Short Century (11 page)

f

“How's Miraaaaanda?”

“She's all right.”

“What do you like about her?”

I couldn't think of what to say, so I said that we had a lot of fun together. When Emily said nothing in response and seemed to be waiting for me to say more, I added that she was very sweet.

“You two want to stop the war, right? What have you done to stop the war in the last two weeks?”

“Emily, I only have a few minutes to talk.”

“Don't get mad. I'm just kidding around. I haven't had a chance to say this to you, but I'm really happy for you.”

“I'm not mad. It's just that I only have a few minutes to talk.”

“You always cut our conversations short. And we only talk when you pick up. Whenever I leave messages with other people on your floor you never call me back. You probably picked up hoping it was Miranda.”

“That's not true.” It was true.

“Do you promise on Paul's grave that you're happy to talk to me?”

“Emily, come on.”

“I lost my virginity last night. To James Hickham.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. But we're not really dating. We just had sex.”

I knew that the fact that this news made me miserable and angry was cause for alarm. “Hickham?”

“I know. That's why I wanted him to be my first. I didn't want my virginity to be a present for anyone. You should throw away your virginity the same way you throw away anything you're finished with.”

“That doesn't make any sense.”

“Why not?”

“Because…”

“Because it should be a present for someone?” she said. “I should have awarded my hymen like a ribbon? ‘In recognition of your maturity, your patience, your intelligence, your warm sense of humor, and above all your true kindness, I present you with this hymen'?”

We parried back and forth a bit about whether having sex with someone she didn't like was a good idea. The image of my sister standing naked with James, the thought of her giving him permission to touch her, was so clear in my head and so impossible to get rid of that it was as if I were locked in the room with them. I assured myself that I would have been happy for her if she had lost her virginity to any other boy. It was because James was such a terrible choice that I was upset. Because I wanted her to have a good life. And because there should, it seemed to me, be at least some justice about who gets to have sex with whom.

f

And now to Neville
Norture, more or less a constant undertow of my relationship with Miranda, from the earliest days to the funeral that he and I will be attending in a little under sixty hours. And his name
is
Neville. As he or his ghostwriter details in the Saul-to-Paul memoir
When I Was Bad
, he decided sometime in the eighties that he did not like bearing a name that made everyone think of the word “appeasement,” so he changed his name to Winston. Apparently the television executives thought that Winston was too British for a general audience; hence Win Norture and the nightly program
On the Homefront with Win Norture
.

Right now I'm watching a late-night comedy show on which “Win” is proudly displaying the sagging skin around his neck. He asks the brunette on the couch next to him whether she thinks a real man would get plastic surgery. She giggles and says that that depends on where; this gets a huge laugh from the audience. Neville invites her, with an ostensibly facetious leer, to stroke his gullet. “Hey, unlike some other cable-news guys I could mention,” he says, “I may have a chicken neck, but I'm no chicken.” In a few minutes, Neville will do what he always does on late-night comedy shows: he'll offer some outrageous opinion and the host will either berate him indignantly or chuckle and change the subject. I forget which host does what.

Neville was far more active than Miranda and I were; he organized almost all of the few events we attended. He also threw a lot of parties and Miranda often insisted that we go, unhappy about that as I was. “Are you going to be jealous or can we go to Neville's party?” was a question she asked on many Saturday nights. He liked to make speeches about how his pharmaceutical executive father was a fascist, how he created drugs to keep the population docile. “My father is no different from the Nazis he dropped bombs on during the war,” he would say (unsurprisingly, he would later write a bestseller entitled
Uncomplaining Valor
about the heroics of his father and the other men in his squadron). Miranda and I would sit on the tattered sofa in the middle of the room and mostly we would talk to no one but each other.

f

We were making love
when news came over the radio of Martin Luther King's assassination. I tried to stop, but I was almost finished, and in the process of pulling out I ejaculated, some inside her, some out. Miranda grabbed a tissue and didn't talk to me for the rest of the day. She wouldn't talk to me as we walked around the stricken campus, hugging the people we knew. “I tried to pull out!” I kept saying, but she just kept shushing me.

Classes were cancelled the next day and there were two memorial services for King at Yale, one for blacks, one for whites. A black minister who spoke at the rally for whites said that King was “a hero for the white man, who deluded us into believing that this was not a nation of division.” Neville leaned over to me and said, simply: “King was a fake. I knew it all along.”

I wanted, or thought I wanted, to live in a world without racial distinctions. I wanted my white skin to mean nothing, but I had done nothing at all to bring about any change. I had barely spoken to any of the blacks who lived in New Haven. I had no cause to feel superior to any racial separatists.

Still, I couldn't help but complain. “Aren't we trying to erase racial distinctions?”

Miranda shushed me. “We need to be respectful.”

Later that night, Miranda said that we had been right to make love through the announcement of King's death since King had long since become a tool of the Establishment. Making love, she said, was far more important, far more politically useful, than mourning this hero for the white man. I sat on my bed and stroked her arm through her light sweater.

f

We came across a
magazine profile of Jersey Rothstein. In his photo, Rothstein had one of those smiles that suggested a joke that you were being kept out of, and of which you might be the object. In 1936, at the age of seven, Rothstein, a Berlin Jew, was sent to the United States to live with distant relatives. His parents and three siblings died in concentration camps.

“My family is of no consequence,” Rothstein told the journalist. “My father, my brothers, my sister, there is one relevant fact about them, and that is that they are dead. The idea that the dead live on through those that loved them is a lie in the costume of a metaphor. To seek justice on behalf of dead people, to ‘honor the dead,' as the phrase goes, is advocacy without a constituency. Yes, I carry my family's genes, but to think this entails any moral responsibility is to infect natural selection with sentiment, to mistake Darwin for a theologian, or perhaps a novelist.”

When Miranda finished reading this aloud, she threw the magazine in the air. It grazed my nose as it fell. “That's genius,” she said. I responded that I was feeling sick and she should take the bus back to Smith. But as soon as she had left I started wondering about what she had said.

Wandering around campus, I ran into George Bush.

“Hunty-Dumpty!” he said. “You look like you…just had a great fall.”

“Maybe I did, George.”

“What's the matter? Chairman Mao pass over you for the Red Guard?”

I was a little embarrassed that Bush asked me this; I hadn't mentioned anything about my political conversion in the few times we'd spoken this year, and I didn't know how he had heard about it. I decided to toss it off. “Yes. Now I'm trying to see if Castro will take me on as the minister of cigars.” The joke wasn't very good, and he seemed to know it wasn't very good, but he laughed anyway.

“I don't know why you're always so mopey, Hunty-Dumpty. Are you just mad that you didn't get tapped?”

“I didn't notice.”

This was an unconvincing lie, and one that made Bush smile. Of course I had noticed I hadn't been selected for Skull and Bones, which might have been my final shot at my father's respect.

“Why are you going around telling people you're a communist?” Bush asked.

“I don't know. Maybe you've been right all along. Maybe loyalty is the only thing that matters in the world.”

“
Did I say that?” He gave me a grin that was either goofy or threatening or both.

“Maybe the most important thing is to be committed to your family,” I said. “Maybe that's much better than chaos. I see some people right now, they're laughing over the death of their family. I'm not saying that's normal, but I've seen it.”

“I'm glad to hear this out of you, Hunty-Dumpty. You had me worried for a while there. I thought maybe you were one of those guys who would sell out his friends and family just because he thought it would help him pick up girls. I was afraid you would deny me three times before your cock grows.”

“This isn't about picking up girls,” I said.

“Sure it isn't, Hunty-Dumpty.”

“Everything's fine for us, but things are fine for us
because
things are so bad for other people. Coffin said that, and I know you hate him, but he's right.”

He took a step closer to me and raised his nose a bit. “Look, Huntington. I've been pretty patient with you over the years. Other people think you're pretty much worthless but I never agreed. Maybe I shouldn't even bother. But I like you. I'm trying to look out for you. I think you should calm down and try to think about who you are. Are you just some guilty rich kid who feels sorry for people who couldn't care less about him?”

I looked into George's eyes, which even then were shifty and dim, and I was certain that the dimness of his eyes concealed some oblique, recondite wisdom, wisdom that he might not be able to articulate but that nonetheless animated him, wisdom that camouflaged itself so that only a happy few could detect it. Really, there was no reason for me to waste any more time on my unacted-upon radicalism. Miranda might leave me any day for a life of nourishing promiscuity. Maybe Rothstein would be revealed as psychotic and disturbed. Maybe it would turn out that he had strangled his wife and child, and then everyone who followed him would have strangled that woman and that child by proxy. Maybe there would be a race war and I would be murdered by the same blacks I was now so quick to defend. Maybe there would be some peaceful transition to communism and I would be arrested and mocked for thinking I qualified as a communist. Maybe there would be no race war and no war of any other sort and Norture and the rest would decide that America and their fathers were not so bad after all. Right now, I could stop being radical or pretending to be radical or whatever I was doing and accept whatever sinecure the Establishment elected to toss my way. I touched our future president on the forearm.

“I'm going to go now, George. Maybe I'll see you around. If I can, I'm going to burn every city in this country to the ground.”

He smirked at me and we walked in opposite directions. The next time I spoke to him was at a White House function shortly after the launch of the Iraq War. “Don't worry, Hunty-Dumpty,” he told me then. “
REDACTED
's on the list.”

f

One afternoon toward the
end of the year Miranda and I were walking back from lunch when we saw Emily standing by herself. She was wearing a frilly white summer dress and was massaging her left hand with her right, as she sometimes did when she was nervous. As soon as she saw me, her nervousness disappeared and was replaced by a big energetic and athletic smile.

“You didn't tell me you were coming to New Haven,” I said.

“I didn't want to ruin the surprise.” She stretched her arms out, almost certainly unconsciously pushing up her cleavage. “Here I am, Big Brother.”

Yes, she sometimes called me Big Brother. I can hear it now, Peter Reaper tapping:
the supposed disciple of Orwell was actually Big Brother
!
What a mob of incisive thinkers the Internet has created.

“You must be Miranda.”

“And you're Arthur's sister. What's your name again?”

Emily tilted her head, and then gave a smile that made her look like our mother.

“Emily,” she said. “I guess Arthur doesn't like to talk about me. I'm like his crazy first wife in the attic.”

This started the girls talking about
Jane Eyre
, which they both loved. Then they moved to making fun of me for being awkward and it was clear that they were great friends. Soon enough we were at a bar, and despite my reservations, Miranda talked me into buying a beer for Emily. Emily had never drunk beer before and it affected her very quickly.

“Don't you think,” she asked me, not slurring her speech but speaking slowly, “that Miranda looks like that doll I used to have?”

“Which one?”

“The one whose head I tore off after Paul died. Or before he died. After? After. Or maybe before. Miranda has the same pointy nose as the doll. It's a really pretty nose. I wish I had a nose like that.”

“Who's Paul?” Miranda asked.

“Our older brother,” I said. “He died a long time ago.”

“You've never mentioned him.”

I felt nauseated and I wanted to go home. “He died a long time ago.”

“Gone and forgotten, apparently.” Miranda lit a cigarette and offered one to Emily, who declined.

“He should be forgotten,” Emily said. “He was an asshole. He was a Nazi who was too stupid to be born at the right time or in the right country. He killed himself. Or I killed him by tearing the head off the doll. I don't really know.”