Short Century (8 page)

It must be awful to kill someone if a daydream could make me feel this bad, I thought.

It was easy enough to imagine Paul, had he lived, taking a rifle to every anti-war protester he encountered. These protesters were all Yale men who, no matter what they would later say, were no likelier to participate in a present-day American revolution than they were to build a time machine and fight next to Robespierre, but Paul wouldn't have taken a chance, or maybe he just wouldn't have cared, and would have just shot them all. When that guy shot some people from a tower at the University of Texas, I thought: Paul must have survived, this must be him. And yet here I was, having the same fantasy.

By the time I looked back for the bone-thin girl in the sweater, I could not see her anymore.

It didn't matter if I was on the losing side right now. I had been born on one team, but the glory of democracy was that I could switch sides. Equality was good, a goal to strive for. If the war was what my class had done for the world, then it deserved to lose. I could switch sides. The glory of democracy was that it sanctified betrayal.

There was a reason, it occurred to me, why people who shared my blood had ruled this country for hundreds of years. It was because we were stronger, more powerful. And the truth was that I was stronger than Paul; he had killed himself and I never would. There was only one other person as strong as I was: Emily. That bone-thin girl wasn't worthy of me—only Emily was.

If I married my sister, even the hippies in San Francisco would have to be impressed. Talk about freedom from taboo!

In a way it made a certain amount of sense. Emily and I got along very well, probably better than most boyfriends and girlfriends or husbands and wives, and there was no reason for us to pay attention to anyone else's standards of morality.

But it was also insane.

This was bad. I could feel myself turning into some kind of evil fascist. That wasn't who I wanted to be. I wanted to be someone who stood up for justice against unfair privilege. In the smithy of my soul I wanted to forge not the oft-created consciousness of my race, but simply my soul. I wanted to turn inward, but not incest-inward. I wanted to be wholly myself in a world that was new, and my sister was not new.

It occurred to me that I should date a black girl. There were, of course, a lot of black girls who lived in New Haven. But I didn't want to date a black girl just for the sake of dating a black girl; that seemed racist, too.

I put a cigarette in my mouth and struck a match against the matchbook, but to no avail. Two more matches failed to light. I could feel Paul laughing at me, both for failing to light a match and for worrying so much about becoming a traitor to my class or to my family. The fact that I was even worried about betraying my class or my family showed that I was much more beholden to Paul than I wanted to think.

I stood there for another ten minutes. Burned children jerked and spun as people shifted their feet and let their placards fall to their sides.

Fingering my cigarette pack, still needing a smoke, I looked around this stretch of Connecticut and wondered whether any of my ancestors had ever killed an Indian where the school's buildings now stood. Doubtful, but it was almost certain that my ancestors were responsible for many deaths.

There was a boisterous couple a few feet from me, the guy with his hands on the girl's waist and both of them laughing. Without noticing it until now, I had been dipping in and out of eavesdropping on their conversation. They had been talking about movies and music and occasionally they shouted slogans. The girl reached behind and scratched the back of her boyfriend's head. Her sunglasses and her dark, curving bangs made her impossibly attractive to me. There would be something wonderful about a world where everyone was equal and everyone shared and no one owned anything or anyone, where I could walk up to this girl and kiss her. Where she could scratch the back of my head.

Paul would have known what to say to this girl. He had probably picked up a lot of girls right where I was standing. I could feel him taunting me for not being bolder.

It was important that I start dating someone immediately—someone as far from a WASP, and certainly as far from Emily, as I could find.

I reached into my pocket for another cigarette, and as I fumbled with the pack I noticed a girl with long black hair. There was something about her mouth that intrigued me—was it that it was wide or that it was narrow? I put the pack back in my pocket and walked over to her.

“Can I bum a cigarette?”

She examined me from head to toe, making no effort to hide that she was doing so.

“You look like you went to Eton.”

“Wrong side of the pond.”

“I think bluebloods are parasites.”

“We are. That's why I'm bumming a cigarette.”

She tilted her head and smiled faintly. I was impressed with myself; this was the sort of line I usually came up with only after the moment was over. I tried to smile slyly, in a way that acknowledged our mutual attraction as an oblique, private joke. She gave me a cigarette and a light. I took a drag and felt wonderful.

f

After the protest dispersed
with a long silence, I took her to an agreeably scummy New Haven diner, where she insisted on ordering only toast.

She told me that she was a sophomore at Smith on scholarship—“my mother wouldn't pay even if she could”—and that she wanted to be a painter. It turned out that we had both seen a production of
Julius Caesar
several weekends earlier, so we talked about that.

“The play was pretty conservative,” Miranda said. “They didn't make any effort to connect the play to our time. They could have dressed Caesar up as General Westmoreland. Or maybe they could have dressed Cassius up as General Westmoreland, depending on how they interpret the play.”

I took an unpleasant bite from my burger. The burgers were good at this diner but they were ruined by the damp buns. I usually ate the burgers with a fork and knife but I didn't want to do that now.

“I think it was about our time,” I said. “It was subtle.”

“Subtle! Subtlety is bourgeois. Brecht taught us that when he popped drama's cherry. He fucked drama until it stopped being subtle, like a lady, and started being useful, like a whore. Don't tell me you're afraid of whores.”

I was transfixed. “I'm not.”

“I'm starting to think that whores could be the revolutionary vanguard.” She leaned over her plate as she spoke, clearly the sort of person who needed to gesticulate in order to follow her own train of thought, and since her hands were occupied with cutlery she compensated with broad facial expressions. In an unattractive girl, this might have been another reason to find her unattractive. It made me want Miranda even more.

“They're obviously the symbol of the proletariat, the human being as chattel, but they can be more than that.” I looked at the tiny mole just above her mouth. Her mouth quivered just a little as she spoke. For all her bombast there was something nervous and shy about her.

“I feel bad,” she said. “I should be back out there. They're holding an all-night vigil outside President Brewster's house.”

“I'm curious. What do you say to people who think that communism is better in theory than in practice?”

She took a bite of her toast and answered as she chewed, trying to suppress a self-satisfied smile. “Practice is better in theory than in practice.”

There was a nice silence that lasted too long and became an awkward silence. I thought I should say something and, after struggling a bit for a topic, I brought up the negotiations to merge Vassar and Yale. She shrugged a bit and said she didn't know why people kept talking about that, as it probably would not wind up happening and it didn't matter much anyway. I brought up Staughton Lynd, a history professor who had been denied tenure, possibly on the basis of academic merit and possibly because he had made a much-publicized visit to Hanoi in support of North Vietnam. She said that the topic was boring and that, even though some students still were not convinced, it was obvious that the process had been fair.

“Somebody can be leftist without being smart,” she said. “By the way, you realize that everything I've told you so far is a lie.”

I knew that she was joking, but something about this claim was arousing.

She was leaning back in her seat now with her arms crossed over her stomach and I could feel her interest in me dissipating. I could envision myself going home alone, with nothing to think about except for my sister.

“Have you read
The Dominion of Pleasure
?” I asked, pulling it out of my back pocket. She had not heard of the book, and she read the back cover with dismay. She read the first page and, not looking up from the book, she said that Rothstein was all wrong, that in fact sex without justice was not sex at all. It was only brutality, and justice without sex was likely only brutality as well.

“This guy is an asshole,” she said. “He's a fascist.”

“An asshole,” I said. “Yes.”

I motioned for the check and took out my wallet, but I didn't have any cash.

“I'll talk to the owner,” I said. “He likes me, I think.”

Miranda swung her leg up on to the table. She reached into her boot and took out a ten-dollar bill. “I always keep a ten-dollar bill in my shoe,” she said. “Just in case.”

After that we walked around campus and she talked about Rothstein, about how if she were a dictator she would want everyone to follow Rothstein's philosophy, about how obvious it was that Rothstein did not understand sex at all. Then she talked about de Kooning and Rothko and other painters. She told me she was an only child. I told her that I had a sister, but that we were not especially close. That was too bad, she said, it always warmed her heart to hear of close siblings. Occasionally she would say, plainly without meaning it, that it was getting late and she really should go to the vigil outside President Brewster's house. I decided not to mention that President Brewster had been a good friend of my father's when they were undergraduates. Haltingly, checking my reaction as she spoke, she talked about her ex-boyfriend, Neville Norture, also a Yale student. She said that he was not the smartest guy she had ever met but beneath all of his idiocies and his off-putting arrogance he really cared about improving the world. A lot of guys were like that, she thought, stupid but caring. He was nothing like me, though, she said; he was not nearly as witty. Before I had time to wonder why she thought I was witty we were talking about a play that she had seen and that I pretended to have seen called
How Now, Dow Jones
. For the most part she talked and I listened; I was afraid that the more I talked the more likely I would be to say something that would expose me as a freak with fantasies of fucking his sister.

Eventually we stopped by the vigil and we stayed until it was too late for her to catch the last bus back to Smith. We both pretended that this was accidental.

f

Bright young lad, the world outside is just a fad
Once you're here, you won't need a map
Welcome to the Chapp

“Such a great song,”
my sister used to say of “I Pine for the Chappine.” The eponymous film—one of the more energetic of the fur-coat-and-tap-dancing movies of the Depression—probably appealed to her more than did the song itself. There's a scene where Ginger Rogers does a few steps of a waltz with a portrait of a stuffy-looking fat man with a moustache and a gold watch, and then tosses the portrait into the fireplace and does a tap dance. Hanging above my desk as I write this is a hack painting of the Chappine's lobby. There are leather chairs and men with cigars, the backs of their heads reflected in mirrors. Today the hotel is for tourists who've seen the movie. Even when I used to come here with my family it was in decline. My grandfather killed himself toward the end of its great era. The leather chairs are still there, though, as are the pillars. There's a new, ostentatious hanging waterfall to replace the old mural, which depicted members of an Indian tribe, presumably the Chappine tribe, huddling around a fire, thrusting spears into the air, as though their spears might propel them into the sky.

When we used to come to the Chappine for Emily's birthday, we rented out a capacious suite on the third floor that is now a fitness center, filled with televisions and elliptical machines. The room I'm staying in is tiny, certainly not large enough for the king-size bed they've insisted on cramming in, and not large enough for the desk on which I'm writing this.

Downstairs in the lobby, the white pillars look just as they did when Emily would try without success to climb them.

For some time after Paul's death, the hotel was a forbidden subject. Because it was only a few blocks away from my family's apartment, we passed by frequently—and when we did, my father dug his crutches into the concrete. My mother had this way of widening her eyes that suggested that she was absent from her body, but that she might very well do violence if she ever returned. One day Emily pointed to the birdshit-dappled gargoyles on the hotel's façade and said they were pretty. Our father halted and, after looking from Emily to the gargoyles, laughed in a way that scared me and made Emily cry—not something Emily often did. He told her that she was right, the gargoyles were pretty, and inside the hotel was even prettier, and because her birthday was coming up the family would spend her birthday there. After that my father rented a suite every year to celebrate Emily's birthday.

When I was a teenager, there was, of course, no Internet. Between checking whether Peter Reaper has said anything new—he hasn't—and exerting the energy required to stop myself from idly looking at pornography, it's amazing that I can write anything at all.

The last time I was at the Chappine was in February of 2003, for a debate on the then-imminent war in Iraq. The debate was sponsored by a liberal magazine I had occasionally written for and which now wanted nothing to do with me, other than to put me at a podium and yell at me. After I accepted his invitation, the editor responded with an email accusing me of accepting only so that I could gloat that all the blood I had been calling for would soon be shed. But gloating wasn't at all what I had in mind. These people had once been my friends, and I didn't want to lord any victory over them (a victory which in any case was not mine but the Iraqis', and for that matter the world's), or honestly even to debate them, but simply to embrace them and drink wine with them and talk about something else entirely. We are about to overthrow a tyrant, I wanted to say, let us celebrate the moment that is about to arrive, regardless of whether we wanted it to arrive. Failing that, they could yell at me all they wanted. It would still be good to see them.