Paul Auster - Invisible

You both love Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Hawthorne and Melville, Flaubert and Stendhal, but at that stage of your life you cannot stomach Henry James, while Gwyn argues that he is the giant of giants, the colossus who makes all other novelists look like pygmies. You are in complete harmony about the greatness of Kafka and Beckett, but when you tell her that Cé-line belongs in their company, she laughs at you and calls him a fascist maniac. Wallace Stevens yes, but next in line for you is William Carlos Williams, not T. S. Eliot, whose work Gwyn can recite from memory. You defend Keaton, she defends Chaplin, and while you both howl at the sight of the Marx Brothers, your much-adored W. C. Fields cannot coax a single smile from her. Truffaut at his best touches you both, but Gwyn finds Godard pretentious and you don’t, and while she lauds Bergman and Antonioni as twin masters of the universe, you reluctantly tell her that you are bored by their films. No conflicts about classical music, with J. S. Bach at the top of the list, but you are becoming increasingly interested in jazz, while Gwyn still clings to the frenzy of rock and roll, which has stopped saying much of anything to you. She likes to dance, and you don’t. She laughs more than you do and smokes less. She is a freer, happier person than you are, and whenever you are with her, the world seems brighter and more welcoming, a place where your sullen, introverted self can almost begin to feel at home.

The conversation continues throughout the summer. You talk about books and films and the war, you talk about your jobs and your plans for the future, you talk about the past and the present, and you also talk about Born. Gwyn knows you are suffering. She understands that the experience still weighs heavily on you, and again and again she patiently listens to you tell the story, again and again the same story, the obsessive story that has wormed itself into your soul and become an integral part of your being. She tries to reassure you that you acted well, that there was nothing else you could have done, and while you agree that you could not have prevented Cedric Williams’s murder, you know that your cowardly hesitation before going to the police allowed Born to escape unpunished, and you cannot forgive yourself for that. Now it is Friday, the first evening of the early July weekend you have chosen to spend in New York, and as you and your sister sit at the kitchen table, drinking your postwork beers and smoking your cigarettes, the conversation once again turns to Born.

I’ve been mulling it over, Gwyn says, and I’m pretty sure the whole thing started because Born was sexually attracted to you. It wasn’t just Margot. It was the two of them together.

Startled by your sister’s theory, you pause for a moment to consider whether it makes any sense, painfully reviewing your tangled relations with Born from this altered perspective, but in the end you say no, you don’t agree.

Think about it, Gwyn persists.

I am thinking about it, you answer. If it were true, then he would have made a pass at me. But he didn’t. He never tried to touch me.

It doesn’t matter. Chances are, he wasn’t even aware of it himself. But a man doesn’t fork over thousands of dollars to a twenty-year-old stranger because he’s worried about his future. He does it out of a homoerotic attraction. Born fell in love with you, Adam. Whether he knew it himself is irrelevant.

I’m still not convinced, but now that you mention it, I wish he had made a pass at me. I would have punched him in the face and told him to fuck off, and then we never would have taken that walk down Riverside Drive, and the Williams kid never would have been killed.

Has anyone ever tried something like that with you?

Like what?

Another man. Has another man ever made a move on you?

I’ve gotten some curious stares, but no one’s ever said anything to me.

So you’ve never done it.

Done what?

Have sex with another guy.

God no.

Not even when you were little?

What are you talking about? Little boys don’t have sex. They can’t have sex-for the simple reason that they’re little boys.

I don’t mean little little. I’m talking about just after puberty. Thirteen, fourteen years old. I thought all boys that age liked to jerk each other off.

Not me.

What about the famous circle jerk? You must have taken part in one of those.

How old was I the last year I went to summer camp?

I can’t remember.

Thirteen… It must have been thirteen, because I started working at the Shop-Rite when I was fourteen. Anyway, the last year I went to camp, some of the boys in my cabin did that. Six or seven of them, but I was too shy to join in.

Too shy or too put off?

A little of both, I guess. I’ve always found the male body somewhat repellent.

Not your own, I hope.

I mean other men’s bodies. I have no desire to touch them, no desire to see them naked. To tell you the truth, I’ve often wondered why women are drawn to men. If I were a woman, I’d probably be a lesbian.

Gwyn smiles at the absurdity of your remark. That’s because you’re a man, she says.

And what about you? Have you ever been attracted to another girl?

Of course. Girls are always getting crushes on each other. It comes with the territory.

I mean sexually attracted. Have you ever felt the urge to sleep with a girl?

I just spent four years at an all-girls college, remember? Things are bound to happen in a claustrophobic atmosphere like that.

Really?

Yes, really.

You never told me.

You never asked.

Did I have to? What about the No-Secrets Pact of nineteen sixty-one?

It’s not a secret. It’s too unimportant to qualify as a secret. For the record-just so you don’t get the wrong impression-it happened exactly twice. The first time, I was stoned on pot. The second time, I was drunk.

And?

Sex is sex, Adam, and all sex is good, as long as both people want it. Bodies like to be touched and kissed, and if you close your eyes, it hardly matters who’s touching and kissing you.

As a statement of principle, I couldn’t agree with you more. I just want to know if you enjoyed it, and if you did enjoy it, why you haven’t done it more often.

Yes, I enjoyed it. But not enormously, not as much as I enjoy having sex with men. Contrary to your view on the subject, I adore men’s bodies, and I have a particular fondness for the thing they have that women’s bodies don’t. Being with a girl is pleasant enough, but it doesn’t have the power of a good, old-fashioned two-sex tumble.

Less bang for your buck.

Exactly. Minor league.

Bush league, as it were.

Stifling a laugh, Gwyn flings her cigarette pack at you and shouts in pretend anger: You’re impossible!

That is precisely what you are: impossible. The moment the word flies out of your sister’s mouth, you regret your lewd and feeble joke, and for the rest of the evening and long into the following day, the word sticks to you like a curse, like some pitiless condemnation of who and what you are. Yes, you are impossible. You and your life are impossible, and you wonder how on earth you managed to find your way into this cul-de-sac of despair and self-loathing. Is Born alone responsible for what has happened to you? Can a single momentary lapse of courage have damaged your belief in yourself so badly that you no longer have faith in your future? Just months ago you were going to set the world on fire with your brilliance, and now you think of yourself as stupid and inept, a moronic masturbation machine trapped in the dead air of an odious job, a nobody. If not for Gwyn, you might think about checking yourself into a hospital. She is the only person you can talk to, the only person who makes you feel alive. And yet, happy as you are to be with her again, you know that you mustn’t overburden her with your troubles, that you can’t expect her to transform herself into the divine surgeon who will cut open your chest and mend your ailing heart. You must help yourself. If something inside you is broken, you must put it back together with your own two hands.