Short Century (13 page)

“I just thought it would be nice. We don't have to.”

“You're going to meet my mother on Saturday.”

“We really don't have to.”

“Too late. We're going to Queens on Saturday. You should bring some wine or something.”

I bought some wine and borrowed a car from one of Norture's friends. For the first half of the trip to Ridgewood, we said little, and I could feel her hating me. At one point I offered to turn the car around and forget the trip, but she said no, firmly and without looking at me. She rubbed her arms and I turned up the radio, thinking that the odds were fairly good we would hear of another assassination.

“Could you stop drumming your fingers on the steering wheel?” she said at one point.

“That's how I relax when I drive.”

“Can't you find some other way to relax? My mother is going to hate you, by the way.”

“Well, I hope she doesn't.”

She adjusted the review mirror and then studied it carefully.

“What if I told you that my father was a Nazi officer?”

“That's not true, is it?”

“What if it is? What if my father and mother left Germany after the war and changed the family name? What if my mother still thinks that Hitler should have won?”

“That's not true.”

“You don't believe in God, do you?” she said.

“No. What does that have to do with anything?”

“I think I might believe in God. I feel some sort of presence, it's hard to describe. You have no idea how much I hate my mother. I really think I might love you, though.” She said this calmly, and then just as calmly grabbed the wheel and turned it sharply to the left. Before I could recover we hit the divider.

We rehashed what had happened several times over the next several hours, first with the police—I told them I had somehow lost control of the car—and then alone.

“We could have been killed,” I said. “Are you psychotic?”

“We weren't killed. We weren't even injured. I had this feeling that we wouldn't be hurt and I was right. Or the feeling was.”

“Feeling? What are you talking about? We could have been killed or we could have killed someone else.”

“I told you, I felt a presence. I decided to have faith.”

“Since when do you believe in God? I thought that's why you hated your mother, because she believes in God.”

“Maybe I hate my mother because she's a Nazi.”

“You shouldn't call your parents Nazis.”

“It's the literal truth.”

“Be serious, Miranda.”

“Well, it's not the literal truth that my mother is a Nazi. My mother
was
a Nazi. And my father used to be a Nazi rocket scientist. Now he works for the Americans. The bombs we use against the Vietnamese, some of them were designed by my dad. That whole thing about living in Queens was bullshit. I live in Virginia.”

“Would you stop with this shit? You practically killed us both, Miranda.”

“This conversation doesn't seem to be leading anywhere.”

“That's because you won't let us actually have a conversation.”

“I'm trying to talk to you about this intense religious feeling I had and all you can think about is something I did to a machine.”

“You say you love me and then you crash our car?”

“I don't like to be yelled at.”

“You crashed the fucking car, Miranda.”

“Don't be so dramatic. It's not like your father can't afford to pay for it.”

“That's not the point.”

“It's part of the point. And this would never have become an issue if you hadn't insisted on meeting my mother in the first place. There was no reason for that.”

We continued arguing in this vein for some time. When she returned to Smith I did not expect to see her again. For a day or two I felt free, I felt that I had rid myself of a bizarre and reckless girl; then I started to think that I had made the worst mistake of my life, that I had lost the girl I loved for no reason, or rather for a very good reason. I knew that she hated her mother, and yet I wanted to meet her anyway because I wanted to get out of going to the Chappine. So I was worthless and selfish and I wanted her back.

The following Saturday morning she woke me with a knock at my door. “Hey there,” she said sweetly.

“Miranda, I'm so glad you're here. I've had such a terrible week. I really realized…”

She put a finger to my lips. “What I did was wrong. Completely wrong. I don't know what came over me. I'm not crazy and I don't believe in God. Please forgive me.”

We held hands as we strolled through campus, and I felt the giddiness of reprieve. By the lawn outside the chapel, she stopped. Biting her lip seductively, she led me into the chapel, which was empty except for an older man in the first pew who kept coughing loudly. As we reached one of the back pews, Miranda winked at me and genuflected. She unbuttoned my pants and took out my cock while we were still in the aisle, so that if the man had turned around, he would have seen it. She lay down under the pew, raised her knees, hiked her skirt, and took off her panties. It struck me as silly to have sex in a church. Religion had never meant anything substantial to me, so defacing it offered no erotic jolt, and all I could think was how dusty the floor was.

We had sex less and less after this. She still visited every weekend, but we just went to sleep at night. She shivered every time we passed the chapel. She said things like “I think it's wrong when people commit sacrilege just for the sake of doing so,” with no reference to what we had done and whether that had constituted sacrilege. Just before winter break, after we had not had sex for over a month, she woke me, straddling my abdomen.

“Guess what?” she said, with a twinkle in her eye that reminded me of Emily.

“What?”

“When I went out to take a walk just now I bumped into Neville. He told me Jersey Rothstein is moving to New Haven! He'll be here in January!”

“Did he get a job here?”

“Neville doesn't know why he's moving here.”

“I'm not sure I understand why you're so happy about this.”

“He'll be here and we'll able to challenge him face to face. Isn't that great?”

“Yeah, that should be exciting.”

She ran her hands up under my white undershirt and kissed my forehead. “Promise to love me forever, Arthur?”

6:00
p.m
. Saturday, May 11, 2012

I have not eaten
since I checked into the Chappine. When I was writing about Paul I ordered some fruit to bring back memories in a kind of a sour-Proust way, but I didn't eat any of it, partially because I didn't like the way the attendant who brought it smirked at me—apparently, “#Huntcest” is a trending topic on Twitter—but mostly because my stomach is too full of Sydney and my past. I have checked news services but no one seems to have any information on her. I have emailed some colleagues and sources but no one has responded; no one seems to want to speak to me. The entire experience does rather make me wish I had a burqa, and this in turn makes me think about Daisy.

Before Jason deployed to Iraq, Miranda emailed me several times a day asking me whether it was possible that there was anything else I had not yet thought of that might still dissuade him, or if there was anything I could think of that might convince the military to keep him in the States or send him to Korea or do anything other than send him to Iraq. After he went to Iraq, she started emailing me several times a week wanting more details about how great and necessary the war was. These were the words she used, great and necessary. At first I thought she was mocking both me and the war, but it quickly became clear that she did in fact want to know precisely what the war was accomplishing, so that she could better cheer on her son. Soon enough, she was sending me her own arguments for the war, her own glosses on the day's news. Sometimes a particularly bad day of bombings would leave me dispirited, but she would email saying that this only further proved that defeating the Islamofascists was absolutely necessary. She started mentioning Jason less and less, restricting herself to general comments about the insurgency. Her support for the war only heightened with Jason's death. “It pains me to say it,” she wrote me only two weeks afterward, “but I think that it may be time to put people in prison for criticizing the war.”

The other issue that Miranda routinely emailed me about was Daisy and her burqa. “What can I do to get her to stop? Any ideas?”

I did not have any ideas, apart from the obvious one that she was doing this only to piss off her mother or someone else. But I thought that there was likely some other reason. I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about burqas, though for the most part there is very little to think about burqas: they are terrible and repressive, and to think anything more about them is likely to yield something clever and wrong. Sydney got angry with me whenever I speculated about the burqa.

“You and my mother don't get it at all. You keep playing Daisy's ‘Guess Why I'm Doing This' game, when it's completely obvious that the only reason she's doing it is to trick you into playing her game. It's like the stupidest and most obvious possible modernist novel, one that the author actually locks in a box so that you can't read it, except that she—her soul more than her body—is the novel and you're the dumb critic who speculates about what's in the novel and why the author would possibly hide a work of such genius. There's nothing in the fucking box! Daisy's clothes have no emperor.”

Sydney didn't often confront me like this—she usually agreed with most of what I said—but when she did, I have to admit that it was exhilarating. Nevertheless, I haven't been able to stop myself from thinking about the burqa. Just after Sydney left for
REDACTED
—mostly to distract myself—I wrote up the few pages I reproduce below in which I imagine myself into Daisy's perspective, imagining, if you'll forgive a hacky reporter's phrase, life inside the burqa. I emailed it to Sydney in hopes that she might receive it while waiting in Cairo, but of course she did not respond, most likely because she didn't receive it. When not talking about her sister, Sydney likes to say that empathy is the most important thing, that empathy is the most important part of our jobs. So I hope that she would appreciate the amount of effort I have put into crafting the friendliest possible version of what I still in my heart consider her sister's essentially evil act.

Maybe the burqa occurs to Daisy as she leaves a bar late one Friday night. The bar is crowded, people are pushing their elbows into her, her boyfriend is drunk and putting his hands on her to an extent that is embarrassing in front of her friends. She keeps on getting poked with a pool cue. Guys look at her breasts and push against her as they pass by. So she leaves the bar, needing a cigarette, and she is surprised at the sudden revulsion she feels, pushing her way to the exit, against all those stupidly constructed elbows. It seems to her that she could rip off the arms and legs in her way and not do any significant harm to the people they're attached to. There's no one in this bar, there's not a single human being in the world, who does not look pasted together from some fleshy stumps of something. They might as well be pasted together by children. People are just bloated stick figures. What kind of a thing to keep a person in is a body?

Yes, yes, a body does not contain a person, a person is something that happens to a body. If she does not know that, she does not know anything.

Still, the problem with faces is that people can see them. The problem with eyes is that with them you see faces. And as soon as she sees a face she has an opinion, whether she's aware of it or not. In this bar for instance: one girl looks needy, one girl looks fucked-out and stupid, another girl looks stupid and sexually deprived. Every girl she sees, and herself depending on the day, has either too much sex or not enough. She has less control over her opinions than she does over how she looks and speaks, which means she has less control over what she thinks about other people than she has over what people think about her. Maybe opinions are the problem, not bodies. Where do opinions come
from? About smoking, about war, about the differences between men and women and the precise formula of nature and nurture in causing those differences. Three tablespoons of nature and two of nurture! Five tablespoons of nurture and three of nature! To hell with opinions. Prefer desire, she says to herself, now almost at the exit, passing the bouncer who is flirting with a girl who must have a fake ID, and whose ID the bouncer must know is fake. See? She couldn't care less about this, and still she is crowded by an opinion. Prefer desire, she says to herself, more or less out loud. This is what is taught by the writers she loves and what is taught by advertising, and an agreement between literature and advertising is the sort of consensus that would only be breached by the sort of people who are too unimaginative to do anything but breach.

Finally she gets outside and lights a cigarette, inhales deeply. Cigarettes: her great triumph of desire over opinion. All of her opinions about the evils of the tobacco industry, all the health consequences she so often recites to herself, mean nothing to her. She wants to smoke and that's that. Smoking will give her body pleasure and then it will destroy it. Which does not say much for desire.

All of these thoughts will go away. Only prigs hate the body, almost by definition. You might as well love what the senses give you, since there's nothing else to love. To hate the body and to hate desire is to hate sex, and she certainly does not hate sex. She wants sex much more than her boyfriend does, though he would never admit it and pretends to want to paw her all the time. She has held herself back, because women are trained to be their own policemen, and still people think she's bitchy. Though of course men are trained to police themselves as well. And here she goes again, men versus women. Boring subject. Since there is no difference between the body and the mind, opinions are calamities that befall bodies.