by Paul Auster
After twenty-four hours of bleak introspection, the agony slowly subsides. The turnaround begins on Saturday, the second evening of the early July weekend you have chosen to spend in Manhattan. After dinner, you and your sister ride the 104 bus down Broadway to the New Yorker theater and walk into the coolness of that dark space to watch Carl Dreyer’s 1955 film, Ordet (The Word). Normally, you would not be interested in a film about Christianity and matters of religious faith, but Dreyer’s direction is so exact and piercing that you are quickly swept up into the story, which begins to remind you of a piece of music, as if the film were a visual translation of a two-part invention by Bach. The aesthetics of Lutheranism, you whisper into Gwyn’s ear at one point, but since she has not been privy to your thoughts, she has no idea what you are talking about and returns your comment with a bewildered frown.
There is little need to rehash the intricacies of the story. Compelling as those twists and turns might be, they amount to just one story among an infinity of stories, one film among a multitude of films, and if not for the end, Ordet would not have affected you more than any other good film you have seen over the years. It is the end that counts, for the end does something to you that is wholly unexpected, and it crashes into you with all the force of an axe felling an oak.
The farm woman who has died in childbirth is stretched out in an open coffin as her weeping husband sits beside her. The mad brother who thinks he is the second coming of Christ walks into the room holding the hand of the couple’s young daughter. As the small group of mourning relatives and friends looks on, wondering what blasphemy or sacrilege is about to be committed at this solemn moment, the would-be incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth addresses the dead woman in a calm and quiet voice. Rise up, he commands her, lift yourself out of your coffin and return to the world of the living. Seconds later, the woman’s hands begin to move. You think it must be a hallucination, that the point of view has shifted from objective reality to the mind of the addled brother. But no. The woman opens her eyes, and just seconds after that she sits up, fully restored to life.
There is a large crowd in the theater, and half the audience bursts out laughing when they see this miraculous resurrection. You don’t begrudge them their skepticism, but for you it is a transcendent moment, and you sit there clutching your sister’s arm as tears roll down your cheeks. What cannot happen has happened, and you are stunned by what you have witnessed.
Something changes in you after that. You don’t know what it is, but the tears you shed when you saw the woman come back to life seem to have washed out some of the poison that has been building up inside you. The days pass. At various moments, you think your small breakdown in the balcony of the New Yorker theater might be connected to your brother, Andy, or, if not to Andy, then to Cedric Williams, or perhaps to both of them together. At other moments, you are convinced that by some strange, sympathetic overlapping of subject and object, you felt you were watching yourself rise from the dead. Over the next two weeks, your step gradually becomes less heavy. You still feel doomed, but you sense that when the day comes for you to be led to the scaffold, you might have it in you to crack a parting joke or exchange pleasantries with your hooded executioner.
Every year since your brother’s death, you and your sister have celebrated his birthday. Just the two of you, with no parents, relatives, or other guests allowed. For the first three years, when you were both still young enough to spend your summers at sleepaway camp, you would hold the party in the open air, the two of you tiptoeing out of your cabins in the middle of the night and running across the darkened ball fields up to the meadow on the northern edge of the campgrounds and then bolting into the woods with flashlights illuminating your path through the trees and underbrush—each one of you holding a cupcake or cookie, which you had stolen from the mess hall after dinner that evening. For three consecutive summers after your camp days ended, you both worked in your father’s supermarket, and therefore you were at home on the twenty-sixth of July and could celebrate the birth of your brother in Gwyn’s bedroom on the third floor of the house. The next two years were the most difficult, since you both traveled during those summers and were far apart on the appointed day, but you managed to perform truncated versions of the ritual over the telephone. Last year, you took a bus to Boston, where Gwyn was shacked up with her then boyfriend, and the two of you went out to a restaurant to lift a glass in honor of the departed Andy. Now another July twenty-sixth is upon you, and for the first summer in a long while you are together again, about to throw your little fête in the kitchen of the apartment you share on West 107th Street.
It is not a party in the traditional sense of the word. Over the years, you and your sister have developed a number of strict protocols regarding the event, and with slight variations, depending on how old you have been, each July twenty-sixth is a reenactment of all the previous July twenty-sixths of the past ten years. In essence, the birthday dinner is a conversation divided into three parts. Food is served and eaten, and once the three-part talk is finished, a small chocolate cake appears, ornamented by a single candle burning in the center. You do not sing the song. You mouth the words in unison, speaking softly, barely raising your voices above a whisper, but you do not sing them. Nor do you blow the candle out. You let it burn down to a stub, and then you listen to it sizzle as the flame is extinguished in the ooze of the chocolate frosting. After a slice of cake, you open a bottle of scotch. Alcohol is a new element, not introduced until 1963 (the last of the supermarket summers, when you were sixteen and Gwyn was seventeen), but for the next two years you were apart and drinkless, and last year you were in a public place, which meant you had to watch your consumption. This year, alone in your New York apartment, you both aim to get good and drunk.
Gwyn has put on lipstick and makeup for the dinner, and she comes to the table wearing gold hoop earrings and a pale green summer shift, which makes the green of her gray-green eyes appear even more vivid. You are in a white oxford shirt with short sleeves and a button-down collar, and around your neck is the only tie you own, the same tie Born ridiculed you for wearing last spring. Gwyn laughs when she sees you in that getup and says you look like a Mormon—one of those earnest young men who go around the world knocking on doors and giving out pamphlets, a proselytizer on a holy mission. Nonsense, you tell her. You don’t have a crew cut, and your hair isn’t blond, and therefore you could never be confused with a Mormon. Still and all, Gwyn says, you look mighty, mighty strange. If not a Mormon, she continues, then perhaps a fledgling accountant. Or a math student. Or a wannabe astronaut. No, no, you shoot back at her—a civil rights worker in the South. All right, she says, you win, and an instant later you remove both the tie and the shirt, leave the kitchen, and change into something else. When you return, Gwyn smiles but says nothing further about your clothes.
As usual, the weather is hot, and because you don’t want to increase the temperature in the kitchen, you have refrained from using the oven and prepared a light summer meal that consists of chilled soup, a platter of cold cuts (ham, salami, roast beef), and a lettuce-and-tomato salad. There is also a loaf of Italian bread, along with a bottle of chilled Chianti encased in a straw covering (the cheap wine of choice among students of the period). After taking your first sips of the cold watercress soup, you begin the three-part conversation. That is the core of the experience for you, the single most important reason for staging this annual event. All the rest—the meal, the cake, the candle, the words of the happy birthday song, the booze—are mere trappings.
Step One: You talk about Andy in the past tense, dredging up everything you can recall about him while he was still alive. Invariably, this is the longest portion of the ritual. You remember your memories of past years, but additional ones always seem to spring forth from your unconscious as well. You try to keep the tone light and cheerful. This is not an exercise in morbidity, it is a celebration, and laughter is permitted at all times. You repeat some of his early mispronunciations of
words: hangaburger for hamburger, human bean for human being, chuthers for each other—as in They kissed their chuthers—and the perfectly logical but demented Mommy’s Ami, following a reference by your mother to the city of Miami. You talk about his bug collection, his Superman cape, and his bout with the chicken pox. You remember teaching him how to ride a bicycle. You remember his aversion to peas. You remember his first day of school (tears and torment), his skinned elbows, his hiccuping fits. Just seven years on this earth, but every year you and Gwyn come to the same conclusion: the list is inexhaustible. And yet, every year, you can’t help feeling that a little more of him has vanished, that in spite of your best efforts, less and less of him is coming back to you, that you are powerless to stop him from fading away.
Step Two: You talk about him in the present tense. You imagine what kind of person he would have become if he were still alive today. For ten years now, he has been living this shadow existence inside you, a phantom being who has grown up in another dimension, invisible yet breathing, breathing and thinking, thinking and feeling, and you have followed him since the age of eight, for more years after death than he ever managed to live, and now that he is seventeen, the gap between you has become ever smaller, ever less significant, and it shocks you, it shocks you and your sister simultaneously, to realize that at seventeen he is probably no longer a virgin, that he has smoked pot and gotten drunk, that he shaves and masturbates, drives a car, reads difficult books, is thinking about what college to go to, and is on the brink of becoming your equal. Gwyn starts to cry, saying that she can’t stand it anymore, that she wants to stop, but you tell her to hang on for a few more minutes, that the two of you never have to do this again, that this will be the last birthday party for the rest of your lives, but for Andy’s sake you have to see this one through to the end.
Step Three: You talk about the future, about what will happen to Andy between now and his next birthday. This has always been the easiest part, the most enjoyable part, and in past years you and Gwyn have sailed through the game of predictions with immense enthusiasm and brio. But not this year. Before you can begin the third and last part of the conversation, your overwrought sister clamps her hand over her mouth, gets up from her chair, and rushes out of the kitchen.
You find her in the living room, sobbing on the sofa. You sit down next to her, put your arm around her shoulders, and talk to her in a soothing voice. Calm down, you say. It’s all right, Gwyn. I’m sorry . . . sorry I pushed you so hard. It’s my fault.
You feel the thinness of her quaking shoulders, the delicate bones beneath her skin, her heaving rib cage pressing against your own ribs, her hip against your hip, her leg against your leg. In all the years you have known her, you doubt you have ever seen her so miserable, so crushed by sadness.
It’s no good, she finally says, her eyes cast downward, addressing her words to the floor. I’ve lost contact with him. He’s gone now, and we’ll never find him again. In two weeks, it will have been ten years. That’s half your life, Adam. Next year, it will be half of mine. That’s too long. The space keeps growing. The time keeps growing, and every minute he drifts farther and farther away from us. Good-bye, Andy. Send us a postcard someday, all right?
You don’t say anything. You sit there with your arm around your sister and let her go on crying, knowing that it would be useless to intervene, that you must allow the explosion to run its course. How long does it last? You haven’t the faintest idea, but a moment eventually comes when you notice that the tears have stopped. With your left hand, the free hand that is not around her shoulders, you take hold of her chin and turn her face toward you. Her eyes are red and swollen. Rivulets of mascara have run down her cheeks. Mucus is dribbling from her nose. You withdraw your left hand, put it into the back pocket of your pants, and pull out a handkerchief. You begin dabbing her face with the cloth. Little by little, you wipe away the tears, the snot, and the black mascara, and throughout the long, meticulous procedure, your sister doesn’t move. Looking at you intently, her eyes washed clean of any discernible emotion, she sits in absolute stillness as you repair the damage left by the storm. When the job is finished, you stand up and say to her: Time for a drink, Miss Walker. I’ll go get the scotch.
You march off to the kitchen. A minute later, when you return to the living room with a bottle of Cutty Sark, two glasses, and a pitcher of ice cubes, she is exactly where she was when you left her—sitting on the sofa, her head leaning against the backrest, eyes shut, breathing normally again, purged. You put down the drinking equipment on one of the three wooden milk crates that stand side by side in front of the sofa, the battered, upside-down boxes that you and your former roommate dragged off the street one day and which now serve as your excuse for a coffee table. Gwyn opens her eyes and gives you a wan, exhausted smile, as if asking you to forgive her for her outburst, but there is nothing to forgive, nothing to talk about, nothing you could ever hold against her, and as you set about pouring the drinks and putting ice into the glasses, you feel relieved that the business with Andy is over, relieved that there will be no more birthday celebrations for your absent brother, relieved that you and your sister have at last put this childish thing behind you.
You hand Gwyn her drink and then sit down beside her on the sofa. For several minutes, neither one of you says a word. Sipping your scotches and staring ahead at the wall in front of you, you both know what is going to happen tonight, you feel it as a certainty in your blood, but you also know that you have to be patient and give the alcohol time to do its work. When you lean forward to prepare the second round of drinks, Gwyn starts talking to you about her broken romance with Timothy Krale, the thirty-year-old assistant professor who entered her life more than eighteen months ago and left it this past April, at roughly the same moment you were shaking Born’s hand for the first time. The teacher of her class on modernist poetry, of all things, the man risked his job by going after her, and she fell hard for him, especially in the beginning, during the first wild months of furtive assignations and weekend jaunts to distant motel rooms in forgotten towns across upstate New York. You yourself met him a number of times, and you understood what Gwyn saw in him, you concurred that Krale was an attractive and intelligent fellow, but you also sensed that there was something desiccated about the man, a detachment from others that made it difficult for you to warm up to him. It didn’t surprise you when Gwyn turned down his proposal of marriage and put a stop to the affair. She told him that she felt too young, that she wasn’t ready to commit herself over the long term, but that wasn’t the real reason, she explains to you now, she left him because he wasn’t a kind enough lover. Yes, yes, she says, she knows he loved her, loved her as much as he was capable of loving anyone, but she found him selfish in bed, inattentive, too driven by his own needs, and she couldn’t imagine herself tolerating such a man for the rest of her life. She turns to you now, and with a look of utmost seriousness and conviction in her eyes, she sets forth her definition of love, wanting to know if you share her opinion or not. Real love, she says, is when you get as much pleasure from giving pleasure as you do from receiving it. What do you think, Adam? Am I right or wrong? You tell her she is right. You tell her it is one of the most perceptive things she has ever said.
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.
