Paul Auster - Invisible

You were going to do it once, just once. It was supposed to be an experiment, not a new way of life, and no matter how much you enjoyed it, you would have to stop after that one night, because if you went on with it after that, things could get out of hand, the two of you could easily get carried away, and then there would be the problem of having to account for bloody sheets, not to mention the grotesque possibility, the unthinkable possibility, which neither of you dared to talk about out loud. Anything and everything, you decided, but no penetration, the whole gamut of opportunities and positions, as much as you both wanted for as long as you both wanted it, but it would be a night of sex without intercourse. Since neither one of you had engaged in sex with anyone before, that prospect was exciting enough, and you spent the days leading up to your parents’ departure in a delirium of anticipation-frightened to death, shocked by the boldness of the plan, crazed.

It was the first chance you ever had to tell Gwyn how much you loved her, to tell her how beautiful you thought she was, to push your tongue inside her mouth and kiss her in the way you had dreamed of doing for months. You were trembling when you took off your clothes, trembling from head to toe when you crawled into the bed and felt her arms tighten around you. It was dark in the room, but you could dimly make out the gleam in your sister’s eyes, the contours of her face, the outline of her body, and when you crawled under the covers and felt the nakedness of that body, the bare skin of your fifteen-year-old sister pressing against the bare skin of your own body, you shuddered, feeling almost breathless from the onrush of sensations coursing through you. You lay in each other’s arms for several moments, legs entwined, cheeks touching, too awed to do anything but cling to each other and hope you wouldn’t burst apart from sheer terror. Eventually, Gwyn began to run her hands along your back, and then she brought her mouth toward your face and kissed you, kissed you hard, with an aggression you had not been expecting, and as her tongue shot into your mouth, you understood that there was no better thing in the world than to be kissed in the way she was kissing you, that this was without argument the single most important justification for being alive. You went on kissing for a long spell, the two of you purring and pawing at each other as your tongues flailed and saliva slid down from your lips. At last, you screwed up your courage and placed your palms on her breasts, her small, still not fully grown breasts, and for the first time in your life you said to yourself: I am touching a girl’s naked breasts. After you had run your hands over them for a while, you began to kiss the places you had touched, to flick your tongue around the nipples, to suck the nipples, and you were surprised when they grew firmer and more erect, as firm and erect as your penis had been since the moment you climbed on top of your naked sister. It was too much for you to handle, this initiation into the glories of female anatomy pushed you beyond your limits, and without any prompting from Gwyn you suddenly had your first ejaculation of the night, a ferocious spasm that wound up all over her stomach. Mercifully, whatever embarrassment you felt was short-lived, for even as the juices were pouring out of you, Gwyn had begun to laugh, and by way of toasting your accomplishment, she merrily rubbed her hand across her belly.

It went on for hours. You were both so young and inexperienced, both so charged up and indefatigable, both so crazy in your hunger for each other, and because you had promised that this would be the only time, neither one of you wanted it to end. So you kept at it. With the strength and stamina of your fourteen years, you quickly rebounded from your accidental discharge, and as your sister gently put her hand around your rejuvenated penis (sublime transport, inexpressible joy), you forged on with your anatomy lesson by roaming your hands and mouth over other areas of her body. You discovered the delicious, down-soft regions of nape and inner thigh, the indelible satisfactions of back hollow and buttocks, the almost unbearable delight of the licked ear. Tactile bliss, but also the smell of the perfume Gwyn had put on for the occasion, the ever more sweaty slickness of your two bodies, and the little symphony of sounds you both made throughout the night, singly and together: the moans and whimpers, the sighs and yelps, and then, when Gwyn came for the first time (rubbing her clitoris with the middle finger of her left hand), the sound of air surging in and out of her nostrils, the accelerating speed of those breaths, the triumphant gasp at the end. The first time, followed by two other times, perhaps even a third. In your own case, beyond the early solo bungle, there was the hand of your sister wrapped around your penis, the hand moving up and down as you lay on your back in a fog of mounting excitation, and then there was her mouth, also moving up and down, her mouth around your once-again hard penis, and the profound intimacy you both felt when you came into that mouth-the fluid of one body passing into another, the intermingling of one person with another, conjoined spirits. Then your sister fell back onto the bed, opened her legs, and told you to touch her. Not there, she said, here, and she took your hand and guided you to the place where she wanted you to be, the place where you had never been, and you, who had known nothing before that night, slowly began your education as a human being.

Six years later, you are sitting in the kitchen of the apartment you share with your sister on West 107th Street. It is early July 1967, and you have just told her that you would prefer to stay in New York for the weekend, that you have no interest in trekking out to your parents’ house on the bus. Gwyn is sitting across the table from you, dressed in blue shorts and a white T-shirt, her long dark hair pinned up on her head because of the heat, and you notice that her arms are tanned, that in spite of the office job that keeps her indoors for much of the day, she has been out in the sun often enough for her skin to have acquired a lovely ginger-brown cast, which somehow reminds you of the color of pancakes. It is six-thirty on a Thursday evening, and you are both home from work, drinking beer directly from the can and smoking unfiltered Chesterfields. In an hour or so, you will be going out to dinner at an inexpensive Chinese restaurant-more for the air-conditioning than the food-but for now you are content to sit and do nothing, to recompose yourself after another tedious day at the library, which you have begun referring to as the Castle of Yawns. After your comment about not wanting to go to New Jersey, you have no doubt that Gwyn will start talking about your parents. You are prepared for that, and talk you will if you must, but you nevertheless hope the conversation will not last too long. The nine millionth chapter in the saga of Marge and Bud. When did you and your sister start calling your parents by their first names? You can’t remember precisely, but more or less around the time Gwyn left home for college. They are still Mom and Dad when you are with them, but Marge and Bud when you and your sister are alone. A slight affectation, perhaps, but it helps to separate them from you in your mind, to create an illusion of distance, and that is what you need, you tell yourself, that is what you need more than anything else.

I don’t get it, your sister says to you. You never want to go there anymore.

I wish I did, you answer, shrugging defensively, but every time I set foot in that house, I feel I’m being sucked back into the past.

Is that so terrible? You’re not going to tell me all your memories are bad. That would be ridiculous. Ridiculous and untrue.