Short Century (24 page)

“All right.”

“Goody!” She clapped her hands, hiked her skirt up, and spread her legs.

I looked into her eyes as I prepared to put my fingers inside her. “Are you sure you want this?”

“Just do it, you sisterfucking motherfucker.”

She pulled her panties to one side, exposing her vagina. I moved my hand toward her.

“Not with your fingers dry, idiot. Here.” She grabbed my wrist, raised my hand to her mouth, and licked my fingers. “Now do it.”

I put two fingers inside her and she closed her eyes and began to squirm. I hated her and thrust my fingers deep inside, wanting to hurt her.

“That feels good,” she said.

I moved my fingers faster and harder, wanting to cause her pain.

She shut her eyes and started shuddering all over her body. “Oh, God, keep doing that.”

Seeing her so turned on turned me on, and I felt tenderness toward her again. I slowed my fingers, caressing her.

“No,” she said. “Do what you were doing before.”

This pissed me off and I tried again to hurt her.

She shuddered and gasped, then grunted contentedly. “Mmmmm, that felt so good. You're getting so good at this.”

I removed my fingers from her and wiped my hand on my khakis.

“So,” she said, hopping off the pedestal. “When are we getting married? Next week? Are there any states where a brother and sister can marry?”

I was miserable and I did not want to speak. “I don't think so.”

“Right, of course not. We'll get forged identification, that's probably not too hard. We could go to Reno. We could take the BMW. Though I guess we'd have to steal it. Maybe we should just get married in New York. That way we can take the train. I've been thinking about it. I don't need to go to college. We can…”

f

Brad called the next
day. He got nervous when I answered and said he would call back later, or not call back later, but I interrupted him.

“Emily wants to go out with you,” I said. “I think she's a little reluctant to be dating anyone, with college coming up and everything, but I know for certain that she really likes you. Don't take no for an answer.”

I called to Emily that Brad was on the line. She came into the room and said she didn't want to talk to him. I muffled the receiver.

“There's no point in talking to him,” she said, “when I'm in love with you.”

I hung up the phone as quickly as I could.

“You have to call him back and tell him you want to see him tonight,” I said.

“Why would I do that? I'm in love with you.”

“You asked me a few days ago if I thought you could still marry him. Well, obviously he's still interested in you.”

“That would be pretty funny if I married Brad now. I could live a boring life even after what's happened.”

“You wouldn't be boring.”

“He wouldn't want to date me if he knew.”

“There's no reason why you should tell him.”

“I don't want to marry Brad. I don't know why I said that the other day. I want to marry you.”

“See him tonight. If you don't have a good time, then you don't have to see him again.”

“Wouldn't it be a little deceitful not to say that I'm in love with someone else?”

“Maybe when you see him again you'll realize that you're actually in love with him.”

“Arthur, I'm in love with you.”

“You said the other day that the only thing I could do for you was to have sex with you.”

“I think that's all I need. I want to be with you forever. It says in the Bible that that's what we're supposed to do. She that loveth not her brother abideth in death.”

“Maybe you should go out with Brad again just to make sure that you don't like him.”

“I didn't tell you last night, because you wouldn't come out of your room, and it seemed like you were mad at me, but I went on a date with James Hickham.”

“And did he rape you?”

“At least he's not my brother.”

“Of course. But Brad's much better for you.”

“I like James better. So if you want me to date someone else so you can dump me without feeling guilty, he's your man. He's kind of hilariously gallant. He pulled my chair out and he took my coat in this way that was just too sweet. He even very sweetly made it clear that he wasn't trying to date me and that we were just having coffee as friends. By the way, Arthur, I've been thinking, and I don't know why you ever liked Miranda. She seemed incredibly cold and self-involved, and it sounds like she's all talk when it comes to politics. I know you don't like it when I talk about her, but you must be over her by now, right?”

“What happened with Hickham? Did you kiss him?”

“At the very end he looked like he wanted to kiss me, so I told him that I was involved with someone else. I was faithful to you, Arthur.”

I tried to overcome my relief that she hadn't kissed him. “I think you should see him again. It sounds like you like him.”

“You could at least be caring enough to be a little jealous. I came this close to kissing someone you hate.”

“It would be better for you to date at least one other person. You're very young and you need to see more of what's out there. I'd rather it be someone other than Hickham, but if he's the one you want to see, then fine. If you date him and maybe a couple other people and you still feel the way you do now, then we can talk about doing what you mentioned yesterday.”

“You mean get married?”

“That's what you want, right?”

“You can't even say it. You're disgusted by the idea of marrying me.”

“I'm disgusted by the idea of marrying my sister, yes.”

She folded her arms and stamped her foot, looking simultaneously like our mother and like a little girl. On her way out she slammed the door.

A couple of hours later I went to her room to apologize. She told me she had made a date with James Hickham.

f

I can do this.
I can write this. I can imagine myself into Emily, not something I would be able to do if I didn't love her.

She must have considered putting her napkin over her chicken l'orange, ignoring whatever James would do to try to make her stay, pushing him to the floor if necessary with a little flick of her palm—ridiculous that he would talk so much about raping women, with those shoulders that don't even look like they could stand to carry a purse all day. It would be easy to walk to the bus stop from the restaurant. In New York she could catch a bus to wherever she wanted to go—she wouldn't even really have to decide until she got there. She must have imagined taking a bus all the way to Chicago, or to San Francisco, where she would never again have to accept a dime that had been handled by a Huntington. Anywhere she could go, there would always be food and shelter for a creature with two eyes and a hole between her legs. Maybe she would get off the bus in a small town, where she could get a job pouring coffee for men who would look at her breasts and dream of fucking her, never dreaming that her brother had done so already. She would let some of them fuck her, maybe many of them, maybe
all
of them. Maybe she would fuck every man who looked at her for more than a second, and infect them all with incest.

But she doesn't run away. She doesn't even laugh with derision as Hickham says that the way the waitress pours the wine proves that she wants to be raped. Something about tightness in her lower back. She isn't really paying attention. There had been something arousing a year ago about this theory, not because there was anything to it, but because at the age of sixteen she had thought it was shameful not to be aroused by everything that anyone might be aroused by.

There is still something arousing about the way that James talks about his theory, about the way he clutches it as though it were a stuffed animal that will keep him company in the dark, and about the way he constantly checks her reaction, about the little bit of panic in him every time he catches her losing interest. He really is astonishingly like Arthur. Which is another reason to leave, right now.

The fact is that she doesn't want to be here, because she loves Arthur. She loves Arthur and she hopes to make him jealous. If she feels anything for James, and if James reminds her at all of Arthur, then that just proves that if she marries someone other than Arthur, she'll just wind up marrying someone exactly like him, and what is the point of that? What makes her feel worst of all, maybe, is how unfair
it is that she has to be the only person in the world to fall in love with someone who is literally her sibling.

The only person? Does Arthur love her, or did he use her to make some sort of grand historical point? There is, horrifically, no way for her to know. If only she could know what he was thinking. And yet she must know, because we always know what the people we love are thinking, however much we try to pretend that we don't. If only she could know how likely it truly is that he will kill himself—maybe her date with James has made him so jealous that he is twisting some rope into a noose right now, assuming that he even knows that there is rope in the garage, which is unlikely. And she is wondering whether she hopes that she will return to the house to find him dead. In addition to making things easier, it may be what he wants.

James starts talking about Ayn Rand or some writer who might as well be Ayn Rand—he has a way of turning every writer he reads into Ayn Rand. She must go home immediately and convince Arthur to take the bus with her. There is no question that they must be together. Destroying taboos, creating total freedom in the world, Arthur can talk about all of that if he wants to. He can make himself into whatever sort of grand hero he likes. All the stuff about not being boring that she had thought about, none of that matters either. This won't make her any less boring—it will just make her a boring old lady who happened to have committed the most repulsive act that a human can commit, a fact which would hardly make her more interesting, whatever it means for a person to be interesting. What matters is that she and Arthur must be together. What matters is that they read books together and watch movies together and play tennis. What matters is that, when the mood strikes her, she will jump on the coffee table and do ballet moves as he pretends to coach her. Really, she would have to be greedy to want anything more from life than what she has with Arthur. The shock of what's happened has left her angry and erratic, even vicious, these past several weeks, but she can give all that up and be a good girlfriend, and soon a good wife. She'll be a wonderful wife and he'll be a wonderful husband. With his degree, Arthur will have to be able to find a job somewhere, maybe in Chicago, maybe in San Francisco. If he can't find a job, then she'll work as a waitress. Maybe he'll get a job as the manager of the diner where she works. Maybe
she'll
be the manager and he'll be the waiter. Maybe one day they'll own a diner together in a town surrounded by a lot of corn and he'll be very particular about finding a supplier with dry, crisp hamburger buns, and very particular too about finding a way to store the buns so they'll stay dry and crisp, and occasionally someone will mention that the two of them look awfully similar, like they could be related, and everyone will laugh about it with only the slightest discomfort, and then the two of them will start talking about the tennis competition their daughter just won. Emily will read books to her little girl and she will nourish whatever curiosities the little girl has. If the girl becomes interested in something she knows nothing about—quantum physics, say—then she and the girl will learn about it together. Every morning she will play tennis with the girl. If the girl likes a game other than tennis, then Emily will learn how to play that. And if Arthur decides he wants to take them all to the Chappine, or that he wants to choose another hotel in Dubuque and pretend it's the Chappine and go there every year and drop fruit on the floor, then she will refuse. She will not make the occasional sarcastic comment and then let Arthur get his way, nor will she let her daughter turn into that sort of person. She will name her daughter Elizabeth, after the woman who, only Arthur and Emily will know, will be her grandmother on both sides, and the girl will in many ways resemble that woman, only done right. She will raise Elizabeth so well that the girl will understand even the worst mistakes a person can make, and one day Emily will tell her the truth about her parentage, and the girl will tell her mother that even a mistake like that does not make her a bad person. Elizabeth will even be glad she made the mistake, because without it she would not be alive, and Elizabeth will be so happy to be alive and to have such a very nearly perfect mother.

Assuming, of course, that their daughter isn't deformed. She should make herself imagine it, living as a housewife in St. Louis or San Antonio, taking care of a little retarded girl with six fingers on each hand who screams in public at the age of twenty. It's hard to imagine that, wiping the horrible girl's spittle from the front of her shirt, looking at her tiny, horrible eyes, she won't think back on this very dinner and wish that she got on the bus and left, or even that she had stayed behind and married James.

So of course there is no chance that she will make a life with Arthur. Of course she will not take that sort of risk and have a baby with him. Of course she will not take the risk of living with Arthur without having a baby, either because she wants to be a mother or because she feels she has to be one (Oh, God, if she could only know the difference!), and because after all, Arthur might become a little much to take after a while if it's only the two of them. So of course she will do what any of the women at the surrounding tables would have done if they had fucked their brothers (what they
did
do after fucking their brothers, for all she knows), and pretend it never happened. She will marry James, or someone a little less silly but still essentially like James, and she will spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with the parents of James or James-facsimile rather than with Arthur—she will have to find a way never to see Arthur again—and she will wear whatever old-lady fashions are in fashion, and she will make sarcastic comments before doing whatever her husband wants her to do.