All I Love and Know (48 page)

THE LONGEST JANUARY HE
had ever lived through passed into February, and Matt was learning to live alone again, without a partner and without kids. He handled his anger at Daniel for cutting Noam and Gal out of his life by spitefully luxuriating, when he awoke in the morning, in visions of Daniel having to wake them, dress them, feed them, and hustle them out of the house by himself, along with feeding and taking out the dog. He'd relearned the austere pleasures of making coffee for one, fishing clean laundry out of the basket when he was ready to wear it instead of folding it and putting it in drawers, sprawling on the queen-sized bed and watching HGTV at night and groaning over the idiots who rejected a home simply because they didn't like the color of the paint on the walls, downloading new music on his iPod for the first time in months. He revived a few friendships he'd been pursuing just when Joel and Ilana had been killed, which he hadn't had the time or energy to pursue after that; he drank martinis at dinner parties and slept a full eight hours a night. He ran and worked out at the gym, and got something of his old lean muscle back, although there remained a little too much paunch for comfort, a sign of getting older that he deplored. He aggressively pursued a few big jobs, and got a piece of one of them, with the promise of more. Derrick had been working for a while on setting up an LGBT version of Big Brothers Big Sisters, pairing queer and questioning high schoolers with queer adults in the Pioneer Valley, and Matt volunteered to be a big brother if it got off the ground.

It was exciting to revive his old self—fun, a good conversationalist, a sexual player. But he wasn't, of course, his old self; he had so much baggage now, he told people, he practically had to hire a porter to come with him everywhere. One night, he had a drink with Alex Connor, Northampton's one gay cop; he had a shaved blond head and an earring in one ear that he wore only when off duty, and his T-shirt stretched over his shoulders. Matt wasn't into the whole Aryan thing, the pale lashes, but he found the tension between Alex's sense of duty and his sense of irony appealing, and enjoyed Alex's stories about Northampton's seamy side. As he told Alex the story of his relationship with Daniel and the last year, Alex reacted with a series of “Whoa's,” and he felt uncomfortable about how glamorously tragic it made him seem; he found himself underplaying things and omitting others, like the custody fight with the Holocaust-survivor grandparents. At the end of the story, he said, “So he just couldn't deal with a partner; he had to scapegoat somebody in the end, and it was me.” He didn't like the way he sounded when he said that, either; if he'd been Alex, listening to him, he'd wonder what bad behavior of Matt's own he was leaving untold.

“Did you like being a parent?” Alex asked.

Matt thought. “I did. I didn't think I would, but I did.”

“Do you feel like”—Alex's voice lowered dramatically, a little sardonically—“you never knew what it meant to love, till then?”

Matt looked at him sharply. “Of course not,” he said. “That's bullshit. What did those people spend their lives doing before kids, jerking off ?” As he spoke, he knew that he was overstating his objection to that cliché, out of worry that he was being mocked. Certainly he'd been willing to give up a whole lot for Gal and Noam, and sometimes he'd be walking down the street with them and know—just calmly know—that if a car swerved toward them, he'd fling his body between it and them. But somehow, that didn't feel like noble parental self-sacrifice, it just felt like the right thing to do. And would he have done any of this if he hadn't loved Daniel with his whole heart—if he hadn't longed to soothe that deep, deep grief ?

“What's next for you?” Alex asked, his eyes traveling in a friendly manner over Matt's face and body.

“Not sure,” Matt said. “I'm thinking about returning to New York.”

Through a friend of Val's, he put down a deposit for a three-month-long sublet in the West Village, thinking he would go back and give living there a trial run before actually moving there. But the closer the time got to the beginning of the sublet, the less New York seemed to shimmer with promise, and he began to wonder whether, at this point, its wonder and excitement were just the mechanical fantasy of a queer living in the boondocks. He found himself getting lethargic each time he was supposed to be packing, and even if it was a total long shot, he felt he had to stick around in case he got to see Gal and Noam. Then his Jetta broke down and needed a new transmission, and for three days he obsessed over whether to continue investing in it—it had ninety-four thousand miles on it—or buy a new car. Either way, it was going to cost a fortune—and if he gave up his sublet, he'd lose his $1,700 security deposit as well.

What was wrong with him? He felt lazy and boring; it felt like an unconscious unwillingness to truly part from Daniel, and he dreaded being the pathetic ex-without-a-clue. He worried that the kids were just an excuse. He'd left New York four years ago because he couldn't take the scene anymore, because he was afraid of the drugs and the self-destruction, because he knew the answer to the game of Who's the Hottest Man in the Room?, and it didn't gratify him anymore. Did he fear that, at thirty-two, with just that infinitesimal thickening, he might not be in the game anymore? And even if he was, he didn't know yet whether he had HIV, and would have to conduct a sex life full of honest confessions and intense precautions with men he didn't even yet know, which wearied him just thinking about it. He had clumsily extricated himself from Alex Connor's muscular arms after their drink for that very reason.

He decided, finally, to stay in Northampton through the summer and consider going back to New York in the fall. It was money down the drain, but you couldn't push this kind of thing. And the truth was, he kind of loved Northampton. Unwillingly, and with a tremendous sense of self-irony, but he did: He'd turned into a nature-loving, dog-loving, hiking New Englander who knows the best local ponds and lakes to swim in, who gorges on farm-stand corn and berries in the summer, and gets his woodpile ready for winter so he can sit in the woodstove's warmth and watch the flames flicker behind the door. Not to mention his love of the cafés crowded with academics writing on their laptops or grading papers, the fantastic bookstores, the organic this and fair-trade that, the fiery debates in local newspapers about the Fourth of July or the Pride parade, or the whole development versus conservation problem. And the lesbians! Could he live without the lesbians now? His tenderness for them was no less deep for its comical condescension. How could you not love the jocks who returned from summer vacations at P-town and the Hamptons and Ogunquit with deep tans and new girlfriends; the buzz-cut butches with their husky laughs; the lesbian moms who were gamely supportive of their daughters who insisted on wearing nothing but tutus and tiaras and pink pink pink?

He didn't see Gal and Noam anywhere around town; it figured that in a small town where you saw everybody all the time, he wouldn't see the people he was actually dying to see. He kept himself from driving past Gal's school and Noam's day care, and past Daniel's house, and he didn't ask their mutual friends about them either because asking would have made him feel too pathetic. But he heard this and that from Val and Adam, Brent and Derrick, and Cam. That the kids missed him. That Daniel was still making plans to take them to Israel for the year anniversary. That he wouldn't keep Matt from seeing them forever. He couldn't, Matt thought. Surely he couldn't.

W
HERE AM I
going to sleep?” Gal asked.

It was early March, and they were in the car on the way to the Newark airport, a four-hour drive to begin their trip to Israel. Noam, strapped into his car seat next to Gal, was sucking his pacifier and clutching his doggie and two wool hats. Over the past few weeks he'd begun saying a few words other than
yeah
and
no
. His newest word was
doggie
. “What's your doggie's name?” people would ask, and he would reply, “Doggie.” His second word was
more,
which he uttered with a huge astonished veer upward, in imitation of the few times they'd teased him about wanting even more of something.

“In your old bed, I guess,” Daniel said to Gal. “And I could put Noam's crib into the little guest room if you want, so you can have your own room.”

“Uh-huh,” Gal murmured, thinking about that. “I think maybe he should sleep in the same room as me, because it's a new place for him.”

“Okay,” Daniel said. Lately, since Noam's cheek injury, she'd been solicitous to him, running to get his passy when he cried and wedging it into his mouth till he sucked; the other day Daniel had come into their bedroom to read a story and found them sitting on Gal's bed, holding hands.

“Where are
you
going to sleep?” Gal asked.

Daniel paused. “I thought I'd sleep in your parents' old room.”

“No,” she said. “I don't think that's a good idea.”

She said it in her most carefully reasoning tone.

“Really?” he asked.

“Because what if I have a bad dream and I get up and go into their room? I'll think I'm going to Ema and Abba but then they won't be there, and then I'll feel even worse.”

Daniel was quiet. Over the past few weeks she'd been full of anxious questions about their visit. Were they staying with her grandparents? Would she sleep over at Leora's house all by herself ? Would they lock the doors when they were in the house? Suddenly she couldn't remember the Hebrew word for
Popsicle
, or for
sidewalk
, and her face flooded with relief when he reminded her.

“Why don't we play it by ear,” he said.

His mind had been going over the vital things he'd packed or zipped into his inside winter coat pocket: wallet, passports, tickets, the kids' legal papers, the keys to the apartment in Jerusalem. His stomach and throat were tight, and for a few days, it had been hard to get food down. When he thought about opening the door to Joel and Ilana's apartment, he wondered what on earth he'd been thinking when he'd agreed with his father to keep it for a while. He imagined how stale and dusty the apartment would be, how half-vacated, how they'd keep coming across pieces of baby gear or freezer-burned food, every object haunted. He couldn't, for the life of him, remember whether they'd gotten rid of Joel and Ilana's clothes.

Gal gazed out the window at bare trees and dirty snow. Her brother's eyes were falling shut and then opening again. She'd wanted to go back so badly, to see Leora and her classmates and her grandparents, to be home. But as the time had approached, she'd had trouble falling asleep at night, as her mind spun with anxious conjecture. What if she got killed by terrorists? Or didn't remember how to say things? Or missed her parents even more? And Noam, too. The scar under his eye, which no longer needed a bandage, was healing slowly—you couldn't see the stitch marks anymore, but it hadn't yet turned white, either. It made him look fragile and damaged, and Gal dreaded everybody asking what had happened to his cheek, and finding out that she had been the one who hurt him.

She'd wanted to tell Daniel she wasn't going to go, but the thought of being separated from him frightened her. And what about her grandparents? She knew that their looking forward to her visits was what kept them alive, her grandfather had told her that. Daniel had tried to talk to her about the trip, asking her how she felt about going back, and she'd looked at him with door stoppers in her throat, words bumping against hard rubber. He sat next to her, wearing a T-shirt fraying around the collar, his hand warm on her leg. He told her that it was going to be hard, and sad, but also fun to see Leora and Shai and Ruti and her other friends.

“You know what the important thing is?” he asked Gal.

She looked in his face, which was serious and sweet. She knew the right answer was something like “That we all love each other.”

“The important thing is that we'll all be together,” he said.

“Is Matt coming, too?” she asked.

He sighed. “No, Gal. You know he's not.”

She stirred and tried, with a deep breath, to disperse the bad feeling sifting through her like dust motes turning in a shaft of sun; she hadn't asked the question to be fresh or mean.

“But Yossi and Rafi are,” Daniel reminded her. Yossi had been talking for a while about taking the family to Israel to visit his aging parents in Petach Tikva, and a few weeks ago, he had decided to go alone with Rafi. He planned it so they and Daniel and the kids could fly back and forth together, and so he and Rafi could come to the memorial. The news had flooded Gal with relief; she had the vague and scary sense of the family dwindling, failing, like the feeble trickle from a faucet after the water runs out.

“Is Rafi going to sleep over?” she asked now, her voice rising over the din of the car. “Where will he sleep?”

“I don't know yet, Gal-Gal. If he does, it'll just be for one night, and we'll figure it out.”

“Why isn't Anat coming?”

“She's staying home with Ezra and Udi, remember? Because they have school and practices they didn't want to miss.”

“Does she have to go to the lab?” Rafi's mother, Anat, who was doing a postdoc in physics, was famous for spending ungodly hours in the lab; Gal knew the Israeli Sign Language sign for
lab
.

“Yes,” Daniel said.

When they arrived at the gate three hours later, flushed and hassled from parking and the shuttle bus and the long security line, Yossi and Rafi were already there. The lounge area wasn't even open yet; it was barricaded off till the security officers could arrive. They wandered around looking for a place nearby to settle and dump their stuff, Noam slumped in his stroller with his passy listless in his mouth; he'd been up three times in the night, and both he and Daniel were haggard. Gal and Rafi examined electronics and iPod accessories and sunglasses and inflatable neck pillows, prodded repeatedly by Yossi and Daniel to move along and keep within eyeshot. In the newspaper store, as the men bought magazines and chewing gum, they fingered the travel-sized items—toothpaste and collapsible toothbrushes, tiny bottles of shampoo and ibuprofen and moisturizer and hand sanitizer, miniature sets of Scrabble and chess. Each time Rafi went with his parents to the supermarket, he begged them for one trial-sized item, and in his room he had a bin of products in deliciously tiny containers that he and Gal loved to plunge their hands into, removing individual items to examine and caress.