Short Century (18 page)

“Isn't it exciting?” Neville said as soon as he saw me. “Our Miranda is dating Jersey Rothstein!”

“Exciting,” I said.

When Jersey came down, he was wearing his silk white robe and sandals. When I would think of this outfit later, it would strike me as ridiculous, but at the time it seemed magisterial, a devastating rebuke to my own poisoned conformity.

“Arthur! I have to admit I didn't expect you to come tonight. Whenever I see you, you turn haughtily away, as though I were nothing but a poor peon. Or a poor, wandering Jew. I'm so delighted that you could join us tonight. I'm very glad you've given up all that pettiness.”

“What pettiness?”

“You've acted as though I stole something from you.”

“I haven't given anything up. I hate you and I always will.”

Neville broke out into a snorting laughter at this.

“Well,” Rothstein said. “It's nice to know that I can count on something.”

“You mean other than not getting an appointment at Yale?” I said.

“We'll see about that,” Jersey said, smiling. “Dinner is almost ready.”

Miranda was sitting at the dining room table and wearing a toga. She murmured a weak hello that made me understand how craven I looked by having shown up, and I wanted to leave, but Jersey entered the room carrying a large bowl.

“Jersey has cooked us one of his amazing curry dishes,” Miranda said, glancing at me for a second, but then turning her eyes, embarrassed, to Norture.

She stood up to help but tripped on her toga. I wanted to laugh at her but Rothstein took her in his arms and the act looked like one of romantic grace. I thought of Emily, the way she was always tripping on things, and I felt a sharp longing to be with her. Emily did not make conversation into a sweaty, bloody contest.

“Stay on your feet, my dear.”

Miranda collected herself and smiled. “Jersey's an excellent chef,” she said.

Jersey touched her elbow, her hair.

“One day, I'll get her to cook for me. I'll make her wifely yet.”

“Marriage is for the herd, Professor Rothstein,” Miranda said.

“You can be wifely without being a wife.”

Miranda giggled and hit Jersey playfully, which made me want to die.

Jersey put some curry on my plate. “This is filled with herbs I acquired while I was in India. They enhance sexual appetite and performance. They should help you with your repression, Arthur.”

“Excuse me?”

“We don't know enough about the brain to know how these chemicals work, but from my purely anecdotal perspective, the effects are astonishing.”

I dug my fork into my palm. “I'm not repressed.”

“I can give you a few bottles to take home if you like.”

I put my fork down and looked at Jersey, with his skeleton's smile. The man was a catastrophe of self-satisfaction. “I don't think you heard me. I'm not repressed.”

“It's nothing to be embarrassed about,” Miranda said, smiling at me sweetly. “You're very young.”

“I'm very young? We had sex all the time.”

“Yes,” Jersey said. “I had to undo all those automatic maneuvers and responses.”

I struck my plate with my fork. “That's bullshit. That's bullshit. You only make such a big deal out of all this stuff because you're too much of a coward to try to change the world.”

“Stop hiding with the world,” Jersey said. “It's not a fig leaf.”

Neville put his hand on my elbow. “Calm down, buddy. You're not going to learn anything by getting angry and shutting yourself down.”

I jerked my arm away. Norture's eyes resembled those of a particularly stupid animal, and I clenched my fist and punched his nose. I felt a sharp pain in my fingers and Norture screamed and covered his face.

Jersey stood up, gently chuckling. “Ah, the vigor of youth. Neville, I'll get you some ice and take you to the hospital. Arthur, I think you should storm out of the house in righteous fury.”

Norture's hands covered most of his face. Blood was seeping through his fingers.

“I am not going to hit back because I am a pacifist.”

My hand was numb now. I tried to think of a response to Jersey, but I couldn't. I looked at Miranda. She didn't look angry or disgusted, though she was probably both, or at least would soon be both. There was a hint of feeling in her eyes, but there was no way to know what the feeling was. I was careful to keep my back straight as I walked out of the house.

I had to admit it felt good to hit Norture, even if he had not been my desired target. I wanted more of this feeling. I wanted to destroy something, but I didn't know what.

12:35
a.m.
May 12, 2012

On the television tucked
into an armoire in my hotel room, Norture is nowhere in sight. What is in sight is a girl who has tripped on some stairs, and who is gasping, terrified, into the camera. A knife comes into the frame and I look away. Of all works of art, it is poorly written horror films, in which repellant people say inane things and make stupid decisions as they fail to evade death, that are most true to life.

When my grandfather hanged himself, all he left behind was a giant, bloated house on the beach that he had built with money he didn't have. Lining the house were eleven empty pedestals. Well, the pedestals weren't empty when he died. At an auction two months before he killed himself, he bought eleven French sculptures for far more than they were worth, which was already quite a great deal. My father sold the sculptures at a heavy loss, but kept the pedestals. Why? “That's for you and your sister. A monetary memento mori.” Really he should have gotten rid of the house, but instead he paid the massive mortgage every month, which until he was very well established was a major burden. Why? He would say because the house was beautiful, but it wasn't particularly. He probably could have built a better house for less money. But he kept it. He also kept, at the far end of the driveway, a sculpture of Cupid pointing an arrow into his own mouth. “Your grandfather thought this sculpture was profound. In a way it is—everything that costs a lot of money is profound. The hustle is beautiful even if the art isn't. Especially if the art isn't.”

My father kept my grandfather's suicide note in a locked drawer in our apartment in New York (I discovered where he kept the key when I was twelve or so). It read, in part: “I despise sleeping at the Chappine because you never know if a Jew or a Negro has slept here the previous night.”

After graduating, I spent much of May and June sitting on the beach, alone when I could manage it (my mother had taken my sister and me to the beach house while my father spent the summer in Washington on business). Emily was home with nothing to do with her summer before entering Wellesley, so she took it upon herself to fix me as though I were a car that had stopped by the side of the road. Whenever she found me outside, she would join me with a bottle of wine and two glasses.

Often she would interrupt a reverie in which Miranda would be lying naked on the beachhead, sitting up, looking at me over her shoulder, tired but excited at something that had just occurred to her. That wonderful morning-sex look. She smiled sweetly, with concern for every fluctuation of my mood. Then out of the ocean, like some free-love doctrinaire sea monster, came Rothstein. Rothstein, whose cock walked on water. He touched Miranda with those hands, varicose veins like rivers of blue-green sewage. She kissed and embraced him and they rolled around.

Rothstein and Miranda were probably somewhere making love creatively, originally. They were enacting the erotic equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting. They were certainly not ripping off
From Here to Eternity
.

And then Emily would be there, pouring me a glass of wine. She would rub my neck and ask me how I was doing, or she would talk about people both of us knew and neither of us cared about in a way that made it clear that the only thing she was thinking about was how I was doing. It made me feel awful to be sprawled in my own wretchedness in front of her, and soon I came to resent her for seeing me as I was.

Once, she sat down next to me and said:

“I spent most of last night talking to James Hickham.”

This took me completely by surprise.

“What did you talk about?”

“I don't know, music or something. Would it make you feel better if I said that I think Rothstein is wrong about everything?”

“But you don't think that.”

“I certainly don't think he's
right
about everything.”

“Did James Hickham tell you about his plans to make you a housewife?”

“He did tell me that all women should be housewives. He tells me that every time I see him.”

“That's awful. I told you you shouldn't have slept with him.”

“It's not like he's actually going to rape anyone. He's just a dumb guy who thinks he's a great philosopher of love.”

“You're not going to go out with him again, are you? He wants to make you a slave. Remember when you were a kid and you used to do that dance on that strange ornate rug we used to have where you would swing your arms around and make weird faces while you chanted ‘Emily can do whatever Emily wants because Emily is free'?”

She put her hands in her hair and raised her toes at the memory. “Mom would say that I
was
free but that was only because I was a child, and that the older I got the less free I would be. I thought that was a stupid thing to say and I told her so. I remember thinking even when I was doing that dance that the chant wasn't true. Do you remember, I think it was on the same rug you're talking about, when you would pretend to teach me the ballets that we watched on TV?”

“What does that have to do with freedom?”

“Nothing, it's just a nice memory.” She poured me a cup of wine. “Sometimes I would climb up on the coffee table and then you would twirl me around a bit.”

“So are you going to go out with Hickham?”

“I told him I have a boyfriend. I figured you would pitch fire and brimstone at me if I said yes.”

“You do have a boyfriend.”

“Bradley and I aren't engaged.”

“So if it weren't for me, you would have gone out with him, despite the fact that you have a boyf…”

“Our Puritan blood is making your face red. Don't worry. Nobody's going to make me wear a scarlet ‘A.'”

“Trust me, you'd be better off alone than with Hickham.”

“Sometimes when we would do those ballet moves,” she said, “I would look through the window and see Paul sitting on the beach by himself. I remember thinking that it was so silly to sit for hours and look at the ocean. The ocean always looks the same.”

“So now I'm like Paul again?”

“No.” Tears came into her eyes. “I'm not saying that at all. When you sit out here, there's something about you that's completely different from Paul. You give me the sense that you're thinking about something much more important than Miranda. I honestly think you're a genius, Arthur. I just wish there were a way I could make you happy.”

There was no indication that she was mocking me. Or that she knew that I thought only about Miranda and was saying this as some sort of nudge for me to think about other things. She truly thought there was something more to me than there was, which made me hate her for a second. It even made me wonder about her intelligence.

“So you're not going out with Hickham?” I said.

“You're exasperating.”

“Why did you mention him? You knew it would upset me.”

“I just wanted to tell you something you would think was interesting.” She wiped the sand off her jeans and left.

Anything that I said she probably would have taken as a sign of some dusting of depression that lay atop whatever she thought there was in me. And of course, nobody wants to be thought less of.

f

My mother: a carnival
of euphemism.

“Maybe you should see someone, or maybe go somewhere.”

“Where, exactly, Mother?”

“Somewhere where they can help you.”

“Where who can help me?”

“People who are trained in this sort of thing.”

“What sort of thing?”

“You can't keep this up forever.”

“Keep what up?”

f

One morning Emily strode
into my room and threw open the curtains.

“It's ten. Time to face the day.”

“You sound like Mom,” I said.

She pursed her lips and folded her hands at her stomach. “My, you've been sleeping an awful lot, haven't you?”

Her impression of our mother wasn't particularly accurate or perceptive.

“Who cares if I sleep? Nixon's going to bomb whether I get out of bed or not.”

Emily cocked her eyebrow at this comment and started laughing, and then I laughed, too. I looked at the red in her cheeks. When we stopped laughing I still felt awful.

“Brad is coming over later. He's bringing Melissa. The four of us should…”

“I don't think so, Emily.”

Her mouth flattened and her lips receded. She looked more like our mother now than she did when she was trying to do an impression of her. She tapped her left foot quickly.

“Brad and Melissa are coming over. The four of us should play tennis.” She grunted and left the room.

Melissa, in addition to being Brad's neighbor, had been my girlfriend my senior year of high school. Emily thought Melissa was still infatuated with me and kept trying to set us up.

I looked at the window and remembered kissing Melissa against it. I felt no desire for Melissa or anyone else, but celibacy would be a capitulation to Jersey and Miranda. I closed my eyes and tried to remember the things about Melissa that I liked. We had made love on this bed a couple times, quickly and on top of the comforter. I was sure I enjoyed it. It was sex, after all.