All I Love and Know (58 page)

“Okay,” Briana said, and Gal broke into a canter.

B
EHIND A DOZEN
other couples and a crowd of kids, Daniel, Matt, Gal, and Noam stood in line at the Northampton courthouse, waiting for a marriage license on the first day they would be issued to gay couples in the United States. Some courthouses in Cambridge and Provincetown, Matt knew, had opened at midnight to let their gay citizens be the very first in the U.S. to receive marriage certificates. Despite that gall to his competitive spirit, he took in with pleasure the sun warming his shoulders, the feel of Gal's hand resting in his, the sheer gorgeousness of the blue spring sky, doubly precious because they'd earned it by slogging through the grueling, grueling winter. Lesbian couples stood in front and in back of them, wearing their pretty dresses, their suits, whatever counted for them as finery. He himself was sporting bright blue shoes and a fedora. A butch passed by them, scanning for someone in line and muttering to herself; she was wearing a cowboy dress shirt with pearl buttons tucked into black jeans. Matt whispered, “Check out Farmer Brown over there.”

Daniel slapped his arm. “
It's her wedding day
,” he admonished.

Around them, people milled and called out to each other. “Tying the knot?” “Taking the plunge?” “Making an honest homo out of him?” They laughed at the idea that those everyday expressions could have anything to do with them. A small Asian-American girl passed by on her father's shoulders, playing the “Wedding March” on a child-sized violin. Several people circulated in caterers' clothes—black pants, white dress shirt—proffering trays of canapés, business cards stacked prettily around the trays' edges. Matt watched them, a smile pulling at his lips at their entrepreneurial spirit.

History had come down and tapped them on the shoulder, and it was hard to know what to feel in the moment. Marriage wouldn't have been Matt's fight, but now it had happened, and that was pretty remarkable. He was proud to live in Massachusetts, USA; other than that, he drew something of a blank. Maybe, he thought, you could only feel these moments in retrospect. He remembered the day that
Lawrence v. Texas
, the Supreme Court case that had overturned Texas's sodomy law, had come down, the Court's majority writing that
Bowers v. Hardwick
—to gay people, an infamously repulsive decision—had been misguided and wrong. He and Daniel had happened to be at Derrick and Brent's for dinner, and they'd all lifted their wineglasses and looked at one another with bemusement, at a loss for the right words, the right emotions, until Brent piped up, “To sodomy!” and they'd all laughed and touched glasses.

The line inched forward. Noam, who was wearing a T-shirt with a bow tie and tuxedo front silk-screened on it, and whose stroller's handlebars had been bedecked with a small rainbow flag, said, “Out! Out!” and Matt unbuckled him, lifted him out, and set him down. “This is taking forever,” he said to Daniel. “I'm going to take a walk with him. C'mon, Shorty.” Matt let Noam lead him around, a tiny hand clasping his pointer finger. People smiled at the sight of the tall, graceful gay man with the toddler chugging along at his side. They walked to the edges of the crowd and Matt stood watching while Noam stooped to pick up and examine some gravel pebbles at the edges of the parking lot.

“Hey,” he heard behind him. It was Brent, smiling, wearing jeans and a blue T-shirt with the big yellow equals sign on the front, a baseball cap to protect his head where his hair was thinning. “We found Daniel in line, and he said you guys had gone for a walk.”

“Change your mind?” Matt grinned.

“No,” he said. “We just came to join the celebration.” He and Derrick had decided not to get married. “It's not for us,” Derrick had said in tactful nonjudgment. “At least not right now.” They'd been together for fifteen years, since freshman year in college, with only an experimental break when Brent had gone abroad to Paris his junior year.

Now Brent looked into his friend's face with an expression both sweet and keen, and slid his arm around his shoulder.

“I've been thinking about Ilana and Joel today,” Matt said.

Brent nodded.

“I think they'd be happy. They trusted us. They trusted us together.” He stepped forward abruptly. “No, honey, that's yucky,” he said to Noam, before Noam's fingers could close over a cigarette butt on the ground.

“Dass yucky,” Noam repeated. He turned to Brent. “Dass yucky,” he said solemnly.

“Yes it is,” Brent said. “And let me commend you on your good talking!”

“It turns out I wasn't so trustworthy,” Matt said. “I don't know why. Well, I do know why. I didn't want to have to spend the rest of my life worrying about being safe. Or something.”

Brent was quiet, his thoughts playing across his face.

“It feels good to say fuck you to the universe!” Matt said. He scanned the courthouse, the peaceable crowd, the cars passing by with supportive beeps, the serene blue sky, and he and Brent laughed, struck at the same time by how very benign the universe was looking at that moment. “Seriously, though,” he said. “That's what this marriage is, too. A leap of faith. Like: We're not going to wait to climb this mountain till they've put up guardrails and signage along all the cliff faces. We're not! Because we want to climb.”

Noam came over to Matt and gave him a handful of stones and street sand left over from the winter plows. “What am I supposed to do with this?” Matt asked, looking at the dirty pile in his hand.

“Take home,” Noam replied.

Matt looked at him, sighed, and emptied it into the pocket of his clean, pressed pants. “Nothing,” he said to Brent, “and I mean
nothing
, makes me feel like a parent more than holding out my hand so they can spill or gag or spit disgusting shit into it.” He rubbed his hands together to clean them off and picked Noam up, raked his bangs back from his forehead with his fingers. “You're a good friend,” he said to Brent. “I'm sorry I haven't been a very present one lately.”

Brent waved his hand and shook his head, his face pinking with little blots of emotion. “It's okay—”

“It's not okay,” Matt said, and Brent clasped his shoulder hard.

When they got back to the line, Daniel and Gal had gotten almost to the courthouse door, and Daniel was anxiously looking around for him. Gal was watching as a little boy on the verge of a tantrum was alternately diverted and scolded by his moms, who were worried their impending moment would be ruined by a screaming toddler. A middle-aged lesbian couple in a suit and a dress were emerging from the courthouse's other door, and raising their clasped hands in the air as reporters took photos of them; there was a wave of applause, then it became rhythmic, and people began to chant, “Thank you! Thank you!” Matt cocked his ear toward a woman next to him. “Goodridge,” she told him. “One of the couples who filed the lawsuit.”

Then Daniel was holding the door open for him, peering into the paneled, crowded hallways in front of them, and then they'd stepped inside. Standing around tables and sitting on benches against the walls, couples were bent over forms, writing. Four clerks behind the long counter were handing out forms, gesturing and talking, collecting money. Daniel and Matt took theirs from a middle-aged woman with curly hair, big glasses, and a face pink from the humid warmth of bodies, who said in a voice whose hassled quality was just barely covered by mirth, “Good luck finding a place to sit down!”

Daniel, who attributed his ability to slice through lines and crowds to the years he'd spent getting on buses in Israel, disappeared for a second, and when Matt found him, he'd slipped onto the corner of a bench and was patting it in an invitation to sit next to him. Matt sat, excused himself to the woman he was making shift over, and smoothed the form over his thigh; they sat and wrote, knees touching. Addresses, parents' names, city of birth. There was a burst of joyful noise, and they looked up—it was two of the Jewish lesbians; their rabbi had arrived, and was singing a
shehechianu
. Gal and Noam had disappeared down the hall, and just as Matt turned to ask Daniel where they were, they returned, Gal holding a hunk of cake on a paper plate, both of their mouths covered with frosting; in a room down the hall, the city of Northampton was celebrating the right of its gay and lesbian citizens to marry with a wedding cake. “Give me a bite,” Daniel said, leaning forward chin-first. He leveled a stern look at Gal when the plastic forkful she offered had just cake on it, no frosting, and she rolled her eyes and stabbed the fork into a gooey heap of white frosting, held it out to him. He grunted with approval, eyes glinting, and took it in his mouth. Matt turned back to his form with a smile.

Their own wedding would be a tiny one at home, a few weeks, or maybe a month from now. They were still debating whether to have a justice of the peace or a rabbi preside. For Daniel, the main appeal of a Jewish wedding was the chance to break the glass at the end, to symbolize the shattering of their lives when Joel and Ilana died, and the continued shattering of Palestinian lives. But he was still trying to figure out whether he'd be satisfied with the one Jewish custom at the end of a secular service. They were also still thinking about whether to invite Malka and Yaakov, along with their parents and their best friends. Or whether to invite anybody but the kids and Yo-yo. They were trying to have a wedding and dodge the idea of a wedding.

“Here we go,” Daniel murmured, his lips grazing Matt's ear. He laid his forefinger on the signature line, and signed.

F
OR VARIOUS FORMS
of vital and enlivening support, I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Dean of Faculty's office at Amherst College. Warm thanks to Ellen Geiger and David Highfill for their faith in the book, and for shepherding it through multiple revisions, each better than the last.

In Jerusalem, the David family—Paula, Uri, Maya, and Tamar—took loving care of me during my research trips, accompanying me to the sites of café bombings, watching sad documentaries with me, introducing me to various professionals, cooking delicious food. Gila Parizian and Ruth Matot talked with me about the various aspects of the work social workers do when there is a terrorist attack in Jerusalem; I thank them for their generosity with their time, and for their emotional energy.

Anston Bosman, Edmund Campos, Stephanie Grant, and the Sánchez-Eppler family made crucial interventions in the novel at various points, and I thank them and my colleagues in the English Department at Amherst College for their enthusiastic and challenging engagement with it. Alexander Chee, Amity Gaige, Daniel Hall, Amelie Hastie, Catherine Newman, Andrew Parker, Paul Statt, Susan Stinson, and Elizabeth Young provided encouragement, advice, and support; I cherish their collegiality and friendship. Amy Kaplan's friendship is one of my greatest pleasures, and her thoughtfulness and erudition about Israel/Palestine made her an essential interlocutor.

Elizabeth Garland is my first and last reader. I thank her for the rigor and conviction with which she approaches my work and for buoying me, always, with her outsized faith in my abilities. Abigail and Claire were born when I was midway through writing; they slowed the process down, but they also provided loads of new material, which is, of course, what having children is all about. I love them all dearly.

This book is dedicated to my mother, brother, and sister. We moved to Israel in 1976, and the consequences of that move continue to reverberate in our lives even though three of us have been back in the U.S. for decades. Thank you, Tony and Paula, for being my companions through our Israeli experiment and its aftermath, for the openness and humanity of your political views, for your equanimity about my plundering aspects of our lives for fiction, and for your love.

My mother died while this book was in proofs. She had already read it several times; it was on a topic dear to her heart, as her relation to Israel/Palestine had undergone a sea change late in her life. She read my work with wonder and appreciation. I love you, Mom, and I'll miss you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JUDITH FRANK
is a professor of English at Amherst College. She received a B.A. from Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a Ph.D. in English literature and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Cornell. She was the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, has held residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell, and is the author of a previous novel,
Crybaby Butch.
She lives in Massachusetts with her partner and two children.

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