“What company does he work for?” Neville asked. “We should bomb his office!”
“No!” Norture may consider me immoral now, but I have never—not even once—suggested any kind of terrorist act.
“Now now, Norture,” Jersey said. “We don’t have time for bombing. I have cheese omelets on the stove.”
I didn’t apologize to Miranda because I didn’t think this was any worse than, say, causing me to crash someone else’s car because she didn’t want me to meet her mother. When we were back at my room, I asked her: “Do you think Rothstein’s having sex with a Briarcliff girl?”
“A Briarcliff girl? What makes you think that?”
“I’m just wondering.”
“Have you heard something? Did he say something to you about a Briarcliff girl? Did Neville say something to you about a Briarcliff girl?”
“I was just thinking. Rothstein spends an awful lot of time with us,” I said. “I don’t know how he has time to see anyone else. There must be a Briarcliff girl he’s having sex with, don’t you think?”
“Oh,” she said. “Yes, I guess that would make sense. He writes about sex so much that there must be a girl he’s having sex with.” She looked relieved, or she looked indifferent, or indifferently curious, as people are about gossip. No, she looked relieved; I would have had to have been an idiot not to see that they had been having sex all this time behind my back. Then I told myself that no, my jealousy was monstrous, I was monstrous for failing to trust her. For her to be sleeping with Rothstein would have required a preposterously elaborate deception. And besides, we weren’t married; if she were sleeping with Rothstein she would simply tell me and I would have no right to be angry.
“But maybe he’s not sleeping with anyone,” Miranda said. Her hands were out of her pockets now and across her stomach, and she looked truly thoughtful. “For all you or I know, he may not be interested in sex at all. When you think about it, when someone talks a lot about God, you don’t automatically think he’s truly holy. Often it’s the opposite. Maybe it’s the same with Rothstein. Maybe it’s the same even if there is a girl he’s sleeping with. Maybe he really loves her but he finds the sex boring. Maybe he’s a total hypocrite and he thinks of nothing but his dead parents when he’s fucking her. Or maybe he loves her and he loves having sex with her, but then he’d still be a hypocrite because of what he says about monogamy. Or maybe he’s sleeping with tons of girls and loves it every single time. But I hope that’s not the case, Arthur, because I’ve been having sex with him.”
Even though I had suspected it, or because I had suspected it, it seemed impossible that she had said what she just said.
“I’m so sorry. I’m really so sorry. Oh God, I wish I hadn’t told you. I’m such a horrible person. Can you forget I said anything?”
“What?”
“Of course you can’t. Of course you can’t. Look, I’m not a horrible person. Why would I even think that? Why do you make me think in this puritanical way? We’re not married. I never swore that I would be faithful to you. I don’t think I ever said it out loud. Would you stop looking like a puppy that just got kicked?”
When she was gone, I didn’t feel upset that she had broken up with me; I only felt upset that I had cried. The truth was I hadn’t been happy for months, I had been so concerned with losing her—not to mention with her new boyfriend’s opinion of me—and now maybe I would be able to be happy again. I took a walk that night and was impressed with how refreshed I felt. It was only over the next several days that rage and grief began to colonize me.
f
For weeks after that I either lay in bed or skulked through campus. I stubbed out my cigarettes in the stone buildings, as though this might burn them down. Occasionally I would spot someone I recognized and I would turn away as I passed. I felt like a conspirator with nothing to plot and no one to plot with.
Miranda hadn’t cared about me, I told myself, and she hadn’t cared about politics. If she cared about politics, she wouldn’t be dating that prophet of disengagement. Her paintings were shit. She had just used me for my money. She was greedy. She just wanted to string me along until we got married, and then she would have divorced me and taken as much of my money as she could. Now she was after the money Rothstein had made off of The Dominion of Pleasure. She couldn’t feel love. No, she refused to feel love. She claimed to care about the poor, but really, she was as heartless as Johnson or Nixon or McNamara. I pitied her, really.
No, pity was obviously not what I felt.
How simple: she had hurt me, she was evil. What was the truth of it?
She loved me, I would say to myself, but we were young, and love fades when you’re young. Mature people accepted that. That was what maturity was: accepting things. The more things you accepted, the more mature you were. Bad things happen to good people, life is full of disappointments, war is hell, soldiers burn babies. Occasionally you love people. They leave you: that’s how life is. They die: that’s how life is. You die: that’s how life is.
Who was the first man who looked at his own surrender and called it maturity? I wanted to tie that guy to a tree, punch him in the gut, and bash his face with a rock. Then he would look back up at me with his blue-black bloody nose and smile wisely with his remaining, splintered teeth. He would say: “This is how life is.”
I knew I wouldn’t feel this way forever. There would be the usual anodyne attractions. The world isn’t that bad, I would say later. But at this moment I was right and my palliated future self was wrong.
Throughout those weeks I would have done anything to be with her. I would have done anything to touch her. To smell her.
Rothstein was wrong. The world could be changed, must be changed. Fucking wouldn’t stop bombs. There was evil in the world, and it was evil to accept it.
Miranda lay next to Rothstein, her sweaty legs entwined with his sweaty legs. Miranda’s hand over Rothstein’s hairy stomach. Was it hairy? It was probably hairy.
As the weeks passed, I went to class more. The budding flowers irritated me, with their intimations of sex, but it was nice to see budding flowers. It was nice to smell them. Misery came in discrete sessions, like bombing raids, and as long as I turned out the lights and waited in the cellar all would be well.
Thinking this way, waiting in the cellar, was surprisingly useful. Wait in the cellar for your pain to pass. Maybe I could throw in some Asian-sounding words and start a religion. “There was no meaning in my life until I became an Arthurist,” people would say. Or maybe they would say they found Arthurism. People seemed to like to find things: God, themselves, their true calling. Life, when lived richly, was an Easter egg hunt.
After the misery, emptiness. There were only weeks until graduation and I felt no ambition. I had never had ambition, but I remembered having ambition to have ambition. I wanted to help people but feared I was too lazy. Maybe laziness was my cardinal characteristic. That was one thing about being rich: if I wanted to do nothing, I could. I tried to imagine it, decades of nothing. Playing tennis, lying on the beach. I tried to imagine what thoughts I would have. I would think about girls. There would be girls on the beach.
Inexhaustible indolence. There was something terrifying about the idea.
People felt sorry for the poor, for blacks. If you were poor or if you were black and you failed, it wasn’t your fault. You failed because you were poor or black and because society was unfair. Nobody would feel sorry for a rich kid; a failed rich kid was either embarrassing or funny, and most likely both.
f
One day Rothstein called me and, without any reference to Miranda, invited me to dinner that night. For fear of looking petulant, I accepted.
After dreading it for the entire day, I made my way to his house that night. When I rang the doorbell, no one answered for several minutes. Other guys waited on stoops for their girlfriends, not for old men who wer
e fucking their girlfriends. After a time, Neville opened the door.
“Isn’t it exciting?” Neville said as soon as he saw me. “Our Miranda is dating Jersey Rothstein!”
“Exciting,” I said.
When Jersey came down, he was wearing his silk white robe and sandals. When I would think of this outfit later, it would strike me as ridiculous, but at the time it seemed magisterial, a devastating rebuke to my own poisoned conformity.
“Arthur! I have to admit I didn’t expect you to come tonight. Whenever I see you, you turn haughtily away, as though I were nothing but a poor peon. Or a poor, wandering Jew. I’m so delighted that you could join us tonight. I’m very glad you’ve given up all that pettiness.”
“What pettiness?”
“You’ve acted as though I stole something from you.”
“I haven’t given anything up. I hate you and I always will.”
Neville broke out into a snorting laughter at this.
“Well,” Rothstein said. “It’s nice to know that I can count on something.”
“You mean other than not getting an appointment at Yale?” I said.
“We’ll see about that,” Jersey said, smiling. “Dinner is almost ready.”
Miranda was sitting at the dining room table and wearing a toga. She murmured a weak hello that made me understand how craven I looked by having shown up, and I wanted to leave, but Jersey entered the room carrying a large bowl.
“Jersey has cooked us one of his amazing curry dishes,” Miranda said, glancing at me for a second, but then turning her eyes, embarrassed, to Norture.
She stood up to help but tripped on her toga. I wanted to laugh at her but Rothstein took her in his arms and the act looked like one of romantic grace. I thought of Emily, the way she was always tripping on things, and I felt a sharp longing to be with her. Emily did not make conversation into a sweaty, bloody contest.
“Stay on your feet, my dear.”
Miranda collected herself and smiled. “Jersey’s an excellent chef,” she said.
Jersey touched her elbow, her hair.
“One day, I’ll get her to cook for me. I’ll make her wifely yet.”
“Marriage is for the herd, Professor Rothstein,” Miranda said.
“You can be wifely without being a wife.”
Miranda giggled and hit Jersey playfully, which made me want to die.
Jersey put some curry on my plate. “This is filled with herbs I acquired while I was in India. They enhance sexual appetite and performance. They should help you with your repression, Arthur.”
“Excuse me?”
“We don’t know enough about the brain to know how these chemicals work, but from my purely anecdotal perspective, the effects are astonishing.”
I dug my fork into my palm. “I’m not repressed.”
“I can give you a few bottles to take home if you like.”
I put my fork down and looked at Jersey, with his skeleton’s smile. The man was a catastrophe of self-satisfaction. “I don’t think you heard me. I’m not repressed.”
“It’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” Miranda said, smiling at me sweetly. “You’re very young.”
“I’m very young? We had sex all the time.”
“Yes,” Jersey said. “I had to undo all those automatic maneuvers and responses.”
I struck my plate with my fork. “That’s bullshit. That’s bullshit. You only make such a big deal out of all this stuff because you’re too much of a coward to try to change the world.”
“Stop hiding with the world,” Jersey said. “It’s not a fig leaf.”
Neville put his hand on my elbow. “Calm down, buddy. You’re not going to learn anything by getting angry and shutting yourself down.”
I jerked my arm away. Norture’s eyes resembled those of a particularly stupid animal, and I clenched my fist and punched his nose. I felt a sharp pain in my fingers and Norture screamed and covered his face.
Jersey stood up, gently chuckling. “Ah, the vigor of youth. Neville, I’ll get you some ice and take you to the hospital. Arthur, I think you should storm out of the house in righteous fury.”
Norture’s hands covered most of his face. Blood was seeping through his fingers.
“I am not going to hit back because I am a pacifist.”
My hand was numb now. I tried to think of a response to Jersey, but I couldn’t. I looked at Miranda. She didn’t look angry or disgusted, though she was probably both, or at least would soon be both. There was a hint of feeling in her eyes, but there was no way to know what the feeling was. I was careful to keep my back straight as I walked out of the house.
I had to admit it felt good to hit Norture, even if he had not been my desired target. I wanted more of this feeling. I wanted to destroy something, but I didn’t know what.
12:35 a.m. May 12, 2012
On the television tucked into an armoire in my hotel room, Norture is nowhere in sight. What is in sight is a girl who has tripped on some stairs, and who is gasping, terrified, into the camera. A knife comes into the frame and I look away. Of all works of art, it is poorly written horror films, in which repellant people say inane things and make stupid decisions as they fail to evade death, that are most true to life.
When my grandfather hanged himself, all he left behind was a giant, bloated house on the beach that he had built with money he didn’t have. Lining the house were eleven empty pedestals. Well, the pedestals weren’t empty when he died. At an auction two months before he killed himself, he bought eleven French sculptures for far more than they were worth, which was already quite a great deal. My father sold the sculptures at a heavy loss, but kept the pedestals. Why? “That’s for you and your sister. A monetary memento mori.” Really he should have gotten rid of the house, but instead he paid the massive mortgage every month, which until he was very well established was a major burden. Why? He would say because the house was beautiful, but it wasn’t particularly. He probably could have built a better house for less money. But he kept it. He also kept, at the far end of the driveway, a sculpture of Cupid pointing an arrow into his own mouth. “Your grandfather thought this sculpture was profound. In a way it is—everything that costs a lot of money is profound. The hustle is beautiful even if the art isn’t. Especially if the art isn’t.”
My father kept my grandfather’s suicide note in a locked drawer in our apartment in New York (I discovered where he kept the key when I was twelve or so). It read, in part: “I despise sleeping at the Chappine because you never know if a Jew or a Negro has slept here the previous night.”
After graduating, I spent much of May and June sitting on the beach, alone when I could manage it (my mother had taken my sister and me to the beach house while my father spent the summer in Washington on business). Emily was home with nothing to do with her summer before entering Wellesley, so she took it upon herself to fix me as though I were a car that had stopped by the side of the road. Whenever she found me outside, she would join me with a bottle of wine and two glasses.
Often she would interrupt a reverie in which Miranda would be lying naked on the beachhead, sitting up, looking at me over her shoulder, tired but excited at something that had just occurred to her. That wonderful morning-sex look. She smiled sweetly, with concern for every fluctuation of my mood. Then out of the ocean, like some free-love doctrinaire sea monster, came Rothstein. Rothstein, whose cock walked on water. He touched Miranda with those hands, varicose veins like rivers of blue-green sewage. She kissed and embraced him and they rolled around.
Rothstein and Miranda were probably somewhere making love creatively, originally. They were enacting the erotic equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting. They were certainly not ripping off From Here to Eternity.
And then Emily would be there, pouring me a glass of wine. She would rub my neck and ask me how I was doing, or she woul
d talk about people both of us knew and neither of us cared about in a way that made it clear that the only thing she was thinking about was how I was doing. It made me feel awful to be sprawled in my own wretchedness in front of her, and soon I came to resent her for seeing me as I was.
Once, she sat down next to me and said:
“I spent most of last night talking to James Hickham.”
This took me completely by surprise.
“What did you talk about?”
“I don’t know, music or something. Would it make you feel better if I said that I think Rothstein is wrong about everything?”
“But you don’t think that.”
“I certainly don’t think he’s right about everything.”
“Did James Hickham tell you about his plans to make you a housewife?”
“He did tell me that all women should be housewives. He tells me that every time I see him.”
“That’s awful. I told you you shouldn’t have slept with him.”
“It’s not like he’s actually going to rape anyone. He’s just a dumb guy who thinks he’s a great philosopher of love.”
“You’re not going to go out with him again, are you? He wants to make you a slave. Remember when you were a kid and you used to do that dance on that strange ornate rug we used to have where you would swing your arms around and make weird faces while you chanted ‘Emily can do whatever Emily wants because Emily is free’?”
She put her hands in her hair and raised her toes at the memory. “Mom would say that I was free but that was only because I was a child, and that the older I got the less free I would be. I thought that was a stupid thing to say and I told her so. I remember thinking even when I was doing that dance that the chant wasn’t true. Do you remember, I think it was on the same rug you’re talking about, when you would pretend to teach me the ballets that we watched on TV?”
“What does that have to do with freedom?”
“Nothing, it’s just a nice memory.” She poured me a cup of wine. “Sometimes I would climb up on the coffee table and then you would twirl me around a bit.”
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