Short Century (17 page)

Do you love her for a reason out of dime-store psychoanalysis—that submitting to this girl of German background is some sick way of submitting to the Nazis?

What terrifies you most of all is that there is no reason whatsoever for you to love Miranda, that nothing motivates love, and love is simply capricious. You cannot believe the other reason that often occurs to you. Nonetheless, it is there, and every time you are with her you think about the way that Miranda resembles your older sister Ulrike. Ulrike used to put her hands in your hair and stroke your hair for hours, and very often she would comb your hair with a kitchen fork, changing your hair from one style to another. When Miranda puts her hands in your hair, they feel like your sister's hands. You have not asked her to comb your hair with a fork, but you would be lying to yourself if you pretended it had not occurred to you to do so.

f

I am not making
up that last detail out of whole cloth—Jersey once made an offhand comment to me that Miranda resembled Ulrike, and the story about Ulrike combing his hair with a fork is true, or if not then he was the one who made it up. I mentioned it offhand to Sydney once and she laughed and said it reminded her of
The Little Mermaid
, but once again, this was her father's story.

I have to take a minute here to compliment myself. There were many details in what I just wrote that were extremely painful for me to write—I basically attacked myself, didn't I? But it yielded what I would wager is a fairly accurate portrait of Jersey and Miranda. I am a much better and more empathetic writer than my enemies maintain, and am better even than Sydney gives me credit for.

Of course I was oblivious while all of this was going on (assuming it was going on—I could, of course, be completely wrong); I was paying too much attention to the conversations. So I might say: “What do you make of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia?” And Rothstein would reply: “It is in the nature of governments to exert as much power as they can just as it is in the nature of people to exert as much power as they can,” a fairly banal answer that may have been the result of his preoccupation with the way Miranda was nibbling at her toast.

“Tell me, Jersey,” I asked late one night. We had all been talking for hours, I had drunk a great deal of wine, and the conversation was winding down, but I wasn't quite ready to go home yet. “Why do you think it is that we think incest is wrong?”

This got his attention. He leaned back in his chair and gripped the armrests, the way certain kinds of men do when preparing for certain kinds of battle.

“Are you asking because you want to have sex with your little sister?” Miranda asked, quickly and sharply enough that I wondered if she truly suspected that the thought had occurred to me.

“That's not called for, Miranda,” Jersey said. “Arthur, you're asking because we're questioning every other kind of sexual restriction, so why not this one as well?”

“I know it sounds like a right-wing parody of sexual freedom, but yes. Why don't we question it?”

“It seems to me that it should be questioned,” Jersey said. “Darwin married his first cousin. And the old argument that it causes a somewhat higher rate of birth defects doesn't quite do the trick, does it? It doesn't explain the
revulsion
we feel. Do you think it should no longer be taboo?”

“It could be an incredible
acte gratuit
,” Neville said. “I like where you're going with this, Arthur. It would hit the bourgeoisie right where they live.”

“Exactly where they live,” Jersey said, “but does that mean they would be against it? It might be just what they are looking for. Never to have to leave the house.”

I wanted to talk about something else, but I wanted to make my position clear so that it wouldn't seem strange that I had brought it up. “But don't you think that we're not truly free if there's one single breathing person we're forbidden to have sex with?”

“No,” Jersey said, chuckling a little. “I don't think that at all.”

“I just think it would be completely disgusting,” Miranda said.

“I'm with Arthur on this one,” Neville said. “We have to be allowed to have sex with every other adult on earth. We don't have to actually do it, because like Miranda says it would be disgusting, but we have to be allowed to do it.”

“So, Jersey,” I asked, as a rather inelegant way of getting off this subject, “how's
your
love life?”

Neville made some hemming and hawing noises, apparently afraid that this would ruin our evenings with Rothstein altogether. I can't say how Miranda reacted at first, because I was focused on Rothstein. He gave me a flat grin that became more menacing the more he looked at me, and if I were smarter I might have realized right there that he was sleeping with Miranda. I wasn't smarter, so I interpreted his grin as having no other meaning than that I had hit a nerve.

“My love life is arid,” Rothstein said. “There is nothing good to be said about it.”

“Jersey has no time for the fairer sex,” Miranda said. “He's too busy unraveling the mysteries of evolution.” She tried to affect an ironic, mock-formal tone when she said this, but something was off.

“How about your father?” Rothstein asked me. “Do you think that your father has affairs with his secretaries while he's making his bombs?”

“What do you mean?” Miranda asked. “Arthur's father is a lawyer.”

“He works for a defense contractor,” I said. “As a lawyer.” I must have let this slip to Rothstein at some point.

“I didn't mean to give away a secret, Arthur,” Jersey said.

“A defense contractor?” Miranda said. Then she started laughing. “Well, at least you don't tell the truth
all
the time!”

“What company does he work for?” Neville asked. “We should bomb his office!”

“No!” Norture may consider me immoral now, but I have never—not even once—suggested any kind of terrorist act.

“Now now, Norture,” Jersey said. “We don't have time for bombing. I have cheese omelets on the stove.”

I didn't apologize to Miranda because I didn't think this was any worse than, say, causing me to crash someone else's car because she didn't want me to meet her mother. When we were back at my room, I asked her: “Do you think Rothstein's having sex with a Briarcliff girl?”

“A Briarcliff girl? What makes you think that?”

“I'm just wondering.”

“Have you heard something? Did he say something to you about a Briarcliff girl? Did Neville say something to you about a Briarcliff girl?”

“I was just thinking. Rothstein spends an awful lot of time with us,” I said. “I don't know how he has time to see anyone else. There must be a Briarcliff girl he's having sex with, don't you think?”

“Oh,” she said. “Yes, I guess that would make sense. He writes about sex so much that there must be a girl he's having sex with.” She looked relieved, or she looked indifferent, or indifferently curious, as people are about gossip. No, she looked relieved; I would have had to have been an idiot not to see that they had been having sex all this time behind my back. Then I told myself that no, my jealousy was monstrous, I was monstrous for failing to trust her. For her to be sleeping with Rothstein would have required a preposterously elaborate deception. And besides, we weren't married; if she were sleeping with Rothstein she would simply tell me and I would have no right to be angry.

“But maybe he's not sleeping with anyone,” Miranda said. Her hands were out of her pockets now and across her stomach, and she looked truly thoughtful. “For all you or I know, he may not be interested in sex at all. When you think about it, when someone talks a lot about God, you don't automatically think he's truly holy. Often it's the opposite. Maybe it's the same with Rothstein. Maybe it's the same even if there is a girl he's sleeping with. Maybe he really loves her but he finds the sex boring. Maybe he's a total hypocrite and he thinks of nothing but his dead parents when he's fucking her. Or maybe he loves her and he loves having sex with her, but then he'd still be a hypocrite because of what he says about monogamy. Or maybe he's sleeping with tons of girls and loves it every single time. But I hope that's not the case, Arthur, because I've been having sex with him.”

Even though I had suspected it, or because I had suspected it, it seemed impossible that she had said what she just said.

“I'm so sorry. I'm really so sorry. Oh God, I wish I hadn't told you. I'm such a horrible person. Can you forget I said anything?”

“What?”

“Of course you can't. Of course you can't. Look, I'm not a horrible person. Why would I even think that? Why do you make me think in this puritanical way? We're not married. I never swore that I would be faithful to you. I don't think I ever said it out loud. Would you stop looking like a puppy that just got kicked?”

When she was gone, I didn't feel upset that she had broken up with me; I only felt upset that I had cried. The truth was I hadn't been happy for months, I had been so concerned with losing her—not to mention with her new boyfriend's opinion of me—and now maybe I would be able to be happy again. I took a walk that night and was impressed with how refreshed I felt. It was only over the next several days that rage and grief began to colonize me.

f

For weeks after that
I either lay in bed or skulked through campus. I stubbed out my cigarettes in the stone buildings, as though this might burn them down. Occasionally I would spot someone I recognized and I would turn away as I passed. I felt like a conspirator with nothing to plot and no one to plot with.

Miranda hadn't cared about me, I told myself, and she hadn't cared about politics. If she cared about politics, she wouldn't be dating that prophet of disengagement. Her paintings were shit. She had just used me for my money. She was greedy. She just wanted to string me along until we got married, and then she would have divorced me and taken as much of my money as she could. Now she was after the money Rothstein had made off of
The Dominion of Pleasure
. She couldn't feel love. No, she refused to feel love. She claimed to care about the poor, but really, she was as heartless as Johnson or Nixon or McNamara. I pitied her, really.

No, pity was obviously not what I felt.

How simple: she had hurt me, she was evil. What was the truth of it?

She loved me, I would say to myself, but we were young, and love fades when you're young. Mature people accepted that. That was what maturity was: accepting things. The more things you accepted, the more mature you were. Bad things happen to good people, life is full of disappointments, war is hell, soldiers burn babies. Occasionally you love people. They leave you: that's how life is. They die: that's how life is. You die: that's how life is.

Who was the first man who looked at his own surrender and called it maturity? I wanted to tie that guy to a tree, punch him in the gut, and bash his face with a rock. Then he would look back up at me with his blue-black bloody nose and smile wisely with his remaining, splintered teeth. He would say: “This is how life is.”

I knew I wouldn't feel this way forever. There would be the usual anodyne attractions. The world isn't that bad, I would say later. But at this moment I was right and my palliated future self was wrong.

Throughout those weeks I would have done anything to be with her. I would have done anything to touch her. To smell her.

Rothstein was wrong. The world could be changed, must be changed. Fucking wouldn't stop bombs. There was evil in the world, and it was evil to accept it.

Miranda lay next to Rothstein, her sweaty legs entwined with his sweaty legs. Miranda's hand over Rothstein's hairy stomach. Was it hairy? It was probably hairy.

As the weeks passed, I went to class more. The budding flowers irritated me, with their intimations of sex, but it was nice to see budding flowers. It was nice to smell them. Misery came in discrete sessions, like bombing raids, and as long as I turned out the lights and waited in the cellar all would be well.

Thinking this way, waiting in the cellar, was surprisingly useful. Wait in the cellar for your pain to pass. Maybe I could throw in some Asian-sounding words and start a religion. “There was no
meaning
in my life until I became an Arthurist,” people would say. Or maybe they would say they found Arthurism. People seemed to like to find things: God, themselves, their true calling. Life, when lived richly, was an Easter egg hunt.

After the misery, emptiness. There were only weeks until graduation and I felt no ambition. I had never had ambition, but I remembered having ambition to have ambition. I wanted to help people but feared I was too lazy. Maybe laziness was my cardinal characteristic. That was one thing about being rich: if I wanted to do nothing, I could. I tried to imagine it, decades of nothing. Playing tennis, lying on the beach. I tried to imagine what thoughts I would have. I would think about girls. There would be girls on the beach.

Inexhaustible indolence. There was something terrifying about the idea.

People felt sorry for the poor, for blacks. If you were poor or if you were black and you failed, it wasn't your fault. You failed because you were poor or black and because society was unfair. Nobody would feel sorry for a rich kid; a failed rich kid was either embarrassing or funny, and most likely both.

f

One day Rothstein called
me and, without any reference to Miranda, invited me to dinner that night. For fear of looking petulant, I accepted.

After dreading it for the entire day, I made my way to his house that night. When I rang the doorbell, no one answered for several minutes. Other guys waited on stoops for their girlfriends, not for old men who were fucking their girlfriends. After a time, Neville opened the door.