Short Century (14 page)

And then it is there: the idea to wear a burqa. Nothing that she has been thinking has logically led to it. Like all thoughts, it was not there and now it is there. At the first instant the idea must just seem funny or it must seem like it would be funny to anyone else. It would even be funny to her if things were slightly different. A burqa. She takes another puff of her cigarette, tries to imagine black flakes settling into a burqa on her lungs. If she wears a burqa, she will still have a body. She will still have all of her desires and opinions underneath all that black...what material do they use? Cotton? And how do they make the face masks, those things that look like wire netting? How is it possible to breathe? It must be so difficult to breathe and to find your way that there is no room for opinions or desires. If she wears a burqa, no man will be wrapping her up. No one will tell her how to wear it, or remind her that she must. If anything, it will be the opposite.

But there is more to this than a matter of wearing what she's not supposed to wear. She wants this element to disappear. She knows what it feels like to do something just to be shocking. It feels constricting, like she's entangling herself further in rules. This feels different. Suddenly the burqa is such a terrific idea that she wants everyone to wear one, she wants all people to wrap themselves up as though they are their own gifts.

No, she will never be able to wear a burqa; even right now she loves the feel of the cold air on her face too much. And it must be impossible to smoke through those things. Maybe she will make the sacrifice and be the only person not to wear the burqa. All men should wear the burqa even if women do not, not to settle some score, but because after all men deserve some kindness. For the expressions on your face to be hidden, who wouldn't want that? No one wants to divulge what the face divulges. Even people who can't be nudged away from annotating their inner lives would like to do away with their faces, which so often show how wrong their annotations are. Our faces cannot help giving us away, like tattletale little sisters. And for men it would have to be a particular blessing, to be able to lust after women as theatrically as they pleased, without their stares bothering the women they looked at. Come to think of it, men would not like this at all. But she would. What a burqa would offer is something she never expected. Privacy? An insufficient, merely political word. The word doesn't exist yet. She'll have to invent it.

But of course all of this is wrong. Daisy is selfish and wants the most selfish thing it is possible to want: to be looked at without being seen. She wants to be a drone, and maybe as lethal as a drone. She has more in common with any famous-for-being-famous starlet who “accidentally” leaks a sex tape than she does with women who are actually forced to wear burqas. No one would voluntarily put on a burqa except for fame. The only other non-Muslim American I have ever heard of wearing a burqa is clearly insane. This is an American woman who lives in
REDACTED
and is known as “The DVD Lady.” During a brief period of relative liberalism that the country underwent in the mid-2000s, a few American journalists—pointedly not including me—were allowed to visit the country, and the DVD Lady stood outside the hotel where they were all forced to stay and tried to sell them pirated DVDs in obviously American English (I say this based on secondhand reports, since she refused to speak whenever any of the reporters were recording). How and why she was in the country was a subject of much speculation, though most likely she's a drug addict or a schizophrenic or both. In any event she wore a burqa and claimed not to be a Muslim. The only time to anyone's knowledge that she lifted her face-net was the time when, outside of any camera's shot, she spat at Brian Williams. This woman is clearly crazy and I see no reason to judge her. She does not have control over her actions, and over the offenses she commits against those forced to wear burqas. Daisy does.

f

When I returned to
campus in January of 1969 for my final semester at Yale, Miranda was waiting for me in the lobby. She was wearing the blue sweater I loved and I wanted to feel her breasts immediately. She jumped up when she saw me; she was holding a flyer. I put my arms around her and kissed her. She pressed her fingers into my back. We stumbled into a ficus plant, then stumbled some more until I pushed her against the mailboxes that lined the wall. I felt her breasts through her sweater and ran my fingers up her abdomen, causing that giggle-sigh of hers as I kissed her neck.

“Baby,” she said. “Baby. Somebody might walk in.”

“Let them look. Let everyone look.” I knew I had heard this line in a movie, maybe lots of movies, but the guys in the movies didn't mean it like I did.

“Baby,” she said. She put her palm on my chest and pushed me away. “Rothstein's speaking at his new house in half an hour. We have to go hear him.”

“I want to make love to you,” I said.

She put her hand on the back of my head. “Later.”

“
Noow
,” I said in a playful mock-whine, as though I were kidding and didn't want to have sex all that badly.

“Soon.” She took me by the hand and led me out the door.

Rothstein's house was well off campus, deep into New Haven. In the foyer was a full-sized African warrior statue, the spear of which pointed the way to the living room. Thirty people or so crammed into the room, bunching up the mohair rug, and Miranda and I had to push our way inside. A handful of girls I recognized from Neville's parties smiled at us, and I smiled and waved and Miranda chatted with them a bit. I felt sure that I could have any of these girls, or all of them, or many others, but I only wanted Miranda and I felt wonderful. I positioned myself behind her, kissed her neck, and put my hands on her hips. She pulled my arms around her stomach.

Norture cleared his throat and people cleared an area for him in the center of the room.

“As the not-leader of Love Circle,” Norture continued, “I am pleased to welcome you to this very special meeting. We're very lucky that Professor Rothstein has invited us here today. He will be speaking to us shortly.”

Norture spoke more, using the words “watershed” and “generation” several times. We waited for Rothstein for ten or fifteen minutes longer, and the crowd broke off into small conversations. Miranda and I didn't speak much; I rocked her and kissed her neck and she stroked my arm. In the months afterward I would spend a great deal of time imagining what Jersey was thinking during that fifteen-minute period, when he was upstairs and there was so much noise downstairs, so much noise from so many people who wanted only to be silent so that he could speak.

“Your generation sickens me,” he called out from the staircase. He continued speaking as he made his way to the center of the room, wearing, somewhat ridiculously, a white robe and sandals. “But not for the reasons you sicken others. Others are sickened because they think you have divorced yourselves from your parents. I am sickened because, for all of your petulant protestations of rebellion, you remained curled in their marriage bed, fighting for your share of the blanket.

“There is one thing that matters. The pursuit of your own sexual pleasure. The ability to fuck whomever you want to fuck, precisely at the moment that you want to fuck them. Look at your slogan. ‘Make love, not war.' You capitulate before you've even thrown down the gauntlet. Make love, not war? You should say that you will make love, and pay no attention to whether they make war. By speaking as though making love is some sort of compensation for not making war, you reduce sex to politics by other means. Political power? What is political power? Senators and presidents decide which states get the most highway money, and maybe every once in a while they decide to blow up some yellow people.” There was clapping and hollering from some people in the audience, the ones who probably weren't paying attention and recognized this as an applause line, but most of the room remained silent.

“But you do not want power, you say,” Rothstein continued. “You want justice. Of all the breathtakingly stupid things to want. If justice is for you an erotic prop, as fur was for Masoch, then you are welcome to it. But do not waste your life chasing justice. What looks like justice today will look like repression tomorrow. What you may call your social conscience, what the superstitious call their soul, is a siren that will lead you to crash upon rock after rock. Your body is your only true compass. Giving yourself over to your body is the only way to take revenge against… the only way to take revenge against those who destroy bodies.”

The room was quiet when Rothstein finished. Some people were drawn into themselves and thinking, others were looking around, surveying each other's reactions (the fact that I remember this means I must have been among the latter). Many people examined their beer bottles and wineglasses, as though this were where they would find the verdict on Rothstein. Much of what Rothstein said, particularly about sex, was inspiring, but it seemed more than likely that he had just repudiated everything the youth movement stood for.

“Fucking fascist,” I whispered to Miranda, my arms still around her. I knew “fascist” was not the right word, but it sounded better than “asshole.” She wriggled out of my arms. I didn't notice until she did so how upset she looked.

“Fucking fascist,” Miranda said, much louder than I had, and causing everyone to look at her.

She puffed herself up and stood, somewhat ridiculously, on her toes. “Fucking fascist,” she said again, screaming this time. She screamed it a third time and a fourth. People stared at her and there was silence. Rothstein stared dead at her with an unreadable expression.

“You're a fucking fascist,” Miranda said.

Rothstein grinned. “But haven't you heard the prevailing opinion? You change the world by having sex. Perhaps with your tall, blond, blue-eyed friend.”

“All you care about is your own pleasure. What's the difference between that and a fascist?”

“Come on, Miranda,” Neville said. “Don't use the term ‘fascist' so lightly.”

“You're not using it lightly,” Rothstein said to Miranda. “At first you were just idly calling me a fucking fascist, but now it sounds as though you're calling me a fascist of fucking. Fatally juvenile, but it has some juvenile charm. Overall I would say you're promising, if not quite impressive.”

I was trying to think of what I could say on her behalf, but Miranda was already storming out. She swatted people out of her way as though she were clearing brush. I followed her; we didn't speak until we were alone on the sidewalk.

“Let's go get some lunch,” I said, putting my hand on her hip.

“Go away.” She folded her arms over her breasts. Except for her breasts she seemed very much like a child.

“Miranda, he's a fascist pig, don't let him get to you.”

“He's such an asshole. He's such an asshole.”

“He is. He is an asshole.”

“I made a fool of myself.”

“The man is a liar,” I said, though I knew that “liar” was even less accurate than “fascist.” Maybe “asshole” was the right word.

f

The next morning, when
Miranda told me she intended to visit Rothstein, I tried to talk her out of it, saying that confronting Rothstein would give him too much power, but I could not convince her. So I insisted on going with her.

When we arrived at Rothstein's house he was once again wearing his white robe and sandals. He looked past us, clearly agitated about something. He started speaking without any greeting or preamble, ushering us in and sitting us both down on his sofa, and both Miranda and I were too bewildered to do anything other than follow him.

“I could never get a job at Yale,” he said by way of introduction. “It hurts me that I'm a Jew, and it further hurts me that I'm considered an anti-Semite—not because the powers that be do not sympathize with anti-Semitism but because they do. Of course the WASPs all need to put on a good show of cosmopolitanism, and so they hire Jews when they must. But if they're going to hire a Jew, they're certainly not going to hire one who will fail to make the others happy. They're not going to hire a Jew who is something other than a curator for a museum of his ancestors.”

A man who was angry because he had been denied tenure, and who invented a conspiracy theory to justify the failure: nothing so unusual about that. Though he would never directly admit to anything so foolish, I was able to glean from later conversations that a friend of his at Yale claimed to be fairly certain he could get him a job with the University, so he moved to New Haven.

“There's less anti-Semitism now than there used to be,” I said. “Just a couple of years ago the school reformed its admissions policy. They pay more attention to academic standards now, so it's harder to get in just because you're a blueblood.”

Rothstein eyed me up and down, reminding me very much of the way Miranda had eyed me the first time we met. “Where did you go to prep school?”

“Well, I…”

“I'm sorry, did you tell me your name?”

“I'm Arthur Hunt. Huntington.”

“You seem unsure.”

“You're a fake, Professor Rothstein,” Miranda said. “Or does it make sense for me to call you Professor, since you're not one?”

To my surprise, he looked honestly hurt by this, and he foolishly proceeded to defend himself by describing his work, which had to do with various issues in molecular biology too esoteric for me to understand. As he spoke I felt more at ease. Perhaps he had a good idea or two, but the man was deluded, a blowhard, ground into resentment by career disappointment. Not a sexual threat.

“All of that is nice,” she said. “But you're still a fake. You say you don't care about your family but everything you say makes it clear that that's a lie. ”

He looked at her for a moment before responding.