All I Love and Know (3 page)

At that moment Sam frowned and pointed into the distance, where a small group of photographers were snapping pictures of them with zoom lenses. “What are they doing?” Shoshi's face darkened and she took off toward them with her arms outstretched; when she got near them, she wagged her finger in their faces, barking commands. They gave her a short argument, and then walked away, one of them turning to utter a final deprecation.

The family had instinctively turned their faces away, and when Shoshi returned, panting and apologizing, they moved their bodies to gather her within the pack. A white van pulled up to the curb, and a driver wearing a yarmulke got out and put their luggage in the back as they climbed inside, Daniel helping Lydia into the front seat. Daniel sat with the social worker in the middle seat, leaving Matt and Sam in the back. They settled into the air-conditioning, wound up by the unexpected fracas with them at its center.

“What was that all about?” Sam asked.

“Joel was a minor celebrity,” Daniel reminded them; he'd been the host of an English-language television interview show.

There was a pause. “How did they know we were . . . ?” Sam trailed off as Shoshi pointed to Daniel's face. “And my emergency gear,” she added.

As the van pulled through the guard stations at the airport exit, Shoshi twisted to sit sideways and told them that the ride to Abu Kabir would take about twenty minutes. Her English was proficient but heavily accented, and from time to time she hesitated and said a word in Hebrew to Daniel, who translated it for his family. She told them that Ilana, Joel's wife, had been identified by her parents, but the other body had been held so that, if it was Joel, he could be identified by his immediate family. She pronounced Joel “Yo-
el
,” its Hebrew version.

“
If
it is Joel?” Lydia asked sharply.

“If it is,” Shoshi said, giving her a steady look.

“Why do you say
if
?” Lydia's voice was rising.

“Mom,” Daniel murmured.

“We cannot say for sure until he is identified.”

“Are mistakes ever made?” Lydia insisted. She had twisted around in her seat, and was trying to pin Shoshi to the wall with a single flashing look.

Shoshi was quiet.

“My wife is asking you a question,” Sam said sharply from the back. Matt started. He had never heard Sam talk like that; his authority was normally genial. Watching Shoshi's sad and patient look, Matt surmised that they did in fact know it was Joel, but that she wasn't allowed to say so until his body was officially identified.

Finally, Shoshi said, “It is very rare.”

Lydia's mouth quivered, and she turned stonily toward the front. Matt looked out the window at long fields, a flat and hazy stretch to the horizon, where he imagined the ocean to be. Irrigation pipes sent up a fine glinting spray. Until that moment, as they'd moved busily through passport control and baggage claim and customs, there had been a faint sense of reprieve. There was the unreality of being in a foreign country, the disorientation of a different time zone. And then the weird and unexpected excitement of being the targets of paparazzi. But now, a crushing silence fell over them. Sam exhaled next to Matt, giving off a smell of alcohol, morning breath, dry cleaning.

No one spoke until the van pulled off the highway onto a smaller road and Shoshi turned again. They were there; a sludge of anxiety seeped through Matt and turned him cold. “I want to tell you a little bit about what will happen inside,” Shoshi said. “You will be brought into a room where police will ask you questions about Joel's body. I will come with you.” She paused, trying, Matt imagined, to give them time to comprehend these barbaric sentences. “They will ask you questions about his body from his toes to the tips of his hair. Then you will be brought into another room to wait. And finally, you will be taken to what is called the separation room, to identify the body there.”

The van stopped, and an electric gate was opened. Matt read the English part of the sign,
Institute of Forensic Medicine
, saw photographers bunched outside the gate, getting shots of the van with zoom lenses. They pulled in and parked in a small lot beside another van, and the driver turned off the engine, leaving them sitting there in silence. “I can't move,” Lydia whispered. Matt knew the feeling; his legs were numb, and it felt as though the force of energy required to lurch into movement would require a strength way beyond him. It was Daniel who pressed down the latch on the door; it slid open with a roar. “Let's get this over with,” he said.

THERE WAS A BRICK
path leading to an unobtrusive entrance. There was a hall with white chairs. Around them, people babbled and wailed. The smell was awful—a combination of what? Formaldehyde, for sure, and burnt hair, but other smells too, hideous ones for which Matt had no olfactory memory or vocabulary. They were urged to wash their faces, and to drink some water. Before Matt knew it, Daniel was stuffed in a chair between his parents, his hands thrust helplessly between his knees. Matt slunk around like the loser in musical chairs. Finally, Lydia snapped, “Sit already, would you?” A horrible wave of righteous indignation rose in his throat. But he sat in a chair beside Sam and stuffed it down, his throat cramping with the effort.

He ran his hands over his face. The sound of crying roared in his ears, and his mind worked at the sound until it smoothed out, became an abstract pattern.

They didn't have to wait long to be ushered into the office with the police; Matt learned later that, except for Joel and an Arab dishwasher, the other fourteen victims had been identified already, and that the remaining mourners in the hall were identifying the bodies of victims of a massive pileup that had occurred the previous night, outside of Tel Aviv. He touched the social worker's sleeve. “Should I go with them?” he asked.

Her look was kind, but doubtful. “The room is quite small,” she said.

“Oh, okay then,” he said in a quick, anxious display of cooperation that he immediately regretted when the door closed behind them.

He thought he could safely leave the building for a little while and be back by the time they emerged, so he wandered outside. He stepped out of the sun into the shadow of pine trees, gravel crunching beneath his shoes, grateful for air that didn't stink of mayhem. His dress pants were damp at the seat and thighs. An old man was sweeping pine needles off the paths that ran between the stuccoed buildings, a lit cigarette in his mouth, and Matt wondered if he dared ask him for one. He felt shy; he didn't know if this dark-skinned fellow was Jewish or Palestinian, and didn't in any case know either language. He slowly walked toward him, and when he met the man's eye, he mimed smoking a cigarette, his eyebrows raised inquiringly. The old man rested the broom handle against his armpit and fished out a rumpled pack from his breast pocket, extended it toward Matt, and Matt drew one out. With a leathery hand, the man gave him his own stub of a lit cigarette to light it with. Matt inhaled deeply and blew two thin streams from his nostrils.

“Thank you,” he said, nodding, in this act of bumming a smoke, without social class or nationality, a man among men.

He strolled back to the building, holding the cigarette in graceful fingers. He leaned against the stucco wall, closed his eyes, and rested. Instantly, his peace was shattered by the vision of Joel's body being torn apart, and he opened them again, found himself laboring to breathe. Inside, they were talking about every inch of Joel's body. Matt felt an overwhelming tenderness toward it. Joel looked a lot like Daniel, but with the slight beefiness of the straight man. Matt and Daniel had been together for a year before Matt met him, and he'd refused to believe that Joel was straight. When Daniel said, “He's
married
,” Matt asked, “To a woman?” He quizzed him suspiciously. Had Joel gone to Israel to
try
to be straight? Did he think a macho culture would straighten him up? Was Daniel sure they were
identical
twins? Then one summer, Joel came to visit them in Northampton and brought his wife, Ilana, and Matt took one look at the butch with the booming voice and bruising handshake and shot Daniel a look:
Why didn't you tell me?

Joel was all
ta-da!
—he had a strong sense of entitlement, but mostly in a nice way. He was a child who had madly flourished under the praise he received when he brought home his accomplishments. He acted as though he believed he was handsome, and that
made
him handsome, although in fact, Daniel was much more so. He was the best dancer Matt had ever seen in a straight man. He flirted with Matt, as though Daniel's gayness gave him a delicious permission; he was even a little inappropriate sometimes, maybe coming on too strong as the cool and gay-affirmative straight twin. He pretended that he was dominated by his giant wife.

Matt crushed the cigarette under his shoe, suddenly sickened by it, and went back inside.

Two big, loutish sons were muttering in Russian, bent over their keening mother, who wore a shapeless housedress and a scarf on her head. The sounds she made seemed to come from some hideous marshy place inside her, and the men winced and muttered, patting her shoulder with stiff paws. Matt took a seat and closed his eyes. An hour passed. He opened his eyes to see Daniel's ghastly face; the Rosens had returned. He patted the seat next to him, and when Daniel sat, he took his arm, but Daniel moved it away. Matt looked around at the hall: For Christ's sake, who was capable of crawling out of their own misery to notice they were queers? He told himself:
Daniel can do anything he wants right now, don't get mad
.

They waited. They were taken outside to a different white house, and led into another office, where they waited some more. “Why must we wait so long?” Lydia moaned, and then her eyes fluttered and she fainted. “
Hello!
” they called, and there was noise, and shuffling, and curt instructions. Daniel and Matt knelt, cradling her head; Shoshi ran out and came back with a wet paper towel, with which she patted Lydia's forehead. They brought her staggering to her feet, her dark hair limp around her face, and pressed a water bottle to her lips. Sam paced around her, swatting at the fabric of her suit where it had become dusty from the fall. The door opened, and Shoshi said, “Now we will go into the separation room, to see the body. I'm sorry to say that the body must not be touched, since it has been prepared for Jewish burial.”

They stared at her dumbly. Matt felt goose bumps shiver along his forearms. They heaved themselves to their feet and followed the social worker down a hallway. Matt stopped at the door. When it opened, he could see into the bare room where a man in a lab coat stood beside a covered body on a pallet. He had a sudden passionate urge to say good-bye to Joel. Could he go in? But Daniel and his parents glided toward the pallet without looking back, the door swung closed in front of him and Shoshi, and he felt that without an explicit invitation, he couldn't.

His eyes were dry and itchy, red-rimmed; he rubbed them furiously with his fists. He'd been kept from Jay, too. That officious little prick Kendrick had neglected to inform him that Jay was on a respirator, and the following afternoon Matt had heard from a different friend altogether that Jay had died that morning.

He pressed his forehead against the glass of the small window in the door.

Lydia and Sam stepped back, and Matt got a glimpse of Joel. His eyes galloped over the covered body to see if it looked intact, and it did, he thought, except for maybe in the middle; he squinted and blinked hard, until his mind reassured him that the whole body was there. Joel's face was white, his dark hair swept stiffly back off his forehead as if by a sweaty day's work. Daniel looked somberly at him, then bent and murmured something into Joel's ear. The doctor was speaking to Daniel's parents with a serious and patient look, as though he wanted his words to be remembered. He stopped from time to time, waiting for them to nod. Beside him, Shoshi spoke. “He's saying that Joel was killed on the spot, and didn't feel anything.”

Part of Matt's mind caught that, and he wondered if the doctor said that to everybody. But mostly he was watching Daniel, and something was coming over him that took his breath away. He squared his shoulders. At that moment he knew the answer to the question with which he'd often secretly tormented himself: whether he would be loving enough, selfless enough, to fling himself into the path of an oncoming car to save Daniel. He would, he suddenly knew he would. He felt stern and important, for all that he was the one left unnoticed outside the door. History had entered their lives with a sonorous call, and it was up to him to shepherd Daniel, and the children too, through this dark flood and onto higher ground. There was no room to ask whether he could do it or not. He had to.

“Good-bye, Joel,” he whispered. “I love you.”

Shoshi placed a gentle hand on his arm. He was trembling.

BEFORE THEY COULD GO,
they had to sign. Shoshi brought them a form in Hebrew and Daniel perused it. “It says that you identified Joel, and that the body is his,” she told Lydia and Sam, handing Daniel a pen.

“They wouldn't let me touch my own son,” Lydia murmured.

Daniel put the form down on a table and leaned over it with straight arms. He stared at it for a long time. Matt stepped up to him and laid his hand on his back, and felt it heave. Finally, Daniel turned toward his father, his face crumpling like a child's. “Dad,” he whispered.

Sam stepped forward and took the pen from him and ran his finger down the page, which was mercifully indecipherable to him, found the blank line, and signed.

And with that, Joel was dead.

I
T WAS FOUR
years earlier, and Matt was taking the bus from New York to Northampton, his temple pressed against the cold window. He wore a T-shirt and a leather jacket, and a small overnight bag sat on his lap. On the streets of his neighborhood, the late-March wind whipped around corners, making storefront gratings rattle, and pedestrians picked their way around slush and garbage and discarded flyers for clubs. When Matt left the gym in the mornings, showered and dressed for the office, the morning sun gleamed in his face and made him squint. He'd take the train from Chelsea to midtown, and when he got to work he'd go to the men's room and wet a paper towel, then scrub at the dirty splotches on the calves of his pants.