Invisible

SUMMER

Spring turns into summer. For you it is the summer after the spring of Rudolf Born, but for the rest of the world it is the summer of the Six-Day War, the summer of race riots in more than one hundred American cities, the Summer of Love. You are twenty years old and have just finished your second year of college. When war breaks out in the Middle East, you think about joining the Israeli army and becoming a soldier, even though you are an avowed pacifist and have never shown any interest in Zionism, but before you can come to a decision and make any plans, the war suddenly ends, and you remain in New York.

Nevertheless, you feel a strong urge to quit the country, to be anywhere but where you are now, and therefore you have already gone to the dean of students and told him that you want to sign up for the Junior Year Abroad Program (after a lengthy consultation with your father, who has grudgingly given his approval). You have chosen Paris. You are not going there simply because you are fond of Paris, which you visited for the first time two summers ago, but because you are keen to perfect your French, which is adequate now but could be better. You are aware that Born is in Paris, or at least you assume he is, but you weigh the odds in your mind and figure your chances of running into him are slight. And if such an event should occur, you feel prepared to handle it in a manner appropriate to the circumstances. How difficult would it be to turn your head and walk on past him? That is what you tell yourself, in any case, but in your innermost heart of hearts you play out scenes in which you do not turn your head, in which you confront him in the middle of the street and strangle him to death with your bare hands.

You live in a two-bedroom apartment in a building on West 107th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue. Your roommate has just graduated and is leaving the city, and because you need someone else to share the place with you, you have already invited your sister to occupy the other bedroom-for, as luck would have it, her years at Vassar have come to an end, and she is about to begin graduate work in the English Department at Columbia. You and your sister have always been close-best friends, co-conspirators, obsessed guardians of your dead brother’s memory, fellow students of literature, confidants-and you are pleased with the arrangement. It is only for the summer, of course, since you will be winging off to Paris in September, but for part of June and all of July and August you will be together, dwelling under the same roof for the first time in years. After you are gone, your sister will take over the lease and find another person to live in the room you have vacated.

Your family is well-off, but not exceedingly well-off, not rich by the standards of the rich, and although your father is generous enough to provide you with an allowance to cover basic expenses, more money is needed for the books and records you want to buy, the films you want to see, the cigarettes you want to smoke, and so you begin looking for a summer job. Your sister has already found one for herself. She is just sixteen months older than you are, but her interactions with the world have always been more sensible and prudent than yours, and within days of learning that she would be studying at Columbia and sharing an apartment with you on West 107th Street, she set about looking for a job compatible with her interests and talents. Consequently, everything has been arranged in advance, and immediately after she arrives in New York, she begins working as an editorial assistant for a large commercial publisher in midtown. You, on the other hand, in your scattershot, haphazard way, put off the search until the last minute, and because you resist the idea of spending forty hours a week in an office with a tie around your neck, you jump at the first opportunity that presents itself. A friend has left town for the summer, and you apply to fill his spot as a page at Butler Library on the Columbia campus. The salary is less than half of what your sister earns, but you console yourself with the thought that you can walk to and from your job, which will exempt you from the ordeal of having to cram yourself twice daily into a subway car filled with hordes of sweating commuters.

You are given a test before they hire you. A senior librarian hands you a stack of cards, perhaps eighty cards, perhaps a hundred cards, each one bearing the title of a book, the name of the author of that book, the year of the publication of that book, and a Dewey decimal number that indicates where that book must be shelved. The librarian is a tall, grim-faced woman of around sixty, a certain Miss Greer, and already she seems suspicious of you, determined not to give an inch. Because she has just met you and cannot possibly know who you are, you imagine that she is suspicious of all young people-as a matter of principle-and therefore what she sees when she looks at you is not you as yourself but you as yet one more guerrilla fighter in the war against authority, an unruly insurrectionist who has no business barging into the sanctum of her library and asking for work. Such are the times you live in, the times you both live in. She instructs you to put the cards in order, and you can sense how deeply she wants you to fail, how happy it will make her to reject your application, and because you want the job just as much as she doesn’t want you to have it, you make sure that you don’t fail. Fifteen minutes later, you hand her the cards. She sits down and begins looking through them, one by one, one after the other, all the way through to the end, and as you watch the skeptical expression on her face melt into a kind of bafflement, you know that you have done well. The stony face cracks a little smile. She says: No one ever gets it perfect. This is the first time I’ve seen it happen in thirty years.

You work from ten in the morning until four in the afternoon, Monday through Friday. You make it a habit to arrive promptly, entering the broad and pretentious faux-classical building designed by James Gamble Rogers with your lunch in a brown paper bag. Pomp and stuffiness aside, the building never fails to impress you with its bulk and grandeur, but the crowning touch of idiocy, you feel, the greatest embarrassment of all, are the names of the illustrious dead chiseled into the façade-Herodotus, Homer, Plato, along with numerous others-and every morning you imagine how different the library would look if it were adorned with other sets of names: the names of jazz musicians, for example (Fats Waller, Charlie Parker, Benny Goodman), or movie goddesses from the 1940s (Ingrid Bergman, Hedy Lamarr, Gene Tierney), or obscure, barely remembered baseball players (Gus Zernial, Wayne Terwilliger, Clyde Kluttz), or, quite simply, the names of your friends. And so the day begins. You go in through the front door, the heavy front door with its polished brass fittings, walk up the marble staircase, glance at the portrait of Eisenhower (former university president, then the president who reigned over your childhood), and enter a small room to the right of the front desk, where you say good morning to Mr. Goines, your supervisor, a small man with owl glasses and a protruding belly, who doles out your chores for the day. Essentially, there are only two tasks to perform. Either you are putting books back on shelves or sending newly requested books to the main desk via dumbwaiter from one of the floors above. Each job has its advantages and disadvantages, and each can be carried out by anyone possessing the mental skills of a fruit fly.

When putting books onto the shelves, you must confirm and then reconfirm that the Dewey decimal number of the book you are shelving is one notch above the book to its left and one notch below the book to its right. The books are loaded onto a wooden cart equipped with four wheels, roughly fifty to a hundred books for each shelving session, and as you guide your little vehicle through the labyrinthine stacks, you are alone, always and everlastingly alone, since the stacks are off-limits to everyone but library personnel, and the only other person you will ever see is one of your fellow pages, manning the desk in front of the dumbwaiter. Each of the several floors is identical to all the others: an immense windowless space filled with row upon row of towering gray metal shelves, all of them stuffed to capacity with books, thousands of books, tens of thousands of books, hundreds of thousands of books, a million books, and at times even you, who love books as much as anyone on this earth, become stupefied, anxious, even nauseated when you consider how many billions of words, how many trillions of words those books contain. You are shut off from the world for hours every day, inhabiting what you come to think of as an airless bubble, even if there must be air because you are breathing, but it is dead air, air that has not stirred in centuries, and in that suffocating environment you often feel drowsy, drugged to the point of semiconsciousness, and have to fight off the urge to lie down on the floor and go to sleep.

Still, your shelving missions sometimes lead to unexpected discoveries, and the cloud of boredom that envelops you is momentarily lifted. Chancing upon a 1670 edition of Paradise Lost, for example. It is not the original printing from 1667, but very nearly so, a copy that came off the presses during Milton’s lifetime, a book the poet conceivably could have held in his hands, and you marvel that this precious tome is not locked away in some temperature-controlled vault for rare books but is sitting out in the open in the musty stacks. Why is this discovery so important to you, why do your hands tremble as you open the book and begin scanning its pages? Because you have spent the past several months immersed in John Milton, studying Milton more closely than any poet you have ever read. During the tormented spring of Rudolf Born, you were one of several undergraduates enrolled in Edward Tayler’s class, the renowned Milton course taught by the finest professor you had all year, attending both lectures and seminars, carefully plowing your way through Areopagitica, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, and a host of shorter works, and now that you have come to love Milton and rank him above all other poets of his time, you feel an instant surge of happiness when you stumble across this book, this three-hundred-year-old book, while making your lugubrious rounds as a shelver in the stacks of Butler Library.

Unfortunately, such moments of happiness do not come often. It is not that you are particularly unhappy with your job at the library, but as time goes by and the hours you spend there accumulate, it becomes increasingly difficult for you to keep your mind on what you are supposed to be doing, mindless as those tasks might be. A sense of unreality invades you each time you set foot in the silent stacks, a feeling that you are not truly there, that you are trapped in a body that has ceased to belong to you. And so it happens that one afternoon, just two weeks after you earned your job with the only perfect test score in the annals of pagedom, as you find yourself on yet another shelving foray, working in an aisle of medieval German history, you are half startled out of your wits when someone taps you on the shoulder from behind. You instinctively wheel around to confront the person who touched you-no doubt someone who has slipped unnoticed into this restricted area to attack and/or rob the first victim he can find-and there, much to your relief, is Mr. Goines, looking at you with a sad expression on his face. Without saying a word, he lifts his right hand into the air, crooks his forefinger at you, and with an impatient, wiggling gesture beckons you to follow him. The little man waddles down the aisle, turns right when he comes to the corridor, walks past one row of shelves, then a second, and makes another right turn into an aisle of medieval French history. You and your cart were in this aisle just twenty minutes earlier, shelving several books on life in tenth-century Normandy, and sure enough, Mr. Goines goes straight to the spot where you were working. He points to the shelf and says, Look at this, and so you bend down and look. At first, you fail to notice anything out of the ordinary, but then Mr. Goines pulls two books off the shelf, two books separated by a distance of about twelve inches, with three or four books standing between them. Your supervisor shoves the two books close to your face, making it clear that he wants you to read the Dewey decimal numbers affixed to the spines, and it is only then that you become aware of your error. You have reversed the placement of the books, putting the first where the second should be and the second where the first should be. Please, Mr. Goines says, in a rather supercilious voice, don’t ever do it again. If a book is put in the wrong place, it can be lost for twenty years or more, maybe forever.

It is a small matter, perhaps, but you feel humiliated by your negligence. Not that the two books in question could have been lost (they were on the same shelf, after all, just inches away from each other), but you understand the point Mr. Goines is trying to make, and although you bristle at the condescending tone he adopts with you, you apologize and promise to be more vigilant in the future. You think: Twenty years! Forever! You are astounded by the idea. Put something in the wrong place, and even though it is still there-quite possibly smack under your nose-it can vanish for the rest of time.

You return to your cart and continue shelving books of medieval German history. Until now, you have not known you are being spied upon. It puts a sickening taste in your mouth, and you tell yourself to be careful, to keep on your toes, to take nothing for granted ever again, not even in the benign, soporific precincts of a university library.

Shelving expeditions eat up approximately half your day. The other half is spent sitting behind a small desk on one of the upper floors, waiting for a pneumatic tube to come flying up through the intestines of the building with a withdrawal slip commanding you to retrieve this or that book for the student or professor who has just asked for it below. The pneumatic tube makes a distinctive, clattering noise as it speeds upward toward its destination, and you can hear it from the moment it begins its ascent. The stacks are distributed among several floors, and since you are just one of several pages sitting at desks on those several floors, you don’t know if the pneumatic tube with the withdrawal slip rolled up inside it is headed for you or one of your colleagues. You don’t find out until the last second, but if it is indeed meant for you, the metallic cylinder comes bursting out of an opening in the wall behind you and lands in the box with a propulsive thud, which instantly triggers a mechanism that turns on the forty or fifty red lightbulbs that line the ceiling from one end of the floor to the other. These lights are essential, for it often happens that you are away from your desk when the tube arrives, in the process of searching for another book, and when you see the lights go on you are alerted to the fact that a new order has just come in. If you are not away from your desk, you pull the withdrawal slip out of the tube, go off to find the book or books that are wanted, return to your desk, tuck the withdrawal slips into the books (making sure that the top portion is sticking out by a couple of inches), load the books into the dumbwaiter in the wall behind your desk, and push the button for the second floor. To top off the operation, you return the empty tube by squeezing it into a little hole in the wall. You hear a pleasant whoosh as the cylinder is sucked into the vacuum, and more often than not you will go on standing there for a moment, following the sound of the clattering missile as it plunges through the pipe on its way downstairs. Then you return to your desk. You settle into your chair. You sit and wait for the next order.

On the surface, there is nothing to it. What could be simpler or less challenging than loading books into a dumbwaiter and pushing a button? After the drudgery of shelving, you would think your stints behind the desk would come as a welcome respite. As long as there are no books to retrieve (and there are many days when the pneumatic tube is sent to you just three or four times in as many hours), you can do whatever you want. You can read or write, for example, you can stroll around the floor and poke into arcane volumes, you can draw pictures, you can sneak an occasional nap. At one time or another, you manage to do all those things, or make an attempt to do them, but the atmosphere in the stacks is so oppressive, you find it difficult to focus your attention for any length of time on the book you are reading or the poem you are trying to write. You feel as if you are trapped inside an incubator, and little by little you come to understand that the library is good for one thing and one thing only: indulging in sexual fantasies. You don’t know why it happens to you, but the more time you spend in that un-breathable air, the more your head fills with images of naked women, beautiful naked women, and the only thing you can think about (if thought is the appropriate word in this context) is fucking beautiful naked women. Not in some sensuously decked-out boudoir, not in some tranquil Arcadian meadow, but right here on the library floor, rolling around in sweaty abandon as the dust of a million books hovers in the air around you. You fuck Hedy Lamarr. You fuck Ingrid Bergman. You fuck Gene Tierney. You couple with blondes and brunettes, with black women and Chinese women, with all the women you have ever lusted after, one by one, two by two, three by three. The hours inch along, and as you sit at your desk on the fourth floor of Butler Library, you feel your cock grow hard. It is always hard now, always hard with the hardest of hard-ons, and there are times when the pressure becomes so great that you leave your desk, dash down the corridor to the men’s room, and wank into the toilet. You are disgusted with yourself. You are appalled by how quickly you give in to your desires. As you zip up you swear it will never happen again, which is exactly what you said to yourself twenty-four hours ago. Shame stalks you as you return to your desk, and you sit down wondering if there isn’t something seriously wrong with you. You decide that you have never been more lonely, that you are the loneliest person in the world. You think you might be headed for a crack-up.

Your sister says to you: What do you think, Adam? Should we go home for the weekend or stay here and sweat it out in New York?

Let’s stay, you answer, as you contemplate the bus ride to New Jersey and the long hours you would have to spend talking to your parents. If it gets too hot in the apartment, you say, we can always go to the movies. There are some good things playing at the New Yorker and the Thalia on Saturday and Sunday, and the air-conditioning will cool us off.

It is early July, and you and your sister have been living together for two weeks now. Since all your friends have vanished for the summer, Gwyn is the only person you have seen-not counting the people you work with at the library, but they don’t count for much. You have no girlfriend at the moment (Margot was the last woman you slept with), and your sister has recently parted ways with the young professor she was involved with for the past year and a half. Therefore, you have only each other for company, but there is nothing wrong with that as far as you are concerned, and all in all you are more than satisfied with the way things have worked out since she moved in with you. You are entirely at ease in her company, you can talk more openly with her than anyone else you know, and your relations are remarkably free of conflict. Every now and then, she becomes annoyed with you for neglecting to wash the dishes or leaving a mess in the bathroom, but each time you fall down on the domestic front you promise to mend your lackadaisical habits, and little by little you have been improving.

It is a happy arrangement, then, just as you imagined it would be when you proposed the idea in the first place, and now that you are slowly going to pieces at your job in the Castle of Yawns, you understand that living in the apartment with your sister is no doubt helping you keep your sanity, that more than anyone else she has the power to lighten the despair you carry around inside you. On the other hand, the fact that you are together again has produced some curious effects, consequences you did not foresee when the two of you discussed the possibility of joining forces back in the spring. Now you ask yourself how you could have been so blind. You and Gwyn are brother and sister, you belong to the same family, and therefore it is only natural, during the course of the long conversations you have with each other, that family matters should sometimes be mentioned-remarks about your parents, references to the past, memories of small details from the life you shared as children-and because these subjects have been unearthed so often during the weeks you have spent together, you find yourself thinking about them even when you are alone. You don’t want to think about them, but you do. You have spent the past two years consciously trying to avoid your parents, doing everything you can to keep them at arm’s length, and you have gone back to Westfield only when you were certain that Gwyn was going to be there as well. You still love your parents, but you don’t particularly like them anymore. You came to this conclusion after your sister went off to college, leaving you alone with them for your last two years of high school, and when you finally went off to college yourself, you felt as if you had broken out of prison. It’s not that you pride yourself for feeling the way you do-in fact, you are revolted by it, appalled by your coldness and lack of compassion-and you constantly berate yourself for accepting money from your father, who supports you and pays your tuition, but you need to be in college in order to stay away from him and your mother, and since you have no money of your own, and since your father earns too much for you to qualify for a scholarship, what choice do you have but to wallow in the ignominy of your two-faced position? So you run, and as you run you know you are running for your life, and unless you maintain the distance between you and your parents, you will begin to wither and die, just as surely as your brother Andy died when he drowned in Echo Lake on August 10, 1957, that small lake in New Jersey with its eerily appropriate name, for Echo too withered and died, and after her beloved Narcissus drowned, there was nothing left of her but a heap of bones and the wailing of her disembodied, inextinguishable voice.

You don’t want to think about these things. You don’t want to think about your parents and the eight years you spent walled up in a house of grief. You were ten at the time of Andy’s death, and both you and Gwyn had been shipped off to a summer camp in New York State, which meant that neither one of you was present when the accident occurred. Your mother was alone with the seven-year-old Andy, planning to spend a week in the little lakeside bungalow your father bought in 1949 when you and your sister were no more than tots, the site of family summers, the site of smoky barbecues and mosquito-ridden sunsets, and the irony was that they were in the process of selling the place, this was to be the last summer at Echo Lake, just an hour’s drive from home but no longer the calm retreat it had been now that all the new houses were going up, and so, with her two oldest kids away, your mother succumbed to a burst of nostalgia and decided to haul Andy out to the lake, even though your father was too busy to go with them. Andy wasn’t much of a swimmer at that point, was still struggling to get the hang of it, but he had a daredevil streak in him, and he incited mischief with such hell-bent exuberance that everyone thought he was destined to earn an advanced degree in Practical Jokes. On the third day of the visit, sometime around six in the morning, with your mother still asleep in her room, Andy got it into his head to go for an unchaperoned swim. Before leaving, the seven-year-old adventurer sat down to write this short, semi-literate message-Deere Mom Ime in the lake Lov Andy-then tiptoed out of the bungalow, jumped into the water, and drowned. Ime in the lake.

You don’t want to think about it. You have run away now, and you don’t have the heart to return to that house of screams and silences, to listen to your mother howling in the bedroom upstairs, to reopen the medicine cabinet and count the bottles of tranquilizers and antidepressants, to think about the doctors and the breakdowns and the suicide attempt and the long stay in the hospital when you were twelve. You don’t want to remember your father’s eyes and how for years they seemed to look right through you, nor his robotic daily drill of waking at six sharp every morning and not returning from work until nine at night, or his refusal to mention the name of his dead son to you or your sister. You rarely saw him anymore, and with your mother all but incapable of tending the house and preparing meals, the ritual of the family dinner came to an end. The chores of cleaning and cooking were handled by a succession of so-called maids, principally worn-out black women in their fifties and sixties, and because on most nights your mother preferred to eat alone in her room, it was usually just you and your sister, sitting face to face at the pink Formica table in the kitchen. Where your father ate his dinner was a mystery to you. You imagined that he went to restaurants, or perhaps the same restaurant every night, but he never said a word about it.

It is painful for you to think about these things, but now that your sister is with you again, you can’t help yourself, the memories come rushing in on you against your will, and when you sit down to work on the long poem you started in June, you often find yourself stopping in mid-phrase, staring out the window, and reminiscing about your childhood.

You realize now that you began running away from them much earlier than you suspected. If not for Andy’s death, you probably would have remained a compliant, dutiful son until the hour you left home, but once the household began to fall apart-with your mother withdrawing into a state of permanent guilt-racked mourning and your father scarcely present anymore-you had to look elsewhere for some kind of sustainable existence. In the circumscribed world of childhood, elsewhere meant school and the ball fields you played on with your friends. You wanted to excel at everything, and because you were lucky enough to have been endowed with reasonable intelligence and a strong body, your grades were always near the top of your class and you stood out in any number of sports. You never sat down and thought any of this through (you were too young for that), but these successes helped to nullify some of the grimness that surrounded you at home, and the more you succeeded, the more you asserted your independence from your mother and father. They wished you well, of course, they were not actively against you, but a moment arrived (you could have been eleven) when you began to crave the admiration of your friends as much as you craved your parents’ love.

Hours after your mother was carted off to the mental hospital, you swore an oath on your brother’s memory to be a good person for the rest of your life. You were alone in the bathroom, you remember, alone in the bathroom fighting back tears, and by good you meant honest, kind, and generous, you meant never making fun of anyone, never feeling superior to anyone, and never picking a fight with anyone. You were twelve years old. When you were thirteen, you stopped believing in God. When you were fourteen, you spent the first of three consecutive summers working in your father’s supermarket (bagging, shelving, manning the register, signing in deliveries, removing trash-thus perfecting the skills that would lead to your exalted position as a page at the Columbia library). When you were fifteen, you fell in love with a girl named Patty French. Later that year, you told your sister that you were going to become a poet. When you were sixteen, Gwyn left home and you went into internal exile.

Without Gwyn, you never would have made it that far. Much as you wanted to forge a life for yourself beyond the grasp of your family, home was where you lived, and without Gwyn to protect you in that home, you would have been smothered, annihilated, driven to the edge of madness. Early memories nonexistent, but you first see her as a five-year-old as the two of you sit naked in the bathtub, your mother washing Gwyn’s hair, the shampoo foaming up in frothy white spikes and bizarre undulations as your sister throws back her head, laughing, and you look on in rapt wonder. Already, you loved her more than anyone else in the world, and until you were six or seven you assumed that you would always live with her, that you would end up as man and wife. Needless to add that you sometimes squabbled and played nasty tricks on each other, but not habitually, not half as often as most siblings do. You looked so much alike, with your dark hair and gray-green eyes, with your elongated bodies and smallish mouths, so alike that you could have passed for male and female versions of the same person, and then in jumped the fair-skinned Andy with his blond curls and short, chubby frame, and right from the start you both found him a comical personage, a clever midget in soggy diapers who had joined the family for the sole purpose of entertaining you. For the first year of his life, you treated him like a toy or pet dog, but then he began to talk, and you reluctantly decided that he must be human. A real person, then, but contrary to you and your sister, who tended to be restrained and well mannered, your little brother was a dervish of fluctuating moods, alternately boisterous and sulky, prone to sudden, uncontrollable crying fits and long spurts of jungle-crazy laughter. It couldn’t have been easy for him-trying to crack into the inner circle, trying to keep up with his big sister and brother-but the gap narrowed as he grew older, the frustrations gradually diminished, and near the end the crybaby was developing into a good kid-more than a little daft at times (Ime in the lake) but nevertheless a good kid.

Just before Andy was born, your parents moved you and your sister into adjoining bedrooms on the third floor. It was a separate realm up there under the eaves, a small principality cut off from the rest of the house, and after the cataclysm of Echo Lake in August 1957, it became your refuge, the only spot in that fortress of sorrow where you and your sister could escape your grieving parents. You grieved too, of course, but you grieved in the way children do, more selfishly, perhaps more solemnly, and for many months you and your sister tortured yourselves by recounting all the less-than-kind things you had ever done to Andy-the taunts, the cutting remarks, the teasing insults, the slaps and shoves, the too hard punches-as if compelled by some shadowy sense of guilt to do penance, to grovel in your wickedness by endlessly rehearsing the slew of misdemeanors you had committed over the years. These recitations always took place at night, in the dark after you had gone to bed, the two of you talking through the open door between your rooms, or else one of you in the other’s bed, lying side by side on your backs, looking up at the invisible ceiling. You felt like orphans then, with the ghosts of your parents haunting the floor below, and sleeping together became a natural reflex, an abiding comfort, a remedy to ward off the shakes and tears that came so often in the months after Andy’s death.

Intimacies of this sort were the unquestioned ground of your relations with your sister. It went all the way back to the beginning, to the very edge of conscious memory, and you cannot recall a single moment when you felt shy or afraid in her presence. You took baths with her when you were small children, you eagerly explored each other’s bodies in games of “doctor,” and on stormy afternoons when you were confined to the house, Gwyn’s preferred activity was jumping on the bed together stark naked. Not just for the pleasure of the jumping, as she put it, but because she liked to see your penis flopping up and down, and diminutive as that organ must have been at that point in your life, you readily obliged her, since it always made her laugh, and nothing made you happier than to see your sister laugh. How old were you then? Four years old? Five years old? Eventually, children begin to recoil from the rowdy, Caliban nudism of toddlerhood, and by the time they reach the age of six or seven the barriers of modesty have already gone up. For some reason, this failed to happen with you and Gwyn. No more splashing in the tub, perhaps, no more doctor games, no more jumping on the bed, but still, an altogether un-American casualness as far as your bodies were concerned. The door of the bathroom you shared was often left open, and how many times did you walk past that door and catch sight of Gwyn peeing into the toilet, how many times did she glimpse you stepping from the shower without a stitch of clothing on? It felt perfectly natural to see each other naked, and now, in the summer of 1967, as you put down your pen and look out the window to think about your childhood, you ponder this lack of inhibition and conclude that it must have been because you felt your body belonged to her, that each of you belonged to the other, and therefore it would have been unimaginable to act differently. It’s true that as time went on you both became somewhat more reserved, but even when your bodies began to change, you did not completely withdraw from each other. You remember the day Gwyn walked into your room, sat down on the bed, and lifted her blouse to show you the first, tiny swell of her nipples, the earliest sign of her incipient, growing breasts. You remember showing her your first pubic hair and one of your first adolescent erections, and you also remember standing next to her in the bathroom and looking at the blood run down her legs when she had her first period. Neither one of you thought twice about going to the other when these miracles occurred. Life-altering events demanded a witness, and what better person to serve that role than one of you?

Then came the night of the grand experiment. Your parents were going away for the weekend, and they had decided that you and your sister were old enough to take care of yourselves without supervision. Gwyn was fifteen and you were fourteen. She was nearly a woman, and you were just emerging from boyhood, but both of you were trapped in the throes of early teenage desperation, thinking about sex from morning to night, masturbating incessantly, out of your minds with desire, your bodies burning with lustful fantasies, longing to be touched by someone, to be kissed by someone, ravenous and unfulfilled, aroused and alone, damned. The week before your parents’ departure, the two of you had openly discussed the dilemma, the great contradiction of being old enough to want it but too young to get it. The world had played a trick on you by forcing you to live in the mid-twentieth century, citizens of an advanced industrial nation no less, whereas if you had been born into a primitive tribe somewhere in the Amazon or the South Seas, you would no longer still be virgins. That was when you hatched your plan-immediately following that conversation-but you waited until your parents were gone before you put it into action.

You were going to do it once, just once. It was supposed to be an experiment, not a new way of life, and no matter how much you enjoyed it, you would have to stop after that one night, because if you went on with it after that, things could get out of hand, the two of you could easily get carried away, and then there would be the problem of having to account for bloody sheets, not to mention the grotesque possibility, the unthinkable possibility, which neither of you dared to talk about out loud. Anything and everything, you decided, but no penetration, the whole gamut of opportunities and positions, as much as you both wanted for as long as you both wanted it, but it would be a night of sex without intercourse. Since neither one of you had engaged in sex with anyone before, that prospect was exciting enough, and you spent the days leading up to your parents’ departure in a delirium of anticipation-frightened to death, shocked by the boldness of the plan, crazed.

It was the first chance you ever had to tell Gwyn how much you loved her, to tell her how beautiful you thought she was, to push your tongue inside her mouth and kiss her in the way you had dreamed of doing for months. You were trembling when you took off your clothes, trembling from head to toe when you crawled into the bed and felt her arms tighten around you. It was dark in the room, but you could dimly make out the gleam in your sister’s eyes, the contours of her face, the outline of her body, and when you crawled under the covers and felt the nakedness of that body, the bare skin of your fifteen-year-old sister pressing against the bare skin of your own body, you shuddered, feeling almost breathless from the onrush of sensations coursing through you. You lay in each other’s arms for several moments, legs entwined, cheeks touching, too awed to do anything but cling to each other and hope you wouldn’t burst apart from sheer terror. Eventually, Gwyn began to run her hands along your back, and then she brought her mouth toward your face and kissed you, kissed you hard, with an aggression you had not been expecting, and as her tongue shot into your mouth, you understood that there was no better thing in the world than to be kissed in the way she was kissing you, that this was without argument the single most important justification for being alive. You went on kissing for a long spell, the two of you purring and pawing at each other as your tongues flailed and saliva slid down from your lips. At last, you screwed up your courage and placed your palms on her breasts, her small, still not fully grown breasts, and for the first time in your life you said to yourself: I am touching a girl’s naked breasts. After you had run your hands over them for a while, you began to kiss the places you had touched, to flick your tongue around the nipples, to suck the nipples, and you were surprised when they grew firmer and more erect, as firm and erect as your penis had been since the moment you climbed on top of your naked sister. It was too much for you to handle, this initiation into the glories of female anatomy pushed you beyond your limits, and without any prompting from Gwyn you suddenly had your first ejaculation of the night, a ferocious spasm that wound up all over her stomach. Mercifully, whatever embarrassment you felt was short-lived, for even as the juices were pouring out of you, Gwyn had begun to laugh, and by way of toasting your accomplishment, she merrily rubbed her hand across her belly.

It went on for hours. You were both so young and inexperienced, both so charged up and indefatigable, both so crazy in your hunger for each other, and because you had promised that this would be the only time, neither one of you wanted it to end. So you kept at it. With the strength and stamina of your fourteen years, you quickly rebounded from your accidental discharge, and as your sister gently put her hand around your rejuvenated penis (sublime transport, inexpressible joy), you forged on with your anatomy lesson by roaming your hands and mouth over other areas of her body. You discovered the delicious, down-soft regions of nape and inner thigh, the indelible satisfactions of back hollow and buttocks, the almost unbearable delight of the licked ear. Tactile bliss, but also the smell of the perfume Gwyn had put on for the occasion, the ever more sweaty slickness of your two bodies, and the little symphony of sounds you both made throughout the night, singly and together: the moans and whimpers, the sighs and yelps, and then, when Gwyn came for the first time (rubbing her clitoris with the middle finger of her left hand), the sound of air surging in and out of her nostrils, the accelerating speed of those breaths, the triumphant gasp at the end. The first time, followed by two other times, perhaps even a third. In your own case, beyond the early solo bungle, there was the hand of your sister wrapped around your penis, the hand moving up and down as you lay on your back in a fog of mounting excitation, and then there was her mouth, also moving up and down, her mouth around your once-again hard penis, and the profound intimacy you both felt when you came into that mouth-the fluid of one body passing into another, the intermingling of one person with another, conjoined spirits. Then your sister fell back onto the bed, opened her legs, and told you to touch her. Not there, she said, here, and she took your hand and guided you to the place where she wanted you to be, the place where you had never been, and you, who had known nothing before that night, slowly began your education as a human being.

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.

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.

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.