Short Century

by David Burr Gerrard

  “Jersey, I think you should probably get some sleep. Is Daisy at home to make you some tea or something?”

  “Excuse me, Arthur, but do you know the answer or not?”

  “I don’t know the answer.” This was a lie.

  “Thank you. Goodbye.”

  Miserable again, I hung up the phone. To forget this conversation, I turned on the television to discover a repeat of Norture’s broadcast from last night. Norture is onscreen, with a recent photograph of Miranda floating next to his eyes.

  I should have mentioned earlier that Miranda is dead. Shortly after I started writing this manuscript I received this text message from Daisy: “My mother is dead. Sydney soon to follow. Don’t contact my father. Go fuck your family and leave what’s left of mine alone.” So, yes, Miranda is dead. Facts are facts. That’s one tautology I’ve been made to see the truth of.

  Norture is, or was, asking the audience’s forgiveness for “taking a portion of this evening to honor the passing of a dear old friend. This was a woman who stayed in her marriage even though it was much less than perfect, and if I have strong differences with her husband’s if-it-feels-good-do-it philosophy, I cannot help but applaud them both. What God joined, they let no man put asunder. And of course I must also salute their son Jason, who bravely fought and died in Iraq.” Here, the photo of Miranda was replaced with a photo of Jason in uniform, looking self-important and humorless in a way that there is every reason to believe he would have outgrown. Norture then started talking about how Miranda believed those who had successfully called for a premature end to the war in Iraq had dishonored Jason’s memory.

  Jason’s memory. Once I finished college, I didn’t see the Rothsteins again until shortly after the fall of the Wall; that encounter had ended acrimoniously. It was not until January of 2003 that they came back into my life. Miranda sent me an email that wound up in a spam folder along with a couple thousand other emails about the Iraq War. I would never have seen it were it not for the fact that I read every one of those emails carefully.

  Her son had, apparently, grown obsessed with my books and articles and had “been spending all his free time crouching in the Current Affairs section of Barnes & Noble” reading everything I wrote. It was flattering to hear this, and maybe something in addition to flattering. Surely sowing ideas into the mind of his child is a more ruthless and satisfying way to cuckold your enemy than is merely fucking his wife.

  But then I read further and saw that he was thinking of joining the Army because of what I had written. This sentence felt like a slap. It had not occurred to me that my articles would inspire anyone to join the military.

  “Though I have nothing but miles-high respect for anyone who serves in the military,” she wrote, “I’m terrified for my son. Would you be willing to call him? Maybe you can suggest some other things Jason could do to support the war without actually going over there.”

  I didn’t want anyone’s death on my hands, so I called the number she provided immediately. On the other end was the deep and sleepy voice of a college male. I expected that introducing myself as Arthur Hunt would make him feel honored, but instead he groaned.

  “Did my mom tell you to call?” he asked.

  “She did. She mentioned that you’re a fan of my work.”

  “She asked you to call so that you could talk me out of going. I should never have let her buy me a cellphone.”

  Naturally, his tone put me off. He also, strangely, sounded a bit like Paul. But this was important. “She told me you would want to talk about my work.”

  “Talking is exactly what I don’t want to do. I’ve read your work. Now I want to act on it.”

  “There are lots of ways to act on it. There’s no reason to…”

  “Mr. Hunt,” Jason said. “I know you dated my mother like five hundred years ago and I know that you’re trying to do her a favor. I do love your work, and if we were talking for any other reason, I would be incredibly honored. But you can’t ask me to be a coward. Iraq is the great cause of my time and I have to be a part of it.”

  “You should finish school. There are important things you can do…”

  “After reading your work, I made the only choice I could make.” Then he talked about how this was the new Spanish Civil War. The rhetoric all sounded silly in his voice.

  “Nobody else I know is serious about this,” he said. “All of my friends who support the war and all of my friends who oppose the war are just applying for internships in Washington. Except for a few of them who are writing novels.”

  “There are more important ways to fight the war than…”

  “Than fighting it?”

  He had a bit of a point.

  “Mr. Hunt,” he said, suddenly sounding disturbed. “Is it true that you…”

  “Is it true that I what?”

  “Is it true that you…look, I just think that a man should follow his ideals.”

  “Please don’t enlist,” I said. “Please just don’t enlist.”

  But he did enlist. And for a while I was happy that he had. I thought that the war might go much better for the presence of a boy who was, after all, most likely every bit as smart and dedicated as he was naïve and unprepared.

  As I write this, I have placed a photo on my desk—right next to the Chappine stationery and cheap plastic pen—of Jason from the autumn before he dropped out of school. He is standing in Riverside Park with a purplish New Jersey in the background, tall, at least six foot two, with close-cropped dark hair and a big grin redolent of confidence and orthodontia. He is full of the promise that attaches to young men like leeches. Next to it is another photo of Jason, the one on Norture’s show, the one of Jason in uniform looking self-important and humorless in a way that maybe he would not have outgrown. I don’t know. His mother gave both photos to me after he died and asked me to keep them above my writing desk as a tribute to her son. I suspect that, at least unconsciously, she did this to make me feel awful, which it certainly does. I comply with her request anyway. Whatever her unconscious motives may have been, I am glad that she and her daughter were important parts of my life over the last several years.

  Norture had said more about me, but thinking about Jason had distracted me, so I had to find the clip online in order to hear the rest. First I had to watch a thirty-second clip in which a couple in a car squabbled in a way that was supposed to make you want to buy corn chips.

  Norture continued:

  “As for Arthur Hunt, an occasional guest on this program, I am naturally distressed by today’s frankly disgusting revelations. The sixties were a terrible time, and made some people do some truly terrible things. Hunt will no longer be welcome on my show, since to be honest, I’m not certain that I’ll ever be able to look at him again without throwing up. But I will say that the support that he has shown in the last decade for his country and for our troops may redeem him a little bit.”

  Redeem him a little bit. I suppose that that is a little bit more than I deserve.

  f

  In the summer of 1968, I declined my usual summer job at my father’s firm and decided instead to drive cross-country with Miranda. My father agreed, maybe too readily, but I wasn’t going to complain. I wrested permission to use the older Mercedes. Emily was upset about my decision but she would get over it. It would be good for her, I thought, to spend a summer without me. She needed to be independent, and besides, she was so much smarter than I was that sometimes I wondered whether her effusive idolatry was a covert form of mockery.

  Anyway, after a few days on the road with Miranda I hardly thought of my family at all. The wheat stalks seemed to bow to us as we drove by. Throughout the summer, we were expecting a violent revolution. We speculated on where exactly we would be when the conflagration would begin.

  We were in the backseat having sex when news came over the radio that Robert Kennedy had b
een shot. I paused, still inside of her. Our eyes locked and she arched her back as she absorbed the news, causing a jolt to my cock.

  “Do you think we should stop?” I asked Miranda.

  “Well,” she said, “I guess it would be racist if we stopped now when we didn’t stop for Mart…”

  “Yeah.” I resumed thrusting.

  We went to San Diego, home of Turon University, to meet Jersey Rothstein, but a secretary at the biology department told us he was on vacation.

  One afternoon I told Miranda I loved her.

  “Why do you have to call it that? Love. It’s so bourgeois. Why use the oppressor’s words? When you name something, you kill it. Naming is like napalm.”

  We intended to be in Chicago for the convention, but the Mercedes broke down in Nevada.

  f

  By that October, we had been dating for a year, and I wanted Miranda to meet my family. I did not know why I wanted this. I was barely speaking with my parents and I spoke to Emily perhaps two or three times each month. Miranda and I agreed that family was a regressive institution that shackled us to the past. Still, I wanted my girlfriend to meet my family. It was a desire I didn’t understand and couldn’t get rid of. I felt like a pervert.

  A few days before Emily’s birthday I was sitting in my room with Miranda, trying to work up the courage to invite her to the hotel. There were many reasons not to invite her. Miranda had already said she didn’t want to see Emily anymore. And it seemed selfish to expose my girlfriend to all the creepiness in the hotel. A good boyfriend would want to meet her family, not prop her up as a shield against his own.

  “Miranda, why don’t we visit your mother?”

  “Why do you have to meet my mother? Isn’t seeing me naked enough?”

  “I don’t have to. I’d like to.”

  “Why?”

  “I guess I’d just like to see where you came from.”

  “You want to see my mother’s cunt?”

  “Miran…”

  “Where I came from. Spoken like a true Daughter of the American Revolution. Or were your ancestors Tories?”

  “Well, aren’t roots important?”

  She laughed in a way that made me feel stupid. “We’re radicals, Arthur. We’re supposed to tear the roots up. That’s what the word means. More or less.”

  “I just thought it would be nice. We don’t have to.”

  “You’re going to meet my mother on Saturday.”

  “We really don’t have to.”

  “Too late. We’re going to Queens on Saturday. You should bring some wine or something.”

  I bought some wine and borrowed a car from one of Norture’s friends. For the first half of the trip to Ridgewood, we said little, and I could feel her hating me. At one point I offered to turn the car around and forget the trip, but she said no, firmly and without looking at me. She rubbed her arms and I turned up the radio, thinking that the odds were fairly good we would hear of another assassination.

  “Could you stop drumming your fingers on the steering wheel?” she said at one point.

  “That’s how I relax when I drive.”

  “Can’t you find some other way to relax? My mother is going to hate you, by the way.”

  “Well, I hope she doesn’t.”

  She adjusted the review mirror and then studied it carefully.

  “What if I told you that my father was a Nazi officer?”

  “That’s not true, is it?”

  “What if it is? What if my father and mother left Germany after the war and changed the family name? What if my mother still thinks that Hitler should have won?”

  “That’s not true.”

  “You don’t believe in God, do you?” she said.

  “No. What does that have to do with anything?”

  “I think I might believe in God. I feel some sort of presence, it’s hard to describe. You have no idea how much I hate my mother. I really think I might love you, though.” She said this calmly, and then just as calmly grabbed the wheel and turned it sharply to the left. Before I could recover we hit the divider.

  We rehashed what had happened several times over the next several hours, first with the police—I told them I had somehow lost control of the car—and then alone.

  “We could have been killed,” I said. “Are you psychotic?”

  “We weren’t killed. We weren’t even injured. I had this feeling that we wouldn’t be hurt and I was right. Or the feeling was.”

  “Feeling? What are you talking about? We could have been killed or we could have killed someone else.”

  “I told you, I felt a presence. I decided to have faith.”

  “Since when do you believe in God? I thought that’s why you hated your mother, because she believes in God.”

  “Maybe I hate my mother because she’s a Nazi.”

  “You shouldn’t call your parents Nazis.”

  “It’s the literal truth.”

  “Be serious, Miranda.”

  “Well, it’s not the literal truth that my mother is a Nazi. My mother was a Nazi. And my father used to be a Nazi rocket scientist. Now he works for the Americans. The bombs we use against the Vietnamese, some of them were designed by my dad. That whole thing about living in Queens was bullshit. I live in Virginia.”

  “Would you stop with this shit? You practically killed us both, Miranda.”

  “This conversation doesn’t seem to be leading anywhere.”

  “That’s because you won’t let us actually have a conversation.”

  “I’m trying to talk to you about this intense religious feeling I had and all you can think about is something I did to a machine.”

  “You say you love me and then you crash our car?”

  “I don’t like to be yelled at.”

  “You crashed the fucking car, Miranda.”

  “Don’t be so dramatic. It’s not like your father can’t afford to pay for it.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “It’s part of the point. And this would never have become an issue if you hadn’t insisted on meeting my mother in the first place. There was no reason for that.”

  We continued arguing in this vein for some time. When she returned to Smith I did not expect to see her again. For a day or two I felt free, I felt that I had rid myself of a bizarre and reckless girl; then I started to think that I had made the worst mistake of my life, that I had lost the girl I loved for no reason, or rather for a very good reason. I knew that she hated her mother, and yet I wanted to meet her anyway because I wanted to get out of going to the Chappine. So I was worthless and selfish and I wanted her back.

  The following Saturday morning she woke me with a knock at my door. “Hey there,” she said sweetly.

  “Miranda, I’m so glad you’re here. I’ve had such a terrible week. I really realized…”

  She put a finger to my lips. “What I did was wrong. Completely wrong. I don’t know what came over me. I’m not crazy and I don’t believe in God. Please forgive me.”

  We held hands as we strolled through campus, and I felt the giddiness of reprieve. By the lawn outside the chapel, she stopped. Biting her lip seductively, she led me into the chapel, which was empty except for an older man in the first pew who kept coughing loudly. As we reached one of the back pews, Miranda winked at me and genuflected. She unbuttoned my pants and took out my cock while we were still in the aisle, so that if the man had turned around, he would have seen it. She lay down under the pew, raised her knees, hiked her skirt, and took off her panties. It struck me as silly to have sex in a church. Religion had never meant anything substantial to me, so defacing it offered no erotic jolt, and all I could think was how dusty the floor was.

  We had sex less and less after this. She still visited every weekend, but we just went to sleep at night. She shi
vered every time we passed the chapel. She said things like “I think it’s wrong when people commit sacrilege just for the sake of doing so,” with no reference to what we had done and whether that had constituted sacrilege. Just before winter break, after we had not had sex for over a month, she woke me, straddling my abdomen.

  “Guess what?” she said, with a twinkle in her eye that reminded me of Emily.

  “What?”

  “When I went out to take a walk just now I bumped into Neville. He told me Jersey Rothstein is moving to New Haven! He’ll be here in January!”

  “Did he get a job here?”

  “Neville doesn’t know why he’s moving here.”

  “I’m not sure I understand why you’re so happy about this.”

  “He’ll be here and we’ll able to challenge him face to face. Isn’t that great?”

  “Yeah, that should be exciting.”

  She ran her hands up under my white undershirt and kissed my forehead. “Promise to love me forever, Arthur?”

  6:00 p.m. Saturday, May 11, 2012

  I have not eaten since I checked into the Chappine. When I was writing about Paul I ordered some fruit to bring back memories in a kind of a sour-Proust way, but I didn’t eat any of it, partially because I didn’t like the way the attendant who brought it smirked at me—apparently, “#Huntcest” is a trending topic on Twitter—but mostly because my stomach is too full of Sydney and my past. I have checked news services but no one seems to have any information on her. I have emailed some colleagues and sources but no one has responded; no one seems to want to speak to me. The entire experience does rather make me wish I had a burqa, and this in turn makes me think about Daisy.

  Before Jason deployed to Iraq, Miranda emailed me several times a day asking me whether it was possible that there was anything else I had not yet thought of that might still dissuade him, or if there was anything I could think of that might convince the military to keep him in the States or send him to Korea or do anything other than send him to Iraq. After he went to Iraq, she started emailing me several times a week wanting more details about how great and necessary the war was. These were the words she used, great and necessary. At first I thought she was mocking both me and the war, but it quickly became clear that she did in fact want to know precisely what the war was accomplishing, so that she could better cheer on her son. Soon enough, she was sending me her own arguments for the war, her own glosses on the day’s news. Sometimes a particularly bad day of bombings would leave me dispirited, but she would email saying that this only further proved that defeating the Islamofascists was absolutely necessary. She started mentioning Jason less and less, restricting herself to general comments about the insurgency. Her support for the war only heightened with Jason’s death. “It pains me to say it,” she wrote me only two weeks afterward, “but I think that it may be time to put people in prison for criticizing the war.”