All I Love and Know (18 page)

The wind cooled his back where his shirt rose above his jeans. Candy wrappers and an empty paper container blew through the patch of hard dirt they stood upon and jammed against a scrubby bush. The man yelped and shuddered in his arms. He staggered away from Daniel for a moment, fumbling to tuck himself back in. Still breathing hard, he kicked dirt and leaves and cigarette butts over the snail's trail of semen he'd left on the ground. “
Tov
,” Daniel said, indicating he was ready to go. He turned, and then suddenly the guy pulled him back and laid a kiss on him, and too shocked to protest, Daniel met his lips and tongue, closed his eyes and felt the blood rush to his head. The man's breath smelled of a hundred cups of coffee. When he pulled away, Daniel staggered, dizzy, clasped his jacket for balance. “
O-pah
,” the man said, steadying him like the nice husband and father he no doubt was.

Daniel drove home quickly through the empty streets, a smile twitching at his lips. He and Matt had debated the question of kissing other men, because they both loved kissing, but it created a dangerous intimacy. In the end they'd allowed it because it almost never happened with guys you picked up. Daniel ran his hand over his chapped mouth and chin, wondering whether his parents would notice that they looked red in the morning. He reached for the lip balm that was always rattling around in one of the coffee holders—Ilana's, he knew—and ran it over his lips, and then he felt as though he'd kissed her too.

He was home in five minutes; he opened the front door as silently as a burglar and eased it shut behind him, crept into his bedroom and closed the sliding door inch by quiet inch, stripped down to his underwear and got in bed. His legs and groin tingled, and he caught and then lost the rumor of the guy's scent. A sense of drowsy well-being gently washed through him. He placed his fingers on his ribs and felt them expand and contract with his breath. Through the open window floated the heavenly smell of the Angel factory. He listened into the silence and heard no rustle or cry.

M
ATT AND CAM
were hunched in front of his computer, reading a smackdown between two mothers on BabyCenter.com. Matt had found the site a few hours ago, and was so riveted he hadn't heard Cam come in until the frantic scrabbling of claws against the wood stairs caught his attention and Yo-yo and Xena burst in, panting, and crashed against his knees. “Ouch!” he yelled. “Cam?”

“Hey,” she said, coming in with a squeak of sneakers and looking around his study. “I brought Chinese and a bottle of wine.”

“Check this out,” Matt said, rolling in his desk chair to grab another chair and pull it up. “You guys, lie down! That means you too, Yo-yo!” He'd read a mother's diary of her child's first year, and the recalls on the car seats—which it seemed nobody used correctly anyway—and the frighteningly intense debates about the family bed, but he'd had no success finding anything about bereaved children, except for those who had lost a grandparent or a pet. Nothing about how to talk to kids whose parents had been killed by a bomb. But then again, he wasn't sure if he was missing some stuff because he was reluctant to register, because that required reporting his children's genders, something he just balked at, fearing they'd start sending him grotesque special articles about how, even in the womb, little boys naturally reach for trucks while little girls reach for dolls.

Now he was reading the milestone chart “What to Expect from Your Thirteen- to Eighteen-month-old.” “Someone seems to have bragged that her two-month-old was already eating solid foods,” he told Cam, “and that really ticked the other moms off.” He read aloud: “ ‘Well, well, well. In addition to being mother of the year, you are also more educated than a pediatrician. Just because your daughter
can
eat solids, does not mean that she
should
do so. A two-month-old baby's digestive system is not ready for the onslaught of solid foods. You are probably setting your daughter up for an increased risk of allergies, as well as digestive problems later on. I am sorry that your children have a mother who thinks so little of them that she ignores advice given by pediatricians worldwide.' ” He looked at Cam, who was squinting at the screen and murmuring, “Dude, lighten up.”

“Signed,” he said, grinning, “‘Sad in Indiana.'” He pouted his lips. “She's sad because those kids have to have such a bad mom.”

“It
is
sad, actually,” Cam said, and they laughed.

“I'll tell you, it's a cutthroat world out there for the moms,” he said. “Those message boards are brutal! But the good news is, they don't expect jack shit from the dads. I swear, if these women's husbands do anything without being hounded into it, they're total heroes. They call them DH, which it took me a long time to figure out meant ‘darling husband.' ”

“Gross,” Cam said.

“I don't know, Cam,” he said, rubbing his face, suddenly depressed by all the arguments, the sheer quantity of
information
parents apparently had to be interested in. “Did you ever want kids?”

“Nope. The thing is, I basically raised my mother”—Cam's mother had had some combination of alcoholism and bipolar disorder—“I don't have the energy to be at anyone else's beck and call.”

Matt nodded with a small smile; and yet, the women Cam loved were unfailingly troubled and demanding.

“If you get them, it's not like you're going to have a choice or anything,” she said. “You'll just raise them. They'll grow up, and be fucked-up like the rest of us.”

DANIEL WAS RUNNING LATE;
he'd gone to the supermarket, where he'd been accosted by a woman who thought he was Joel for a moment, and then he'd had to stay with her as she recovered. And just as he pulled out of the parking garage on his way home, he remembered that he'd forgotten eggs, the thing that had sent him shopping in the first place. He stopped at the
makolet
on his block and bought eggs with his last bit of cash, and wound his way home through twisty, clogged streets. Assaf had agreed to be his lawyer, and he had set up this appointment with the caseworker. She was an American with a New York accent named Dalia Rosenblum, who'd made
aliyah
ten years ago, and he had bet his parents a thousand dollars that she was religious.

“You don't have that kind of money,” his father had said with an annoying complacency.

“Okay, I'll bet you
two
thousand dollars,” Daniel had shot back.

His father had given him the wise nod of the father humoring the impetuous son.

His phone conversation with Assaf had thrown him into a stew of anxiety and fear. First, Assaf had told him that the social worker assigned to do the parental competency hearing would be interviewing him six times over the course of three months. Daniel had said that he couldn't be away from work that long, and begged him to find out if there was any way to do it more quickly. Assaf also said that the courts tended to want to toss the kids around as little as possible, especially after a trauma like this. When Daniel asked him if he thought it would help or hurt to have Matt present at the parental competency hearings, Assaf was silent for a long time.

“That bad, huh,” Daniel said.

“No, no—it's that I honestly don't know. I have never experienced such a situation.” He weighed it out loud: On the one hand, it wouldn't help that they were gay, and that Matt wasn't Jewish, but on the other, Daniel couldn't lie about his living situation, and Assaf believed that parental competency assessments explicitly mandated assessing the spouse. “I think you will have to acknowledge him, and that therefore he will need to be present,” Assaf had concluded.

When Daniel got home, he saw a strange car parked outside and cursed; he was late for the caseworker. He walked into the house, apologizing, laden with plastic bags of groceries. “Don't worry about it,” Dalia said. She was a young woman with a covered head; she wore a dress and hose. Daniel swiveled toward his father, who was hovering over the hissing kettle, as he hefted the bags onto the counter, and rubbed his fingers together to signify the money Sam owed him. He had the sudden memory of Ilana calling the cops on the religious people who'd put up a
succa
by her supermarket and played loud music during evenings of the Succot holiday. They'd told her they couldn't do anything about it, which she'd known before she even called. But it had made her feel better to do something rash and mean toward the religious people she—and most of her friends—lived among in simmering animosity.

He put some biscuits on a plate and brought them out, set them on the big nicked coffee table. His mother emerged from the bedroom in a nice dress, freshly made-up, and introduced herself. They sat. Dalia began by emphasizing that she was the advocate for Gal and Noam, and that the court, to which this case would surely go, would settle it according to its best judgment of the best welfare of the children. “You say that in a way that implies that Daniel doesn't want the best for them, that
he's
not their advocate,” Lydia said.

“Not at all,” Dalia said. “But the custodianship of the children is contested. I have just come from Ilana's parents, and they are quite determined to raise the children as their own, here in Israel.”

“You're aware that Joel and Ilana wanted Daniel to be the guardian, yes?” his father said.

“I have seen the will,” Dalia replied, implying, to Daniel's ear, that it was somehow open to interpretation. He wished his parents would shut up; they were making it look as though he couldn't speak for himself. Dalia was probably in her midthirties, with dark eyebrows and straight hair slanting across her forehead. She sat with a pad of paper in her lap and a pen in her hands. Her hands were quiet. “I know this must seem arbitrary and wrong to you,” she said. “But evidence shows that the mourning process is best facilitated if the child's physical and social environment remain essentially unchanged.”

Daniel's heart sank. So not only might he and Matt not get them, but even if they did, they'd be harming their mourning process.

“You live, in the States, with a homosexual partner, is that true?”

“Yes,” Daniel said, holding her gaze.

“Will the court have a problem with that?” his mother asked. Daniel leveled a stare at her, and she looked at him, uncomprehending.

Dalia gave an expressive shrug and said she didn't know. “There are two parts to it: the partner and living in the States. How does your partner feel about raising two children who are not his own?”

Daniel made a quick, strategic decision to read her as simply direct, as many Israelis were, rather than as homophobic. He paused; he wanted to get this right. “Matt hardly knows the baby. But he and Gal have always been close. He's devastated by what has happened and wants to take these children in, to help them heal in a loving home.” It sounded wretchedly platitudinous when it came out of his mouth, but it wasn't untrue.

“It will certainly be a big change in his lifestyle,” his mother said.
Yes,
Daniel thought,
those are the words coming out of her mouth.
Dalia looked at Lydia and then back at him, then at Lydia again. He saw that she was registering that Lydia didn't like Matt. “What do you mean?” Dalia asked.

Seeing all eyes on her, Lydia backtracked. “Oh, nothing dramatic,” she said. “I only mean that he's a young man.”

“Mom, he's thirty-two. A lot of men have children at that age, and they adjust just fine.”

“That's all I meant,” Lydia protested.

There was a pause in which the air seemed motorized, whizzing with brainpower, as everybody made a quick decision about how to proceed. Then Dalia asked a series of questions—about their jobs, their income, their house—and the hum dispersed and settled. She asked Daniel what his town was like, and where the kids would sleep in his house. He gave her the names of references, Derrick and his boss April; and he had the idea of giving her the name of Joel's best friend, Josh Levinson, who'd come over with them in the junior-year program and had made
aliyah
around the same time as Joel. He'd seen Josh and his wife at the shiva, and they'd tearfully urged him to stay in their lives. Dalia wrote the names and numbers on her pad without looking down at it. She asked if he and Matt knew how to take care of a baby, and he said they hadn't before now, but that they'd had a crash course in the past weeks. As if on cue, they heard Noam begin to cry in his bedroom. Daniel and Lydia stood at the same time. “I'll get him,” Daniel said, his desire to display parental competence only slightly stronger than his desire to get his mother out of Dalia's earshot before she said anything else that might sabotage his cause.

He went into the kids' room, sighing in a big release of tension, saying, “Hi, mister!” He stopped in his tracks. In his crib, Noam was red and crying and covered in poop. “Holy shit, Noam, you exploded!” Daniel cried, and hoisted him up, holding him at arm's length. “Mazel tov, sweetie!” He planted a big kiss on the baby's red face, and then pulled away in disgust from the smell. It was even in Noam's hair. He laid him on the changing table and peeled off the filthy diaper with his fingertips, fastidious at first, and then realized that if he just accepted the fact that he was going to get covered in shit, things would go a lot more quickly. He dropped the diaper in the pail. There were streaks of shit on Noam's thighs and on the hands he was grabbing his pacifier with. The stench made Daniel gag.

There was a shadow at the doorway and Dalia came in. “I let the baby get covered in feces!” Daniel exclaimed. “Choose me, I'm a fantastic parent!”

Dalia approached with a faint smile. “Sha-
lom
,” she cooed, caressing the second syllable. “Did you make a big kaki?”