Short Century_A Novel

by David Burr Gerrard

  The other issue that Miranda routinely emailed me about was Daisy and her burqa. “What can I do to get her to stop? Any ideas?”

  I did not have any ideas, apart from the obvious one that she was doing this only to piss off her mother or someone else. But I thought that there was likely some other reason. I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about burqas, though for the most part there is very little to think about burqas: they are terrible and repressive, and to think anything more about them is likely to yield something clever and wrong. Sydney got angry with me whenever I speculated about the burqa.

  “You and my mother don’t get it at all. You keep playing Daisy’s ‘Guess Why I’m Doing This’ game, when it’s completely obvious that the only reason she’s doing it is to trick you into playing her game. It’s like the stupidest and most obvious possible modernist novel, one that the author actually locks in a box so that you can’t read it, except that she—her soul more than her body—is the novel and you’re the dumb critic who speculates about what’s in the novel and why the author would possibly hide a work of such genius. There’s nothing in the fucking box! Daisy’s clothes have no emperor.”

  Sydney didn’t often confront me like this—she usually agreed with most of what I said—but when she did, I have to admit that it was exhilarating. Nevertheless, I haven’t been able to stop myself from thinking about the burqa. Just after Sydney left for REDACTED—mostly to distract myself—I wrote up the few pages I reproduce below in which I imagine myself into Daisy’s perspective, imagining, if you’ll forgive a hacky reporter’s phrase, life inside the burqa. I emailed it to Sydney in hopes that she might receive it while waiting in Cairo, but of course she did not respond, most likely because she didn’t receive it. When not talking about her sister, Sydney likes to say that empathy is the most important thing, that empathy is the most important part of our jobs. So I hope that she would appreciate the amount of effort I have put into crafting the friendliest possible version of what I still in my heart consider her sister’s essentially evil act.

  Maybe the burqa occurs to Daisy as she leaves a bar late one Friday night. The bar is crowded, people are pushing their elbows into her, her boyfriend is drunk and putting his hands on her to an extent that is embarrassing in front of her friends. She keeps on getting poked with a pool cue. Guys look at her breasts and push against her as they pass by. So she leaves the bar, needing a cigarette, and she is surprised at the sudden revulsion she feels, pushing her way to the exit, against all those stupidly constructed elbows. It seems to her that she could rip off the arms and legs in her way and not do any significant harm to the people they’re attached to. There’s no one in this bar, there’s not a single human being in the world, who does not look pasted together from some fleshy stumps of something. They might as well be pasted together by children. People are just bloated stick figures. What kind of a thing to keep a person in is a body?

  Yes, yes, a body does not contain a person, a person is something that happens to a body. If she does not know that, she does not know anything.

  Still, the problem with faces is that people can see them. The problem with eyes is that with them you see faces. And as soon as she sees a face she has an opinion, whether she’s aware of it or not. In this bar for instance: one girl looks needy, one girl looks fucked-out and stupid, another girl looks stupid and sexually deprived. Every girl she sees, and herself depending on the day, has either too much sex or not enough. She has less control over her opinions than she does over how she looks and speaks, which means she has less control over what she thinks about other people than she has over what people think about her. Maybe opinions are the problem, not bodies. Where do opinions come from? About smoking, about war, about the differences between men and women and the precise formula of nature and nurture in causing those differences. Three tablespoons of nature and two of nurture! Five tablespoons of nurture and three of nature! To hell with opinions. Prefer desire, she says to herself, now almost at the exit, passing the bouncer who is flirting with a girl who must have a fake ID, and whose ID the bouncer must know is fake. See? She couldn’t care less about this, and still she is crowded by an opinion. Prefer desire, she says to herself, more or less out loud. This is what is taught by the writers she loves and what is taught by advertising, and an agreement between literature and advertising is the sort of consensus that would only be breached by the sort of people who are too unimaginative to do anything but breach.

  Finally she gets outside and lights a cigarette, inhales deeply. Cigarettes: her great triumph of desire over opinion. All of her opinions about the evils of the tobacco industry, all the health consequences she so often recites to herself, mean nothing to her. She wants to smoke and that’s that. Smoking will give her body pleasure and then it will destroy it. Which does not say much for desire.

  All of these thoughts will go away. Only prigs hate the body, almost by definition. You might as well love what the senses give you, since there’s nothing else to love. To hate the body and to hate desire is to hate sex, and she certainly does not hate sex. She wants sex much more than her boyfriend does, though he would never admit it and pretends to want to paw her all the time. She has held herself back, because women are trained to be their own policemen, and still people think she’s bitchy. Though of course men are trained to police themselves as well. And here she goes again, men versus women. Boring subject. Since there is no difference between the body and the mind, opinions are calamities that befall bodies.

  And then it is there: the idea to wear a burqa. Nothing that she has been thinking has logically led to it. Like all thoughts, it was not there and now it is there. At the first instant the idea must just seem funny or it must seem like it would be funny to anyone else. It would even be funny to her if things were slightly different. A burqa. She takes another puff of her cigarette, tries to imagine black flakes settling into a burqa on her lungs. If she wears a burqa, she will still have a body. She will still have all of her desires and opinions underneath all that black...what material do they use? Cotton? And how do they make the face masks, those things that look like wire netting? How is it possible to breathe? It must be so difficult to breathe and to find your way that there is no room for opinions or desires. If she wears a burqa, no man will be wrapping her up. No one will tell her how to wear it, or remind her that she must. If anything, it will be the opposite.

  But there is more to this than a matter of wearing what she’s not supposed to wear. She wants this element to disappear. She knows what it feels like to do something just to be shocking. It feels constricting, like she’s entangling herself further in rules. This feels different. Suddenly the burqa is such a terrific idea that she wants everyone to wear one, she wants all people to wrap themselves up as though they are their own gifts.

  No, she will never be able to wear a burqa; even right now she loves the feel of the cold air on her face too much. And it must be impossible to smoke through those things. Maybe she will make the sacrifice and be the only person not to wear the burqa. All men should wear the burqa even if women do not, not to settle some score, but because after all men deserve some kindness. For the expressions on your face to be hidden, who wouldn’t want that? No one wants to divulge what the face divulges. Even people who can’t be nudged away from annotating their inner lives would like to do away with their faces, which so often show how wrong their annotations are. Our faces cannot help giving us away, like tattletale little sisters. And for men it would have to be a particular blessing, to be able to lust after women as theatrically as they pleased, without their stares bothering the women they looked at. Come to think of it, men would not like this at all. But she would. What a burqa would offer is something she never expected. Privacy? An insufficient, merely political word. The word doesn’t exist yet. She’ll have to invent it.

  But of course all of this is wrong. Daisy is selfish and wants the most selfish thing it is possible to want: to
be looked at without being seen. She wants to be a drone, and maybe as lethal as a drone. She has more in common with any famous-for-being-famous starlet who “accidentally” leaks a sex tape than she does with women who are actually forced to wear burqas. No one would voluntarily put on a burqa except for fame. The only other non-Muslim American I have ever heard of wearing a burqa is clearly insane. This is an American woman who lives in REDACTED and is known as “The DVD Lady.” During a brief period of relative liberalism that the country underwent in the mid-2000s, a few American journalists—pointedly not including me—were allowed to visit the country, and the DVD Lady stood outside the hotel where they were all forced to stay and tried to sell them pirated DVDs in obviously American English (I say this based on secondhand reports, since she refused to speak whenever any of the reporters were recording). How and why she was in the country was a subject of much speculation, though most likely she’s a drug addict or a schizophrenic or both. In any event she wore a burqa and claimed not to be a Muslim. The only time to anyone’s knowledge that she lifted her face-net was the time when, outside of any camera’s shot, she spat at Brian Williams. This woman is clearly crazy and I see no reason to judge her. She does not have control over her actions, and over the offenses she commits against those forced to wear burqas. Daisy does.

  f

  When I returned to campus in January of 1969 for my final semester at Yale, Miranda was waiting for me in the lobby. She was wearing the blue sweater I loved and I wanted to feel her breasts immediately. She jumped up when she saw me; she was holding a flyer. I put my arms around her and kissed her. She pressed her fingers into my back. We stumbled into a ficus plant, then stumbled some more until I pushed her against the mailboxes that lined the wall. I felt her breasts through her sweater and ran my fingers up her abdomen, causing that giggle-sigh of hers as I kissed her neck.

  “Baby,” she said. “Baby. Somebody might walk in.”

  “Let them look. Let everyone look.” I knew I had heard this line in a movie, maybe lots of movies, but the guys in the movies didn’t mean it like I did.

  “Baby,” she said. She put her palm on my chest and pushed me away. “Rothstein’s speaking at his new house in half an hour. We have to go hear him.”

  “I want to make love to you,” I said.

  She put her hand on the back of my head. “Later.”

  “Noow,” I said in a playful mock-whine, as though I were kidding and didn’t want to have sex all that badly.

  “Soon.” She took me by the hand and led me out the door.

  Rothstein’s house was well off campus, deep into New Haven. In the foyer was a full-sized African warrior statue, the spear of which pointed the way to the living room. Thirty people or so crammed into the room, bunching up the mohair rug, and Miranda and I had to push our way inside. A handful of girls I recognized from Neville’s parties smiled at us, and I smiled and waved and Miranda chatted with them a bit. I felt sure that I could have any of these girls, or all of them, or many others, but I only wanted Miranda and I felt wonderful. I positioned myself behind her, kissed her neck, and put my hands on her hips. She pulled my arms around her stomach.

  Norture cleared his throat and people cleared an area for him in the center of the room.

  “As the not-leader of Love Circle,” Norture continued, “I am pleased to welcome you to this very special meeting. We’re very lucky that Professor Rothstein has invited us here today. He will be speaking to us shortly.”

  Norture spoke more, using the words “watershed” and “generation” several times. We waited for Rothstein for ten or fifteen minutes longer, and the crowd broke off into small conversations. Miranda and I didn’t speak much; I rocked her and kissed her neck and she stroked my arm. In the months afterward I would spend a great deal of time imagining what Jersey was thinking during that fifteen-minute period, when he was upstairs and there was so much noise downstairs, so much noise from so many people who wanted only to be silent so that he could speak.

  “Your generation sickens me,” he called out from the staircase. He continued speaking as he made his way to the center of the room, wearing, somewhat ridiculously, a white robe and sandals. “But not for the reasons you sicken others. Others are sickened because they think you have divorced yourselves from your parents. I am sickened because, for all of your petulant protestations of rebellion, you remained curled in their marriage bed, fighting for your share of the blanket.

  “There is one thing that matters. The pursuit of your own sexual pleasure. The ability to fuck whomever you want to fuck, precisely at the moment that you want to fuck them. Look at your slogan. ‘Make love, not war.’ You capitulate before you’ve even thrown down the gauntlet. Make love, not war? You should say that you will make love, and pay no attention to whether they make war. By speaking as though making love is some sort of compensation for not making war, you reduce sex to politics by other means. Political power? What is political power? Senators and presidents decide which states get the most highway money, and maybe every once in a while they decide to blow up some yellow people.” There was clapping and hollering from some people in the audience, the ones who probably weren’t paying attention and recognized this as an applause line, but most of the room remained silent.

  “But you do not want power, you say,” Rothstein continued. “You want justice. Of all the breathtakingly stupid things to want. If justice is for you an erotic prop, as fur was for Masoch, then you are welcome to it. But do not waste your life chasing justice. What looks like justice today will look like repression tomorrow. What you may call your social conscience, what the superstitious call their soul, is a siren that will lead you to crash upon rock after rock. Your body is your only true compass. Giving yourself over to your body is the only way to take revenge against… the only way to take revenge against those who destroy bodies.”

  The room was quiet when Rothstein finished. Some people were drawn into themselves and thinking, others were looking around, surveying each other’s reactions (the fact that I remember this means I must have been among the latter). Many people examined their beer bottles and wineglasses, as though this were where they would find the verdict on Rothstein. Much of what Rothstein said, particularly about sex, was inspiring, but it seemed more than likely that he had just repudiated everything the youth movement stood for.

  “Fucking fascist,” I whispered to Miranda, my arms still around her. I knew “fascist” was not the right word, but it sounded better than “asshole.” She wriggled out of my arms. I didn’t notice until she did so how upset she looked.

  “Fucking fascist,” Miranda said, much louder than I had, and causing everyone to look at her.

  She puffed herself up and stood, somewhat ridiculously, on her toes. “Fucking fascist,” she said again, screaming this time. She screamed it a third time and a fourth. People stared at her and there was silence. Rothstein stared dead at her with an unreadable expression.

  “You’re a fucking fascist,” Miranda said.

  Rothstein grinned. “But haven’t you heard the prevailing opinion? You change the world by having sex. Perhaps with your tall, blond, blue-eyed friend.”

  “All you care about is your own pleasure. What’s the difference between that and a fascist?”

  “Come on, Miranda,” Neville said. “Don’t use the term ‘fascist’ so lightly.”

  “You’re not using it lightly,” Rothstein said to Miranda. “At first you were just idly calling me a fucking fascist, but now it sounds as though you’re calling me a fascist of fucking. Fatally juvenile, but it has some juvenile charm. Overall I would say you’re promising, if not quite impressive.”

  I was trying to think of what I could say on her behalf, but Miranda was already storming out. She swatted people out of her way as though she were clearing brush. I followed her; we didn’t speak until we were alone on the sidewalk.

  “Let’s go get
some lunch,” I said, putting my hand on her hip.

  “Go away.” She folded her arms over her breasts. Except for her breasts she seemed very much like a child.

  “Miranda, he’s a fascist pig, don’t let him get to you.”

  “He’s such an asshole. He’s such an asshole.”

  “He is. He is an asshole.”

  “I made a fool of myself.”

  “The man is a liar,” I said, though I knew that “liar” was even less accurate than “fascist.” Maybe “asshole” was the right word.

  f

  The next morning, when Miranda told me she intended to visit Rothstein, I tried to talk her out of it, saying that confronting Rothstein would give him too much power, but I could not convince her. So I insisted on going with her.

  When we arrived at Rothstein’s house he was once again wearing his white robe and sandals. He looked past us, clearly agitated about something. He started speaking without any greeting or preamble, ushering us in and sitting us both down on his sofa, and both Miranda and I were too bewildered to do anything other than follow him.

  “I could never get a job at Yale,” he said by way of introduction. “It hurts me that I’m a Jew, and it further hurts me that I’m considered an anti-Semite—not because the powers that be do not sympathize with anti-Semitism but because they do. Of course the WASPs all need to put on a good show of cosmopolitanism, and so they hire Jews when they must. But if they’re going to hire a Jew, they’re certainly not going to hire one who will fail to make the others happy. They’re not going to hire a Jew who is something other than a curator for a museum of his ancestors.”