Short Century_A Novel

by David Burr Gerrard

  “I’m about to come,” I said. I expected her to lift her mouth from my cock, as Miranda did when I was about to come, but Emily did not lift her mouth, and it felt wonderful, perhaps better than anything I had ever felt before. And certainly better than anything I have ever felt since.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Emily, thank you.”

  She peeked up at me, wearing the blanket as a shawl, and I kissed her. The thought of it was a bit disgusting since she had my semen in her mouth but I kissed her.

  “They say boys don’t respect girls who use their mouths,” she said.

  I kissed her nose, delighted at the words she used. I was a boy and she was a girl.

  “I love you so much, Emily. I feel so good right now I can’t tell you.”

  “Try.”

  “I feel so so so sooooooo good right now.”

  She squealed and rolled over and over on the bed, entangling herself further in the blanket as she did so. When she stopped she was on top of me. I felt her chest against my stomach. We were man and wife: we were one flesh. We were one flesh and this was how we would enter eternity.

  Even if I were wrong, even if it had to end, this was enough, this moment was enough and this moment would never die.

  “Your cheeks are red,” I said, trailing my finger along her back.

  Giggling, she covered her cheeks with her forearms and her ears with her fists. When our laughter died down, she rested her elbows on my chest.

  “Should I break up with Brad?”

  “God, yes,” I said, twirling my finger in her hair.

  “I can hear your heart beating,” she said. “That’s very cool.”

  I murmured happy assent.

  Slapping my thigh, she threw off the sheets and hopped out of bed. “Let’s go tell Mom.”

  “Tell Mom what?”

  She smiled brightly. “That we’re in love.”

  I searched for a sign that she was joking, but she was not. “Emily, why don’t you sit down and we’ll think about this.”

  “What is there to think about? I’ll tell Mom that we’re in love, she’ll throw us out of the house, and we’ll go off somewhere. Or maybe she’ll understand. I was thinking about this last night, that maybe I’ve underestimated her. Maybe she’ll be happy for us.” She picked up her nightgown and threw it on.

  I disentangled myself from the sheets and got out of bed; I picked up my boxer shorts and put them on. “I think maybe we should take everything more slowly.”

  Her face became wrinkled and knotted again. “Why?”

  “Emily. We’re brother and sister. Whatever we do is going to be complicat…”

  “We’re brother and sister,” she said in a horrified whisper, as though this information were new to her. She folded her fingers in a steeple at her mouth. “I had sex with my brother. I had sex with my brother.” Then she was sobbing convulsively. I tried to take her in my arms but she pushed me away. I stroked her hair in a gesture I hoped was absent of sex. Her sobs were quick and ceaseless. I felt a brotherly urge to pummel the person who had treated her so badly.

  I needed to get control of myself. If I could steady myself I could steady her.

  “Emily, I…” I did not want to say that I loved her. “I care about you more than anything. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  “We just fucked, Arthur.”

  “Emily, please. Emily, we…we made love.”

  “Goddamn it. I did not want to do this. You manipulated me, you manipulated me and we…How did this happen?”

  “Keep your voice down.” I hugged her tightly to my chest, partially to muffle her voice.

  “I’m sick and perverted and a whore. God, I’m so disgusting.”

  “Emily. You’re none of those things. All of this is my fault. It’s all because I’m so stupid—it’s because I’m evil—and I made you do this.”

  Emily picked at her nails and I waited, strangely out of breath, for her to respond.

  “You’re not stupid, you’re not evil,” she said. “I did it, too.”

  “It’s my fault. You’re not old enough and it’s my fault.”

  “Of course I’m old enough. I’m seventeen years old, I’m not a child.”

  “It’s my fault.”

  “I can make my own decisions. If you say I can’t I’m going to be really upset.”

  We started laughing at the same moment.

  “Wow,” she said. “Wow.” She wiped her eyes with her wrists. We looked at each other and started laughing again. “Do you really think what we did was so wrong?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What about: ‘Ooh, I’m evil, I’m stupid.’” She laughed and entangled her fingers in mine. “I mean, I do love you,” she said. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  “And maybe we were right last night. I think we were right. So what should we do?” she asked. “Just pretend this never happened? That’s probably what we should do.”

  I saw that agreeing with her would destroy her.

  “No,” I said. “I think we should be together. But we probably shouldn’t tell Mom.”

  “Yeah.” She trailed a finger along my hand. “Sorry about that.”

  “Don’t be sorry.” For lack of anything else to do I kissed her neck.

  “We could move to California,” she said.

  “Do you like the sun that much? Let’s go downstairs and have breakfast.”

  “How about San Francisco? The weather there is pretty temperate.”

  “I didn’t like San Francisco that much when I was there last summer.”

  She frowned, rather childishly. “You went to San Francisco with Miranda.”

  “Maybe we can move to India or Morocco or something. But first let’s go downstairs and have some break…”

  “REDACTED. We can go there, Arthur. We can help those people.”

  “Okay. But first let’s go downstairs and have breakfast.”

  “Those soldiers in REDACTED who are killing villagers? We can take guns and kill the soldiers! And then we can make love in the sunset. Or! Maybe we could move to Appalachia and admit that we’re brother and sister. Or maybe we could move to Kansas and become farmers. That might be fun. No one around for miles. We could pick up pitchforks like in that painting. We should change our names. Something exotic, like Dietrich. Oh, hey! We could just shorten it to Hunt. Arthur and Emily Hunt. It’s sort of exotic in its own way. Who will we be?”

  I was caught up. “I grew up in Manhattan. My parents were jazz musicians. They died of a heroin overdose.”

  “Both of them?”

  “You’re right. Too melodramatic. My father was a jazz musician and he abandoned my mother when I was an infant.”

  “He was a saxophone player! Like in Some Like It Hot.”

  “My mother was a cellist with the New York Philharmonic.”

  “They were star-crossed lovers.”

  “I grew up privileged,” I said, “but suffocated by my mother’s sadness. One day I got on a Greyhound bus and never looked back. That’s how I got to Kansas.”

  She laughed, and how could I not be in love with her laugh? “That’s so good,” she said. “My father died in World War Two.”

  “Wait, how old are you?”

  “Right. Details. My father died in the Korean War. No, after the war was over, but while he was still in Korea. A supply truck backed over him.”

  “Oh, the poor man.”

  “My mother became a prostitute in order to feed me.” She touched my chest. “You’re right. Too melodramatic. You’re sexy when you frown, though.” She kissed me and stroked my cheek.

  “Okay,” she said. “My mother was an English professor at a small New England college. I hate New England because…because…because I’m color blind and t
he autumn foliage mocks the limitations of my sight.”

  “That’s brilliant!”

  “So I decided to move out West—let’s move out West, let’s not move to Kansas, Kansas is probably boring and farming is probably boring, too. Then we met… How did we meet? How did we meet? Oh, wait. Can girls be color blind? I forget. You know what? This game is a tiny bit boring. Let’s figure out the details later. Let’s wake up Mom and have breakfast.” She was headed for the door.

  “Emily.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m not going to tell her anything. I’m not stupid.”

  As we walked down the stairs, Emily was holding my arm and I was realizing that I had over the last several minutes become not only Emily’s lover, but also her boyfriend, virtually her husband. It had been stupid of me to join in her identity fantasy, which a few days earlier might have been a harmless game but was now an urgent discussion of what to do next. Everything I did or said now, short of an outright rejection, which would have been unthinkable, drew us closer together.

  When we reached the kitchen, Emily told me to wake up Mom while she started the eggs.

  “Do we have to wake her? You know she needs her sleep. Let’s just have breakfast.”

  “Fine. I’ll wake Mom.” She headed down the hallway to our parents’ bedroom. As her bare feet hit the wood floor they sent echoes; the acoustics of the house were such that anything that happened in that hallway could be heard throughout the house. I was terrified of what would happen and furious with Emily for refusing to be cautious, but I followed her.

  She flung our mother’s door open without knocking. “Mother, wake up. We’re making eggs.”

  Our mother did not stir. “Jesus fuck.” Emily folded her hands and took a deep breath. She looked, or perhaps I only hoped that she looked, like she was trying to get control of herself. She crossed to the window, calmly, and opened the curtains.

  “Wake up, Mother,” she said, still sounding calm.

  “Emily,” our mother said, sitting up. “What’s the matter?”

  “Arthur and I are making eggs. We’d like you to join us. I haven’t made breakfast for you in a while and Arthur and I thought it would be nice. It will be fun.”

  I saw her getting upset and tried to think of something I could say that would allow her to get back to sleep and allow me to get Emily out of the room.

  “Please, Mommy,” Emily said, her voice tinged with sarcasm now. “It will be fun.”

  I thought sarcasm was a foolish tactic, but it worked. “You’re right. It will be fun. Just give me a few minutes to get ready.”

  Emily clapped and skipped out of the room, brushing past me and looking very much like a small child. I wondered whether she had actually been being sarcastic at all. I followed her to the kitchen, a few steps behind. She took a carton of eggs from the refrigerator and I took out the frying pan, finding the right cupboard on the third try.

  “It’s been so long since we’ve done this,” our mother said as she joined us. She looked delighted. Emily greased the pan and turned on the stove.

  “So, Emily, how was your date last night?”

  “I had a really great time. I think I’m in love.”

  I clutched the edge of the counter.

  “That’s wonderful. You know that I like Brad.”

  “No, a different boy. But I’m going to keep it a secret.”

  Our mother scowled.

  “Is it some boy you just met?”

  Emily laughed. “Not at all.”

  “Emily,” I said, “why don’t you come over here and help me pick out the eggs?”

  “They’re eggs,” she said. “They’re all the same. Mother, I’m going to keep it a secret for now. I’ll tell you who it is after things are a little more settled, all right?”

  “I like these the best,” I said, still desperate to distract her and pointing to a few eggs at random. “What do you think, Emily?”

  “I want to break them,” Mom said. “Emily, if you’re happy, I’m happy.”

  “Thank you, Mommy. Thank you.”

  Mom took from the carton the eggs I selected, as though my selections meant something. She cracked the eggs against the frying pan; I looked at her dark blue eyes and hated myself. My mother might have been an extraordinary woman for all I knew, or she might have been an entirely ordinary one, or even a barely adequate one, but in any case she was my mother and I had profaned her.

  “I’m glad the two of you woke me up,” she said. “We should do this more often.”

  I gritted my teeth to keep from sobbing. I took another egg and cracked it swiftly, making a loud noise and causing the yolk to spill over my hand. Emily wiped my hand with a hand towel and leaned into the side of my face not facing my mother.

  “Don’t fall apart,” she whispered.

  “Arthur, is something bothering you?” our mother asked.

  “Arthur never knows whether he’s making an omelet or just breaking eggs,” Emily said.

  As we ate, Emily and our mother talked, Emily seeming cheerful but not distressingly so. My contributions to the conversation were limited to terse replies. When we finished the meal, our mother, uncomplicatedly pleased with breakfast, excused herself to shower.

  At Emily’s suggestion she and I went for a walk. She led me through the garden and past the empty pedestals. I watched her legs as she walked, I watched her bite her lip as she looked back at me. A life with Emily, it seemed to me, might be wonderful. I touched her shoulder and moved to kiss her, but she put her palm on my chest. After standing on her toes and ostentatiously checking that we couldn’t be seen from any of the windows, making us both laugh, she kissed me.

  Shortly after this, a group of astronauts found that all their energy and effort had landed them atop a giant, airless wedge of stone.

  f

  Many of the days that followed were days of bliss, days when the world was new, or at least elsewhere. We had sex, waited for me to get hard again, then had sex again. I stroked her hair, nuzzled her breasts, stroked her legs. I nuzzled her nose and her neck and her toes. It felt so good to have a girl in bed beside me; I had missed it so much since Miranda.

  I imagined what Emily and I looked like from above. Perhaps there was a God and this was how God saw us. Perhaps God was not omniscient but was in fact a faltering old man, prone to forgetting things about the world he had once created, and among the things he had forgotten was that Emily and I were brother and sister, and when he looked at us he saw two people in love and nothing else. Perhaps there was a God and he was omniscient and he loved Emily and me for loving each other.

  There were several nights when we stayed up all night, taking a break from sex to watch a late movie. Once she climbed on to the coffee table and we made love.

  We would play tennis for four or five hours at a time, well past the point of physical exhaustion for both of us. Neither of us wanted to be the first to suggest that we leave the court; this was the competition more than the games themselves. Eventually we would both stagger off the court at the same time. Then we would go to my room and Emily would say, over and over, that she loved me.

  Emily and I had always spent a lot of time together, so our mother suspected nothing. Besides, what we were doing was unthinkable, so she would have no reason to think it. Emily stroked the back of my neck at dinner, with my mother across from us.

  In the streets in town, Emily tugged me out of the way of cars that were far down the road. It was not until she started doing this that I realized Miranda had done it as well.

  Emily had always wanted to talk to me about everything; now she had little to say but wanted to be around me all the time. I started to think of when we were kids, when she would refuse to leave my room. I wanted to be alone; I had never wanted to be alone the way I wanted to be alone now. One afternoon, as we lay in bed, Emily started stro
king my chest with her index finger and her thumb. I wanted to read a book or take a walk or something, but I knew she would get upset if I asked. I ran my hand up and down her back, filled with the sort of boredom that feels as though your mind is being boiled into steam.

  “Why did we do this?” she asked.

  “For freedom,” I said.

  “That’s not why I did it,” she said. “Do you think I could still marry Brad? Or Hickham?”

  “Hickham?”

  “I think he’s cute,” she said. “And he’s stimulating to talk to.”

  “And you’re saying you want to marry him?’

  “Do you think I’d be able to?”

  “Why wouldn’t you be able to?”

  “Let’s just have sex.” She reached for my cock, but I grabbed her wrist and stopped her.

  “Is there anything I can do to make you feel better?” I asked.

  She wriggled her wrist free and pulled the blanket against herself. “You can have sex with me. That’s pretty much it.”

  f

  I was reading one afternoon when Emily came into my room. I kept reading, hoping she would leave, but she did not, and finally I put the book down and asked her how she was.

  Not looking at me, she took a few steps toward the window, then stopped. “Would you like to take a walk in the garden?”

  There was nothing at this point that I wanted, other than to be left alone.

  “All right.”

  I followed her down the stairs, and she devoted a great deal of effort to staying several steps ahead of me.