Paul Auster - Invisible

Now that you are living on such intimate terms with her, Gwyn has emerged as a slightly different person from the one you have known all your life. She is both funnier and more salacious than you imagined, more vulgar and idiosyncratic, more passionate, more playful, and you are startled to learn how deeply she exults in filthy language and the bizarre slang of sex. Gwyn has rarely sworn in your presence. She is a literate, well-educated girl who speaks in full, grammatical sentences, but except for the night of the grand experiment long ago, you have known nothing about her sexuality, and therefore you could not have guessed that she would grow up into a woman who likes to talk about sex as well as have it. Common twentieth-century words do not interest her. She shuns the term making love , for example, in favor of older, more hilarious locutions, such as rumpty-rumpty, quaffing, and bonker bang. A good orgasm is referred to as a bone-shaker. Her ass is a rum-dadum. Her crotch is a slittie, a quim, a quim-box, a quimsby. Her breasts are boobs and tits, boobies and titties, her twin girls. At one time or another, your penis is a bong, a blade, a slurp, a shaft, a drill, a quencher, a queller, a lancelot, a lightning rod, Charles Dickens, Dick Driver, and Adam Junior. The words excite and amuse her, and once you recover from your initial shock, you are excited and amused as well. In the grip of approaching orgasm, however, she tends to revert to the contemporary standbys, falling back on the simplest, crudest words in the English lexicon to express her feelings. Cunt, pussy, fuck. Fuck me, Adam. Again and again. Fuck me, Adam. For an entire month you are the captive of that word, the willing prisoner of that word, the embodiment of that word. You dwell in the land of flesh, and your cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow you all the days of your life.

Still, you and your sister never talk about what you are doing. You don’t even have a conversation to discuss why you don’t talk about it. You are living in the confines of a shared secret, and the walls of that space are built by silence, an insane silence that can be broken only at the risk of bringing those walls down upon your heads. So you sit in your lukewarm bath, you slather each other with soap, you make love on the floor before dinner, you make love in Gwyn’s bed after dinner, you sleep like stones, and early in the morning the alarm clock rousts you back to consciousness. On the weekends, you take long rambles through Central Park, resisting the temptation to hold hands, to kiss in public. You go to the movies. You go to plays. The poem you started in June has not advanced by a single line since the night of Andy’s birthday, but you don’t care, you have other things to absorb your attention now, and time is passing quickly, there are fewer and fewer days before your departure, and you want to spend every moment you can with her, to live out the mad thing you have done together to the very end of the time that is left.

The last day comes. For seventy-two hours, you have been living in a state of constant turmoil, of ever-mounting dread. You don’t want to go. You want to cancel the trip and stay in New York with your sister, but at the same time you understand that this is out of the question, that the month you have lived with her in unholy matrimony was made possible only by the fact that it was for one month, that there was a limit to how long your incestuous rampage could go on, and because you can’t bear to face the truth that it is over now, you feel broken and bereft, benumbed by sorrow.

To make matters worse, you have to spend your last day in New York with your parents. Bud and Marge drive their big car into the city to treat you and your sister to a farewell family lunch at an expensive midtown restaurant-and then on to the airport for last kisses, last hugs, last good-byes. Your nervous, overmedicated mother says little during the meal, but your father is in uncommonly good spirits that day. He keeps addressing you as son rather than by your name, and while you know that your father intends no harm, you find this verbal tic annoying, since it seems to deprive you of your personhood and transform you into an object, a thing. Not Adam but Son, as in my son, my creation, my heir. Bud says he envies you for the adventure that awaits you in Paris, meaning Paris as the capital of loose women and late-night naughtiness (ha ha, wink wink), and though he himself never had such an opportunity, could never even afford to go to college, much less spend a year studying in a foreign country, he is clearly proud of himself for having done well enough in the money department to be backing his offspring’s trip to Europe, symbol of the good life, the rich life, an emblem of middle-class American success, of which he is one of Westfield, New Jersey’s shining examples. You cringe and endure, struggling not to lose your patience, wishing you could be alone with Gwyn. As usual, your sister is calm and composed, alert to the tensions underlying the occasion but stubbornly pretending not to notice them. On the way to the airport, you sit together in the backseat of the car. She takes hold of your hand and squeezes it hard, not loosening her grip throughout the entire forty-minute ride, but that is the only hint she gives of what she is feeling on this horrible day, this day of days, and somehow it is not enough, this hand squeezing your hand is not enough, and from this day forward you know that nothing will ever be enough again.

At the departure gate, your mother puts her arms around you and begins to cry. She can’t stand the thought of not seeing you for a whole year, she says, she will miss you, she will worry about you day and night, and please remember to eat enough, send letters, call if you feel homesick, I will always be there for you. You hug her tightly, thinking, My poor mother, my poor wretched mother, and tell her that everything will be fine, but you are by no means certain of that, and your words lack conviction, you can hear your voice trembling as you speak. Over your mother’s shoulder, you see your father observing you with that distant, shut-down look in his eyes, and you know he doesn’t have the first idea what to make of you, that you have always been a mystery to your father, a person beyond understanding, but now, for once in your life, you find yourself in accord with him, for the truth of the matter is that you, too, have no idea what to make of yourself, and yes, even to yourself, you are a person beyond understanding.

A last look at Gwyn. There are tears in your sister’s eyes, but you can’t tell if they are meant for you or your mother, if they are an expression of private anguish or sympathy for the overwrought woman who has been weeping in her son’s arms. Now that the end has come, you want Gwyn to suffer as much as you are suffering. Pain is the only thing that holds you together now, and unless her pain is as great as yours, there will be nothing left of the small, perfect universe you have lived in for the past month. It is impossible to know what she is thinking, and because your parents are standing less than three feet from you, you cannot ask. You take her in your arms and whisper: I don’t want to go. You say it again: I don’t want to go. And then you step back from her, put your head down, and go.

One week after I read the text of Summer , I was in Oakland, California, ringing the doorbell of Walker’s house. I hadn’t written or called to tell him what I thought of the second part of his book, nor had he written or called to ask. I felt it would be better to hold back from giving any comments until I saw him in person, and with our scheduled dinner looming up on the immediate horizon, my chance would come soon enough. I couldn’t explain why it was so important to me, but I wanted him to be looking into my eyes when I told him that I was not disgusted by what he had written, that I did not find it brutal or ugly (to quote his words back to him), and that my wife, who had now read the first and second parts of the book, felt the same as I did. That was the little speech I rehearsed in my head as the taxi took me across the bridge from San Francisco to Oakland, but I never managed to say what I wanted to say. It turned out that Walker had died just twenty-four hours after he’d sent me the manuscript, and by the time I reached the front door of his house, his ashes had been in the ground for three days.