A Brilliant Novel in the Works (16 page)

After we have sex for the first time in at least three years (it sounds
crazy to say that phrase: after we have sex, after we have sex, after
we have sex), I tell my wife, “Wow.” And she says, “Wow.”

The crazy thing about the missionary position is that it
is so warm and comfortable and nice when you’re pressed
against another body that wants to be pressed against you. I
tell her that her people have a brilliant way about pulling off
this so-called sex thing.

“It wasn’t me,” my wife says.

It burns in all the places where our bodies are touching,
her breasts against my bony chest, the heat of her thighs, and
I can feel her kneecaps pressed against my legs. We kiss while
we talk. It’s some kind of horrible, sentimental nightmare
we’re living in. But as far as nightmares go, it’s not the worst
kind of nightmare.

I say, “If it wasn’t you, then who was it?” And I know my
breath must smell like the breath of a man who hasn’t left his
house in months.

She spends some time thinking about this. She looks out
the window. She looks at the ceiling. She looks at me. She
looks at that messy pile of papers on the floor which I try so
fucking hard to call my novel.

And she says, “The gorilla did it.”

It’s quieter with Julia in the house than before. I tiptoe
to the kitchen so I don’t wake her up.

I put my manuscript on the kitchen counter and I sit on a stool
and read the manuscript while eating a BLT. With the lights off. Just
the moonlight. And the smell of Julia in the house. And a thumping
ache in my temples. I also put that photograph of Yousef ’s father on
the table. It’s funny. The more I look at the photograph, the more it
resembles my father. Put this guy in a river and replace the apple
with a fishing rod and it’s the same smile. It’s the same thumbs-up.

I don’t know how much time goes by, but I’m able to read over
everything I’ve written in this novel.

It’s funny, my novel. I see that. But there needs to be more.
It’s me on the page all the time. I leave no room for anything
else. And Shmen was right: the novel does go off the tracks. But
hopefully I’ve begun putting it back on track.

My editor may never like the novel, I may have to take out a
loan to pay back the advance, I may have to take an actual day job
to pay my debts, but all those things seem like simple problems
once I realize I might soon like this crazy fucking novel of mine.

You really shouldn’t stalk someone thinking he can save your
novel. Even though I got terrified too soon for Yousef to see me,
I still suspect that he knows that I was at his house. He smells the
cowardly afterglow of my Jewy presence. He knows.

Yousef must still be fresh in the grief of his father. I wonder if
he died on the operating table just like I told him he wouldn’t. I
wonder if Yousef has friends and family around him.

“Still with the no sleep?” she says. Julia sits on a stool next to
me. She’s got something between her fingers and it takes me a
while to register that it is a cigarette. She lights the thing and then
takes a long drag. Then she grabs my empty plate and lets the
cigarette rest on it.

“You smoke?” I say.

“A new hobby,” she says.

“It’ll kill you,” I tell her.

“Will you let me read it?” she says, looking at the manuscript.
This was a boundary we had not yet crossed. It was as if

my writing was nothing more than secret diary entries. Unless
something got published. But most of my stories never made it
out of the “maybe_a_story” subdirectory on my computer. And
so she knew very little of what I wrote.

“I’m serious,” she says to me. “I’d like to read your novel.”

I think about this for a moment. I’m not talking about just
a literary moment, I mean some substantial time goes by. Long
enough for my wife to fix herself a BLT. Long enough for me to
wash our dishes. Long enough for her to light another cigarette.

And finally, I say, “Give me a few weeks to clean some
things up.”

“Why wait?” she says. I see her suspicious look. She expects
one of my typical, idiotic ways of weaseling out of things. Once I
refused to go out with her and her friends until she pulled down
her pants and sang “Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head.” Once
I asked her to put her hands in my pants during dinner for some
reason that I can no longer remember.

I tell my wife I’m honing in on the core problem with my
novel. I tell her that I see its fundamental flaw.

She looks at me for a good while. “Homing,” she says.

“What?”

“You hone your skills, and you home in on an issue. But there
is no honing in.”

“Home, hone, horn, porn. Just give me a few more weeks.”

I grab her cigarette and take a long drag. It’s such a clean feeling. To
have her cigarette smoke in my lungs. And after I blow it all out, I kiss
Julia like a man with a confident
schmeckel
.

Julia and I have gotten accustomed to being together again. Three
months ago, I thought I’d never see her again. And now I feel like
she’s mine again. I know this assumption is dangerous again.

She appreciates that I wasn’t so hard on her for her little
infidelity, the gentilfidelity, and we’ve found a way to have sex, but
there’s more to a relationship than just fucking and forgiveness.
There are needs and wants. She wants a baby. She wants a family.
She wants a stable companion. She wants both more space and
more attention. She wants to read my novel. I need to give her
answers. We’re good to each other again, but I still need to
connect with her better. I have to decide about family. I know
that subject has to come back around. And I still want to look
out for Shmen. I still need this novel to go further. I still haven’t
had the courage to visit Yousef. I want to talk to him. And I still
want to be spanked.

I’ve given you one kinky erection, one impossible colonoscopy, one missing
prostate, some leather restraints, a whole mess of pianos, one ridiculous
story about Uranus, a deceptive napkin, no shortage of
kahkee
and
schmeckel
references, a Palestinian in mourning, and even sex with
Julia.

But that’s just a list of my dirty laundry. Something’s got to
give. I can hear the clock ticking. Julia won’t wait forever for us to
get back on track. Gentilfidelity guilt can only be carried so many
miles. And then real change needs to take place. And this novel
will fall apart if I’m not careful, or if I’m too careful. I’m missing
some pieces to this Jewy puzzle. And Shmen, well, I don’t know
how many visits to the hospital he can stand. Or I can stand.

Who knows how many pages I have left to clean this all up,
but it can’t be many.

I still look at the razor blades and think, “Yummy.” Just a couple
more cuts wouldn’t harm anyone. And on some mornings—like
on this morning—as I wait for Julia to get out of the shower,
I realize I miss her more now that she’s with me. And I don’t
understand why that is. I still wake up some mornings and think,
“Shit. I’m me again.”

I’ve also begun thinking about that gentile of hers. At first, it
was relieving for me—like a hypochondriac who is blessed with
a fatal illness—to know she fucked someone else, but the blessing
has begun to wear off. What will stop her from going back to him
and his healthy foreskin?

I also didn’t tell her about Yousef. Because then I’d need
to explain to her that I have been stalking a Palestinian/
Clevelandian man I barely know and that I’m doing it to save
my book. I’ve hidden the photo of his father along with my
hidden pictures of Julia.

You’d think there would be more growth at this point in the
novel.

As I wait for Julia’s shower to end, I do something knowingly
crooked. I call the brother of the person I really ought to be
talking to right now.

“Shmuvi,” he says. “It’s you. I need a drink.”

What I want to say is, “You’re on!” But what I do say is: “You
can’t drink. We quit. It’s 9 am. It’ll kill you. Julia will kill both of
us. No more drinking. It’s bad. We’ll never be able to stop. Take
up smoking or snorting.”

“I need a drink and a sitter,” he says.

“What’s wrong?”

I’m wanting to know why he needs a drink, but instead he

says, “Next Saturday night. We need a babysitter.”

“I’ll do it,” I say to him. This seems like the perfect thing for
me. “You mean with Maddy, right? You mean for money, right?”

I need to finish off this novel. And I think I know one
way to do it. It’s going to be a little bumpy. It’s a long shot. But I don’t
have much time. It involves a pee pee scene, a few palindromes, several overly
symbolic anagrams, sixteen clotheslines, another visit to a purple apartment
that may change the course of a book. It also involves a small, insignificant
mountain with a giant horse on it.

How many of you have I lost already?

I hate to think of it.

When Yousef opens the door, he is surprised to see me. Surprised,
as in, he doesn’t recognize me. He looks too sleepy for noon. He
is red in the eyes. He has lost weight. His beard is too thick.

“Yes,” he says. “Hello,” he says, but he still doesn’t open the
door all the way to let me in.

“We spoke at the hospital waiting room many months ago.”
I take off my backpack and reach into a pouch and pull out his
business card, which is all bent-up by now, and I pass it to him,
as if that is some kind of proof. I imagine my mom saying, “Oof!
Yuvi! Why are you so awkward when you introduce yourself?”

“Oh,” Yousef says, looking at his own bent up card and back
to my face. I see his mind go back to that moment. Back to when
his father was alive.

“I’m sorry about your father,” I say to him.

He is too dazed to know exactly how I know this information,
but he appreciates that I’ve acknowledged it. I know this because
he opens the door all the way and points me to the couch. I’ve
officially been invited into his house, which is one notch better
than last time. I sit down and he sits down next to me and lets out
a big sigh. I put my backpack against my legs. I’ve got my mess of
a novel inside that bag.

There is still a photo album and those poisoned dates on his coffee table
though the photos of his dad are gone. I almost tell him that I was in his
apartment three months ago but I can’t imagine that going well:
Hello,
grieving stranger. I broke into your apartment three months ago while you
were shitting and stole a picture of your dead dad. Can I come in again?

“Yeah,” Yousef says as if we were in the middle of a
conversation, “it’s still hard without him.”

I want to put my hand on his shoulder or pat him on the back
or just express some form of guyish intimacy. I put my hand
gently on the table.

“I know this doesn’t help,” I say, “but it took me some time to
stop feeling like my life was over when my father died. It’s nice
to imagine that you can read some holy book or whack off or
punch someone and have the feeling go away, but it doesn’t work
that way.”

He scratches his beard and smiles, though I know he’s not
finding anything too funny. “When do you get over it?” he says.
It’s a question everyone asks—or wants to ask—when someone
close to them dies.

“You don’t.”

He makes a grunting sound, which I think is good. I had the
same fear when my parents died: thinking that I was supposed to
completely get over that ache. But it gets easier when you finally
just let it stay there.

“You want a date?” he says.

I grab a date and toss it in my mouth. I try to do it in slow
motion like Indiana Jones, but it just goes up in the air and drops
on the couch. And so I grab the date off the couch and stick it in
my mouth the regular way. They are sweet and soft and totally
not poisonous-tasting.

He puts his hand on the photo album. He begins to open it.
But then he closes it and looks back at me. I wonder for a second
if he is on medication. He’s got Xanax eyelids.

“Is this a bad time to visit?” I say.

He ignores my question and keeps staring at me. “You do not
seem much like an Israeli.”

“How do you figure?”

“Well,” he says, “you’re too fragile and sensitive.”

I don’t know whether to be flattered or offended. Or both. Or
neither.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t stereotype.”

“It’s okay,” I say. “When I saw those dates, my first thought
was that they were poisoned.”

Yousef smiles. “
Raiders of the Lost Ark?
”

“Yes,” I admit, with my head down.

“Have you ever been to Egypt?” he asks.

“No,” I admit, with my head down. I know the “Let my people
go” Egypt. I know a little about the 2011 protest against Mubarak.
But I don’t honestly know what life is like in Egypt. I remember
as a kid my dad telling me about Sadat and Begin and the Camp
David Peace Treaty. I also know that Sadat was assassinated. But
I don’t know much else.

I can see he almost says something to me. Maybe he almost
tells me about pollution in Cairo. He almost tells me about the
beauty of the Red Sea. He almost tells me about the Nile. And
about the camels that are sold at a Bedouin market.

“Never been there either,” Yousef says. “But a great movie.” I
feel like this is good enough to know that he still accepts me, with
all my ignorance.

We are silent for too long.

Just as I consider whipping out my novel, he reaches for
the photo album again, as if that were his manuscript. He flips
through the pages until he comes to one of a girl, maybe sixteen.
It’s an old picture, at least fifty years old, a faded black and white,
only about two inches by two inches, with jagged edges. The girl
has long hair, longer than the picture can show, and she is smiling
and looking below the camera and there is a tree she is leaning
against. A tree that is too tall to see.

“This is my grandmother,” he says.

“She’s beautiful,” I say. And I don’t just say that because it’s
polite to say that. I say it because his grandmother is smiling like
the photographer just told her a fabulous joke. An inside joke
that no one is still alive to tell.

“Yes,” he says. “She was special.”

He shows me another picture. This time it’s his grandmother
with her four sisters. And two brothers. And her mother. They
are all lined up against a stone wall that is cracked behind them.
In one of the cracks, a shrub growing out of the wall.

Here’s the thing: her brothers are wearing yarmulkes.

“Your grandmother was a Jew?” I say.