A Brilliant Novel in the Works (4 page)

It’s three in the morning and it feels like forever since we were
out with Shmen and Ally, even though it was only a few hours
ago. Julia and I are both awake (at opposite ends of the house)
when I start thinking about the nylon restraints in the bottom
drawer of my desk.

I love these nights when the rain is so hard you think
you can feel it thrashing in your temples. Julia’s been doing
paperwork in the living room and I’ve been reading and re-reading an Isaac Bashevis Singer story in my office. Julia is
getting ready to start her own nonprofit that helps families
affected by alcoholism and I’m trying to figure out how the
son of the rabbi in this story is able to stare at a sexy woman’s
legs for so many paragraphs. Does Singer get away with it
because of the boy or because of the legs?

When we got married, we both agreed that babies were
not on our radar. The idea of someone depending on me
while I walk around in my underwear not writing sounds too
terrifying to think about. I’d rather keep my failures to myself.

My editor suggested that I amp up the tension in my
stories to make them more interesting. “You know,” she says.
“Put a birth or a death in there. Put a murder in the story. Or
even better, connect your story to the struggles of Israel and
Palestine.” I think about this for a good long moment. It’s true
that I’ve got Israeli blood inside of me, but I don’t know how
to write about a seemingly hopeless struggle where no one is
speaking the same language. So I say to my editor, “Fine. Send
me the complete manuscript you want me to write.”

I’m desperate to do anything other than confront my novel.
I’ll write page after page of poop stories about my brother-in-law to avoid my novel. So far, my novel is about nothing. It’s
about worse than nothing: it’s about not being able to write. I
start making clawing gestures with my hands and I know it’s a
sign that it’s not going to be a great night.

I miss my father, and I haven’t even told his story yet. He’s
in plenty of my short stories and essays, but I can’t show you
those. Because I’m a novelist. Or a faux-novelist. A fauxvelist.
So you don’t know how I felt about that man—that man who
died without a prostate and with stents in his arteries and with
enough fly rods to build a cathedral.

It’s another of my failings.

I keep expecting my wife to bug me about something,
you know, about the bills or needing to get to bed or needing
to check that the gutters aren’t clogged or if I’m hungry or
needing help with some of the accounting, but she hasn’t
checked on me in two hours. I can still hear papers shuffling,
imagine her with those reading glasses on, doing research
about 401c’s or 407d’s or 501k’s…I’m dying for her to bug me
about something. Anything. Almost anything.

I can’t stop thinking about the words on that napkin: Save
Me, Julia. If it weren’t written in someone else’s handwriting
on someone else’s napkin, then I would have suspected myself
of writing it.

Julia and I sometimes pretend that we have little affection
for each other, but when we eventually make our way to the
bed, when we get too sleepy to keep our guard up, we do
slowly, eventually, end up close to each other, maybe holding
hands, maybe a little deep-sleep spooning, or maybe we sleep
for an hour with my lips against her back, or her arm around
my waist. But as it gets close to morning again, we separate,
go back to opposite sides of the bed. And when we wake up,
we’re back to our protected selves. That’s how it goes with us.

But even with our guard up, we have an understanding
about each other’s needs. There are some things needed just
for survival. So I open my drawer, the bottommost drawer,
and pull out the nylon restraints I bought at a sex shop a few
years ago. I take off all my clothes. Then I remember about
the scabs on my ass that I don’t want her to see. Because I
supposedly stopped doing those kinds of things. So I put my
boxers back on. And then I fasten the nylon straps to each
arm and each leg, making sure the Velcro fasteners are nice
and tight. I grab the rest of the equipment that she’ll use to
strap me to the bed. I grab my wife’s leather belt from the
bedroom. And I make my trek to the living room.

Maybe these big rainstorms only come when you’re trying
to work something out inside yourself—something big about
who you are or what you believe in. And they don’t let up
until you’ve made some kind of movement. In my narcissism,
I wonder if this rainstorm is trying to tell me something.

The metal hooks on the restraints make little clicking sounds as I walk.
Which causes my wife to turn around and see me standing there like a horny
little
golem
— standing there naked with restraints and her belt.
She is deep into her work and it takes some time for her to take in the situation.
If there is a message in this rainstorm, then I hope I can still receive it
while being handcuffed to the bedpost and spanked.

My wife takes a deep breath. My poor wife; I know she isn’t
crazy about doing these things to me. She wants regular sex
like in the early days of our marriage. But I can’t give that to
her right now. Shame is all that turns me on these days.

Save Me, Julia.

“Do you need to be taught a lesson?” she asks me with the
seriousness of someone who’s been doing tedious accounting.

I love those reading glasses of hers.

The wind blows hard. The rain bangs against the window.
Even indoors, it seems that we should be wearing raincoats,
that we need protection from all that we’re up against.

When I was six years old, I had a vivid picture in my
mind that God was dressed in a thick yellow raincoat with a yellow rain hat
shaped like an origami boat. I don’t know where this image came from, but
it was something I was sure of. And so, I felt blessed one afternoon when
Mom and I were sitting on the front steps of our apartment, after that vicious
rainstorm, and I saw a tall man in just that outfit coming toward us. The
sky had cleared up in a matter of minutes and the sun was shining bright,
even with the ground still wet. The yellow of his raincoat was the purest
yellow I could imagine. His bangs were thick and curly and completely gray.
He had a limp in his walk, but it also made him pop up with every other step
in a way that seemed more certain than typical walking.

My mother wasn’t looking at him, she was looking out at the parking lot.
I think we were waiting for someone to pick us up for some event, a birthday
party or a trip to the mall. I tugged on my mother’s sweater—she often wore
thick sweaters with a lot of material to grab. She leaned toward me and said,
“What is it, mameleh?” in her gentle voice. She used Hebrew words instead
of English for all the warmest and coldest things.

I tried to be subtle about the way I pointed in the man’s direction.
He was getting closer and humming a tune and he made little coughs at the
high notes. I asked my mother, “Is he God?”

“What?” my mother said. She was smiling, already knew her son was about
to say something she’d be amused by. I said, “Is the man in the raincoat Adonai?”

My mother looked at me, then she looked at this man—he

was almost in front of us—and then she looked back at me, and then she
looked back at the man. I figured that my mother was sincerely considering
this insight of mine.

The man stopped in front of us, as if we had called for him. I was sure
that he knew exactly what we had been speaking about—an easy thing for God
to know.

“What is it, Tziona?” the man said. I didn’t know at the time that my
mom had already met this man before, that this man was a neighbor of ours.
His voice had a scratchiness that made me think he was very wise—rather than
that he had smoked two packs a day for forty years.

I still believed this man was God, but I also had the feeling that if
my mother revealed my question to this man, it would destroy whatever power
I had given him.

My mother looked down at me one last time. I’m sure I had some kind of
desperation on my face, and then she looked back up at our neighbor, David
Watts. “My son asked me if you are G o d .”

David put his hand above his eyes to block the glare of the sun and gave
me a good look. “You want to know if I am… God?”

Both of them—Mom and David—had that gut-busting kind of laugh; they were
clutching their stomachs from the pain, wiping the tears from their faces.
This was one hell of a moment. I wanted to get away from the two of them but
my body wouldn’t move. I couldn’t even manage to cover my face with my hands.
I was stuck there watching.

After a few minutes of this, David scratched my head forcefully, messed
up my hair that way I hated, and then he limped away, coughing and laughing
at the same time. When he was nearly out of sight, I heard him say, “Goddamn,
that’s a great line. I’ll have to remember that one.”

I vowed never to say anything personal to my mother again. I regretted
everything important I ever told her. The wind started blowing and I remember
being cold, sitting there in the wet sunny weather.

My mom put her arm around me. She tried to shake me in a playful way.
But when she saw that I wouldn’t budge, she squeezed me instead. She put her
lips to my forehead—they were warm and moist—and she said so that it vibrated
right through my forehead, “It’s okay, mameleh.”

And just like that, I was glad to be going to the mall with my mother.

My wife unhooks me from the bed and says, “I hope that did the trick.”

It did. It’s the closest thing that we have to sex these days.
She’s got all her clothes on and I’m in my boxers with my ass
burning from all that spanking. Not one orgasm within a five-mile
radius of our bedroom.

Julia isn’t looking at me; she’s looking out the dark
window. She is trying to decide if she can do more work or
if it’s time to finally get to bed. She needs to have a business
plan together by the end of the week. I shouldn’t have
interrupted her work.

It’s still raining and it feels like the rain has gone on for
too long. I think of saying something about how we’re like
Noah and his wife, but I already know how that conversation
goes. We’re not the best example of the male and female of the
species. And I haven’t read anywhere about Noah having a
predilection for being spanked by his wife.

“It’s not normal,” she says to the window.

I rub my wrists to get the blood circulating again. “The
rain has been going on for too long,” I say.

“I’m talking about you,” she says. “When are we going to
have normal sex again? It’s been three years. I don’t like doing
this stuff to you.”

“It’s not my fault,” I tell her. What I want to tell her is that it
is my fault. That somehow everything feels like my fault and I
want to be punished for it all. That I can’t imagine normal sex
with her because when we’re pressed up against each other,
all I think about are the things that are wrong in our lives.
Like that other man who writes her messages on napkins and
sticks them in her pants.

I track down a pair of pants from the closet. It’s strange
putting on a fresh pair at four in the morning. “It’s not my fault,”
I say again, with my pants on I feel more comfortable deflecting,
“the problem has to do with mistakes made by the government.”

“If you blame the Bush administration one more time,” my
wife says, “I will never tie you up again.”

It’s true. I love to blame the Bush administration. They did so
many things wrong—why not tack on a little problem of sexual
intimacy? At one point in my life, I blamed my father for all my
problems. But I got over it. Besides, my father had charm. That’s
more than what you could say for the Bush administration.

It’s red around Julia’s eyes and her hair is messy and she
sighs a little too much. Her lips move slightly but I know she
isn’t about to say anything. She’s got her hand buried inside
her hair and she scratches her scalp to get the itch out.

“You’re getting crazier than the characters in your stories,”
she says.

I take a deep breath. I try to relax. What we need is one
of those coming-to-Jesus moments. I’ve always wanted a
coming-to-Jesus moment. Non-believers deserve them too.
And I can tell that Julia and I need to get back on track
somehow. It didn’t used to be this crooked with us.

I say, “Julia. Do you want the real story? Do you want the
whole megillah?” And I prepare myself for something that I’m
not exactly prepared for.

She takes a deep breath. She tries to relax. She closes her
eyes. I can see her eyeballs moving underneath as if she were
asleep. And when she opens her eyes again, she says, “I’m
sorry. Not tonight,” and then steps out of the room with her
leather belt and her exasperation, leaving me alone on the bed
with my disappointment and my relief.

I was bouncing up and down on the hotel bed, banging matchbox
cars into each other. I was making too much noise in too small a room on too
ugly a day. I knew it was wrong, but it was a strange moment for me—I had
seen tears in my dad’s eyes for the first time ever—so jumping on the bed
and banging cars seemed as good a way as any to pass the time until things
returned to normal.

He almost never hit me; his anger mostly circled in the realm of nasty
words and nasty eyes. But those eyes were big and brown and bloodshot. And
this was the day of his mother’s funeral, with me jumping on the bed and banging
cars together and yelling “Deathtrap!” whenever two cars crashed into each
other.

I’m not saying that I deserved it, but if he were ever going to lose
control, this was as good a day as any. His belt flew off his waist so fast
I could hear it cut through the air. It was made of three intertwined pieces
of leather and made a web-like pattern on my thigh. I was crying instantly,
just as instantly as my dad stormed out of the hotel room (his belt still
on the bed), just as instantly as my mom was at my side, holding my hand,
saying, “It’s okay, mameleh. It’s okay, darling.” With her Israeli accent,
darling sounded like dahling, which still seems to me a far sweeter word
.

In my twenties, I started cutting myself. Little slits
on my chest, on my arm, sometimes on my hip exactly where the waistband of
my boxers would chafe as I walked. On my ass, so that every time I sat down
I would remember. I loved feeling that burn during the worst days of my depression.
“But you have nothing to be depressed about,” is what my friends would tell
me. So I stopped talking to my friends. They didn’t understand how I burned,
feeling inadequate and unloved no matter what I did. I learned how to cut
myself, how to stare at the blood in the mirror at three in the morning, and
then to sit back and relax to a Simpsons episode, ideally a season five or
six episode, when the writers figured out how to get the best out of the characters,
but before they got desperate for a story
.

When my father hit me that day, I cried, but there was
relief in the smack as well. Usually, there was just that rage in his eyes
and in his words, and since we never spoke of it, and since he never apologized,
it was hard to know if it was real. Our arguments became blurred dreams afterward,
vague enough that I sometimes thought I made them up. Except on the morning
he hit me—I had this beautiful bruise right on my thigh. It was as many colors
as the skin of a fish when you looked at it in the right light.

My dad came back to the room after an hour. Nobody spoke. My parents
prepared for the funeral, I stayed in the room with a babysitter, and they
were off, the belt still on the bed.

When we returned home to Atlanta, he bought me the exact three matchbox
cars that I wanted—even the hard-to-find one with the black widow spider on
the hood, that red hourglass mark showing on its abdomen.

This smack of the belt was not a pivotal event for me. One smack isn’t
such a messy thing for a child to overcome if you think about how much worse
it could be. He had good days and he had bad days, just like anyone else.

It was two dozen years later, when I was thirty-four and he was seventy-six,
that my father spoke to me about this event, which I had nearly forgotten.
Imagine my father at seventy-six: that gray beard, those long bony arms, with
my mother dead, his sister dead, most of his friends dead, after his open
heart surgery, after surviving cancer, after he turned to fly fishing like
a religion.

I was already living in Portland, but I still came to visit him in North
Carolina twice a year. He had moved back to the area where he grew up—the
Pisgah National Forest. During these trips, we spent the mornings outdoors,
then came back home in the afternoon for a martini or two, depending on how
he felt that day. He brought up the day in the hotel while we were walking
along the Davidson River. It was his favorite stretch, where you could walk
down to the water and step right in if you wanted.

“Come on,” my father said, and waved me into the water. He was wearing
a pair of tennis shoes older than me. It was the first time I noticed how
little hair he had on his legs, and I wondered when that change had happened.
His movements were not of the fragile man I thought him to be. He stepped
with ease on rocks that were covered in slippery moss, never lost balance.

I was wearing my favorite black pair of shoes, but I followed him into
the water anyhow.

It was so cold at first I had to squeeze my eyes shut. But after a few
seconds, the pain went away and it felt more like a tickle. I started walking
in the river.

“We need a good rain,” he said loud enough for me to hear him downstream,
and he squatted to touch the water. He put his wet fingers up to his nose.
My father, smelling the river.

“It feels so good in the water,” I said. It was strange to walk into
a river, it seemed wrong and freeing, like driving around without a seatbelt.
The water was shallow—barely up to my ankles—but it was moving fast and I
had a continuous feeling that I was about to fall.

“I tell people,” my father yelled back to me, “that the only reason I
fish is to have an excuse to be standing knee deep in a river.”

I made my way with awkward steps up to where my father was squatting
and I squatted next to him. He had a small rock in his hand and he turned
it over, as if reading its backside. He said, “I never forgave myself for
hitting you after my mama died.”

It took me a few moments to recollect what happened in that room. I remembered
my father crying about his mother and the way he covered his eyes with his
bony fingers—and then I remembered the belt on the bed, and that bruise on
my thigh. As I watched my father turn that rock over and over, I understood
how many times my father had replayed that scene in his head, how many times
he regretted what happened with the belt.

“Hell,” he said. He threw his little rock upstream as far as he could
throw it. “It all seems so easy when you’re sitting in the middle of a river.”

I looked down at the water and said nothing. As we squatted there, I
was struggling not to fall over, but my father was firmly planted. He reached
over and rubbed my back and massaged my neck. It made me feel safe the way
it did when I was a kid, even though it became that much harder to keep my
balance.

And then, as if someone had called to him, my dad stood up. And so I
stood up as well, looking and listening for signs. All I could hear was the
river.

Upstream, I could see a big rock against the shore. From where we stood,
the rock looked so much like a grand piano that I wondered if someone had
carved into it to make this effect.

“I like to stand on that rock,” my father said, “and fish into the water
just below. They love wooly buggers down there in Piano Pond.”

I thought of him standing there, so tall on that piano.

“You know,” my father said, “when I wake up in the morning, all I pray
for is to be able to get out on the river one more time.”

He kept looking at that rock, squinting as if he could almost make out
a person playing it. But the more I looked at the rock, the more it just looked
like a rock.

“You got a lousy deal that day,” he said. “I wish I could take it back.”

I wanted to reach out to him so badly. To say something. Even if I conjured
up a cliché, it would have felt better than saying nothing. Even now, as I
sit at my computer 2,200 miles away from that river, I’m still trying to make
the memory of myself say something to my father, just one truth about how
I felt about him
.

The first time Julia caught me cutting myself, my pants
and underwear were on the floor, and I was standing on the bathroom counter,
my ass toward the medicine cabinet mirror. I had a razor in my hand.

I don’t remember what I was worried about that day, but it was surely
something catastrophic and forgettable.

I pressed the razor hard against my ass and slid the razor vertically
so that the blade had a chance to make long, continuous contact with my skin.
I did this several times in a row. At first, there was no visible mark. But
there was a beautifully sharp pain that tingled from my ass to my head to
my toes. There were twenty or more seconds before the blood finally rose to
the surface. And then they appeared: those gorgeous, bright red lines across
the flesh.

When a wife enters the house expecting to surprise her husband with his
favorite lunch (pastrami on rye from Zook’s Deli), it is not a fabulous feeling
for her to see her husband balancing on the bathroom counter with streaks
of blood across his ass.

She covered her mouth with her hand. And through her skinny fingers she
said, “What in God’s name.” She wouldn’t look up at me at first, just down
at the floor, where my pants were, where my feet should have been planted.
And then she looked up.

It took that look in her eyes for me to know how abnormal this situation
was. It sure felt like a normal thing to do on a day when my writing wasn’t
going well or when I missed my father or when the mailman was annoyed with
me about our rickety mailbox.

I told her that I wouldn’t cut myself again. That was three years ago.
When I stopped cutting, I lost the ability to have sex with her—a notable
side effect. Even though I’ve started cutting myself again, the other problems
still haven’t gotten better. Things have only gotten worse, because now I
feel guilty about cutting on top of all the other things.

When I climbed down from the counter, I noticed drops of blood by the
sink. Bright and rounded like little ladybugs. I was careful not to smudge
them.

I stood there in the bathroom, pantsless, looking at Julia. She didn’t
say anything and I didn’t say anything. But I still waited—it was easy to
make eye contact with her, even though her eyes were searching all over the
room for something besides eye contact with me. Pretty soon, she walked away.

I loved doing this cutting ritual and I knew it would be hard to let
go of. It was something that was in me to love long before that one little
moment when my father hit me with that belt and then bought me a black widow
matchbox car to make up for it.

The matchbox car is still with me—in a shoebox in my closet. The two
front wheels are missing, and the back wheels are too bent to spin. Sometimes,
when I’m looking for something to be sentimental about, I squeeze the cold
metal of the little car and think about how many years a man can carry around
the things of his past.

It was my father who saw it first. He tapped me gently
on the shoulder and pointed down by our feet. Almost nibbling at our toes
was a rainbow trout. Maybe a foot long, shining from the light of the sun.
It was too big and bright for this dull little river. We kept as still as
we possibly could. The fish wiggled silently up to us. It inspected my father’s
feet and then my feet, and after careful consideration, it made a quick turn
upstream.

“There’s been a mayfly hatch,” my father said. He took a deep breath,
as if he could smell insect larvae. This was my father’s world. I was just
a visitor here, but he was as natural to this river as the water itself.

The fish swam out of sight in less than a second but we stood there quietly
for five minutes. Maybe we were expecting the fish to come back to us. Or
maybe we were trying to say goodbye
.