Invisible

by Paul Auster

  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.

  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.

  III

  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.

  Rebecca was the one who told me these things, the same Rebecca Adam had talked about in the second letter I received from him, his thirty-five-year-old stepdaughter, a tall, broad-shouldered woman with light brown skin, penetrating eyes, and an attractive if not conventionally pretty face, who referred to her mother’s white husband not as her stepfather but as her father. I was glad to hear her use that word, glad to know that Walker had been capable of inspiring that degree of love and loyalty in a child who had not been born to him. That one word seemed to tell me everything about the sort of life he had built for himself in this small house in Oakland with Sandra Williams and her daughter, who eventually became his daughter, and who, even after her mother’s death, had stayed by him until the end.

  Rebecca broke the news to me just seconds after she opened the door and let me into the house. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. In spite of the weakness and fear I had detected in his voice when we talked on the phone, in spite of my certainty that he was coming to the end, I hadn’t thought it would happen just yet, I had assumed there was still some time left—enough time for us to have our dinner, at any rate, perhaps even enough time for him to finish his book. When Rebecca spoke the words My father passed six days ago, I felt so rattled, so unwilling to accept the finality of her statement that a sudden wave of dizziness rushed through my head, and I had to ask her if I could sit down. She walked me over to a chair in the living room, then went into the kitchen to fetch a glass of water. When she returned, she apologized for her stupidity, even though no apologies were necessary, and even though she was anything but stupid.

  I didn’t find out that you and my father were planning to have dinner tonight until less than an hour ago, she said. Ever since the funeral, I’ve been coming to the house and sorting through his things, and it didn’t enter my fat little head until six o’clock this evening to open his date book and see if there were any appointments I had to cancel. When I saw the thing for seven o’clock, I immediately called your house in Brooklyn. Your wife gave me the number of your hotel in San Francisco, but when I called them, they said you weren’t in your room. I figured you were already on your way here, so I called my husband, told him to feed the kids, and stuck around here waiting for you to show up. You might not be aware of it, but you rang the bell exactly on the dot of seven.

  That was the deal, I said. I promised to be here at the stroke of seven. I thought your father would be amused by my punctuality.

  I’m sure he would have been, she replied, with a touch of sadness in her voice.

  Before I could say anything, she changed the subject and again apologized for something that needed no apology. I was planning to call you within the next few days, she said. Your name is on the list, and I’m sorry I didn’t get around to it sooner. Dad had a lot of friends, a ton of friends. So many people to contact, and then there was the funeral to arrange, and a million other things to take care of, and I suppose you could say I’ve been a bit swamped. Not that I’m complaining. It’s better to keep yourself busy at a time like this than to sit around and mope, don’t you think? But I’m really sorry I didn’t get in touch with you earlier. Dad was so happy when you wrote back to him last month. He’s been talking about you ever since I can remember, I feel as if I’ve known you all my life. His friend from college, the one who went on to make a name for himself out in the big world. It’s an honor to meet you at last. Not the best of circumstances, I know, but I’m glad you’re here.

  Me too, I said, feeling somewhat calmed by the patter of her resonant, soothing voice. Your father wa
s writing something, I continued. Did you know about that?

  He mentioned it to me. A book called 1967.

  Have you read it?

  No.

  Not a word?

  Not a single letter. A couple of months ago, he told me that if he died before he finished it, he wanted me to delete the text from his computer. Just wipe it out and forget it, he said, it’s of no importance.

  So you erased it?

  Of course I did. It’s a sin to disobey a person’s dying wish.

  Good, I thought to myself. Good that this woman won’t have to set eyes on Walker’s manuscript. Good that she won’t have to learn about her father’s secret, which surely would have hurt her deeply, confused her, devastated her. I could take it in my stride, but that was only because I didn’t belong to Walker’s family. But imagine his child having to read those fifty pages. Unthinkable.

  We were sitting face to face in the living room, each one of us planted in a soft, tattered armchair. Minimal furnishings, a couple of framed posters on the wall (Braque, Miró), another wall lined with books from top to bottom, a cotton throw rug in the center of the room, and a warm California dusk hovering outside the windows, yellowish and dim: the comfortable but modest life Walker had referred to in his letter. I drank down the last of the water Rebecca had given me and put the glass on the round short-legged table that stood between us. Then I said: What about Adam’s sister? I used to know her a little bit back in the sixties, and I’ve often wondered what happened to her.