by Paul Auster
“It nearly killed me,” Tom said. “In two seconds, my dick went soft as a marshmallow. I pulled up my pants, buckled my belt, and got out of there as fast as I could. It knocked me flat, Nathan. My little sister, vamping in a skin magazine. And to find out about it in such a terrible way – out of the blue, sitting in that goddamn clinic at the very moment I’m trying to jerk off. It made me sick, sick to my stomach. Not just because I hated seeing Rory like that, but because I hadn’t heard from her in two years, and those pictures seemed to confirm my worst nightmares about what had happened to her. She was only twenty-two, and already she’d fallen into the lowest, most degrading kind of work: selling her body for money. It was all so sad, it made me want to cry for a month.”
When you’ve lived as long as I have, you tend to think you’ve heard everything, that there’s nothing left that can shock you anymore. You grow a little complacent about your so-called knowledge of the world, and then, every once in a while, something comes along that jolts you out of your smug cocoon of superiority, that reminds you all over again that you don’t understand the first thing about life. My poor niece. The genetic lottery had been too kind to her, and she had come up with all the winning numbers. Unlike Tom, who had inherited his shape from the Woods, Aurora was a Glass through and through, and as a family we are universally thin, angular, and tall. She had developed into a carbon copy of her mother – a long-legged, dark-haired beauty, as lithe and supple as June herself. Natasha from War and Peace, as opposed to her brother’s big-footed, awkward Pierre. It goes without saying that everyone wants to be beautiful, but beauty in a woman can sometimes be a curse, especially if you’re a young woman like Aurora: a high school dropout with no husband and a three-year-old kid to support, with a wild and rebellious streak in you, willing to thumb your nose at the world and take on any risk that comes your way. If you’re hard up for money, and if your looks are your prime selling point, why would you hesitate to strip off your clothes and reveal yourself to the camera? As long as you can handle the situation, giving in to an offer like that can mean the difference between eating and not eating, between living well and barely living at all.
“Maybe she only did it that one time,” I said, doing what little I could to comfort Tom. “You know, she’s having trouble paying the bills, and a photographer comes along and proposes the job to her. One day’s work for a nice bundle of cash.”
Tom shook his head, and from the sullen expression on his face, I understood that my remark was no more than a futile exercise in wishful thinking. Tom didn’t know all the facts, but he was certain that the story had neither begun nor ended with that photo session for Midnight Blue. Aurora had been a topless dancer in Queens (at the Garden of Earthly Delights, of all places, the very club where Tom had dropped off the drunken businessmen on the night of his thirtieth birthday), had appeared in more than a dozen porn films, and had posed for nudie magazines six or seven times. Her career in the sex business had lasted a solid eighteen months, and because she was well paid for her work, she probably would have kept at it a good deal longer if not for something that occurred just nine or ten weeks after Tom spotted her picture in Midnight Blue.
“Nothing bad, I hope,” I said to him.
“Worse than bad,” Tom replied, suddenly on the verge of tears. “She was gang-raped on the set of a film. By the director, the cameraman, and half the crew.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“They really worked her over, Nathan. She was bleeding so much by the end, she had to check herself into a hospital.”
“I’d like to kill the fucks who did that to her.”
“Me too. Or at least put them in jail, but she refused to press charges. All she wanted was to get away, to get the hell out of New York. That’s when I heard from her. She wrote me a letter in care of the English department at the university, and when I realized what kind of spot she was in, I called her and said she should come out to Michigan with Lucy and live with me. She’s a good person, Nathan. You know that. I know that. Everyone who’s ever come near her knows that. There isn’t a bad bone in her body. A bit out of control, maybe, a bit headstrong, but entirely innocent and trusting, the least cynical person in the world. Good for her that she wasn’t ashamed of working in porn, I suppose. She thought it was fun. Fun! Can you imagine? She didn’t understand that the business is filled with creeps, the vilest cruds in the universe.”
So Aurora and the three-year-old Lucy moved to the Midwest and settled into the top two floors of a rented house with Tom. Aurora had been making decent money before her departure, but most of it had gone into rent, clothes, and a full-time nanny for Lucy, which meant that her savings were nearly exhausted. Tom had his fellowship, but he was living on a restricted graduate-student budget, with a part-time job at the university library to help make ends meet. They talked about calling their father in California to ask for a loan, but in the end they decided against it. The same with their stepfather in New Jersey, Philip Zorn. Rory’s belligerent teenage antics had ravaged the household for years, and they were reluctant to turn to a man who had grown to despise his stepdaughter during the great battles of those earlier days. Tom never said a word to his sister about it, but he knew that Zorn secretly blamed Aurora for their mother’s death. She had put June through a prolonged siege of turmoil and despair, and the only recompense for all that suffering had been the unexpected gift of being able to raise her infant granddaughter. Then that was snatched away from her as well, and Zorn felt it was the anguish of having to part with the child that had killed her. It was a sentimental reading of the story, perhaps, but who’s to say he wasn’t right? To be perfectly honest, on the day of the funeral the same thought had also occurred to me.
Instead of asking for handouts, Rory found herself a job waiting tables at the priciest French restaurant in town. She had no experience, but she charmed the owner with her smile, her long legs, and her pretty face, and because she was a clever girl, she caught on quickly and mastered the routine within days. It was a big comedown from her high-voltage life in New York, perhaps, but the last thing Aurora was looking for now was excitement. Chastened and bruised, still haunted by the vicious thing that had been done to her, she longed for nothing more than a dull and uneventful respite, a chance to recover her strength. Tom mentioned bad dreams, sudden outbursts of sobbing, long, moody silences. For all that, he also remembered the months she spent with him as a happy time, a time of great solidarity and mutual affection, and now that he had his sister back, there was the unrelenting pleasure of being able to assume the role of big brother again. He was her friend and protector, her guide and support, her rock.
As Aurora slowly regained the spunk and élan of her former self, she started talking about getting a high school equivalency diploma and applying to college. Tom encouraged her to go ahead with the plan, promising to help with the work if she found any of it too difficult. It’s never too late, he kept telling her, it’s never too late to start again, but in some sense it already was. Weeks passed, and as Rory continued to put off the decision, Tom understood that her heart wasn’t in it. On her days off from the restaurant, she began turning up on open-mike nights at a local club, singing blues songs with three musicians she had met one evening while serving them dinner, and before long the quartet had decided to band together and form a group. They called themselves Brave New World, and once Tom saw them perform, he knew that Rory’s fleeting impulse to go on with her education had been stopped dead in its tracks. His sister could sing. She’d always had a good voice, but now that she was older, and now that her lungs had been subjected to the tars and fumes of fifty thousand cigarettes, a new and compelling quality had been added to it – something deep and throaty and sensual, an aching, hard-knocks candor that made you sit up in your chair and listen. Tom was both happy and frightened for her. Within a month, she had taken up with the bass guitarist, and he knew it was only a matter of time before she and Lucy would be leaving with him and the two others for s
ome larger city – Chicago or New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco, anywhere in America that wasn’t Ann Arbor, Michigan. Deluded or not, Aurora saw herself as a star, and she would never find joy or fulfillment unless the eyes of the world were looking at her. Tom understood that now, and he made no more than a weak, pro forma attempt to talk her out of going. Skin movies yesterday; blues songs today; God knows what tomorrow. He prayed that the bass guitarist, whose name also happened to be Tom, wasn’t as stupid as he looked.
When the inevitable moment arrived, Brave New World and their little mascot climbed into a used Plymouth van with eighty thousand miles on it and headed for Berkeley, California. Seven months went by before Tom heard from her again: a telephone call in the middle of the night, and her voice on the other end singing “Happy Birthday” to him, as sweet and innocent as ever.
Then nothing. Aurora vanished as thoroughly and mysteriously as she had before turning up in Michigan, and for the life of him Tom couldn’t understand why. Wasn’t he her friend? Wasn’t he someone she could count on no matter what kind of trouble she was in? He felt hurt, then angry, then miserable, and as the long months of silence stretched on for more than another year, his misery mutated into a deep and ever-growing despond, a conviction that something terrible had happened to her. In the fall of 1997, he finally gave up on his doctoral thesis. The night before he left Ann Arbor, he collected all his notes, all his diagrams and lists, all the countless rough drafts of his thirteen-part debacle, and one by one burned every page in an oil drum in the backyard. As soon as the great Melvillean bonfire was extinguished, one of his housemates drove him to the bus depot, and an hour later he was on the road to New York. Three weeks after his arrival, he began his stint as a yellow cab man, and then, just six weeks after that, Aurora unexpectedly called. Neither frantic nor upset, Tom said, neither in desperate straits nor asking for money – she just wanted to see him.
They met for lunch the next day, and for the first twenty or thirty minutes he couldn’t stop looking at her. She was twenty-six now and still lovely, as lovely as any woman on earth, but her entire presentation of self had changed. She still looked like Aurora, but it was a different Aurora who sat in front of him now, and Tom couldn’t decide if he preferred the new version or the old. In the past, she had worn her lavish, tumbling hair long; there had been makeup, large jewelry, rings on every finger, and a flair for decking herself out in inventive, unorthodox clothes: green leather boots and Chinese slippers, motorcycle jackets and silk skirts, lacy gloves and outrageous scarves, a demipunk, demi-glamorous style that seemed to express her youth and brave fuck-you spirit. Now, in comparison, she looked positively prim. Her hair had been cut in a short bob; she had no makeup on except for the tiniest slash of rouge on her lips; and her clothes were conventional to a fault: blue pleated skirt, white cashmere sweater, and a pair of nondescript brown high heels.
No earrings, just one ring on the fourth finger of her right hand, and nothing around her neck. Tom hesitated to ask, but he wondered if the big eagle tattoo on her left shoulder was still there – or if, in some effort to purify herself, to expunge all traces of her former life, she had gone through the painful procedure of having the ornate, multicolored bird removed.
There was no question that she was glad to see him, but at the same time he sensed how reluctant she was to talk about anything but the present. She offered no apologies for having been out of touch for so long, and when it came to her comings and goings since leaving Ann Arbor, she skimmed over the facts in just a few sentences. Brave New World broke up after less than a year; she sang with a couple of other groups in northern California; there were men, and then more men, and she began taking too many drugs. Eventually, she parked Lucy with two of her friends – a lesbian couple in their late forties who lived in Oakland – and checked herself into a rehab clinic, where she managed to get herself clean after six months. The entire saga was recounted in under two minutes, and because it had flown by him so quickly, Tom was too bewildered to press her for more details. Then she started talking about someone named David Minor, her group leader at the clinic, who had already turned himself around by the time she left detox and entered the program. He was single-handedly responsible for saving her, she said, and without him she never would have pulled through. More than that, he was the only man she had ever met who didn’t think she was dumb, who didn’t have sex on the brain twenty-four hours a day, who wasn’t after her just for her body. Except Tom, of course, but sisters weren’t allowed to marry their brothers, were they? It was against the law, and so she was going to marry David instead. They had already moved to Philadelphia and were staying with his mother while they both looked for work. Lucy was in a good school, and David was planning to adopt her after the wedding. That was why she had come to New York: to ask for Tom’s blessing and find out if he would be willing to give her away at the ceremony. Yes, Tom said, of course he would, he would be honored. But what about their father, he asked, wasn’t it his job to walk down the aisle with his daughter? Maybe so, Aurora said, but he didn’t care about either one of them, did he? He was all wrapped up with his new wife and new kids, and besides, he was too cheap to spring for the airfare from L.A. to Philadelphia. No, she said, it had to be Tom. Tom and no one else.
He asked her to tell him something more about David Minor, but she spoke only in the vaguest generalities, which seemed to suggest that she didn’t know as much about her future husband as she should have. David loved her, he respected her, he was kind to her, and so on, but there was nothing solid enough in those phrases for Tom to form a picture of who the man was. Then, her voice dropping almost to a whisper, Aurora added, “He’s very religious.”
“Religious? What sort of religion?” Tom asked, trying not to sound alarmed.
“Christianity. You know, Jesus and all that stuff.”
“What does that mean? Does he belong to a specific denomination, or are we talking about a born-again fundamentalist?”
“Born-again, I guess.”
“And what about you, Rory? Do you believe in all that?”
“I try to, but I don’t think I’m very good at it. David says I need to be patient, that one day my eyes will open and I’ll see the light.”
“But you’re half Jewish. By Jewish law, you’re all Jewish.”
“I know. Because of Mom.”
“And?”
“David says it doesn’t matter. Jesus was Jewish, too, and he was the son of God.”
“David seems to say a lot of things. Is he the one who got you to cut your hair and change the way you dress?”
“He never forces me to do anything. I did it because I wanted to.”
“With David’s encouragement.”
“Modesty befits a woman. David says it helps my self-esteem.”
“David says.”
“Please, Tommy, try to be nice. I know you don’t approve, but I’ve finally found a chance for a little happiness, and I’m not going to let it slip through my fingers. If David wants me to dress this way, what difference does it make? I used to walk around looking like a slut. This is better for me. I feel safer, more pulled together. After all the screwed-up things I did, I’m lucky I’m still alive.”
Tom backed off and changed his tone, and they parted company that afternoon with fierce hugs and earnest kisses, swearing never to fall out of touch again. Tom was convinced that Aurora meant it this time, but as the date of the wedding approached, he still hadn’t received an invitation from her – nor a letter, nor a telephone message, nor a word of any kind. When he called the number with the Philadelphia area code she had scribbled onto a paper napkin for him during lunch, a mechanical voice announced that the number was no longer in service. He then tried to track her down through local information, but of the three David Minors he spoke to, not one of them had heard of a woman named Aurora Wood. True to form, Tom blamed himself. His negative comments about Minor’s religion had probably hurt Rory’s feelings, and if she had gone ah
ead and told her fiancé about her atheist brother in New York, perhaps he had forbidden her to invite him to the wedding. From the little Tom had heard about Minor, he sounded like that kind of man: one of those overbearing zealots who laid down the law to others, a sanctimonious prick.
“Any news from her since?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Tom said. “It’s been about three years since we had that lunch, and I have no idea where she is.”
“What about the telephone number she gave you? Do you think it was real?”
“Rory has her faults, but lying isn’t one of them.”
“If they moved, then, you should have been able to contact her through the mother.”
“I tried, but nothing came of it.”
“Strange.”
“Not really. What if her name wasn’t Minor? Husbands die, after all. People get divorced. Maybe she married again and was using her second husband’s name.”
“I feel sorry for you, Tom.”
“Don’t. It’s not worth it. If Rory wanted to see me, she’d call. I’m pretty much resigned to it by now. I miss her, of course, but what the hell can I do about it?”
“And your father. When was the last time you saw him?”
“About two years ago. He had to come to New York for an article he was working on, and he invited me out to dinner.”