Short Century

by David Burr Gerrard

  “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.

  I threw the blankets off and went to the bathroom to shower and shave. Then I was consumed with which aftershave I would use, with how I would arrange my hair. How pathetic: I was primping for Melissa.

  f

  At tennis I concentrated on Brad’s serve. Tennis had meant something to me once. I used to love the smells of the game. The heat, the ball, the concrete.

  Emily, standing next to Brad, tamped down the air with her racket. “Come on, Arthur, you’re not even trying.”

  “Leave him alone,” Melissa said, stroking my back. “He’s got a lot on his mind. Don’t you, sweetie?” I remembered loving the way she said “sweetie.” I wanted to find the person who delighted in Melissa’s scratchy voice. What capacity for love, what generosity of spirit that person must have had! I was a usurper in my own body and I wanted to restore the exiled ruler. I looked at the way Melissa’s black hair fell over her shoulders. In the scheme of things, it wasn’t that different from the way Miranda’s black hair fell over her shoulders. By any reasonable standard Melissa was much more attractive. As Emily and Brad conferred over something, Melissa pressed her breasts into my side and I got an erection, as though she had placed a quarter into a jukebox and produced a song.

  I turned to Emily, who was preparing to serve. Sweat from her abdomen soaked through her shirt.

  “You know, Arthur,” Brad said. “You might want to consider seeing my tennis coach. I’ve been using him for years.” Brad threw his broad, toweled shoulders back and smiled at me. His smile asserted that there was nothing in the world that might displease anyone who mattered, and it was surprisingly persuasive on this point. I wished I could be Brad, this strong-jawed, bountifully inconsequential boy who was fucking my sister.

  “He has this marvelously Italian way of looking at things,” Brad continued. “He…”

  “That’s fascinating, darling.” Emily tossed the ball, and as she did I noticed something in her smile. Or maybe it was something in her eyes. There was no question that I wanted to have sex with her. It had nothing to do with politics, there was no way that I could dress up my desire in ideology—I just wanted to have sex with her. She hit the ball and then she shook her hair from her face and repositioned her feet. A loud noise came from Melissa’s racquet, then another, and another. Some of these noises came from my racquet but I was repelling the ball more than returning it. I looked at the muscles in Emily’s thighs, straining against her shorts. She was beautiful. But I knew this already.

  This was just a passing thought. Like all the other thoughts had been passing thoughts. I did not want to have sex with my sister. I was not some hunched-over, jagged-toothed pervert.

  Melissa hit the ball over the net. “Hahaha. I’m so bad at this,” she said. Melissa’s hair looked like a clump of squid ink. Her eyes looked like coins that had been left in a fountain too long. “I’m so bad. Hahaha. Hahahaha. Hahahahahahahaha.”

  I dropped my racquet. “Fucking shut up, you goddamned whore.”

  f

  I did not leave my room for the rest of the day. My mother yelled at me from outside my door, and then yelled at Emily when I wouldn’t answer. I picked up books but could not stay focused for more than two or three paragraphs. I thought of the way Emily would bunch her hair and massage her scalp when she was embarrassed. I thought of those movies where at the end the hero realizes he’s in love with the girl who’s been close by all along.

  I would stop thinking like this soon. It was absurd and it would pass. It was nothing to worry about. It was nothing. It would be gone after a good night’s sleep. I just had not been myself lately.

  If I was not myself, my sister was not my sister.

  This was bad. I had had the idea before, but it had never felt like a need. Had some co
mbination of Miranda and the Department of Defense ravaged me so thoroughly? Surely I had enough moral fortitude, well below the reasonably expected minimum, not to attempt to seduce my sister.

  In all likelihood she would probably not even want to have sex with me. True, there was the way she touched me—always grabbing me, always poking me—and there was the way she wanted to know every opinion and every observation that crossed my mind. But she wasn’t insane, she wasn’t sick. There wasn’t some sort of canker growing on her brain, as there apparently was on mine.

  I needed sleep. That was all.

  f

  When I heard Emily’s voice the next morning as she threw the blinds open, I scratched some crust from my eyes and roused myself.

  “You’re not going to like this, Arthur,” she said. She was wearing a white dress that showed no cleavage.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “We’re going to go to church.”

  “Church.”

  “I know, I know. But Mom says you need it. She wasn’t happy about the way you spoke to Melissa. And apparently she thinks that going to church will sanitize your potty mouth. She’s so medieval.”

  “She’s right. Let’s go to church.” I reached for the sheets, intending to throw them off, but I stopped myself when I realized I was naked.

  “Don’t worry, it won’t be that bad,” Emily said. “If we just go today, she’ll forget and she won’t make us go next week.”

  “Right. Let me just take a shower and get dressed. I won’t be more than twenty minutes.”

  “You look like you’re actually excited to go.”

  “Yeah, I’m really excited to go to church,” I said, careful to sound sarcastic.

  She grinned. “You have a hard-on for church.”

  “I don’t have a hard-on!”

  She laughed. “Sorry about this. You know how Mom gets. See you downstairs. Oh, I dumped Brad.”

  “What? Why?”

  “He wanted to make me make you apologize to Melissa, and I told him that all you did was accurately describe her as a godforsaken whore.”

  “Emily, why did you…”

  “I know, you actually called her a goddamned whore, but I think I was more precise. I don’t think God has condemned her to Hell; he just can’t be bothered with her. Anyway, they’re both morons, you know that. I just set you up with Melissa because I thought maybe you wanted to get laid.”

  “Why did you date Brad in the first place?”

  “I’ve been trying to figure that out. I’ll see you downstairs.”

  My tie was tied as well as it had been at prep school—which is to say, serviceably if not perfectly—when I arrived downstairs. I greeted my mother, but she did not look up from her paper. There was a dryness to her face, her face looked like an arid patch of desert, as though having me for a son were like living in a drought. This was entirely reasonable. I was a disgrace, a humiliation. I had called an intemperately nice girl a goddamn whore. Even though my mother couldn’t know what was happening in my head, I had done enough to be awful.

  But I was sure that she did know what was happening in my head. Somehow she knew what a monster her son was.

  “I’m sorry, Mother,” I said. “I really am. There’s no excuse for my behavior.”

  “I hope you plan to apologize to that poor girl,” she said without looking at me.

  In the car Emily kept trying to catch my eye to draw me into some private joke, but I wouldn’t let her. When we got to church, I tried to make sure that our mother sat between us, but Emily grabbed my arm as we filed into the pew and we sat next to each other.

  We were silent until the Reverend spoke. The Reverend, blond and blue-eyed with imposing girth, reminded me of Rothstein, though he looked nothing like Rothstein. He began to read the second book of Samuel, chapter 7, verse 2.

  “The King said to Nathan the prophet: See now, I dwell in a house of Cedar, but the ark of God dwells within curtains. And Nathan said to the King: Go, do all that is in your heart, for the Lord is with you.”

  As the Reverend continued speaking I looked down at the floor and as I did so I saw Emily’s calves. I thought of the way Miranda’s legs looked against the pew the day we made love in the church.

  Maybe Emily was right; maybe I was being a Puritan. Maybe breaking up with Miranda had left me disgusted by the human body, which was not something I wanted to be disgusted by. I should be encouraging Emily’s robust sexuality. We could not have sex with each other, but we should each travel the most scenic of erotic roads.

  Paul would never have had the balls to seduce Emily.

  I remember that this was a jarring thought even in that morning of jarring thoughts. Surely I did not want to seduce Emily to prove that I was more of a man than Paul. Strange way to prove that, if this were my goal.

  But I wanted to have sex with Emily. I loved her.

  I could fuck, more, I could make love to Emily. One session would be fucking and another would be making love, or we would erase the distinction between the two. It would be sex for its own sake and sex for the highest of political ends. Rothstein was wrong: sex and politics were not antagonists.

  Maybe sex between a brother and a sister was the opposite of what I wanted to oppose. Sex between a father and a daughter or a mother and son would never be clean of coercion, if only because any relationship between parents and children is never quite clean of coercion. A brother and a sister who had sex, on the other hand, would be doing so as equals. It would be an act of total freedom—freedom from taboo, freedom from power, freedom from imperialism, freedom from anything it was possible to think of. Not a Raskolnikov-like act of violence, but an Arthur-like act of creation. An Arthur-and-Emily-like act of creation.

  It was my duty to do this, it was my duty to destroy civilization by fucking my sister.

  Do all that is in your heart, for the Lord is with you.

  f

  Throughout the rest of the service I could not wait to speak to Emily, and it was only as we were leaving the pew and she asked me if I had spotted the curl of hair coming from the Reverend’s left ear that I remembered that deciding to have sex with my sister would not by itself make it happen. I would have to convince her, and I had no idea how to do that.

  On the drive back, Emily said, much louder than necessary: “Wasn’t that boring?” She directed the question at me, but she was looking at our mother to see her reaction.

  “Yes!” I said. “Christianity has always been the Gestapo of desire, since long, long before there was a Gestapo. Instead of Jews to hate, Christianity has desire. Though I guess Christianity has Jews, too. In any case, all the ovens in the world can’t incinerate desire. So they try to turn desire into other things. Jesus was a carpenter! Think about that! Think about it. Carpenters take wood, which comes from nature, trees, forests, they cut down wood so they can take what nature made perfect and turn it into these ugly pieces of furniture.” I did not know why I was saying the things I was saying. “That’s what Christianity does. We need to defy Christianity by having healthy, unfettered sex. And also by bringing social justice to the world.”

  Then I continued on about how Jesus was right about social justice even though he was wrong about sex. I ended up on something about the camel and the needle’s eye. As I spoke, Emily and my mother looked progressively more confused.

  “What I mean is that Christianity takes beautiful desire and makes ugly morality the way carpenters…”

  “Maybe that’s enough now, Arthur,” my mother said, more concerned than angry, the way she used to speak to me when I had a fever. Emily looked at her hands, folded in her lap.

  f

  To want something with all of one’s soul and to be too timid to go after it was to fall into the most contemptible class of people, and that class was now mine. I was a failure at transgression: the
moral equivalent of smelling of piss and eating out of garbage bins.

  There was at least cause to feel sorry for people who ate out of garbage bins. If there was any creature with two eyes and a cock less likely to receive sympathy than a rich kid who couldn’t be happy, it was a pervert who couldn’t get laid. Or a rich pervert who couldn’t get laid. I might as well buy a raincoat and start leaving puddles of semen in the Manhattan subway.

  For the first time all summer Emily left me alone. I ate my meals by myself and spent the rest of the day on the beach or in my room. When we passed in the house Emily smiled at me and did not say anything. She was so distant that I wondered whether she had detected what I had been thinking. It was either that, or she had decided that my suicide was a foregone conclusion, so there was no point worrying about me anymore.

  Later that day the phone rang. It was the voice of a boy who wanted to speak with Emily. I told him he had the wrong number.

  f

  Late that night I came downstairs to get some food when I found Emily in front of the television. Right now the movie was It Happened One Night, one of our favorites.

  There was a famous scene, about ten or fifteen minutes away, where Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert try to hitchhike and she hikes her skirt up her thigh to stop a car. Emily liked to raise her skirt in tandem with Colbert, and we had always acted as though it were innocent for her to show off her leg for me. Now it was obvious to me that we had been deluding ourselves, and I couldn’t wait for the scene.

  “I love this movie,” I said, though Emily already knew this.

  “I love the guy playing the violin,” she said. “I love how he’s playing the violin on a bus. Or would you call it a fiddle?”

  “A fiddle, I think.”

  “Men look so good in fedoras. It must be great to take an all-night bus trip. Look at the rain on the bus window; it’s ghostly in a weird way. Why did you tell Jacob Anderson that he had the wrong number?”

  “Who’s Jacob Anderson?”

  “The boy you told had the wrong number when he called here today. Why did you tell him that?”

  “I’m sorry, I just…”