Short Century_A Novel

by David Burr Gerrard

  “No, you need to go to college.”

  “Okay then. No excitement for me.”

  “Maybe you don’t need to go to Paris for excitement.” This was a lame thing to say.

  “You mean the most exciting journey is the journey inward? If that’s what you’re saying, I swear to God I’m going to have you defenestrated, decapitated, disemboweled, and castrated. In whatever order I see fit.”

  “What I mean is that I don’t really see you bumming around anywhere. I see you doing something great.”

  “You mean like leading people to freedom?”

  “I see that as something you could do.”

  “That’s a nice compliment.”

  I handed her a glass of wine and took a sip of my own.

  “Are you sure you’re okay, Arthur? You really do look a little strange.”

  “Maybe you don’t need to go to Paris for excitement.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about what happened this afternoon at the park.”

  Something turned in her face. “That was funny. Right?”

  Out with it. Now.

  “Emily. I think we should have sex.”

  She could clearly tell that I wasn’t joking. “Arthur, I know you’re trying to be funny, but I think you’re getting sick. You should get to bed.”

  “Why shouldn’t we? Why shouldn’t we make love?”

  “Arthur, tomorrow I’m going to call the doctor and I’m going to make you see him.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “Dr. Richardson can see if there’s anything wrong with you physically, and if not, I’m sure he can suggest a psychiatrist.”

  “That’s still not an answer.”

  Her face was firm and determined. For the first time that I could remember, I thought she looked like our father. “I’m going to bed. Goodnight, Arthur.”

  She walked a few steps, and I knew that if I let her go to bed with things the way they were our relationship would be ruined.

  “Because you can’t come up with an answer?” I said, careful to speak softly so as not to be heard anywhere else in the house, and also to lend my voice authority. “Because you obey a taboo that you can’t defend?”

  She stopped and stood with her back to me. I could see that she had raised her arm but I couldn’t see what she was doing with it. I wanted to calm her and protect her, but it was better to say nothing and let her come to whatever she would come to.

  “Fine,” she said, turning to me and smiling. “Make your argument for why this is all right.”

  “Um.” I had an argument, I had many arguments, but I couldn’t remember any of them. She drummed the fingers of one hand against the back of the other and cocked an eyebrow to taunt me.

  “Why should we be shackled by society?” I said. “Why should we let the same society that burns children in Vietnam tell us who we can fuck and who we can’t fuck? Why should we let our family, with all its blood money—because that’s what it is, blood money—why should we let our family with all its blood money and all its hotel hangings tell us what to do? Emily, for all of our protestations of rebellion, right now we remain curled in our parents’ marriage bed, fighting for our share of the blanket. The flag of sex is ours to hoist. Why should we let it lie twisted at our feet?” I hated myself for using Rothstein’s words.

  Her hand was at her hip and she pulled at her dress. For the most part she seemed unimpressed, but she had furrowed her brow when I said “hotel hangings.” I had just thrown it in for cadence; it was a stupid thing to bring up, entirely irrelevant and the opposite of an aphrodisiac. She looked away from me, but came back to the kitchen.

  She picked up the corkscrew and traced the metal with one finger. She turned it over several times and then pulled at the wooden handle.

  “If we did this,” she said, “you wouldn’t kill yourself.”

  “What?”

  “This would set you apart from Paul and Grandpa. Whatever it was that made them kill themselves wouldn’t be able to touch you. Don’t you think that’s true?”

  “Emily, that doesn’t really have anything to do with…”

  “If we did this, I would never have to worry about you killing yourself ever again.” She scratched at her neck, still not looking at me. “And I’d be leaving boring behind forever.”

  “Forever.”

  “We’d sort of be sexual pioneers,” she said. Gently she swayed and held her fingers still at her neck.

  “That’s right. We’d be cutting through the brush. We’d be…”

  She grabbed the back of my neck and kissed my lips.

  “Fuck,” she said. “I can’t believe that just happened. Fuck.” Then she grabbed the back of my head and thrust her tongue deep into my mouth. There was absolutely nothing sexual in the way she did this; she was like a child taking medicine. We stood there, moving our tongues. I didn’t want to break the kiss because I had no idea what I would do next.

  After a minute or so we broke apart.

  “Wow, Arthur. Wow.”

  Suddenly I was unspeakably irritated at the thought of having to touch her. I wanted her to be away from me.

  I told myself that I needed to take the lead. I had started this and I needed to guide her.

  “See?” I said. “We weren’t struck down by lightning.”

  She was looking away from me. “I wonder if I’ve wanted to do that forever,” she said.

  I put my hand around her waist and kissed her again. “Let’s go upstairs,” I said.

  “This is fun,” she said. “Let’s do it.” She kissed me again, and when we broke the kiss, she took my hand and led me to the stairs.

  “You know, I’m not a virgin,” she said. “I wasn’t lying about having sex with James.”

  I wasn’t sure why she had said this. “Good,” I said.

  The stairs creaked and I was afraid our mother would wake up, but I didn’t want to remind Emily of our mother, so I didn’t say anything.

  When we were halfway up the stairs, she stopped me and bit my neck. She looked at me and smiled, then bit my neck again. Was she trying to give me a hickey?

  “This is ridiculous,” she said. She was giggling and sounded happy. “This is totally ridiculous.”

  She squeezed my hand and pulled me the rest of the way up the stairs. She continued to giggle and I realized she didn’t sound happy.

  “Emily,” I said, “let’s not do this.”

  “Too late.” She pulled my shirt out of my khakis and ran her hand over my abdomen. “Besides,” she said, “if we don’t like it, we can always pretend it never happened.”

  “You’re drunk. You’ve had too much wine.”

  She gazed at me, attempting a sexy fake-innocent pout. She stood on her toes and, walking backwards, pulled me toward my room. I wanted to say we had to stop, but instead I kissed her neck, her shoulder, her neck again, and reached behind her to open the door.

  “Emily, you’re so beautiful,” I said. “God, you’re so beautiful.”

  She giggled, and I wished she would stop.

  I decided that I shouldn’t read into her giggling. Of course there would be something different about her behavior; she was about to have sex with her brother. She said everything was all right, so everything was all right. I needed to stop tyrannically assuming that I knew better.

  She pushed me into the room and slammed the door behind us, slamming it again when it didn’t close all the way the first time.

  “Arthur, you’re handsome,” she said. “Handsome and brilliant.”

  I kissed her. “You’re beautiful and brilliant.”

  I pushed the dress straps from her shoulders and ran my hands over her back. She wriggled in my arms and I unzipped her dress and she twisted and jerked until the dre
ss was at her feet. She stepped out of the dress and kicked it away. Now she was wearing cotton panties, a cotton bra, stockings, and a necklace. She looked plumper without clothes, and she looked happy.

  And so when Emily said, “This is right. This feels right,” I said that it did and I reached behind her to undo her bra. My fingers knocked against each other as I tried to unfasten the clasp, which would not give way. It occurred to me that I was terrified at the thought of seeing her naked.

  She chuckled, sounding perhaps truly comfortable. “Let me,” she said, and unfastened the clasp and took off her bra.

  I looked at her breasts. They were just tits, a girl’s tits. They looked no different for belonging to my sister. All those years, in towels, in bathing suits, in anything really, she had been hiding these wonderful tits from me. It was unnatural that she had devoted so much effort to depriving me of seeing her this way.

  “Emily, you’re so beautiful,” I said.

  She laughed her confident mocking laugh that I knew so well, proving to me that the way I was acting was silly and pretentious, but not evil.

  “I can hear you breathing a little heavier,” she said. “Do you think I’m prettier than Miranda?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Touch them.” She sounded suddenly impatient. I put my hands on her breasts, and she closed her eyes and I kneaded her breasts. Her eyes still closed, she leaned forward to kiss me, but she kept missing my lips, and for some reason it didn’t occur to me to lean into her kiss. She opened her eyes and, without kissing me, placed my hands on her hips. I tried to pull down her panties but she stopped me. She had changed her mind. Of course she had changed her mind. This was insane.

  She unbuttoned my shirt and took it off me. She took a deep breath, as though she were about to dive under water, and pulled my boxer shorts down to my ankles.

  “So, that’s your penis?”

  “Um,” I said. “Yes.”

  She rose and put her hand on my shoulder and shook me a bit. “We must be two of the bravest people who have ever lived,” she said. She took her hand from my shoulder and put it on my cock. I felt somehow surprised that her fingers were around my cock, as though I had awoken to find them there. She was pinching my cock more than stroking it. I slid her panties down. I looked at her yellow pubic hair and my own.

  She stepped around me to sit on my bed. She hugged her breasts and her knees touched.

  “You need to use a condom,” she said. “I should be on the pill. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. God, you have nothing to apologize for.” I turned to my chest of drawers and took a condom from the sock drawer. I put it on and turned back to her. She was still hugging her breasts and her knees still touched. I reached between her thighs, hoping she would part them. She did not. I kissed her forehead again and I kissed her nose. I drew back to look at her. The corners of her mouth were turned up in what was possibly a smile. I kissed her breasts and with my hands parted her legs. On seeing her vagina, I wanted a glass of water and I wanted to sit down.

  This was absurd. It wasn’t as though I hadn’t expected her to have a vagina. I touched her knee to steady myself.

  I had always thought that vaginas, with their flaps and folds, looked somehow unfinished. Emily’s vagina had come out of my mother’s vagina, as had all of her, as had all of me. There was something wonderful about the two of us making love, two halves of a clay sculpture once again becoming whole.

  She reached up for my hand. I thrust my cock into her and she groaned or sighed. I moved in and out. Her vagina did not feel all that different from Miranda’s. Part of me had hoped that the act itself would feel wrong, perhaps even that the parts would not fit, that there would be a signal from nature that what we were doing was wrong and we would be called to account. But if our bodies noted any kinship, the feeling was one of warmth, of the comfort rather than the shock of recognition, like two old friends who meet after years apart and fairly burst as each tells the other of all that has happened since they were last together. Emily was crying lightly so I thrust more gently. Her eyes were so beautiful. I steadied myself with my right hand on her thigh and stroked her face with my left. I looked at the way she held her hand, curling her fingers into her palm. I had been witness to the entire history of her movement, gesture by gesture I had watched the whole evolution of things she had done with her body, from the flailing infant I could remember dimly to the little girl pressing her nails into a red balloon to see how much pressure she could apply without popping it, to the beautiful woman who curled her fingers into her palm as I penetrated her. Now this history had, in retrospect, a goal. Every step she had ever taken had brought her closer to my bed.

  I wasn’t entirely sure whether it had been one minute or ten when I felt myself about to ejaculate; I tried to delay it but I ejaculated. I pulled out of her vagina and looked at my condom-covered cock, which, soaked and shrinking, looked like a snake that had died in a swamp in the midst of shedding its skin. I pulled off the condom and as I did so I felt a sharp pain; I must have gotten it caught on a pubic hair. I dropped the condom on the floor, wiped my hands on my thighs, and flopped onto the bed next to her.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I draped my leg over hers and grasped her hand. “I usually last longer.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” she said, still looking at the ceiling.

  What felt like a long time passed in silence. “So,” I said, hoping this would make her laugh. It did not.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “This was right, Emily,” I said. “You put it perfectly. We’re sexual pioneers.”

  “I think you said that.”

  “I think you said it.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “I did say it.”

  “Who cares who said it? We did it. We broke the taboo.”

  “Could you move your leg? It hurts a little.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” I felt suddenly shy and solicitous.

  “No, it’s okay.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. I’m fine. We—we did something great. I think I’m going to go. I’m going to go.” She stood up, still naked, and put her hand to her mouth, obviously on the verge on vomiting. She picked up her panties, her bra, and her dress. Dressing, she hopped toward the door, looking like a miserable parody of a ballet dancer.

  I wanted to tell her not to be ashamed, but the feeling was surrounding me that I had made her do something terrible. She finished dressing and left without saying goodnight.

  Why had I done this? I remembered thinking that having sex with my sister would have some sort of political impact, would make the world or at least the two of us freer. This was so stupid it seemed impossible that I had ever thought of it. Surely there must have been some other reason.

  There would never again be a moment in my life when I had not fucked my sister.

  Now it was clear to me that I had been free until a few moments ago, and that now I was a slave to this event.

  What an idiot I was! Tomorrow I would decide that this was wrong and that the truth of my life was elsewhere, and then I would decide that that truth was a lie, and on and on. At the moment of any given evening’s revelation, I would wonder at how I could have been so misguided for so long. Life’s ceaseless epiphanic zigzag.

  f

  Emily woke me the next morning, throwing the curtains open and saying things that I could not distinguish, though the noise prodded at me.

  “Jesus, Emily. Isn’t it early?”

  “It’s good to get up early. It makes you feel good the entire day.”

  I searched her tone for hostility but I could not detect any. I wanted to see her face, but the sunlight was such that I could not see her clearly.

  “How could you fall asleep last night?” she asked.

  I tried to think of something to say,
something funny and comforting, or at least one of the two.

  “Do you know if the Yankees won yesterday?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “You and I don’t talk about baseball. Dad and I talk about baseball a lot, but only when you’re not around. One time he told me that I’m manlier than you, which I didn’t think was very nice to either of us. Brad doesn’t like baseball but he won’t admit it for some reason. We go to games but he never pays attention and I have to find subtle ways to tell him what’s going on. He told me he loved me last night. He said, ‘Emily, you’re the only girl I’ll ever love and I hope we get married.’ He’s a really sweet boy. How should I tell him it’s over?”

  “Why would you tell him that?”

  She turned to the window, and I knew that I had answered terribly—it wasn’t just my words but my voice, indecisive, plaintive, and exasperated at once. I also knew that there was likely no answer that would have pleased her. As she paced by the foot of my bed, her arms folded, I grew angry with her and I wanted her out of my room, or at the very least I wanted her not to fold her arms the way she was folding her arms, not to make the faint noise her feet made as she paced the floor.

  “So,” she said. “It’s the morning. Do you still respect me?”

  “Of course.”

  “What are we going to do now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  She tapped her feet. Her face was wrinkled and knotted in ways that made it impossible to read. With her toe she poked at my boxers, still crumpled on the floor from the previous night. When she grunted in disgust I thought it was because of the boxers, but in fact it was because of the used condom still lying on the floor.

  I expected her to start screaming or crying, but with breathtaking composure she took a tissue, picked up the condom, walked to the wastebasket, and dropped it in. Still I was afraid that an explosion was imminent. She turned to me and, smiling at me as though we were about to share a cake meant for someone else, took off her nightgown and was naked. She kneeled onto the bed and crawled toward me. I wanted overpoweringly to be alone, but I did not resist her for fear of hurting her beyond repair. She pulled the blanket from my torso, bunched it between her knees, and took me in her mouth. At first her tongue lapped dully against my cock and I doubted I would get an erection, but something shifted and I became aroused. I reached for her hand, first hitting her arm, then my leg, before finding and grasping her fingers. She moved her fingers around mine until we were holding hands. I squeezed and she squeezed in return, then I squeezed harder and she squeezed harder, until this was a silly, sweet, loving game. I loved her and I would never leave her. It was insane of course but I would never leave her.