no finesse whatever”), Roth rang up Brigit and gave her “a full and gleeful report of the goings-on.” He was in love. A month later he hired a limo and took her along for a shopping spree in SoHo. “Imagine a scene that Mann never wrote where Aschenbach buys clothes for Tadzio,” he said, still delighting in the memory years later. At Assets he bought her a leather jacket and skirt, then at Barbara Bui he picked out a little black dress and asked her to try it on: “She was just delicious,” he said, and she agreed it was nice but worried about the stupendous price tag. Roth handed her his credit card and went outside to wait in the car. “You know what the salesgirl said to me?” Brigit said afterward. “ ‘You got the black dress too?’ ”‡ On December 7, the couple attended the annual New Yorker holiday party at Pastis—their first public outing. “Philip Roth made an appearance with a twenty-something young lady,” Gawker reported. “Mr. Roth and his lady were the subject of much conversation.”
The only cloud was her imminent departure—on January 1, 2006—for a five-month theater fellowship in Colorado. She and Roth spent their last weekends together in Connecticut, dancing on Saturday nights to the big-band music of Roth’s youth, and one night, Faunia-like, Brigit performed a charming striptease in Roth’s bedroom. “Who needs any more than this?” she exulted one snowy, twilit evening. The most memorable night of all was New Year’s Eve: in front of a fire they drank Champagne and consumed a pot of caviar, then Roth sat opposite her in his Eames chair and asked her to tell him the story of her adult life, from college graduation to the present day. For the next three hours—midnight came and went; nobody noticed—she held forth, vividly, hardly pausing except to collect herself when she came to the terrible saga of her mother’s illness and death. Her departure the next day was wrenching.
Except for Brigit’s visits, the place in Connecticut had become too cold and lonely during winter months, and Roth was in the process of turning his New York apartment into a more permanent haven. Rather than soundproof the walls with cork à la Proust, Roth bought up the surrounding apartments: The first, below him, had been owned by a burly doting father who crashed around playing with his children every night; next Roth bought the apartments on either side of him, 12D and 12F, renting out the first to a temperate lodger, and renovating the second as an extension to his studio—an elaborate project that would take the full five months of Brigit’s absence, during which he stayed at Plante’s apartment on Claremont Avenue, near Columbia, while Plante was away in Europe on sabbatical.
The day after her arrival in Colorado, Brigit sent Roth some paint samples she’d picked out for the spare bedroom—that is, her room—in Roth’s soon to be renovated New York apartment, as well as samples for the downstairs parlor in Warren, which was to be her office. The two spoke on the phone at least once a day, never briefly, and arranged to meet three times during Brigit’s fellowship. For three days in early April, Roth booked a suite at the Peninsula in Chicago, showing Brigit around Hyde Park haunts from another halcyon period of his life. A rather grim memento mori, however, was the decrepitude of his brother, Sandy: in the eight or so months since Philip had seen him last, osteoporosis had bent Sandy almost double, and never mind the heart disease that would kill him in three more years. Meanwhile his wife, Dorene, was a little bemused by her seventy-three-year-old brother-in-law’s romance, and not simply for the obvious reasons. “He saw none of her spoiled-brat qualities,” she remembered. “She seemed like somebody who was poised to have a very man-filled life.” Another tactical blunder on Roth’s part, arguably, was arranging a dinner with Janis Bellow when the couple stayed at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, or so Ross Miller opined during a taped interview with Dick Stern: “How crazy are you to put up Janis as a model?”—that is, of a devoted caretaker for a much much older man who, in her case, had recently died after a long decline into dementia. Roth, incensed when he heard Miller’s comment on tape, insisted that Janis was just his “dear lovely friend” and he was hardly “selling” her to Brigit. Even so loyal a person as Judith Thurman, though, saw parallels in the Bellow union that might have appealed to Roth: “But [Brigit] didn’t have that temperament,” she added. “She was very ambitious. She didn’t want to be a handmaiden.”
For the time being, anyway, Brigit hardly had to worry about the caretaking side of things. Ribaldry inspired the otherwise proper young woman: she rhapsodized about their sex games in her letters, and for Roth’s seventy-third birthday she composed a breathtakingly filthy parody of “Mr. Sandman”—“Mr. Hard-on,” whom the singer begs to bring her something more tangible than a dream. Little wonder Roth kissed Plante on the lips when the two met again at Broadway and 116th, while students streamed around them through the campus gate. The whole thing was reminiscent of a favorite Roth joke: an old man goes into a confession booth in Ireland and says, “I’m eighty-three and I’m sleeping with a twenty-eight-year-old!” “Do I detect a Jewish accent?” the priest replies. “Why are you telling me this?” “I’m telling everybody!”
BACK IN 1996, during Miller’s first foray as biographer, he interviewed three people in addition to Roth: the Schneiders and Julius Goldstein. After signing his Houghton contract, in 2004, more than a year passed before he interviewed a fourth, Aaron Asher, on September 27, 2005, and another four months before he got around to Bob Lowenstein, who was a weary, bewildered ninety-eight by then.§ When Roth’s faithful librarian friend Charles Cummings died on December 21, 2005 (almost two months to the day after he’d jubilantly accompanied Roth on Philip Roth Day, an event he helped organize),¶ Roth complained to Julia Golier that Miller wasn’t interviewing his more elderly family and friends—or hardly anyone else, for that matter—and now they were dying off; Golier earnestly offered to do it herself, though by then she had her hands full with motherhood and professional obligations.
When Roth learned that his and Bloom’s old friend Barbara Epstein was dying of lung cancer, he could stand on the sidelines no longer. For almost ten years now, he’d been eager to confirm some gossip that Veronica Geng had heard from Epstein and shared with Roth—namely, that Francine du Plessix Gray had “practically dictated” Leaving a Doll’s House to Bloom. At Roth’s exasperated urging, Miller finally wrote Epstein on February 6, 2006, requesting an interview, and that same day Epstein faxed Roth a note on New York Review stationery: “Would you like me to talk to him? I’ll do what you say.” Miller, however, would later tell Dick Stern that Epstein had been disinclined to cooperate because she knew he was “close friends” with Roth, and then, too, Miller’s own scruples were affronted: “[Philip] figured, ‘Well, Ross, he’s writing the biography, but we’re such good friends, well, he can settle my scores for me.’ . . . I’m supposed to get Barbara Epstein to talk to me about this”—i.e., the Francine rumor—“and she’s dying. And the cruelty of it! . . . He sends me twenty questions to ask her, and they’re all questions that make him look good.”
Actually, some of the questions—Miller was expected to pretend they were of his own devising—were a little sly. Roth wondered whether Claire’s descriptions of him in Doll’s House were consistent with Epstein’s own impressions during the years of their friendship (“Was there a Jekyll and Hyde division at the core of him?”), and waited stealthily until question 6 before pouncing on the Francine rumor:
I [“Miller”] have read that book [Doll’s House] as well as Claire’s first book, Limelight and After, and it does strike me, as I think it would anybody with any sensitivity to language and literature who took the time to make the comparison, that the two books do indeed appear not only to have been written, sentence by sentence, by two different people# but to have been conceived by people of utterly divergent moral natures. This leads me to believe that what you told Veronica was indeed the case. Am I correct?
Perhaps because she hadn’t heard further from Miller, Epstein changed her mind and declined an interview the following month (March); three months later she was dead.
By the time of the Epstein debacle, Roth “had already begun losing faith in Ross’ capacity to do the job”; nevertheless he gave him a lavish sixtieth birthday party that same month (February 26). Fifteen or so guests—including Wylie, David Remnick, Jack Miles, and Brigit (along with Roth’s official photographer, Nancy Crampton, the better to record for posterity this unwarranted act of generosity)—occupied the second floor of Roth’s favorite Italian restaurant, Patsy’s, a “decidedly unchic” place conceived “before the discovery of arugula.”** After Roth gave a toast, the birthday boy rose and reminisced about Aunt Marilyn (Monroe). “This surprised me,” said Roth, “because Ross made fun of his Uncle Arthur for never failing to bring up Marilyn’s name when his monologue was losing hold on the crowd and he needed a hook.”
Three months later, an explicit rift occurred over Miller’s duties as editor of the Library of America Roth edition. “The initial delight is wonderful,” Roth had said about his canonization as the only living author in the series. “But after a while, it’s just another edition of a book.” At other times, however, Roth conceded his considerable pleasure in the honor, and made a point of inserting it into press releases and the like. Max Rudin admitted that having a living author in the series—much less one so vigilant as Roth—was apt to keep him and his colleagues “on [their] toes”; and yet, in an uncharacteristic lapse (such was his faith in Miller perhaps), Roth hadn’t bothered to check galley proofs for the first two volumes. As volume 3 was going to press, the LOA’s Brian McCarthy volunteered a proof of Miller’s Notes on the Texts, whereupon Roth was “astonished” to discover his friend had produced only nine pages for an 869-page book—nor were Miller’s notes altogether accurate or clear, as Roth saw it, and there was no “logical reason why he had footnoted some things and not footnoted others.” The only living author in the Library of America demanded they halt the presses while he peruse the volume from beginning to end, and when he did he “blew [his] stack.”
The next morning Roth bombarded his friend with faxes: “this is unacceptable!” read one of Roth’s many glosses. “You don’t connect the footnote to the context. What is going on with you?” A lyrical passage from The Great American Novel about Spaulding’s first cork-centered baseball, for example, was meant to “echo Melville’s style.” Finally he phoned Miller so he could berate him more directly, and Miller protested that he’d been specifically enjoined not to write “interpretive” notes. “I’m afraid I cannot talk to you about this,” Roth faxed him afterward.
I am too fucking angry. Nothing I sent you in my morning note had to do with being “interpretive.” It had to do with being accurate and to the point of what was being footnoted. . . . Is it “interpretive” to point out that Danny Kaye was Jewish and that Tony Martin was Jewish in the notes about each?†† Reread the first paragraph of the book and tell me if pointing that out is “interpretive” or if it isn’t at the very heart of the job you are supposed to be doing. This has become ludicrous.
Miller’s work as a Library of America editor led Roth to air more general grievances. “It pains me to have to write this letter but things are not going as I expected with your projects and I don’t want them to get worse,” his grand remonstrance began.
You said you hadn’t contacted Bob Silvers because you wanted Barbara [Epstein] “to feel flattered at being asked first.” . . . [Y]ou were going to contact Bob precisely because Barbara has consistently refused to see you. I reminded you of this at the time and all you did was shrug off what was nothing less than a baldfaced lie. To me! . . . I remind you: this is my life’s work that I have put into your hands, fifty years of work—so what are you lying for . . . Why, why, why?
Then there was Miller’s recent trip to Chicago to interview Roth’s only, rapidly fading brother. Afterward Miller told Roth the interview hadn’t gone well because of Sandy’s deteriorating mental state; but meanwhile Sandy had mentioned that he and Miller met at a museum cafeteria for all of thirty minutes before Miller bolted, sticking Sandy with the check. “Sandy said he was waiting for you to call him back the next day because he couldn’t believe that was the interview. But you never did call him back. What are you doing? . . . Nobody can be interviewed like that, and nobody is ever going to be interviewed for this biography like that in the future.” At length Roth concluded: “This is excruciatingly awful for me to have to write as it must be for you to have to read, and I’m stopping here.”
Max Rudin agreed that Miller “did a very sloppy job” as LOA editor, but in fairness pointed out that they’d agreed at the outset to “go lightly on the notes.” Within two weeks, however, the in-house staff had reviewed volume 3 and expanded the notes from nine to twenty-seven pages, elucidating such matters as “Lake District,” Jane Austen’s Persuasion, and “objective correlative”; The Great American Novel, especially, with all its “quotations, allusions, and literary burlesques and parodies,” needed amplification. After the staff’s heroic efforts to appease him, Roth wrote Brian McCarthy a note apologizing for his occasional irritability in the past: “I had no idea until very recently that there was a serious editorial problem quite separate from the work done by you and your office.” At the bottom of this fax, somebody drew a doghouse with “ROSS” over the door.
The outcome, at any rate, was arguably a boon to all concerned: henceforth the notes were prepared in-house before going to Roth (“They were solid and perfect,” he wrote Rudin of volume 6, “—I made not a single correction or suggestion”), and finally, pro forma, to Miller, who was “pretty disengaged” (Rudin) but still nominally the editor. And of course Roth, as ever, went on updating the Chronology and writing almost every syllable of the jacket copy. To the back flap of volume 6, for instance, he wished to add that two of the greatest literary critics in the English-speaking world, Harold Bloom and Frank Kermode, had both proposed Sabbath’s Theater “as the finest American novel of the last quarter of the twentieth century”: “To accommodate this new line it may be necessary to shorten Ross’s biographical note,” Roth wrote, suggesting a particular sentence to delete (“[Miller’s] criticism has appeared . . .”); it was duly deleted.
FOR EVERYMAN, published that spring of 2006, Roth wanted the jacket to resemble a tombstone. (“This book is about death!” he said. “You’ll love it!”) A number of Roth’s old friends assumed the novel was a “threnody” (Tom Rogers) inspired by the author’s own grinding decline, a notion on which Roth was determined to put the kibosh, what with his reconstructed spine and twenty-nine-year-old girlfriend. “I’ve neither been languishing in ‘loneliness and isolation’ or sidetracked by ‘the scourges of [my] illnesses,’ ” he scolded Brustein. “My model wasn’t my life. My model was Tolstoy.” Lest readers miss the point, Roth’s author photo showed a grimly muscular septuagenarian in a short-sleeved shirt.
In her Sunday New York Times review, Nadine Gordimer raved about Roth’s celebration of “the splendid ingenuity of the body” via “the joy of loving sexual intercourse,” lavishly concluding, “Philip Roth is a magnificent victor in attempting to disprove Georg Lukacs’ dictum of the impossible aim of the writer to encompass all of life.” Michiko Kakutani, however, fixed on the drearier aspects of Roth’s novella. With dour tautology she described the novel as “a laundry list of complaints about the human condition” and (same sentence) “an existential litany of grievances, regrets and disappointments”; Everyman, indeed, was “sketchy,” “labored,” “contrived,” and “etiolated” yet: “a cobbled-together production of a writer coasting wearily along on automatic pilot.”
While there’s a fair amount of joyful sexual intercourse in the book, Everyman is certainly more concerned with the morbid; Daniel Mendelsohn wryly observed in The New York Review of Books that the hero seems “to have enjoyed bizarrely poor health,” given the many complaints he suffers en route to his eventual demise: a hernia, peritonitis, various heart ailments, and so on—in other words, Roth’s own precisely documented medical history, minus the back surgeries. The pain of our all-too-finite span on this “perfect, priceless planet” is suggested from the start, when Everyman’s older brother, Howie, remarks at Everyman’s funeral that the dead man had removed their father’s Hamilton watch just prior to the surgery that killed him; a page later we go back to forty-eight hours earlier, in the hospital, where Everyman tries distracting himself from mortal thoughts by remembering his first-ever operation (hernia) at age ten. So the novel proceeds: from illness to illness, interspersed with scenes of the hero’s dotage, when the ravages and wrong turnings are everywhere evident. What struck Kakutani as “peculiarly abstract” and “oddly sketchy” (both) about Everyman’s life was not just his anonymity per se, but also the rather generic nature of his virtues and flaws. Roth, in fact, hadn’t noticed he’d neglected to assign a name to his character until he read his first draft and decided the accident was fortunate: “Let him be defined by his relationship to others.” Thus his daughter, Nancy—the product of a loving second marriage—adores him, whereas his older children, Randy and Lonny, share their mother’s (his first wife’s) animus for the man she’d described, in court, as “a well-known philanderer.” An average man, in short, whose average flaws leave him all but entirely alone in the world. “Without even Howie!” he laments near the end, having distanced himself, out of envy, from his more successful brother. “Terrible and so human, as envy is,” Roth wrote in his notes. “The lust for Merete”—Everyman’s third wife—“that destroys his highly compatible marriage. Terrible and so human, as lust is. Lust and envy isolate him. But they are human things and so they befall him.”
Roth’s challenge was to make his eponymous hero, if average, then average in a relatively nuanced way. “EVERYTHING A MORALITY PLAY IS NOT IS WHAT MY BOOK IS,” he noted. “UNLIKE EVERYMAN”—i.e., the medieval morality play—“IT IS NOT TOLD FROM THE CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE, IT IS NOT PEOPLED BY CHARACTERS WHO ARE PERSONIFIED VIRTUES AND VICES, IT IS NOT DIDACTIC IN TONE. . . . THE TENSION BETWEEN THE TITLE AND THE CONTENT IS WHAT INTERESTS ME.” Perhaps the main reason Everyman, as a character, seems interesting is his categorical refusal to accept the “lie” of religion, no matter how bleakly in need of such comfort he becomes. “But there’s no remaking reality,” he tells his thirteen-year-old daughter when she painfully rips a tendon in her hip and faces the end of her track career. “Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes. There’s no other way.” And Roth (who liked to say “ ‘Redemptive’ isn’t a word I use very much except at the grocery store”) is merciless in portraying the “massacre” of old age, as the body deteriorates and there’s less and less to fill one’s days, and (at least in Everyman’s case) almost nothing to look forward to. When even his painting avocation begins to pall, he has little to do but walk in the morning and swim in the afternoon; meanwhile the damage of his failed marriages, and the essential hollowness of his old professional friendships, leave him with nobody in his life but Nancy: “True, he had chosen to live alone, but not unbearably alone.”
“This is a novel with, literally, Nothing to offer,” David Gates wrote in Newsweek, “—except moving scenes with lovingly presented people, a beautifully shaped narrative and the resolution with which it faces the unfaceable.” With Everyman Roth became the only writer to win the PEN/Faulkner three times, for three very different novels that showed the vast distance he’d traveled in only thirteen years of his (ultimately) fifty-five-year career—from the ludic reality games of Operation Shylock to the somber dissection of American puritanism in The Human Stain, and finally to the stark, unhappy Everyman, with its craftsmanly set pieces about jewelry and grave digging that pique the reader’s imagination without a whit of cliché—such as Roth found in yet another deplorable reading guide: “ ‘Existential facts,’ ” he wrote his publisher. “Why not just [say] ‘the facts of illness and aging and death.’ Existential is a bullshit word to be avoided at all costs.”
ONE OF ROTH’S FIRST meetings with Brigit, after she returned from Colorado in May 2006, was for breakfast at Nice Matin, near Roth’s apartment on West Seventy-ninth (still under construction) and Brigit’s family home on Riverside Drive. Roth had stayed up most of the night rewriting Miller’s LOA notes and grinding them through his fax machine. “Would somebody bring my toast?!” he yelled, smacking the table, and Brigit started, appalled. It was the kind of thing her boorish father would do, and she let Roth know she didn’t like it.
By then it was clear she wasn’t the same woman who used to sing “Mr. Hard-on.” After her first night back with Roth, chez Plante, she left early the next morning to visit a friend in Brooklyn. A few days later Roth expected her for dinner at seven; he bought the food and laid it out, but she hadn’t come by eight, and he sat watching a ball game, fuming. Finally she appeared; she’d been at a party, she explained, and had to wait for some old friends to show. “Sternly,” Roth recalled, “meaning my words, I asked her, ‘Do you want to get out of this? Do you want this to be over?’ Very sheepishly she said, ‘No.’ (I thought, when she spoke, that she didn’t have the courage, quite then, to say, ‘Yes.’) The meal that followed was eaten in silence.”
Brigit was the first woman Roth had ever wanted to marry, but, given his own nearness to death, he thought it only fair to offer her a child—a prospect, in this case, that thrilled him too. Still, he knew the risks of siring a child at his age—Bellow’s late-life daughter, with Janis, had turned out to have a degree of autism—and on March 8, 2006, he’d consulted a geneticist at New York–Presbyterian Hospital, Dr. Wendy Chung.‡‡ She canvassed Roth’s family medical history and advised him that advanced paternal age could indeed result in autism, Marfan syndrome, and certain forms of dwarfism, but she couldn’t make a proper determination until she had Brigit’s information as well. Three months later, then, after Brigit’s return, Roth mentioned his visit with Dr. Chung and asked the young woman to make an appointment so they could complete the evaluation. “You are so responsible,” she said, after a fraught silence, then began to cry.
She never made the appointment. “I don’t feel in the mood for this tonight,” she said in Connecticut, during sex, and Roth obligingly withdrew and went to sleep. At breakfast the next morning she announced that she wanted to end the affair. “The hours that followed were horrendous,” Roth remembered. “As never before in my life with women (in my life with anyone), I begged and pleaded and I berated her for listening to her friends and her family, who knew nothing about what there was between us.” Finally she seemed to relent, but a few days later mentioned she’d be spending the entire summer at her family house on Cape Cod, where she was directing a production of Macbeth. Roth had naturally hoped they’d spend the summer in Connecticut, but finally gave her one of his Volvo station wagons and off she went.
Roth arranged to visit her for a few days in early August, but a week or so before, while swimming, he felt a wrench in his back and knew he was in for a long siege of pain. At the Hyannis Port airport he hobbled from his gate, grimacing, and caught a glimpse of Brigit waiting for him beyond the glass partition: he knew at once she wasn’t happy to see him. The visit was the expected bust. He’d booked a room at an inn near Brigit’s house, but the days were boiling hot and the pool was always packed with children; Brigit was busy with rehearsals all day, and Roth sat alone in his room, unable even to walk. One night she made dinner for them, but he was in so much pain he lay on the floor trying not to scream: “Not even the Vicodin helped. This was the last thing I wanted her to see.”
Back in New York, Roth’s pain management doctor suggested a denervation of two arthritic facet joints in Roth’s lower left vertebrae (a procedure using radio frequency to kill the nerves causing pain); he scheduled Roth’s operation for the first week of September. Meanwhile Brigit returned from Cape Cod and came to Roth’s refurbished New York apartment for dinner; “terrifically excited to see her,” he mentioned something he wanted to do with her the next night, and Brigit produced a piece of paper on which she’d carefully plotted her booked-up social week, culminating in East Hampton for the weekend. Finally she agreed to return in time to pick him up from the hospital. Within forty-eight hours of his denervation, as the local anesthetic wore off, Roth was in worse pain than ever. His doctor explained that “the nerve was dying back,” and a little more time would have to pass before things got better.
That week Brigit was sleeping in Roth’s spare room, and one night she came back from dinner with her sister and father and sat on the edge of Roth’s bed. “I just had the most wonderful time,” she said, and began to tell him something funny her father had said. “I’m not interested in what your father says,” he cut her off. The father had recently bought her a nice apartment in Brooklyn Heights—in exchange, Roth suspected, for ditching the elderly boyfriend—and now the father, as Roth put it, was “suddenly wonderful.” “What did my father ever do to you?” said Brigit. “You’re the one who says things about him.” “You’re the one who says things about him!” Roth rejoined, and Brigit fled weeping to her room. At an utter loss, Roth phoned Julia and told her the story of his summer. “Get rid of her,” she said (“Good old Julia; she’s so smart”), so the next day Roth told Brigit he saw no sense in going on this way, and that was that.
For the rest of his life, Roth would often imagine that a woman on the street was Brigit and quicken his steps to make sure. Only once did he see her again, roughly nine months after their breakup, when she passed him on West Seventy-ninth near his apartment. At the time he was on his way to meet his friend Claudia Roth Pierpont, who wrote in her diary that he looked “devastated” afterward: “She gave him a weak hello and he didn’t answer at all,” Pierpont noted.
Two years later Roth was cleaning out his studio and found Brigit’s college yearbook, which he’d borrowed as research for Exit Ghost, along with two nude portraits she’d taken of herself for a college photography course. He returned them to her Brooklyn address with a note asking whether she’d like to meet “for a sociable cup of coffee” at Nice Matin some afternoon. Months later she replied with a tersely civil note: She’d decided this was “not the right time” for them to meet, though maybe later she’d be in touch. He never saw or heard from her again.