Short Century (16 page)

It is not excitement you feel with Rothstein, not quite. Nor is it the protection, alternately hard and soft, of a father figure. Rothstein has nothing in common with your father beyond his veiny hands (you like to trace the veins on his hands, just as you did with your father when you were a little girl). Moles on their eyelids: another thing Rothstein and your father share. A general looseness to the skin, as though their skeletons were losing pull. But the two share nothing beyond the things shared by all men over the age of forty or so and a refusal to talk about their pasts—though Rothstein will at least acknowledge his past, unlike your father, who walked out of the room every time you asked him what he did before you were born. There is in Rothstein nothing of your father's volatility. The more time you spend with Rothstein, the more you poke at him, the more comments you make to affront his vanity, the absurdity of his hopes at Yale. You poke at him not out of cruelty or, as was the case when you first met him, to grab at some power over him, but out of love. You insult him not out of a hope that he will lose his delusions, but out of a lover's curiosity. You want to know everything about him, you want to know how he moves, how he catches himself when he feels himself about to trip in the shower, the sounds he makes when he chews and how those sounds differ depending on how hungry he is, and you want to know how he reacts to affronts to his vanity, and more crucially how he reacts to repeated affronts to his vanity from someone he seems to love, in most of the admittedly arbitrary measures you have for judging such things (the watery look in his eye, the eagerness to see you). And there is a difference between how Rothstein reacts to these affronts now and how he reacted to them when he first knew you. No longer does he respond with sarcasm, possibly glad for the affront because he enjoys refining and displaying his sarcasm more than he enjoys pitying himself. Now when you affront him he looks sad and responds defensively, pathetically, about how he just had a conversation with someone in the biology department and it really does look as if something might come through. You keep waiting for him to respond with rage, as your father would have, to throw you out of his house or perhaps to take off his belt and to try to hit you—you are curious whether you could outrun Rothstein, as you could always outrun your father. But rage is not something that Jersey seems capable of; he couldn't even find it in himself to feel rage at the Nazis. You are surprised at your surprise that you love him for this. That your father may have been a Nazi—he always talked about how much he hated America and the Jews, and your parents never explained their background to your satisfaction—is the most obvious but not the most salient distinction between him and Jersey. It is not until now that you understand just how much your father needed to feel enraged, with what devotion he searched for the next humiliation. When he sent you to the butcher shop for cut-rate meat, he did not need meat, in fact he probably could have sustained himself with nothing but his bile; he needed to be humiliated in front of the butcher, so that he could then hate the butcher, and throw a punch at the butcher, which would then cause him to break his hand, another cause for humiliation and another reason to hate the butcher. Like a child who lives only to redress a swiped ice cream cone or some sand kicked in his face. And like a piece of machinery from Freud's assembly line, you were prepared to find a man just like your father. Isn't that what you have seen in Arthur? Wasn't all of your talk of wit simply a cover for what really attracted you to him, his constant need to be enraged? A rage so overpowering that he has no idea it is there, that it has made him, to most outward appearances, meek. (Yes, she probably thought this. Let no one say that I can't follow empathy all the way into masochism.)

Unfortunately, Rothstein does not excite you either. He excites you in bed—he is a skilled lover and it is impossible not to admire how many different ways he knows how to deliver an orgasm. You are curious whether he loves you, you look for clues that he loves you, but you would not be devastated to discover that he did not in fact love you, or so at least you think. You are actually irritated that he loves you, because now you will never know how you would feel if he did not love you. There is affection in your curiosity but no urgency. Maybe the problem is with you: you lack the ability to feel. But that's not true. The thought that you lack the ability to feel makes you almost unbearably sad. You lack the desire to feel. Your old excuse, your Catholic education, with its search-and-destroy incursions into your sexual desire, won't save you; whatever it is that makes it impossible for you to love was inside of you before the nuns got to you, before even your parents got to you.

This is intolerable, and there is no reason to believe it is true. You're a child, and the belief that you'll never change or get better is a childish one; worse, it's an adolescent one, and whatever people's thoughts on childhood and adulthood, everyone seems to agree that nothing thought by an adolescent can be correct. You'll get better. Maybe the problem is that you don't understand what romantic excitement is, perhaps you are experiencing romantic excitement with Rothstein but you are so inexperienced that you don't recognize it. After all, your only models are Arthur and Neville. Stay with Rothstein and you'll learn what romantic excitement is.

Before the end of every evening spent with Arthur and Neville at his home, Jersey will pull you aside. He will ask to see you the next night, and you will agree, even though you are exhausted from making the bus trip so frequently and you wish you could be free and in your dorm room, even though you can hardly think for how tired you are and wonder if you would be someone else entirely if only you could get a little more sleep. You
do
care for him intensely, even if there is nothing romantic in it. Each time he makes love to you, you hope that he and his expert dick will finish quickly, because you like to watch him when he is asleep. There is nothing impressive any longer about his endless opinions, but there is something adorable in them, the way it is adorable when children express their opinions on whatever the adults are talking about. The fact is that there is something maternal in your feelings for him. It doesn't make any sense, of course; he is twice your age and there is a good deal of gray in his pubic hair. But he seems so sad all the time, so blustery in ways that you can't believe once fooled you into thinking he was invincible. He is like the sort of young boy who, after being hit, does not hit back but rather broods on the hit. Without being aware of it, you're brooding on whether you might like to spend your entire life as this man's mother.

f

Now let's say you're
Rothstein. The speech at your house neither galvanized nor shocked most of the assembled kids. They applauded and moved on to the next manifesto. Only manifestoes that tell them what they want to hear or tell them the precise opposite of what they want to hear will hold their attention for more than a minute or two. The kids applaud what you say about sex and ignore what you say about politics. The only one who seemed to get anything out of your speech was the girl who yelled afterward; at the very least she understood that you were presenting them with a stark choice, and even with her it is impossible to tell whether she actually considered what you said or whether she reacted against you like a Maoist robot, her anger response switched on by a word or two in your speech. Neville failed to notice that you mocked him for mangling your words, as did the rest of the crowd. You are ashamed because this was what you wanted to happen. You wanted the kids to misinterpret what you said, and to think you said they could have sex and change the world. This was what they thought you said, what functionally you did say; their indifference was not a result of your telling them difficult truths.

But after all, the kids are only kids. You concentrate on getting the job. Not
the
job,
a
job. There is no specific position available. You should never have given your friend's hints of a job any credit at all, but instead you gave them so much credit that you moved to New Haven. And by the time you moved he had clearly forgotten, he was clearly bored by you. Why did you move to New Haven, of all places? Because you are obsessed with prestige? But surely you are more sophisticated than that. Did you move to New Haven so that you can be here to witness the race riots, which, when they come in full force, will burn the country to the ground? Do you want to see the world destroyed? The race riots so far, even the worst of them, in Watts and Newark and Detroit, have still left buildings standing. There is much, much worse to come, and New Haven will be a perfect place to watch; it will be a perfect place to watch the blacks burn the WASPs.

No, that's not the reason. Really you are here for the prestige because you can't accept that you will never get a job again. You can't accept that no one takes you seriously anymore. You are widely suspected to be just another imitator of Timothy Leary, just another moderately talented academic straining for prophethood. Maybe you should never have published the book, but the proceeds allow you to live unemployed. Unemployed and bitter. You know that you are bitter. The reasons that you haven't gotten a job have nothing to do with anti-Semitism. You don't even believe what you say to the black-haired Maoist robot and her comical WASP boyfriend; you say what you say simply because you are bitter and agitated, although there is something about the boy's agitation that relaxes you, as it is so much worse than your own. His eyes keep darting to check his girlfriend's reaction and your reaction to everything that is said, as though everyone else needs constant surveillance because everyone else's darkest emotions are always as close to the surface as his are. He is as angry as you were when you were his age, but you can forgive yourself for thinking that you had much more to be angry about. You are rather astonished at the WASP capacity for resentment, which seems close to inexhaustible. The earliest of them probably resented Indians for allowing themselves to be cheated and killed. But putting aside the questions of the merit and justice of one's hatreds, the boy still reminds you of yourself at a young age, reminds you of the Jersey Rothstein who not only wanted but needed to kill Nazis, and for whom being denied the ability to kill Nazis was a denial on par with the denial of all human contact; it felt like being locked in a room with food and water and nothing else for a lifetime, or at least for ten years. You are happy to see the boy again because he reminds you so much of yourself, though you do not tell him this, because he would not understand what you mean and in any case being compared to a Jew whose family perished in the Holocaust would give him the smugness of oppression without the cost, far outweighing the benefit, of actually having been oppressed. At the moment he is like you were after the Americans entered the war, and probably wants not to fight as desperately as you wanted to fight. Soon enough he will come to the point that you came to, that morning when you sat at your aunt's kitchen table as the sun was rising, that morning after you had spent yet another night not sleeping and instead imagining your mother and your sisters in the gas chamber (Were they together? Did they embrace as they died? Did they hate each other and fight over food?) that morning when you said to yourself:
Enough. No more. No more of the dead
. You decided that your life would not be a funeral procession for your family, a funeral procession that would end only with your own funeral. Let others appease the dead, as though the entire Earth above ground were Munich. Over you, death shall have dominion, but the dead shall not.

And why do you want Arthur to come to this conclusion? Simply because adopting a Goy would be so offensive to your dead ancestors? To satisfy your paternal desires, your desire to pass on what you are and know?

For whatever reason, you sit with Arthur and you try to guide him. Essentially you restate points you made in the book. You tell him that love is the opposite of freedom, that it is love that makes people waste their lives on jobs they cannot stand to provide for their family. You add something you left out of the book, that communism is even worse than capitalism because it turns everyone into a giant family. Arthur nods thoughtfully as you talk, but sometimes you get the sense that he wants something entirely different from you, that he wants guidance on how to lash out rather than on what to do instead of lashing out. It is difficult to tell, though, because most of the time Arthur is there Miranda and Neville are there as well. Why do you listen to Neville, why do you allow him to speak? Really, you should simply throw him out. And yet you have to admit you enjoy mocking him. You wish you did not but you do; perhaps it is a way of taking revenge on the entire rotting carcass of twentieth-century vatic banality.

And then there is Miranda. At first you are unnerved by how quiet she is. True believers tend to be much more dangerous when they are quiet than when they are loud. When they are loud, they are just talking; when they are quiet, they tend to be plotting something. You wonder if you have gotten it wrong, and Miranda is the one who wants to do something terrible. When she asks to see you privately, you almost say no for fear of what she will do (knife you? set your house on fire?), and you are all but certain that her intimations of a tryst are just a ploy, but you realize that your fear is irrational and so you agree, and to ensure that she does not know you are unnerved, you force a smile. You are nervous for hours before she arrives, and you try to calm yourself. When she does arrive, you make a great show of calm. When she kisses you, you are shocked, though the kiss lasts no more than three or four seconds before you think that of course she is attracted to you, of course she wants to kiss you.

You never find her attractive, exactly, and she is not particularly creative or experienced sexually, but whatever the reason, she quickly becomes all you think about. After this, Norture and Arthur are no more than an irritation, a distraction from Miranda. They sit in your kitchen, and you cook for them, because cooking for them is better than paying attention to them, and as you scrape eggs onto their plates with your spatula they ask you for your opinions on topics you don't care about. You could tell them not to come anymore, but you don't. Why? Their adulation, still? Or is it mere politeness? Or politeness and the fact that you prefer Miranda to have a boyfriend? You do not want her to fall in love with you. Long after you have fallen in love with her, you do not want her to fall in love with you. Why do you fall in love with her? Why do you fall in love with a twenty-one-year-old who is under the impression that she is a communist? How does the switch in your mind get flipped that turns you into the robot adorer of a Maoist robot? On that you have no idea. One day you can live without her, the next you cannot. A love as unwelcome and inarguable as death.