Invisible

by Paul Auster

  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.

  No, no, not all bad. Good and bad together. But the strange thing is, whenever I’m there, it’s the bad ones I think about. When I’m not there, I mostly think about the good.

  Why don’t I feel that way?

  I don’t know. Maybe because you’re not a boy.

  What difference does that make?

  Andy was a boy. There were two of us once, and now there’s only me—sole survivor of the shipwreck.

  So? Better one than none, for God’s sake.

  It’s their eyes, Gwyn, the expression on their faces when they look at me. One minute, I feel as if I’m being reproached. Why you? they seem to be asking me. Why did you get to live when your brother didn’t? And the next minute, their eyes are drowning me with tenderness, a worried, nauseating, overprotective love. It makes me want to jump out of my shoes.

  You’re exaggerating. There’s no reproach, Adam. They’re so proud of you, you should hear them carry on when you’re not there. Endless hymns to the wonder boy they created, the crown prince of the Walker dynasty.

  Now you’re the one who’s exaggerating.

  Not really. If I didn’t like you so much, I’d feel jealous.

  I don’t know how you can stand it. Watching them together, I mean. Every time I look at them, I ask myself why they’re still married.

  Because they want to be married, that’s why.

  It makes no sense. They can’t even talk to each other anymore.

  They’ve been through fire together, and they don’t have to talk now if they don’t feel like it. As long as they want to stay together, it’s none of our business how they manage their lives.

  She used to be so beautiful.

  She’s still beautiful.

  She’s too sad to be beautiful. No one that sad can still be beautiful.

  You stop for a moment to absorb what you have just said. Then, turning your eyes away from your sister, unable to look at her as you formulate the next sentence, you add:

  I feel so sorry for her, Gwyn. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to call the house and tell her that everything is okay, that she can stop hating herself now, that she’s punished herself long enough.

  You should do it.

  I don’t want to insult her. Pity is such an awful, useless emotion—you have to bottle it up and keep it to yourself. The moment you try to express it, it only makes things worse.

  Your sister smiles at you, somewhat inappropriately, you feel, but when you study her face and see the grave and pensive look in her eyes, you understand that she has been hoping you would say something like this, that she is relieved to hear that you are not quite as walled off and coldhearted as you make yourself out to be, that there is some compassion in you, after all. She says: Okay, little brother. You’ll sweat it out in New York if you like. But, just for your information, a trip back home every now and then can lead to some rather interesting discoveries.

  Such as?

  Such as the box I found under my bed the last time I was there.

  What was in it?

  Quite a few things, actually. One of them happened to be the play we wrote together in high school.

  I shudder to think . . .

  King Ubu the Second.

  Did you take a look at it?

  I couldn’t resist.

  And?

  Not too hot, I’m afraid. But there were some funny lines, and two of the scenes almost made me laugh. When Ubu arrests his wife for burping at the table, and the bit when Ubu declares war on America so he can give it back to the Indians.

  Adolescent drivel. But we had a good time, didn’t we? I can remember rolling around on the floor and laughing so hard that my stomach hurt.

  We took turns writing sentences, I think. Or was it whole speeches?

  Speeches. But don’t make me swear to it in court. I could be wrong.

  We were crazy back then, weren’t we? Both of us—each one as crazy as the other. And no one ever guessed. They all thought we were successful, well-adjusted kids. People looked up to us, we were envied, and deep down we were both nuts.

  Again you look into your sister’s eyes, and you can sense that she wants to talk about the grand experiment, a subject neither one of you has mentioned in years. Is it worth going into now, you wonder, or should you deflect the conversation onto something else? Before you can decide what to do, she says:

  I mean, what we did that night was absolutely insane.

  Do you think so?

  Don’t you?

  Not really. My dick was sore for a week afterward, but I still look back on it as the best night of my life.

  Gwyn smiles, disarmed by your insouciant attitude toward what most people would consider to be a crime against nature, a mortal sin. She says: You don’t feel guilty?

  No. I felt blameless then, and I feel blameless now. I always assumed you felt the same way.

  I want to feel guilty. I tell myself I should feel guilty, but the truth is that I don’t. That’s why I think we were insane. Because we walked away from it without any scars.

  You can’t feel guilty unless you think you’ve done something wrong. What we did that night wasn’t wrong. We didn’t hurt anyone, did we? We didn’t force each other to do anything we didn’t want to do. We didn’t even go all the way. What we did was a little youthful experimenting, that’s all. And I’m glad we did it. To be honest, my only regret is that we didn’t do it again.

  Ah. So you were thinking the same thing I was.

  Why didn’t you tell me?

  I was too scared, I guess. Too scared that if we kept on doing it, we might find ourselves in real trouble.

  So you found yourself a boyfriend instead. Dave Cryer, the king of the animals.

  And you fell for Patty French.

  Water under the bridge, comrade.

  Yes, it’s all water under the bridge now, isn�
�t it?

  You and your sister talk about the past, then, and your parents’ silent marriage, and your dead brother, and the childish farce you wrote in tandem one spring vacation years ago, but these matters take up no more than a small fraction of the time you spend together. Another fraction is consumed in brief conversations concerning household maintenance (shopping, cleaning, cooking, paying the rent and utility bills), but the bulk of the words you exchange that summer are about the present and the future, the war in Vietnam, books and writers, poets, musicians, and filmmakers, as well as the stories you bring home from your respective jobs. You and your sister have always talked, the two of you have been engaged in a complex, ongoing dialogue since your earliest childhood, and this willingness to share your thoughts and ideas is probably what best defines your friendship. It turns out that you agree about most things, but by no means all things, and you enjoy duking it out over your differences. Your spats about the relative merits of various writers and artists have a somewhat comical aspect to them, however, since it rarely happens that either of you manages to persuade the other to change his or her opinion. Case in point: you both consider Emily Dickinson to be the supreme American poet of the nineteenth century, but whereas you have a soft spot for Whitman, Gwyn dismisses him as bombastic and crude, a false prophet. You read one of the shorter lyrics out loud to her (The Dalliance of the Eagles), but she remains unconvinced, telling you she’s sorry, but a poem about eagles fucking in midair leaves her cold. Case in point: she admires Middlemarch above all other novels, and when you confess to her that you never made it past page 50, she urges you to give it another try, which you do, and once again you give up before reaching page 50. Case in point: your positions on the war and American politics are nearly identical, but with the draft staring you in the face the instant you leave college, you are far more vociferous and hotheaded than she is, and whenever you launch into one of your apoplectic rants against the Johnson administration, Gwyn smiles at you, sticks her fingers in her ears, and waits for you to stop.

  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.