Short Century_A Novel

by David Burr Gerrard

  Of course my euphoria was shadowed by the thought of Jason Rothstein, by then in basic training.

  My way to the hotel was only very minimally obstructed by the overstuffed but undernourished protest. I stopped by a group of girls in matching turquoise knit caps. They were talking in terms that were more or less blatantly anti-Semitic about how Jews had “hijacked U.S. foreign policy” on behalf of Israel. This has always struck me as a strange argument. Second- or third-generation Americans wholeheartedly supporting a war fought for American ideals was, far from of an act of sedition, a form of immigrant striving.

  “Do you think Arthur Hunt is a war criminal?” I asked the girls.

  “Who’s Arthur Hunt?” one of them asked. None of the others had heard of me either.

  “He’s a journalist who supports the war,” I said. “You haven’t heard the rumor that he was involved in the assassination of Augusto Sanchez? The labor leader in Mexico?” There was no such person.

  “I think I remember reading that somewhere,” one of them said. “How was he supposed to be involved again?”

  “He scheduled an interview with Sanchez,” I said, “and the CIA assassinated him at the meeting place. Did you read the article in the New Neo-Marxist Review?” There was no such magazine. Or there may have been, but I hadn’t heard of it.

  “Just before he was murdered,” I said, “Sanchez gave a speech saying that America was a cannibal. America feeds on the flesh of the world. But why shouldn’t it? Not to feed on the flesh of world wouldn’t just be weak—it would be arrogant. The only possible reason for the greatest power the world has ever known not to use its power would be haughtiness. And Arthur Hunt is so haughty that he believes American power should be used for the freedom of others, which is just to squander it. The machinery of the military itself is not haughty and wants only, beautifully, to destroy.”

  They were already beginning to argue with me as I turned away from them and approached the hotel. The entire façade had been redone recently; the old stone gargoyles had been replaced with new, sleeker gargoyles made with what looked like shale but probably wasn’t. By any standard this was far uglier, though this was not quite enough to recommend it.

  If only I could be the Arthur Hunt who collaborated in killing Augusto Sanchez. An Arthur Hunt who would do whatever his government asked of him, and so would never have any confusion about his motives, never have to wonder about Bush’s true motives, never have to construct complicated Rube-Goldberg justifications for the use of American power. What a beautiful thing it would be to love your own nation and to hate all the others—openly and simply and, therefore, beautifully. A politics that needed no explanation. Why would I want to use American power? Because I was an American.

  Before I made it into the building a giant puppet head of Bush, painted a rotting eggplant blackish purple, bobbed and swayed down the street. The mouth was twisted into the anguished knot of a mask of tragedy. Whoever was holding the mask was obscured, and the head looked as though it were commanding the marchers, as though it were in the midst of a speech so powerful that it needed no words at all. From time to time it jolted upward as though to stir the crowd. Only with the dreary aid of context could you see that the mouth was supposed to be twisted into agony rather than into Bush’s dazzled, triumphant smirk. Just like me, everyone here was submitting to George Bush because there was no other option.

  It occurred to me—as of course it had already occurred to me—that Paul, if he had lived, would have supported this war. But he would have supported it for the wrong reasons.

  I walked past the Chappine and missed the debate.

  f

  The morning after I slept with Miranda, she took the bus back to Smith and I took the bus to New York. The windshield wipers pushed away the rain, both the wipers and the rain slow and heavy, as though each possessed the stolid determination extolled at prep school. My father would not let me have a car; inexplicably, he deemed it extravagant. This was typical of my father, who denied things to me apparently at random. I knew I had no cause to complain, but still it was a curious despotism. As I sat on the bus I was gripped by a feeling that was beyond happiness or unhappiness, that in fact made the concepts of happiness and unhappiness seem feeble and perverse, as feeble and perverse as stolid determination.

  When I arrived at the hotel my suit was dripping. As I entered the lobby I imagined, as I always did, my grandfather hanging by a noose from the chandelier. Emily was sitting in one of the clay-red leather chairs in the lobby with her legs draped over the edge, which in the nice silver dress she was wearing had probably taken some effort. Her hair had clearly been worked on that morning and looked even straighter and more exhaustively yellow than usual. I did not think her attractive or unattractive. I just thought her my lovely sister, and I felt terrible that I had entertained thoughts of defiling her. She looked uncomfortable, as though she were wearing a movie-star costume.

  She jumped out of her chair and stumbled on her heels. Grabbing my hand to steady herself, she twisted her mouth for an instant to acknowledge her clumsiness.

  “Welcome to Hanging Huntington’s Hotel,” she said. “I really thought I would be able to get us out of it.”

  “Next time.”

  “James just bought me a really nice sweater. It’s a shade of blue I really like. Do you think I need to give it back?”

  “You shouldn’t have broken up with him just because of what happened with me.”

  “It wasn’t just that. He’s boring. All the boys I know are so boring. And the girls are much, much worse. I wish you still lived at home.”

  This was not what I wanted to hear given what I had been thinking about the previous day. “Maybe you should get back together with James,” I said.

  “Don’t I look horrible? Mom forced me to wear this ugly dress.”

  “You look gr…”

  “I thought about calling you this morning and saying you didn’t have to come, but I wanted you here. Was that selfish?”

  “Of course I’m here. It’s your birthday.”

  And on saying this, I felt a rush of triumph, just because Paul was dead and I was here.

  “I was just thinking,” Emily said, “about a time when I was maybe three or four when Paul told me that all the Greek gods lived in the Chappine. This was before anybody in the family knew that I knew that Grandpa had killed himself. I was too old to believe Paul about the gods so I asked him to take me to the Chappine to prove it. He said that the gods killed little girls who entered. I think on some level he actually believed that the hotel had some sort of mystical force, as opposed to just being a place where the wives of insurance agents from Kansas pretend they’re rich Europeans. He was such an idiot. You’re nothing like him. Are you sure you’re all right? You look like something’s bothering you.”

  “Buses always make me want to throw up.”

  “You know, I don’t know what I think about whether I want to get married. And I sometimes think that I wouldn’t miss Mom at all if she suddenly dropped dead. That’s awful to say, but it’s the way I feel. I love Dad, but you’re the most important person in the world to me. I want you to know that in case you ever think about doing what Paul did. You’re so much smarter than he was and I don’t think you would, but just in case you ever…”

  “Maybe you should get back together with James.”

  “You don’t have to worry. I’m doing fine. We should get going. Arthur the Third is waiting.”

  As concerned as she was for me, she couldn’t resist the opportunity to get under my skin. And I couldn’t resist the urge to let it bother me.

  “Do you have to call him that?”

  “Arthur the Third is waiting.” She asked me how I thought the war was going as we headed to the elevators.

  Emily rang the bell to our suite and we waited a longer time than I would have expected. She pantomime
d a noose, cocked her head sideways, and stuck out her tongue. This was not such a bad life, really. I would never have to work if I didn’t want to. I could stay in hotels like this one, but that weren’t this one. That were much more luxurious than this one, in fact. I could marry a girl like Emily and laugh all the time. I could ignore politics. People who didn’t ignore politics usually got into trouble, and they often got a lot of other people in trouble as well. It was frequently said that the only reason you got involved in politics was to distract yourself from personal problems. And it was true that you could consign your life to politics and get everything wrong. But you could just as easily consign your life to personal matters and still get everything wrong. You could think you were advocating for democracy and actually be advocating for the death camps. Or you could fling open every closet of regret and desire in yourself and the people you loved, and still there would be one closet you missed, and crouched in that closet, never to see the dark of day, would be your most crucial self. Maybe these were synonyms for private and public: the unspoken and the unspeakable.

  Our mother opened the door wearing a dress identical to Emily’s and holding a half-eaten pear. She hugged me, and past her I saw discarded fruit lying on the floor: apple cores, banana peels, orange peels. It had become a ritual when we were at the Chappine, one that we never acknowledged, to discard fruit on the floor. Not even Emily and I talked about it. How this ritual got started, I can’t say, but one of the first things my mother did whenever we arrived at the Chappine was order a bowl of fruit from room service, and over the course of the day we all dropped fruit on the floor.

  “Bright young lad!” my mother said. “Welcome to the Chapp!” Then she dropped her pear and, careful to step around the fruit, disappeared into the suite’s master bedroom with the small, aggrieved, but unobtrusive steps that were her trademark.

  While she was making her retreat, my father greeted me, not moving his crutches. By this time my father was spending more time in Washington than in New York, so I hadn’t seen him in some time. He had a habit of giving a weary little laugh whenever he saw me, as though I were the punchline to a very long joke.

  “I was at the protest against Mrs. Johnson’s speech,” I said. Immediately, I knew that saying this this way made me sound like a child leaping at the chance to offend. I expected sarcasm and dismissal, but instead I got delight.

  “Good! Maybe you’ll end the war. Mac Bundy thought he could bring freedom to Vietnam, but the problem with freedom is that when people have it, they do what they want to.”

  This comment hit me hard, and I thought about it often as my thinking evolved. I have often wondered whether the anti-war left secretly agrees with my father, and is secretly uncomfortable with the idea of freedom, particularly for black and brown people.

  “The only good thing the Defense Department does is make bombs,” my father said. “Bombs are a marvel created by a human race otherwise unworthy of them.”

  I had heard my father talk like this before. The aesthetics of bombs was one of his favorite topics, and it always led directly into the main speech of the afternoon.

  “Arthur,” Emily said, pulling me away. “I want to show you that new sweater I was telling you about.”

  “The human race is horrible, but if it has to survive, it should at least survive with a Huntington stamp.” He picked up a pear from the fruit bowl and now there was no stopping him, and now there was no question that we would all have to listen. Even my mother emerged from her room and stood in the doorway. We knew he was ridiculous but there was something arresting about him as well, as he leaned against one of his crutches, holding aloft a pear and discussing the end of the world.

  “The twentieth century will be a short century,” he said. “Either we or the Soviets will launch the missiles before long, and all the lies will be burned away. Members of our family will be there for whatever comes afterward. Emily, you may be the founding mother of the postapocalyptic race.” Emily and I suppressed our giggles. “You’ll have to watch out for weakness, though,” our father continued. “Some of us have indulged in the ultimate weakness right here in this hotel.”

  Emily ducked behind him and did the noose-pantomime that she always did at this part of the speech.

  “I could tell even when I was a child that your grandfather was weak. When he killed himself I was not even terribly surprised. But Paul surprised me. I thought Paul was strong, and yet he decided to leave nothing of himself. It’s awful to say, but Paul might as well never have lived. You should have as many children as you can. I love both of you, but two surviving children is not enough.”

  “Are you insulting Paul?” I asked.

  “No. I respect Paul enough to acknowledge that he never existed. That was what he set out to do and that was what he did. He also set out to make every minute that I spent with him a waste of my time on earth, and he did that as well. My son and my father had a lot in common with each other, and nothing in common with me. I find suicide simply unintelligible, as, I can already tell, does Emily.”

  “Daddy, don’t you want to give me my presents?” She adopted this little-girl tone whenever she spoke to our father. Around our father she was a different, and much diminished, person, which is strange given that I’m fairly certain that our father would have preferred her as she acted when it was only the two of us. How much sarcasm there was in her behavior was never clear to me, and maybe never clear to her.

  “Arthur,” my father said, “you should know that I don’t think you’re doomed to kill yourself if you don’t want to.”

  “Daddy doesn’t mean that,” Emily said, putting her hand on my shoulder.

  “So he does think I’m doomed to kill myself?”

  “Just because you’re not a very forceful young man,” my father said, “doesn’t mean you won’t find a way to make your mark.”

  “I’m going to prove you wrong,” I said. “Not about me, I don’t care about myself, but you’re wrong about the world. We’re not condemned to war, or whatever it is that you’re saying. There is good in the world.” I stormed off, though I didn’t know where in particular I was going. I made it a few steps before I fell on my ass.

  Yes, I slipped on a banana peel.

  f

  Free the oppressed peoples of the world, and make love to Miranda. These were my directives that fall and winter, and if I made little progress on the former, I proved abundantly triumphant on the latter. Soon, she was coming to school every weekend. (I always bought her ticket, though we never talked about it.) After the first several times we made love, lying entwined with Miranda’s sweaty body came to feel sacramental, or at least as I imagined sacraments must feel for a believer. I was amazed that both this and the episodes of haphazard groping and grasping I was accustomed to could be crammed together under the word “sex.” Our pleasure was so momentous it seemed Vietnamese peasants would have to experience some ripple effect.

  Our impulses were essentially monastic; for all our bluster about a worldwide movement, we brought out each other’s essential shyness. In truth we missed everything about 1968, both what was at the time incidentally and is now canonically ridiculous, and everything that was truly important. We were only dimly aware of the student movements outside the country, in Paris, Prague, Warsaw, Mexico City, Rome, West Berlin. The amount of freedom in the world is at least minimally greater as a result of what happened in these places, and they happened without my participation, or anything more than my fitful attention. Many years later I read that in Prague in April, there was an average of one suicide per day among politicians, and now whenever I think about 1968 I imagine these politicians getting in line, waiting their turn. Miranda and I might have gone to Europe or Mexico, but we did not, nor did we do much at home. The university movement was not as dramatic inside the country as it was outside of it, and not as dramatic at Yale as it was at Columbia, or, a bit later, Harvard, but
there was still a great deal going on, and we barely left my room on any given weekend. We went to a few sit-ins and teach-ins, but during these we talked mostly only to each other. We would have been horrified if someone had pointed this out to us—Miranda insisted on keeping the radio on when we made love, “to let the world in”—but for us 1968 might as well have been the first year of a nuclear winter; there might have been millions of survivors across an ocean, but to our unaided eyes and noses we were the only unburned of our species.

  There were entire days when I did not think of Paul or Emily. Or at least entire afternoons.

  For hours we would lie, her nose at my shoulder or my navel, reading aloud from Das Kapital. We were determined to read Marx’s entire corpus before the end of the year, or rather she was determined, and her determination was infectious. At some point we realized that Marx had little to do with contemporary communist movements, or else we simply got bored, so we read Marcuse and Debray. Furtively, as though we were each trying to keep it a secret from the other, we read Jersey Rothstein. Marcuse provided a counterpoint to Rothstein: Eros and Civilization argued that sexual freedom would itself change the world. “See,” Miranda said, “this is the truth.” Sitting in class one morning, I found her pubic hair in my teeth.

  When we weren’t having sex, she painted. One painting was titled “McNamara in Hell.” It depicted the Secretary of Defense among charred foliage, besieged by Asian children with garish green wings and tails. The lapels of McNamara’s suit coat were a smoldering orange, like the tip of a cigarette. As propaganda, the painting was numbingly blunt, but there was something in her palette that left me haunted.

  Many mornings, there was some variation of this scene: she would kiss my neck, waking me. She pressed her cheek against mine. I felt her oven-warm breath against my face and her scratchy pubic hair against my abdomen. I started laughing and so did she. There was something triumphantly funny about being so turned on. She slid down my torso, lumbering like a penguin. I loved that she lumbered. She put my cock inside of her, quickly and smirking, the way she might toss something into her purse if she were shoplifting.