All I Love and Know (6 page)

He heard Daniel come out of the bathroom and join the fray, speaking quickly in Hebrew, and then he heard the baby's cry, and silence fell over the apartment.

BY THE TIME IT
was his turn to shower, the water was cold. He stood shivering and swearing, turning off the water and furiously rubbing his head with shampoo till the suds ran down his wrists and arms, then rinsed, then soaped himself up again, all over. His nipples were as hard as pebbles, his dick shrunk back like a turtle's head. He scrubbed himself so hard his arm muscles hurt. He got out and toweled off, pushing his dirty pants and underwear into the corner of the bathroom with his toe, and stopped dead when he realized he hadn't brought any clean clothes in with him. He thought for a second, then thought,
Fuck it
, and wrapped the towel securely around his waist. He tiptoed quickly back to his room through the apartment, his toweled-off hair standing straight up and dripping down his neck—passing through the living room where Daniel, dressed in black pants and a white dress shirt, was nuzzling the baby, and his mother was crying. “Don't mind me,” Matt waved, with a grimace. As he was closing the bedroom door behind him, he heard Yaakov ask, “Who is that?”

He picked through the open suitcase on the floor, found underwear and his white shirt, only slightly wrinkled. He was pulling on his pants when the bedroom door slid open gently, and Daniel eased in with the freshly diapered baby in his arms, baby clothes clamped under his armpit, and slid the door firmly closed again. “They want to know why you're always half-naked,” he said. Matt ignored him and approached the baby. Noam had wispy brown hair, dark eyes in a moon face with multiple chins. “Hey, little baby,” Matt said softly, looking at his lover's face and suddenly seeing the handsome dad, which made his heart hurt. “I'm Matt,” he told the baby. He took Noam's hand and shook it gently, and the baby's face broke into a smile so crooked and goofy, his little tongue sticking out between his teeth, that Matt laughed out loud.

Daniel laid Noam on the bed and began pulling pants over his fat legs, while Matt leaned over Noam's face and nuzzled him, and Noam grabbed onto his hair. “Ouch,” he said, and extricated himself. He looked at the baby's fuzzy tulip skin, the purple shadow of his nipples. “Almost a year, huh. Can he talk?” he asked Daniel.

Daniel straightened and stared at him, his eyes narrowed in thought. “Beats me,” he said, shrugging, and they both laughed. Matt pulled Daniel into his arms, and Daniel cried “Don't!” and pulled away. “I can't do this right now,” he whispered. “I'm sorry, baby.”

“Okay,” Matt said. Daniel turned back to Noam, removing his glasses and wiping his eyes with his forearm. As Matt finished dressing, Daniel pulled the waist of the pants over Noam's diaper; he scrunched up the shirt to the collar and pulled it over the baby's head, and stuffed his arms clumsily into the sleeves.

“There,” he said, and picked Noam up. “Are you ready?” His lips grazed the baby's cheek.

“Why isn't he crying?” Matt asked. His fingers grew still over the buttons of his shirt as a thought occurred to him. “How do babies mourn, anyway?”

“I have no idea,” Daniel said.

Matt considered. “You don't think we'll ruin them, do you?”

Daniel looked at him wearily. “I think somebody has already done that for us.”

THE FUNERAL WASN'T THE
way Matt had feared it would be—not at all like the settler funerals he saw on television, armed and bearded civilians roaring with bombastic song. But dignitaries had arrived in long Mercedeses, and they and their bodyguards stood, their hands clasped before them, at the front of the crowd clustered under the strong lights set up to illuminate the cemetery. There were photographers, too: Matt couldn't see them, but he heard the clicking of camera shutters. The mourners were gathered on an outcrop of rock on a mountainside, huddled in overcoats, hundreds of people crowded around them. The wind was strong and noisy, and the sound of weeping reached up and was taken by it, bobbing on the wind. Gal stood behind her Grampa Sam, wrapped around his leg, while Daniel held the baby, who was crying, joggling him and cupping his head. Headstones stretched out far ahead of them, and Matt could see that there were graves set into the rock wall as well. He had a sudden memory: Ilana at their house in Northampton, packing to go back home, sighing, calling Israel “that sad piece of rock.” Ilana hated Jerusalem, the city in which she'd grown up; she hated the religious people, the city's fraught status as a symbol for three religions. She was a teacher, and her work took her close to abused and neglected and hungry children. She had named her daughter Gal, which meant “wave,” to evoke her beloved Tel Aviv, which was on the ocean.

They had been taken to the cemetery in the van, and herded first into a large, crowded hall. When they entered, a hush fell over the crowd. Matt walked self-consciously behind the others to the front. He towered above most of the people there, and Daniel had taken a large yarmulke from a box at the door and pinned it to Matt's hair, so he felt like a big beanpole in Jewish drag. The family held their heads high—asserting, he imagined, that they had dignity even though their destinies had turned them into every other person in the room's worst nightmare, to be pitied and avoided, or maybe fetishized in some creepy way, from this point on. They reached the front and sat in seats that had been reserved for them. It was so clear, he thought, who were to be honored and supported here; he had a sudden and unexpected flash of sympathy for Kendrick's loudmouthed partnering of Jay: he was trying to make himself
count.
Before them, the bodies were laid out, wrapped in white sheets draped with cloths with fringes and Stars of David on them.

A man approached Daniel, bent, and murmured something in his ear. Daniel cleared his throat and rose, and removed the folded eulogy from his overcoat pocket. The coat was Joel's; he'd taken it because he hadn't brought a warm enough jacket, and in the van, he kept sniffing at the lapels and fighting back tears.

The paper crackled under the microphone as Daniel smoothed it with shaking fingers. He cleared his throat and neared his face to the microphone and said, “Shalom.” He said, “I'm Daniel Rosen, Joel's brother.” His voice was hoarse; he cleared his throat. “I have a big strawberry birthmark on my back,” he said. “I've always thought that Joel was in such a hurry to get out and take the world by storm, he shoved me aside, right there.” There was a wave of low laughter. “But I loved Joel more than anybody in the world.”

Matt took in the complicated message and stored it for future rumination, when he was less exhausted and more mature. That was the last thing he understood, because Daniel delivered the rest of his eulogy in Hebrew. Daniel had learned Hebrew in Jewish summer camp and during the year he spent in Israel; he had learned it quickly—he had a facility for languages, spoke French and German as well—and was vain about it. Out of the corner of his eye, Matt saw Lydia whisper in Sam's ear and wring the handkerchief she held in both hands, and he thought it was sad that they weren't able to understand the eulogy. But as Daniel spoke and got into it, Matt found he didn't mind. The actual words might have destroyed him. Instead, he heard a Jewish man speaking the language of Jewish prayer. It was weird: Speaking Hebrew, Daniel seemed somehow more authoritative. More masculine, even—the microphone took his everyday tenor and wove it in rich, colored strands. He gripped the sides of the podium. His mouth moved in ways Matt had never seen before, his lips and tongue making all the consonants juicy. His language was leaving the mundane world of the queer everyday, and elevating itself to the universal. Matt looked on, enthralled, conscious in a tiny part of his mind that he was idealizing his partner's speech, that it was, after all, coming from the same mouth that kissed him and sucked him. But watching Daniel, he felt proud to belong to him.

There were tears, and the honks and sniffles of people blowing their noses. The baby had fallen asleep on his Israeli grandmother's shoulder. He heard Daniel say in Hebrew, “I love you, Joel”—
Ani ohev otcha
, words he had taught Matt long ago, and uttered from time to time when they were in bed, after sex or right before falling asleep. He whispered a few last broken words, and stepped down. He looked over the crowd, blind and disoriented; Matt stood so Daniel could see him, and he stumbled over to his seat.

He sat beside Matt with his face in his hands, sobbing freely. In the swing of crying, he'd picked up the rhythm of marathon crying rather than sprinting, his sobs low and regular and inconsolable. A box of Kleenex was passed their way, and Matt fed tissues to Daniel, and took the used ones off his lap, laying them on the floor between his own feet. The air was chilly, but damp with body heat. Up on the podium, Sam was sighing into the microphone, making a shuddery crackling sound. He was saying that Joel had never hurt anyone, that he had many Arab friends and colleagues, that he didn't deserve to be claimed by this terrible conflict. “What kind of person,” he pondered, “blows himself up in order to harm innocent people?”

Matt bit his lip and looked down at the floor. Sam was gripping the podium and looking out into the sea of mourners as though waiting for a reply. He spoke, Matt thought, as if he was the first person to ponder this problem. As if the fact that he—a wealthy and powerful American man—didn't understand was supposed to mean that nobody could, that it was utterly unfathomable. Sam sighed heavily and shook his head. “I just don't get it,” he said. “I just don't get it.”

Matt shifted. A rancor was rising in him that he wanted to shake off.
Have some respect
, he told himself furiously. The man was mourning his son, talking about his death the best way he knew how; he had no right to criticize him. Matt's ruminations were interrupted by a squeeze of his hand. Daniel was cutting his eyes toward him. His mind tumbled rapidly over the meaning of this communication, and his spirit lifted a little.

It seemed to have been agreed upon in advance that Malka would not speak. And at the last moment, Lydia didn't rise to the podium either; her arm grew rigid against Sam's hand, and a look of terror came over her face. “I can't,” she whispered. Yaakov spoke, in a manner so dazed that Matt wished several times that someone would do him a favor and lead him away from the podium. His head and lips sagged like a stroke victim's; it was hard to tell when he'd finished, he trailed off so many times. Finally, he sighed and turned away, walking in the wrong direction; a man jumped to his feet and led him back to his seat. There was a long respectful pause. Then a friend of Joel's named Shmulik, a man with a round droll face and a very slight lisp, got up and told some story in a rapid-fire delivery that sent waves of laughter over the hall. Matt watched Daniel's face break and redden, taken by surprise, and hearing the peal of his laughter made Matt love him so much he could hardly stand it.

There was a brief speech by a fat honcho. And then a bunch of Hasids came and took hold of the pallets the bodies lay upon, and the mourners walked out to the cemetery through the chilly night air, Lydia clutching Daniel's arm, up a long paved incline and onto this hillside. The Hasids swayed and prayed over the bodies, and Matt gazed at their long beards and side curls, thinking that if Ilana was standing beside him, she'd have something sarcastic to say. They laid the bodies straight into the ground without coffins, and each person shoveled dirt over the grave. He looked quickly at Gal, hidden behind her grandfather's leg. She was crying, her eyes darting around, as if trying to alight upon the person who would save her; the wind was whipping at her face, making her hair fly. Matt burst into tears. He cried through the singing of the national anthem. The women's voices rose tearfully at first, tinny and a little shrill, then took strength in numbers and grew in beauty and texture. The sound of voices in unison, men and women an octave apart, in the cold night air, with the stars shining fiercely, pierced him through with grief and something like joy. He looked at Gal and saw that her lips were moving too, even as tears ran down her face. He told himself to remember that singing would bring her solace.

WHEN THEY GOT HOME
they were quiet. Ilana's parents had gone to their own house, leaving the children with the Rosens. The baby was fast asleep in his car seat; Daniel reached in and eased him over his shoulder, carried him in. “Should I change him?” he murmured to his mother.

“No,” she said. “Never wake a sleeping baby.”

Daniel laid him in his crib without waking him. Lydia went into the bathroom to wash up for bed. In the kitchen, Sam was taking a Ziploc bag out of his briefcase. “I just remembered this,” he said, and then looked up to see whom he was talking to. His eyes fell on Matt, who sat down with him at the table. Sam sat heavily in one of the kitchen chairs and pondered Joel's effects. He removed Joel's wedding ring and slipped it over his pinkie, where it caught on the second knuckle. Matt saw that his fingers had thickened over the years and his own wedding band was now a tight squeeze. There was a filthy wallet. Sam went through it and took out dirty cash, tiny wrinkled photographs of Ilana and the kids, and laid them on the table. And then Joel's cell phone, still in its holder. Daniel came into the room. “What's that?” he asked.

Sam undid the Velcro fastener and pulled out the phone. Two small black nails clattered onto the table. Sam inhaled sharply. The three of them stared at one another. Daniel reached down and picked them up, brought them to his face, and sniffed them.

“What are you doing?” Sam asked.

“I don't know,” Daniel said, stuffing the nails into his pocket.

They fell out later, when he and Matt undressed and folded their pants over the tiny guest room's desk chair. Matt stooped and gathered them off the floor, and suppressing a strong desire to throw them in the trash, set them on the desk. Daniel was taking the pillows off the foldout couch and laying them in a stack in a corner of the room. He slid the bed open and went in search of sheets. At the other end of the apartment, Lydia and Sam were putting Gal to bed.