Unfortunately, Rothstein does not excite you either. He excites you in bed—he is a skilled lover and it is impossible not to admire how many different ways he knows how to deliver an orgasm. You are curious whether he loves you, you look for clues that he loves you, but you would not be devastated to discover that he did not in fact love you, or so at least you think. You are actually irritated that he loves you, because now you will never know how you would feel if he did not love you. There is affection in your curiosity but no urgency. Maybe the problem is with you: you lack the ability to feel. But that’s not true. The thought that you lack the ability to feel makes you almost unbearably sad. You lack the desire to feel. Your old excuse, your Catholic education, with its search-and-destroy incursions into your sexual desire, won’t save you; whatever it is that makes it impossible for you to love was inside of you before the nuns got to you, before even your parents got to you.
This is intolerable, and there is no reason to believe it is true. You’re a child, and the belief that you’ll never change or get better is a childish one; worse, it’s an adolescent one, and whatever people’s thoughts on childhood and adulthood, everyone seems to agree that nothing thought by an adolescent can be correct. You’ll get better. Maybe the problem is that you don’t understand what romantic excitement is, perhaps you are experiencing romantic excitement with Rothstein but you are so inexperienced that you don’t recognize it. After all, your only models are Arthur and Neville. Stay with Rothstein and you’ll learn what romantic excitement is.
Before the end of every evening spent with Arthur and Neville at his home, Jersey will pull you aside. He will ask to see you the next night, and you will agree, even though you are exhausted from making the bus trip so frequently and you wish you could be free and in your dorm room, even though you can hardly think for how tired you are and wonder if you would be someone else entirely if only you could get a little more sleep. You do care for him intensely, even if there is nothing romantic in it. Each time he makes love to you, you hope that he and his expert dick will finish quickly, because you like to watch him when he is asleep. There is nothing impressive any longer about his endless opinions, but there is something adorable in them, the way it is adorable when children express their opinions on whatever the adults are talking about. The fact is that there is something maternal in your feelings for him. It doesn’t make any sense, of course; he is twice your age and there is a good deal of gray in his pubic hair. But he seems so sad all the time, so blustery in ways that you can’t believe once fooled you into thinking he was invincible. He is like the sort of young boy who, after being hit, does not hit back but rather broods on the hit. Without being aware of it, you’re brooding on whether you might like to spend your entire life as this man’s mother.
f
Now let’s say you’re Rothstein. The speech at your house neither galvanized nor shocked most of the assembled kids. They applauded and moved on to the next manifesto. Only manifestoes that tell them what they want to hear or tell them the precise opposite of what they want to hear will hold their attention for more than a minute or two. The kids applaud what you say about sex and ignore what you say about politics. The only one who seemed to get anything out of your speech was the girl who yelled afterward; at the very least she understood that you were presenting them with a stark choice, and even with her it is impossible to tell whether she actually considered what you said or whether she reacted against you like a Maoist robot, her anger response switched on by a word or two in your speech. Neville failed to notice that you mocked him for mangling your words, as did the rest of the crowd. You are ashamed because this was what you wanted to happen. You wanted the kids to misinterpret what you said, and to think you said they could have sex and change the world. This was what they thought you said, what functionally you did say; their indifference was not a result of your telling them difficult truths.
But after all, the kids are only kids. You concentrate on getting the job. Not the job, a job. There is no specific position available. You should never have given your friend’s hints of a job any credit at all, but instead you gave them so much credit that you moved to New Haven. And by the time you moved he had clearly forgotten, he was clearly bored by you. Why did you move to New Haven, of all places? Because you are obsessed with prestige? But surely you are more sophisticated than that. Did you move to New Haven so that you can be here to witness the race riots, which, when they come in full force, will burn the country to the ground? Do you want to see the world destroyed? The race riots so far, even the worst of them, in Watts and Newark and Detroit, have still left buildings standing. There is much, much worse to come, and New Haven will be a perfect place to watch; it will be a perfect place to watch the blacks burn the WASPs.
No, that’s not the reason. Really you are here for the prestige because you can’t accept that you will never get a job again. You can’t accept that no one takes you seriously anymore. You are widely suspected to be just another imitator of Timothy Leary, just another moderately talented academic straining for prophethood. Maybe you should never have published the book, but the proceeds allow you to live unemployed. Unemployed and bitter. You know that you are bitter. The reasons that you haven’t gotten a job have nothing to do with anti-Semitism. You don’t even believe what you say to the black-haired Maoist robot and her comical WASP boyfriend; you say what you say simply because you are bitter and agitated, although there is something about the boy’s agitation that relaxes you, as it is so much worse than your own. His eyes keep darting to check his girlfriend’s reaction and your reaction to everything that is said, as though everyone else needs constant surveillance because everyone else’s darkest emotions are always as close to the surface as his are. He is as angry as you were when you were his age, but you can forgive yourself for thinking that you had much more to be angry about. You are rather astonished at the WASP capacity for resentment, which seems close to inexhaustible. The earliest of them probably resented Indians for allowing themselves to be cheated and killed. But putting aside the questions of the merit and justice of one’s hatreds, the boy still reminds you of yourself at a young age, reminds you of the Jersey Rothstein who not only wanted but needed to kill Nazis, and for whom being denied the ability to kill Nazis was a denial on par with the denial of all human contact; it felt like being locked in a room with food and water and nothing else for a lifetime, or at least for ten years. You are happy to see the boy again because he reminds you so much of yourself, though you do not tell him this, because he would not understand what you mean and in any case being compared to a Jew whose family perished in the Holocaust would give him the smugness of oppression without the cost, far outweighing the benefit, of actually having been oppressed. At the moment he is like you were after the Americans entered the war, and probably wants not to fight as desperately as you wanted to fight. Soon enough he will come to the point that you came to, that morning when you sat at your aunt’s kitchen table as the sun was rising, that morning after you had spent yet another night not sleeping and instead imagining your mother and your sisters in the gas chamber (Were they together? Did they embrace as they died? Did they hate each other and fight over food?) that morning when you said to yourself: Enough. No more. No more of the dead. You decided that your life would not be a funeral procession for your family, a funeral procession that would end only with your own funeral. Let others appease the dead, as though the entire Earth above ground were Munich. Over you, death shall have dominion, but the dead shall not.
And why do you want Arthur to come to this conclusion? Simply because adopting a Goy would be so offensive to your dead ancestors? To satisfy your paternal desires, your desire to pass on what you are and know?
For whatever reason, you sit with Arthur and you try to guide him. Essentially you restate points you made in the book. You tell him that love is the opposite of freedom, that it is love that makes people waste their lives on jobs they cannot stand
to provide for their family. You add something you left out of the book, that communism is even worse than capitalism because it turns everyone into a giant family. Arthur nods thoughtfully as you talk, but sometimes you get the sense that he wants something entirely different from you, that he wants guidance on how to lash out rather than on what to do instead of lashing out. It is difficult to tell, though, because most of the time Arthur is there Miranda and Neville are there as well. Why do you listen to Neville, why do you allow him to speak? Really, you should simply throw him out. And yet you have to admit you enjoy mocking him. You wish you did not but you do; perhaps it is a way of taking revenge on the entire rotting carcass of twentieth-century vatic banality.
And then there is Miranda. At first you are unnerved by how quiet she is. True believers tend to be much more dangerous when they are quiet than when they are loud. When they are loud, they are just talking; when they are quiet, they tend to be plotting something. You wonder if you have gotten it wrong, and Miranda is the one who wants to do something terrible. When she asks to see you privately, you almost say no for fear of what she will do (knife you? set your house on fire?), and you are all but certain that her intimations of a tryst are just a ploy, but you realize that your fear is irrational and so you agree, and to ensure that she does not know you are unnerved, you force a smile. You are nervous for hours before she arrives, and you try to calm yourself. When she does arrive, you make a great show of calm. When she kisses you, you are shocked, though the kiss lasts no more than three or four seconds before you think that of course she is attracted to you, of course she wants to kiss you.
You never find her attractive, exactly, and she is not particularly creative or experienced sexually, but whatever the reason, she quickly becomes all you think about. After this, Norture and Arthur are no more than an irritation, a distraction from Miranda. They sit in your kitchen, and you cook for them, because cooking for them is better than paying attention to them, and as you scrape eggs onto their plates with your spatula they ask you for your opinions on topics you don’t care about. You could tell them not to come anymore, but you don’t. Why? Their adulation, still? Or is it mere politeness? Or politeness and the fact that you prefer Miranda to have a boyfriend? You do not want her to fall in love with you. Long after you have fallen in love with her, you do not want her to fall in love with you. Why do you fall in love with her? Why do you fall in love with a twenty-one-year-old who is under the impression that she is a communist? How does the switch in your mind get flipped that turns you into the robot adorer of a Maoist robot? On that you have no idea. One day you can live without her, the next you cannot. A love as unwelcome and inarguable as death.
Do you love her for a reason out of dime-store psychoanalysis—that submitting to this girl of German background is some sick way of submitting to the Nazis?
What terrifies you most of all is that there is no reason whatsoever for you to love Miranda, that nothing motivates love, and love is simply capricious. You cannot believe the other reason that often occurs to you. Nonetheless, it is there, and every time you are with her you think about the way that Miranda resembles your older sister Ulrike. Ulrike used to put her hands in your hair and stroke your hair for hours, and very often she would comb your hair with a kitchen fork, changing your hair from one style to another. When Miranda puts her hands in your hair, they feel like your sister’s hands. You have not asked her to comb your hair with a fork, but you would be lying to yourself if you pretended it had not occurred to you to do so.
f
I am not making up that last detail out of whole cloth—Jersey once made an offhand comment to me that Miranda resembled Ulrike, and the story about Ulrike combing his hair with a fork is true, or if not then he was the one who made it up. I mentioned it offhand to Sydney once and she laughed and said it reminded her of The Little Mermaid, but once again, this was her father’s story.
I have to take a minute here to compliment myself. There were many details in what I just wrote that were extremely painful for me to write—I basically attacked myself, didn’t I? But it yielded what I would wager is a fairly accurate portrait of Jersey and Miranda. I am a much better and more empathetic writer than my enemies maintain, and am better even than Sydney gives me credit for.
Of course I was oblivious while all of this was going on (assuming it was going on—I could, of course, be completely wrong); I was paying too much attention to the conversations. So I might say: “What do you make of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia?” And Rothstein would reply: “It is in the nature of governments to exert as much power as they can just as it is in the nature of people to exert as much power as they can,” a fairly banal answer that may have been the result of his preoccupation with the way Miranda was nibbling at her toast.
“Tell me, Jersey,” I asked late one night. We had all been talking for hours, I had drunk a great deal of wine, and the conversation was winding down, but I wasn’t quite ready to go home yet. “Why do you think it is that we think incest is wrong?”
This got his attention. He leaned back in his chair and gripped the armrests, the way certain kinds of men do when preparing for certain kinds of battle.
“Are you asking because you want to have sex with your little sister?” Miranda asked, quickly and sharply enough that I wondered if she truly suspected that the thought had occurred to me.
“That’s not called for, Miranda,” Jersey said. “Arthur, you’re asking because we’re questioning every other kind of sexual restriction, so why not this one as well?”
“I know it sounds like a right-wing parody of sexual freedom, but yes. Why don’t we question it?”
“It seems to me that it should be questioned,” Jersey said. “Darwin married his first cousin. And the old argument that it causes a somewhat higher rate of birth defects doesn’t quite do the trick, does it? It doesn’t explain the revulsion we feel. Do you think it should no longer be taboo?”
“It could be an incredible acte gratuit,” Neville said. “I like where you’re going with this, Arthur. It would hit the bourgeoisie right where they live.”
“Exactly where they live,” Jersey said, “but does that mean they would be against it? It might be just what they are looking for. Never to have to leave the house.”
I wanted to talk about something else, but I wanted to make my position clear so that it wouldn’t seem strange that I had brought it up. “But don’t you think that we’re not truly free if there’s one single breathing person we’re forbidden to have sex with?”
“No,” Jersey said, chuckling a little. “I don’t think that at all.”
“I just think it would be completely disgusting,” Miranda said.
“I’m with Arthur on this one,” Neville said. “We have to be allowed to have sex with every other adult on earth. We don’t have to actually do it, because like Miranda says it would be disgusting, but we have to be allowed to do it.”
“So, Jersey,” I asked, as a rather inelegant way of getting off this subject, “how’s your love life?”
Neville made some hemming and hawing noises, apparently afraid that this would ruin our evenings with Rothstein altogether. I can’t say how Miranda reacted at first, because I was focused on Rothstein. He gave me a flat grin that became more menacing the more he looked at me, and if I were smarter I might have realized right there that he was sleeping with Miranda. I wasn’t smarter, so I interpreted his grin as having no other meaning than that I had hit a nerve.
“My love life is arid,” Rothstein said. “There is nothing good to be said about it.”
“Jersey has no time for the fairer sex,” Miranda said. “He’s too busy unraveling the mysteries of evolution.” She tried to affect an ironic, mock-formal tone when she said this, but something was off.
“How about your father?” Rothstein asked me. “Do you think that your father has affairs with his secretaries while he’s mak
ing his bombs?”
“What do you mean?” Miranda asked. “Arthur’s father is a lawyer.”
“He works for a defense contractor,” I said. “As a lawyer.” I must have let this slip to Rothstein at some point.
“I didn’t mean to give away a secret, Arthur,” Jersey said.
“A defense contractor?” Miranda said. Then she started laughing. “Well, at least you don’t tell the truth all the time!”
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