E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

“You’re going to kill us!” Phyllis screamed.

“All you have to do is take off your pants.”

“I’ll do it, I’ll do it, but first slow down!”

“First do it!”

Phyllis unbuckled her belt and unzipped her fly and arching her back off the seat pulled her bellbottoms down. “I’m going to tell them,” she said. “I’ll tell them what you do to me and they’ll put you right in there with your sister. The both of you!”

“All the way off, please.”

Lifting her knees, she put the heels of her boots on the seat, unzippered her boots, pulled them off, dropped them on the floor, and pulled the pants over her ankles, and threw them down on top of the boots. Then she looked at him and pulled her underpants off and threw them into the pile at her feet. Then she held her hands over her ears and closed her eyes and bent her head.

Daniel took his foot off the gas pedal and turned on the windshield wipers. Phyllis was crying. She ran her fingers up through her hair and held her ears and cried. Daniel moved into the right-hand lane. A clap of thunder struck directly overhead. Daniel instructed Phyllis to kneel on the seat facing her side of the car, and to bend over as far as she could, kneeled and curled up like a penitent, a worshiper, an abject devotionalist. Weeping, she complained that the car was too small and she too big to get comfortable that way. Daniel gently urged her to try.

“Like this?” she said, her voice muffled by her hair.

“That’s fine.”

“Everyone will see me.”

“No one can see you.”

“The baby.”

“The baby is asleep.”

“Don’t hurt me. Just don’t hurt me, Daniel.”

He ran his right hand over her buttocks. The small of her back was dewy with sweat. She shivered and the flesh of her backside trembled under his hand. He tracked the cleft downward. Triangulated by her position it yielded a slightly sour smell of excrement. He teased the small hairs of her tiny anus. Then, with the back of his hand, he rubbed her labia lying plump in their nest between the upturned soles of her feet.

The rain drummed down. The thunder was fierce. Cars were passing on the left. The sky was black. Daniel leaned forward and pressed the cigarette lighter. His hand remained poised. Do you believe it? Shall I continue? Do you want to know the effect of three concentric circles of heating element glowing orange in a black night of rain upon the tender white girlflesh of my wife’s ass? Who are you anyway? Who told you you could read this? Is nothing sacred?

On the other hand the only thing worse than telling what happened is to leave it to the imagination. There is a classic surrealist silent film by Buñuel and Dali. It is a film about a live hand in a box, and a man dragging the carcass of a cow through his living room at the end of a rope; and the cow turns into a grand piano; and the hand is thrown into a sewer, and a crowd gathers and someone driving away from this fear in a taxi finds the hand in its box in the taxi — and if I recall these images inaccurately that is just as good. But the central event of the picture is this: a hefty and darkly handsome man in a tight-fitting ribbed undershirt stands in a room sharpening a straight razor. A lady sits on a wooden chair in the room with him. She too is half-dressed. Her face is controlled. Through the window we see that it is a moonlit night and that there are clouds moving through the bright moonlit sky. The man comes over to the woman, large eyed, bow mouthed, and impassive in her straight-backed chair, and with his thumb and forefinger spreads her eyelids as far apart as they will go. Then he brings his straight razor down toward her face and her eyeball. The film cuts to the night sky outside the window. A thin, knifelike cloud is seen gliding across the bright orb of the moon. And just as you, the audience, have settled for this symbolic mutilation of the woman’s eye, the camera cuts back to the scene, and in close-up, shows the razor slicing into the eyeball.

They never talked about Paul and Rochelle. While they grew up with the Lewins there was no need to. They had shared an experience so evenly that to have spoken about it would have diminished what they knew and understood. Share and share alike, the cardinal point of justice for children driven home to them with vicious exactitude. (Do not strike, this is rhetorical but true. Only a son of Rochelle’s could say this line. In our house there could be a laying on of words like lightning. Dispensed outrage, the smell of burning in the mouths of our mother and father. Once she said, “Let our death be his bar mitzvah.”) So at the beginning at least, there was no need to talk about it. When the brother and the sister went somewhere, or did something together; when he tightened her skate or helped her with her homework, or took her to the movies; the way they moved, physically moved, in a convalescence of suffering spoke about it. The way he would hold her arm as they ran across the street in front of traffic spoke about it. The way his muscles tensed when she wasn’t where she was supposed to be at any given time of the day, that spoke of it as well.

But they grew. He had taught her how to play casino and all the chords he knew on the guitar, he had taught her to ride a two-wheeler and to do the crawl, and one day she appeared to him suddenly past the age of being taught and taken care of. There were certain needs and expectations for life that could not properly be filled by your brother or sister. That was normal. And she must have come to feel, as he did, bored or unfairly burdened by the habits of a relationship that were drying up into sentimental gestures. And added to that was what he supposed was the normal inevitable loathing for the people who look like you and smell the same as you. That experience of total dissatisfaction with the closely related: who are not smart enough, good-looking enough, cool enough, to get through a day without boring you or shaming you. Except with their parents not available for that kind of self-honing, that sharpening of independence, he was the strop; the mother, the father, the brother, the family. And it was painful and they had some terrible fights.

Embarrassingly, Daniel and Susan adjusted to the rise in their fortunes. The life provided by an assistant professor of law was, by comparison, one of spectacular wealth. At the time there was no mention of the Trust. Each child had a room of his own. Lise bought them clothes that fit. It was life in the middle class and it was unbelievably good. Bob Lewin with his kind smile and his gentle sense of humor, came on in a way that seemed to suggest it might be possible to live comfortably and yet with honor. Their new parents never shouted, life didn’t beat out that rhythm of crisis and training for crisis. There was an absence of ideology and relentless moral sentiment. They had a new name, which was like being high. The streets were new, the house was new. It was quiet. There were no intruders. There was a daily routine of school, play, practice, homework. There was a weekend routine of a planned activity or outing. There was an assumption that constantly surprised Daniel, that took getting used to: It was all right every now and then to enjoy yourself and have a good time. It really was all right.

Less and less did my heart bound in erratic dysynchronous jumps, like the rubber band balls I used to make.

And so Susan and Daniel Lewin slipped into the indolent rituals of the teenage middle class. In order for them to do this, there had to be a dialectic of breaking free: you asked yourself why live in faith or memorial to the people who had betrayed you. For obvious reasons this too was unspoken between them. There were at least a couple of years, a couple of good years, when none of it had happened. Or if it had happened, neither of them could have cared less. They had their own bodies, their own friends, they had lives of their own.