“I think it was about our time,” I said. “It was subtle.”
“Subtle! Subtlety is bourgeois. Brecht taught us that when he popped drama’s cherry. He fucked drama until it stopped being subtle, like a lady, and started being useful, like a whore. Don’t tell me you’re afraid of whores.”
I was transfixed. “I’m not.”
“I’m starting to think that whores could be the revolutionary vanguard.” She leaned over her plate as she spoke, clearly the sort of person who needed to gesticulate in order to follow her own train of thought, and since her hands were occupied with cutlery she compensated with broad facial expressions. In an unattractive girl, this might have been another reason to find her unattractive. It made me want Miranda even more.
“They’re obviously the symbol of the proletariat, the human being as chattel, but they can be more than that.” I looked at the tiny mole just above her mouth. Her mouth quivered just a little as she spoke. For all her bombast there was something nervous and shy about her.
“I feel bad,” she said. “I should be back out there. They’re holding an all-night vigil outside President Brewster’s house.”
“I’m curious. What do you say to people who think that communism is better in theory than in practice?”
She took a bite of her toast and answered as she chewed, trying to suppress a self-satisfied smile. “Practice is better in theory than in practice.”
There was a nice silence that lasted too long and became an awkward silence. I thought I should say something and, after struggling a bit for a topic, I brought up the negotiations to merge Vassar and Yale. She shrugged a bit and said she didn’t know why people kept talking about that, as it probably would not wind up happening and it didn’t matter much anyway. I brought up Staughton Lynd, a history professor who had been denied tenure, possibly on the basis of academic merit and possibly because he had made a much-publicized visit to Hanoi in support of North Vietnam. She said that the topic was boring and that, even though some students still were not convinced, it was obvious that the process had been fair.
“Somebody can be leftist without being smart,” she said. “By the way, you realize that everything I’ve told you so far is a lie.”
I knew that she was joking, but something about this claim was arousing.
She was leaning back in her seat now with her arms crossed over her stomach and I could feel her interest in me dissipating. I could envision myself going home alone, with nothing to think about except for my sister.
“Have you read The Dominion of Pleasure?” I asked, pulling it out of my back pocket. She had not heard of the book, and she read the back cover with dismay. She read the first page and, not looking up from the book, she said that Rothstein was all wrong, that in fact sex without justice was not sex at all. It was only brutality, and justice without sex was likely only brutality as well.
“This guy is an asshole,” she said. “He’s a fascist.”
“An asshole,” I said. “Yes.”
I motioned for the check and took out my wallet, but I didn’t have any cash.
“I’ll talk to the owner,” I said. “He likes me, I think.”
Miranda swung her leg up on to the table. She reached into her boot and took out a ten-dollar bill. “I always keep a ten-dollar bill in my shoe,” she said. “Just in case.”
After that we walked around campus and she talked about Rothstein, about how if she were a dictator she would want everyone to follow Rothstein’s philosophy, about how obvious it was that Rothstein did not understand sex at all. Then she talked about de Kooning and Rothko and other painters. She told me she was an only child. I told her that I had a sister, but that we were not especially close. That was too bad, she said, it always warmed her heart to hear of close siblings. Occasionally she would say, plainly without meaning it, that it was getting late and she really should go to the vigil outside President Brewster’s house. I decided not to mention that President Brewster had been a good friend of my father’s when they were undergraduates. Haltingly, checking my reaction as she spoke, she talked about her ex-boyfriend, Neville Norture, also a Yale student. She said that he was not the smartest guy she had ever met but beneath all of his idiocies and his off-putting arrogance he really cared about improving the world. A lot of guys were like that, she thought, stupid but caring. He was nothing like me, though, she said; he was not nearly as witty. Before I had time to wonder why she thought I was witty we were talking about a play that she had seen and that I pretended to have seen called How Now, Dow Jones. For the most part she talked and I listened; I was afraid that the more I talked the more likely I would be to say something that would expose me as a freak with fantasies of fucking his sister.
Eventually we stopped by the vigil and we stayed until it was too late for her to catch the last bus back to Smith. We both pretended that this was accidental.
f
Bright young lad, the world outside is just a fad
Once you’re here, you won’t need a map
Welcome to the Chapp
“Such a great song,” my sister used to say of “I Pine for the Chappine.” The eponymous film—one of the more energetic of the fur-coat-and-tap-dancing movies of the Depression—probably appealed to her more than did the song itself. There’s a scene where Ginger Rogers does a few steps of a waltz with a portrait of a stuffy-looking fat man with a moustache and a gold watch, and then tosses the portrait into the fireplace and does a tap dance. Hanging above my desk as I write this is a hack painting of the Chappine’s lobby. There are leather chairs and men with cigars, the backs of their heads reflected in mirrors. Today the hotel is for tourists who’ve seen the movie. Even when I used to come here with my family it was in decline. My grandfather killed himself toward the end of its great era. The leather chairs are still there, though, as are the pillars. There’s a new, ostentatious hanging waterfall to replace the old mural, which depicted members of an Indian tribe, presumably the Chappine tribe, huddling around a fire, thrusting spears into the air, as though their spears might propel them into the sky.
When we used to come to the Chappine for Emily’s birthday, we rented out a capacious suite on the third floor that is now a fitness center, filled with televisions and elliptical machines. The room I’m staying in is tiny, certainly not large enough for the king-size bed they’ve insisted on cramming in, and not large enough for the desk on which I’m writing this.
Downstairs in the lobby, the white pillars look just as they did when Emily would try without success to climb them.
For some time after Paul’s death, the hotel was a forbidden subject. Because it was only a few blocks away from my family’s apartment, we passed by frequently—and when we did, my father dug his crutches into the concrete. My mother had this way of widening her eyes that suggested that she was absent from her body, but that she might very well do violence if she ever returned. One day Emily pointed to the birdshit-dappled gargoyles on the hotel’s façade and said they were pretty. Our father halted and, after looking from Emily to the gargoyles, laughed in a way that scared me and made Emily cry—not something Emily often did. He told her that she was right, the gargoyles were pretty, and inside the hotel was even prettier, and because her birthday was coming up the family would spend her birthday there. After that my father rented a suite every year to celebrate Emily’s birthday.
When I was a teenager, there was, of course, no Internet. Between checking whether Peter Reaper has said anything new—he hasn’t—and exerting the energy required to stop myself from idly looking at pornography, it’s amazing that I can write anything at all.
The last time I was at the Chappine was in February of 2003, for a debate on the then-imminent war in Iraq. The debate was sponsored by a liberal magazine I had occasionally written for and which now wanted nothing to do with me, other than to put me at a podium and yell at me. After I accepted his invitation
, the editor responded with an email accusing me of accepting only so that I could gloat that all the blood I had been calling for would soon be shed. But gloating wasn’t at all what I had in mind. These people had once been my friends, and I didn’t want to lord any victory over them (a victory which in any case was not mine but the Iraqis’, and for that matter the world’s), or honestly even to debate them, but simply to embrace them and drink wine with them and talk about something else entirely. We are about to overthrow a tyrant, I wanted to say, let us celebrate the moment that is about to arrive, regardless of whether we wanted it to arrive. Failing that, they could yell at me all they wanted. It would still be good to see them.
I would have preferred an invasion of REDACTED to an invasion of Iraq, but it would have seemed churlish to complain.
Was I nervous about going to the Chappine? Not at all. Whatever ghosts there were would have grown tired of waiting for me and moved on. Besides, the war was too important for me to be thinking about myself. I was thinking about the Iraqis, about the people in Saudi Arabia and throughout the region, and I was thinking about Emily. Surely, Emily, if she was still alive, must have read my articles, and she must have supported the war. She must have seen that I was fighting for the rights of women. She must have been reading the newspapers every day for the previous eighteen months, cheering as women in Afghanistan took off their burqas. Maybe she was an aid worker in Kandahar, having moved there after the fall of the Taliban. Maybe she was somehow in Iraq and she was one of the women whom the American military would save from rape. In any case, she must have seen that I was fighting for the right of women not to be raped by the sons of a dictator, for the right of women not to cover their faces, for the right of women not to be beaten by their husbands. Emily couldn’t help but see my involvement in all of this as a righting of what she and I had done. Even if everything that happened between us had gone as we had hoped, only she and I would have been made free. What was happening now would make many people free. She must have supported the war. On my way to the debate I thought that there was even the possibility that she would be in the audience at the Chappine, there to smile at me from the audience, even if she perhaps covered her face with a scarf or something, not ready to see me yet—and for all I know she may have been there.
The debate had been scheduled to coincide with the Saturday of the massive worldwide protests against the war, so I wound up spending much of the subway ride listening to two college students, a boy and a girl on their way to the New York protest. The girl, whose eyes were strikingly similar to Miranda’s, was holding a placard that said, in purple marker and glitter, ARTHUR HUNT IS A WAR CRIMINAL. I was wearing a Panama hat and they did not seem to have noticed me. They would have loved to have known that I had been up late into the night on the phone with a friend at the Pentagon, even though he and I had spoken only very briefly and in very broad terms about military strategy before settling into a conversation about whether Solzhenitsyn or Orwell was of greater world-historical import.
I didn’t want to listen to these kids. I wanted to see Emily in the audience.
“Why do you care about Arthur Hunt?” the boy asked his girlfriend, putting his hand on her lower back. “Nobody really listens to him. There are plenty of other guys who betrayed their sixties principles.”
Oh, the betrayal of principles! What very few people understood was that my support for the war on Islamofascism, of which the Iraq War would be merely a part, was not at all a slinking to the center or the right as it is frequently caricatured, but a hardening of revolutionary principles, of a refusal to accept that you should do nothing to prevent Arab women from being raped or hanged simply because of the accident that you were not born an Arab. To support the war was to believe that Arab women were your sisters, or closer than your sisters, because the affinity was free of the cumbersomely genetic.
“I hate Arthur Hunt because of why he supports the war,” said the girl with Miranda’s eyes.
“Every war has journalists who say that it’s for freedom. Doesn’t mean anything.”
“I think some of them mean it. I think Hunt definitely means it. Hunt actually believes that this war will bring freedom to the Iraqis. That’s what makes him so bad.” Her movements, too, reminded me of Miranda, especially the way her free hand was fluttering. “It’s one thing to be honest and say that you want to burn the flesh of Arabs because you think that the smell will reassure you that you are safe and secure, like the smell of a fireplace in winter. But the liberals seem to think that kindling is what benefits from a fire.”
For all the rhetorical energy of this speech, it sounded very much like something she had rehearsed several times. It sounded willed rather than willing. There was none of what had made Miranda so exhilarating to listen to: her expectation of success. Still, it was gratifying that a girl this young was paying attention to my arguments at all. I imagined lying naked with her in a hotel bed, maybe kissing the butterfly tattoo on her neck, proving to her the errors in her logic and the moral necessity of invading Iraq. She was smart, so it wouldn’t take more than an hour to correct her, and then we would make love again. I chastised myself; the girl was much too young for me. But I felt so young just then, and she seemed so defeated and old. Maybe, spiritually speaking, she was even too old for me.
“It doesn’t feel very good,” said the girl, “to be protesting getting rid of Saddam Hussein. It feels kind of awful, actually. It would be so great for so many people if he were no longer in power. The war might be necessary. Maybe what’s important right now is to have a lot of doubt about everything.”
This was too much for me, this luxuriating in caution and doubt. Not making up your mind provides the illicit thrill of complying at once with the most rigorous standards of morality and with none at all. “It seems awful,” I wrote in an article at the time, “either to support the war, which is to add one more signature to a death order for what admittedly could be thousands of civilians, or to oppose the war, which would be to consent to the continued rape and torture of those same civilians. But to understand this, to look clearly at the awfulness of either option, to keep your mind clean of every evasion and euphemism and thus see things in all their terrible contours, this is condemnably satisfying. For all the famously perilous pleasures of certainty, doubt has its own heady, priggish joys.”
I pulled my Panama hat down so it obscured my eyes as I leaned toward the kids.
“Have you heard the rumor,” I asked, “that Arthur Hunt likes to eat Iraqi babies? Dipped in oil, of course, and a pinch of salt, though he abstains from butter for reasons of health. You’re right that he’s a monster.”
“Let’s get off at the next stop,” her boyfriend said, edging between her and me.
“We have a couple more stops to go,” she said. There is a particular type of young girl who can never resist engaging with apparently lunatic people she happens to meet. She turned back to me. “I’m not saying that Arthur Hunt is a monster. I’m saying he’s a war criminal.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Monsters are sympathetic once you understand them.”
“Hasn’t Hunt written that he’s concerned that the Bush Administration has unnecessarily alienated our allies and that we’re not going in with enough troops?” I asked.
“Sure, but he still insists that any American who criticizes the war has been duped into loving Saddam Hussein.”
“Just the sort of atrocious behavior I’d expect from a baby-eater. That story is true, you know. He’ll do any disgusting thing that pops into his head, whether it’s supporting the war or eating babies. Killing Iraqis to make them free is something he enjoys doing only on a full stomach of babies. Everything is fair game for Arthur Hunt. Especially eating babies.”
About halfway through this, the girl recognized me and said so, but I ignored her.
“Why do you think we have the right to get involved in
things that are none of our business?” asked her boyfriend. “The war isn’t in our interests.”
“Why are you interested in our interests?” I asked. “Steadying the stilts of a dictator does not strike me as a revolutionary activity.” I turned to the girl. “Your beautiful green eyes remind me of a girl I used to know. I don’t think she would have liked you very much. You remind me of a different girl I knew, too, but it’s more painful for me to think of her. I hate Bush and I would do anything for this war to be fought by someone else. Do you know how awful it is to be supporting that man? I’m sorry I’ve been yelling at you. Won’t you slow down so we can talk for a minute?”
By the time I got to the end of this, the doors had opened, the boyfriend had shepherded the girl off the subway, and I was following, shouting against a crush of people getting on. I had almost caught up with them before I realized I had no idea why I was following them, so I slowed down to let them get far ahead and disappear into the crowd.
My desire to debate had rather definitively gone. I couldn’t stand another round of Munich-Vietnam pingpong in which I would say “Munich” and they would say “Vietnam,” and then we would repeat until it was time for refreshments. But the cold air reminded me of my purpose. That particular day of protests has acquired some prestige in retrospect, as well as some of the energetic, offhand beauty of girls raising their brightly colored mittens to their mouths to amplify their demands that there be no war for oil. But at the time most of the energy seemed to be little more than the exhaust fumes of backward-looking vanity. All these people pretending not to know that, if the Islamofascists have their way (as they still might), the twenty-first century will be a short one.
For me, it was the war itself that felt like a second flowering of youth, a third coming of 1968 and 1989. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be very nearly old was very nearly heaven. A new society was possible, if not for us then for the Iraqis. Iraqi society as it horrifically was would be incinerated, and out of it would grow something else. All across the region the sexual revolution would arrive by tank.
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