Paul Auster - Invisible

When does it start? When does the idea revolving in both your minds manifest itself as action in the physical world? Midway through the third drink, when Gwyn hunches forward and puts her glass down on the makeshift table. You have promised yourself that you will not make the first move, that you will hold back from touching her until she touches you, for only then will you know beyond all doubt that she wants what you want and that you have not misread her desires. You are a little drunk, of course, but not egregiously so, not so far gone that you have lost your wits, and you fully understand the import of what you are about to do. You and your sister are no longer the floundering, ignorant puppies you were on the night of the grand experiment, and what you are proposing now is a monumental transgression, a dark and iniquitous thing according to the laws of man and God. But you don’t care. That is the simple truth of the matter: you are not ashamed of what you feel. You love your sister. You love her more than any person you have known or will ever know on the face of this wretched earth, and because you will be leaving the country in approximately one month, not to return for an entire year, this is your only chance, the only chance for both of you, since it is all but inevitable that a new Timothy Krale will walk into Gwyn’s life while you are gone. No, you have not forgotten the vow you took when you were twelve years old, the promise you made to yourself to live your life as an ethical human being. You want to be a good person, and every day you struggle to follow the oath you swore on your dead brother’s memory, but as you sit on the sofa watching your sister put her glass down on the table, you tell yourself that love is not a moral issue, desire is not a moral issue, and as long as you cause no harm to each other or anyone else, you will not be breaking your vow.

A moment later, you put down your glass as well. The two of you lean back on the sofa, and Gwyn takes hold of your hand, intertwining her fingers with yours. She asks: Are you afraid? You tell her no, you’re not afraid, you’re extremely happy. Me too, she says, and then she kisses you on the cheek, very gently, no more than the faintest nuzzle, the merest brush of her mouth against your skin. You understand that everything must go slowly, must build by the smallest of increments, that for a long while it will be a halting, tentative dance of yes and no, and you prefer it that way, for if either one of you should have second thoughts, there will be time to back down and call it off. More often than not, what stirs the imagination is best kept in the imagination, and Gwyn is aware of that, she is wise enough to know that the distance between thought and deed can be enormous, a gulf as large as the world itself. So you test the waters cautiously, baby step by baby step, grazing your mouths against each other’s necks, grazing your lips against each other’s lips, but for many minutes you do not open your mouths, and although you have wrapped your arms around each other in a tight embrace, your hands do not move. A good half hour goes by, and neither one of you shows any inclination to stop. That is when your sister opens her mouth. That is when you open your mouth, and together you fall headfirst into the night.

There are no rules anymore. The grand experiment was a onetime-only event, but now that you are both past twenty, the strictures of your adolescent frolic no longer hold, and you go on having sex with each other every day for the next thirty-four days, right up to the day you leave for Paris. Your sister is on the pill, there are spermicidal creams and jellies in her bureau drawer, condoms are available to you, and you both know that you are protected, that the unmentionable will never come to pass, and therefore you can do anything and everything to each other without fear of destroying your lives. You don’t discuss it. Beyond the brief exchange on the night of your brother’s birthday ( Are you afraid? No, I’m not afraid ) you never say a word about what is happening, refuse to explore the ramifications of your monthlong affair, your monthlong marriage, for that is finally what it is, you are a young married couple now, a pair of newlyweds trapped in the throes of constant, overpowering lust-sex beasts, lovers, best friends: the last two people left in the universe.

Outwardly, your lives go on as before. Five days a week, the alarm clock wakes you early in the morning, and after a minimal breakfast of orange juice, coffee, and buttered toast, you both rush out of the apartment and head for your jobs, Gwyn to her office on the twelfth floor of a glass tower in the heart of Manhattan and you to your dreary clerk’s post in the Palace of Null. You would prefer to have her within your sight at all times, would be perfectly content if she were never apart from you for a single minute, but if these unavoidable separations cause you a measure of pain, they also increase your longing for her, and perhaps that isn’t a bad thing, you decide, for you spend your days in the thrall of breathless anticipation, agitated and alert, counting the hours until you can see her and hold her again. Intense. That is the word you use to describe yourself now. You are intense. Your feelings are intense. Your life has become increasingly intense.

At work, you no longer sit behind your desk fantasizing about Ingrid Bergman and Hedy Lamarr. From time to time, an erection still threatens to burst through your pants, but you don’t need to touch it anymore, and you have stopped running to the men’s room at the end of the corridor. This is the library, after all, and thoughts about naked women are an inextricable part of working in the library, but the only naked body you think about now belongs to your sister, the real body of the real woman you share your nights with, and not some figment who exists only in your brain. There is no question that Gwyn is just as beautiful as Hedy Lamarr, perhaps even more beautiful-undoubtedly more beautiful. This is an objective fact, and you have spent the past seven years watching men stop dead in their tracks to stare at her as she walks past them on the street, have witnessed how many quick, astonished turns of the head, how many surreptitious glances on the subway, in restaurants, in theaters-hundreds and hundreds of men, and every one of them with the same leering, misty, dumbfounded look in his eyes. Yes, it is the face that launched a thousand hopes, the face that spawned a thousand dirty dreams, and as you wait at your desk for the next pneumatic tube to come rattling up from the second floor, you see that face in your head, you’re looking into Gwyn’s large, animated, gray-green eyes, and as those eyes look into yours, you watch her undo the back of her white summer dress and let it slide down the length of her tall, slender body.

You sit in baths together. That is the new postwork routine, and rather than spend that hour in the kitchen as you did before your brother’s birthday party, you now hoist your beers and puff on your cigarettes while soaking in a lukewarm bath. Not only does it provide respite from the heaviness of the dog-day heat, but it gives you yet another chance to look at each other’s naked bodies, which you never seem to tire of doing. Again and again, you tell your sister how much you love to look at her, that you adore every centimeter of her vibrant, luminous skin, and that beyond the overtly feminine places all men think about, you worship her elbows and knees, her wrists and ankles, the backs of her hands and her long, thin fingers (you could never be attracted to a woman with short thumbs, you tell her one day-an absurd but utterly sincere pronouncement), and that you are both mystified and enchanted by how a body as delicate as hers can also be as strong as it is, that she is both a swan and a tiger, a mythological being. She is fascinated by the hair that has grown on your chest (a recent development of the past twelve months) and has an unflagging interest in the mutabilities of your penis: from the limp, dangling member depicted in biology textbooks to the full-bore phallic titan at the summit of arousal to the shrunken, exhausted little man in postcoital retreat. She calls your dick a variety show. She says it has multiple personalities. She claims she wants to adopt it.