by Paul Auster
You don’t want to think about these things. You don’t want to think about your parents and the eight years you spent walled up in a house of grief. You were ten at the time of Andy’s death, and both you and Gwyn had been shipped off to a summer camp in New York State, which meant that neither one of you was present when the accident occurred. Your mother was alone with the seven-year-old Andy, planning to spend a week in the little lakeside bungalow your father bought in 1949 when you and your sister were no more than tots, the site of family summers, the site of smoky barbecues and mosquito-ridden sunsets, and the irony was that they were in the process of selling the place, this was to be the last summer at Echo Lake, just an hour’s drive from home but no longer the calm retreat it had been now that all the new houses were going up, and so, with her two oldest kids away, your mother succumbed to a burst of nostalgia and decided to haul Andy out to the lake, even though your father was too busy to go with them. Andy wasn’t much of a swimmer at that point, was still struggling to get the hang of it, but he had a daredevil streak in him, and he incited mischief with such hell-bent exuberance that everyone thought he was destined to earn an advanced degree in Practical Jokes. On the third day of the visit, sometime around six in the morning, with your mother still asleep in her room, Andy got it into his head to go for an unchaperoned swim. Before leaving, the seven-year-old adventurer sat down to write this short, semi-literate message—Deere Mom Ime in the lake Lov Andy—then tiptoed out of the bungalow, jumped into the water, and drowned. Ime in the lake.
You don’t want to think about it. You have run away now, and you don’t have the heart to return to that house of screams and silences, to listen to your mother howling in the bedroom upstairs, to reopen the medicine cabinet and count the bottles of tranquilizers and antidepressants, to think about the doctors and the breakdowns and the suicide attempt and the long stay in the hospital when you were twelve. You don’t want to remember your father’s eyes and how for years they seemed to look right through you, nor his robotic daily drill of waking at six sharp every morning and not returning from work until nine at night, or his refusal to mention the name of his dead son to you or your sister. You rarely saw him anymore, and with your mother all but incapable of tending the house and preparing meals, the ritual of the family dinner came to an end. The chores of cleaning and cooking were handled by a succession of so-called maids, principally worn-out black women in their fifties and sixties, and because on most nights your mother preferred to eat alone in her room, it was usually just you and your sister, sitting face to face at the pink Formica table in the kitchen. Where your father ate his dinner was a mystery to you. You imagined that he went to restaurants, or perhaps the same restaurant every night, but he never said a word about it.
It is painful for you to think about these things, but now that your sister is with you again, you can’t help yourself, the memories come rushing in on you against your will, and when you sit down to work on the long poem you started in June, you often find yourself stopping in mid-phrase, staring out the window, and reminiscing about your childhood.
You realize now that you began running away from them much earlier than you suspected. If not for Andy’s death, you probably would have remained a compliant, dutiful son until the hour you left home, but once the household began to fall apart—with your mother withdrawing into a state of permanent guilt-racked mourning and your father scarcely present anymore—you had to look elsewhere for some kind of sustainable existence. In the circumscribed world of childhood, elsewhere meant school and the ball fields you played on with your friends. You wanted to excel at everything, and because you were lucky enough to have been endowed with reasonable intelligence and a strong body, your grades were always near the top of your class and you stood out in any number of sports. You never sat down and thought any of this through (you were too young for that), but these successes helped to nullify some of the grimness that surrounded you at home, and the more you succeeded, the more you asserted your independence from your mother and father. They wished you well, of course, they were not actively against you, but a moment arrived (you could have been eleven) when you began to crave the admiration of your friends as much as you craved your parents’ love.
Hours after your mother was carted off to the mental hospital, you swore an oath on your brother’s memory to be a good person for the rest of your life. You were alone in the bathroom, you remember, alone in the bathroom fighting back tears, and by good you meant honest, kind, and generous, you meant never making fun of anyone, never feeling superior to anyone, and never picking a fight with anyone. You were twelve years old. When you were thirteen, you stopped believing in God. When you were fourteen, you spent the first of three consecutive summers working in your father’s supermarket (bagging, shelving, manning the register, signing in deliveries, removing trash—thus perfecting the skills that would lead to your exalted position as a page at the Columbia library). When you were fifteen, you fell in love with a girl named Patty French. Later that year, you told your sister that you were going to become a poet. When you were sixteen, Gwyn left home and you went into internal exile.
Without Gwyn, you never would have made it that far. Much as you wanted to forge a life for yourself beyond the grasp of your family, home was where you lived, and without Gwyn to protect you in that home, you would have been smothered, annihilated, driven to the edge of madness. Early memories nonexistent, but you first see her as a five-year-old as the two of you sit naked in the bathtub, your mother washing Gwyn’s hair, the shampoo foaming up in frothy white spikes and bizarre undulations as your sister throws back her head, laughing, and you look on in rapt wonder. Already, you loved her more than anyone else in the world, and until you were six or seven you assumed that you would always live with her, that you would end up as man and wife. Needless to add that you sometimes squabbled and played nasty tricks on each other, but not habitually, not half as often as most siblings do. You looked so much alike, with your dark hair and gray-green eyes, with your elongated bodies and smallish mouths, so alike that you could have passed for male and female versions of the same person, and then in jumped the fair-skinned Andy with his blond curls and short, chubby frame, and right from the start you both found him a comical personage, a clever midget in soggy diapers who had joined the family for the sole purpose of entertaining you. For the first year of his life, you treated him like a toy or pet dog, but then he began to talk, and you reluctantly decided that he must be human. A real person, then, but contrary to you and your sister, who tended to be restrained and well mannered, your little brother was a dervish of fluctuating moods, alternately boisterous and sulky, prone to sudden, uncontrollable crying fits and long spurts of jungle-crazy laughter. It couldn’t have been easy for him—trying to crack into the inner circle, trying to keep up with his big sister and brother—but the gap narrowed as he grew older, the frustrations gradually diminished, and near the end the crybaby was developing into a good kid—more than a little daft at times (Ime in the lake) but nevertheless a good kid.
Just before Andy was born, your parents moved you and your sister into adjoining bedrooms on the third floor. It was a separate realm up there under the eaves, a small principality cut off from the rest of the house, and after the cataclysm of Echo Lake in August 1957, it became your refuge, the only spot in that fortress of sorrow where you and your sister could escape your grieving parents. You grieved too, of course, but you grieved in the way children do, more selfishly, perhaps more solemnly, and for many months you and your sister tortured yourselves by recounting all the less-than-kind things you had ever done to Andy—the taunts, the cutting remarks, the teasing insults, the slaps and shoves, the too hard punches—as if compelled by some shadowy sense of guilt to do penance, to grovel in your wickedness by endlessly rehearsing the slew of misdemeanors you had committed over the years. These recitations always took place at night, in the dark after you had gone to bed, the two of you talking through the open door betw
een your rooms, or else one of you in the other’s bed, lying side by side on your backs, looking up at the invisible ceiling. You felt like orphans then, with the ghosts of your parents haunting the floor below, and sleeping together became a natural reflex, an abiding comfort, a remedy to ward off the shakes and tears that came so often in the months after Andy’s death.
Intimacies of this sort were the unquestioned ground of your relations with your sister. It went all the way back to the beginning, to the very edge of conscious memory, and you cannot recall a single moment when you felt shy or afraid in her presence. You took baths with her when you were small children, you eagerly explored each other’s bodies in games of “doctor,” and on stormy afternoons when you were confined to the house, Gwyn’s preferred activity was jumping on the bed together stark naked. Not just for the pleasure of the jumping, as she put it, but because she liked to see your penis flopping up and down, and diminutive as that organ must have been at that point in your life, you readily obliged her, since it always made her laugh, and nothing made you happier than to see your sister laugh. How old were you then? Four years old? Five years old? Eventually, children begin to recoil from the rowdy, Caliban nudism of toddlerhood, and by the time they reach the age of six or seven the barriers of modesty have already gone up. For some reason, this failed to happen with you and Gwyn. No more splashing in the tub, perhaps, no more doctor games, no more jumping on the bed, but still, an altogether un-American casualness as far as your bodies were concerned. The door of the bathroom you shared was often left open, and how many times did you walk past that door and catch sight of Gwyn peeing into the toilet, how many times did she glimpse you stepping from the shower without a stitch of clothing on? It felt perfectly natural to see each other naked, and now, in the summer of 1967, as you put down your pen and look out the window to think about your childhood, you ponder this lack of inhibition and conclude that it must have been because you felt your body belonged to her, that each of you belonged to the other, and therefore it would have been unimaginable to act differently. It’s true that as time went on you both became somewhat more reserved, but even when your bodies began to change, you did not completely withdraw from each other. You remember the day Gwyn walked into your room, sat down on the bed, and lifted her blouse to show you the first, tiny swell of her nipples, the earliest sign of her incipient, growing breasts. You remember showing her your first pubic hair and one of your first adolescent erections, and you also remember standing next to her in the bathroom and looking at the blood run down her legs when she had her first period. Neither one of you thought twice about going to the other when these miracles occurred. Life-altering events demanded a witness, and what better person to serve that role than one of you?
Then came the night of the grand experiment. Your parents were going away for the weekend, and they had decided that you and your sister were old enough to take care of yourselves without supervision. Gwyn was fifteen and you were fourteen. She was nearly a woman, and you were just emerging from boyhood, but both of you were trapped in the throes of early teenage desperation, thinking about sex from morning to night, masturbating incessantly, out of your minds with desire, your bodies burning with lustful fantasies, longing to be touched by someone, to be kissed by someone, ravenous and unfulfilled, aroused and alone, damned. The week before your parents’ departure, the two of you had openly discussed the dilemma, the great contradiction of being old enough to want it but too young to get it. The world had played a trick on you by forcing you to live in the mid-twentieth century, citizens of an advanced industrial nation no less, whereas if you had been born into a primitive tribe somewhere in the Amazon or the South Seas, you would no longer still be virgins. That was when you hatched your plan—immediately following that conversation—but you waited until your parents were gone before you put it into action.
You were going to do it once, just once. It was supposed to be an experiment, not a new way of life, and no matter how much you enjoyed it, you would have to stop after that one night, because if you went on with it after that, things could get out of hand, the two of you could easily get carried away, and then there would be the problem of having to account for bloody sheets, not to mention the grotesque possibility, the unthinkable possibility, which neither of you dared to talk about out loud. Anything and everything, you decided, but no penetration, the whole gamut of opportunities and positions, as much as you both wanted for as long as you both wanted it, but it would be a night of sex without intercourse. Since neither one of you had engaged in sex with anyone before, that prospect was exciting enough, and you spent the days leading up to your parents’ departure in a delirium of anticipation—frightened to death, shocked by the boldness of the plan, crazed.
It was the first chance you ever had to tell Gwyn how much you loved her, to tell her how beautiful you thought she was, to push your tongue inside her mouth and kiss her in the way you had dreamed of doing for months. You were trembling when you took off your clothes, trembling from head to toe when you crawled into the bed and felt her arms tighten around you. It was dark in the room, but you could dimly make out the gleam in your sister’s eyes, the contours of her face, the outline of her body, and when you crawled under the covers and felt the nakedness of that body, the bare skin of your fifteen-year-old sister pressing against the bare skin of your own body, you shuddered, feeling almost breathless from the onrush of sensations coursing through you. You lay in each other’s arms for several moments, legs entwined, cheeks touching, too awed to do anything but cling to each other and hope you wouldn’t burst apart from sheer terror. Eventually, Gwyn began to run her hands along your back, and then she brought her mouth toward your face and kissed you, kissed you hard, with an aggression you had not been expecting, and as her tongue shot into your mouth, you understood that there was no better thing in the world than to be kissed in the way she was kissing you, that this was without argument the single most important justification for being alive. You went on kissing for a long spell, the two of you purring and pawing at each other as your tongues flailed and saliva slid down from your lips. At last, you screwed up your courage and placed your palms on her breasts, her small, still not fully grown breasts, and for the first time in your life you said to yourself: I am touching a girl’s naked breasts. After you had run your hands over them for a while, you began to kiss the places you had touched, to flick your tongue around the nipples, to suck the nipples, and you were surprised when they grew firmer and more erect, as firm and erect as your penis had been since the moment you climbed on top of your naked sister. It was too much for you to handle, this initiation into the glories of female anatomy pushed you beyond your limits, and without any prompting from Gwyn you suddenly had your first ejaculation of the night, a ferocious spasm that wound up all over her stomach. Mercifully, whatever embarrassment you felt was short-lived, for even as the juices were pouring out of you, Gwyn had begun to laugh, and by way of toasting your accomplishment, she merrily rubbed her hand across her belly.
It went on for hours. You were both so young and inexperienced, both so charged up and indefatigable, both so crazy in your hunger for each other, and because you had promised that this would be the only time, neither one of you wanted it to end. So you kept at it. With the strength and stamina of your fourteen years, you quickly rebounded from your accidental discharge, and as your sister gently put her hand around your rejuvenated penis (sublime transport, inexpressible joy), you forged on with your anatomy lesson by roaming your hands and mouth over other areas of her body. You discovered the delicious, down-soft regions of nape and inner thigh, the indelible satisfactions of back hollow and buttocks, the almost unbearable delight of the licked ear. Tactile bliss, but also the smell of the perfume Gwyn had put on for the occasion, the ever more sweaty slickness of your two bodies, and the little symphony of sounds you both made throughout the night, singly and together: the moans and whimpers, the sighs and yelps, and then, when Gwyn came for the first time (
rubbing her clitoris with the middle finger of her left hand), the sound of air surging in and out of her nostrils, the accelerating speed of those breaths, the triumphant gasp at the end. The first time, followed by two other times, perhaps even a third. In your own case, beyond the early solo bungle, there was the hand of your sister wrapped around your penis, the hand moving up and down as you lay on your back in a fog of mounting excitation, and then there was her mouth, also moving up and down, her mouth around your once-again hard penis, and the profound intimacy you both felt when you came into that mouth—the fluid of one body passing into another, the intermingling of one person with another, conjoined spirits. Then your sister fell back onto the bed, opened her legs, and told you to touch her. Not there, she said, here, and she took your hand and guided you to the place where she wanted you to be, the place where you had never been, and you, who had known nothing before that night, slowly began your education as a human being.