Here I Am (20 page)

Julia was sitting on the edge of her bed. The TV was set to an advertisement for the hotel in which she was already captive. The lithograph on the wall was in an edition of five thousand—five thousand perfectly identical, perfectly unique, utterly corny snowflakes. She started to dial Jacob. She considered looking for Sam. There were always too many things to do when she had no time. But in need of a way to fill minutes, she never knew how.

The wilderness was interrupted by a knock.

“Thank you for opening the door,” Mark said when it was only cracked.

“The peephole was smudgy,” Julia said, opening it farther.

“I was out of line.”

“You were off the map.”

“I'm trying to apologize here.”

“You found your interior monologue, and it told you you were being an asshole?”

“That's exactly what happened.”

“Well, allow my exterior monologue to echo the sentiment.”

“Duly noted.”

“Now isn't a good time.”

“I know.”

“I just had a terrible fight with Sam.”

“I know.”

“You know everything.”

“I wasn't lying when I told the kids I'm omniscient.”

Julia rubbed her temple and turned, creating a space for Mark to enter.

“Whenever Sam would cry as a baby, we'd say, ‘I know, I know,' and give him his pacifier. So he started calling it his ‘I-know.' Your omniscience just reminded me of that. I haven't thought about it for years.” And with a disbelieving shake of the head: “Was that even this life?”

“Same life, different person.”

With a voice like a window that knows it's about to be broken, she said, “I'm a good mother, Mark.”

“You are. I know.”

“I'm a really good mother. It's not just that I try hard. I'm
good.”

The distance between them closed by a step, and Mark said, “You're a good wife, and good mother, and good friend.”

“I try so hard.”

When Jacob brought Argus home, Julia felt betrayed—she showed fury to Jacob, and delight to the boys. And yet it was she who actually bothered to read a book on dog training and care. Most of it was intuitively obvious, but one thing that struck her was the advice that one shouldn't say no to a dog, as it would process the
no
as an existential assessment—a negation of the animal's worth. It would hear
no
as its name: “You are No.” Instead, you should make a little clicking sound, or say, “Uh-uh,” or clap your hands. How anyone could know this much about a dog's mental life, or why it would be so much better to be named “Uh-uh,” was beyond Julia, but something about it seemed plausible, even significant.

Julia needed an existential assessment of goodness. She needed to be renamed, to hear: “You are Good.”

Mark put his hand on her cheek.

She took a half step back.

“What are you doing?”

“I'm sorry. Did that feel wrong?”

“Of course it did. You
know
Jacob.”

“Yes.”

“And you know my kids.”

“I do.”

“And you know that I'm going through something very difficult. And you know that Sam and I had a terrible fight.”

“Yes.”

“And your response is to try to kiss me?”

“I didn't try to kiss you.”

Could she have misinterpreted? She couldn't have. But neither could she prove that he was trying to kiss her. Which made her feel small enough to go hide in the closet by walking under its closed door.

“OK, so what
were
you trying to do?”

“I wasn't trying to do anything. You obviously needed comforting, and reaching for you felt natural.”

“Natural to
you
.”

“I'm sorry.”

“And I don't need comforting.”

“I thought it would be welcomed. And everyone needs comforting.”

“You thought touching my face would be welcomed?”

“I did. The way you angled your body to suggest I enter the room. How you looked at me. When you said, ‘I'm good,' and took a step closer.”

Had she done that? She remembered the moment, but felt certain that
he
had stepped toward
her
.

“Boy, was I asking for it.”

Was it possible she'd been too hard on Jacob, simply because he'd been first to express what she knew she'd been first to feel? There was no balance to be found in cruelty—only in cheating on him, which she wasn't going to do.

“I'm not full of shit, Julia. You think I am—”

“I do.”

“—but I'm not. I'm sorry if I put you in an uncomfortable position. That's not at all what I had in mind.”

“You're lonely, and I look like a Band-Aid.”

“I'm not lonely, and you don't—”

“You're
the one who needed comforting.”

“We both did. We both do.”

“You need to leave.”

“OK.”

“So why aren't you going?”

“Because I believe you don't want me to go.”

“How could I prove it?”

“You could push me.”

“I'm not going to push you, Mark.”

“Why do you think you just used my name?”

“Because it's yours.”

“What were you emphasizing? You didn't use my name when telling me to go. Only when telling me what you weren't going to do.”

“Jesus. Just go, Mark.”

“OK,” he said, and turned for the door.

She didn't know what the emergency was, only that the trauma center of her brain was consuming everything. At the margin, still safe, remained the strange joy of finding and removing ticks in Connecticut. But the trauma smelled the pleasure, and attacked it. At the end of every night, she sat in a dry bathtub and checked herself, because if she didn't, no one would.

“No, wait,” Julia said. Mark turned back to face her. “I did need comforting.”

“Still, I—”

“I'm not finished. I did need comforting, and I'm sure I communicated as much, even if I didn't intend to, or realize it.”

“Thank you for telling me that. And while we're in the business of full disclosure: I stepped toward you.”

“You lied to me.”

“No, I just couldn't find a way to—”

“You lied to me, and made me question myself.”

“I couldn't find a way—”

“I knew I was right.” She paused. A small memory displaced a small laugh: “Kisses. I just remembered what Sam used to call kisses.”

“What?”

“He had a few different names for them, depending on the situation. A ‘make-it-better' was a kiss given in response to an injury. A ‘sheyna boychick' was a kiss from his great-grandfather. A ‘that-face' was from his grandmother. A ‘you' was one of those spontaneous, I-need-to-kiss-you-right-now kisses. I guess we'd always say ‘You' when going in for one of those.”

“Kids are wonderful.”

“Before they know anything, they really are.”

Mark folded his arms and said, “So, here's the thing, Julia—”

“Uh-oh, emphasis.”

“I
was
trying to kiss you.”

“You were?” She felt not only relieved of the earlier embarrassment, but, for the first time in her selectively edited memory, wanted.

“Truth be told.”

“Why were you trying to kiss me?”

“Why?”

“To
make-it-better
me?”

“To
you
you.”

“I see.”

“So you've chosen not to close your eyes?”

“What?”

“You see.”

She stepped toward him, open-eyed, and asked, “Are things about to become bad?”

“No.”

She took another half step toward him, and asked, “You promise?”

“No.”

There was no more distance to cross.

She asked: “What can you promise?”

He promised: “Things are about to be different.”

“This is a
joke
?” Irv asked as they drove to Washington National—the Blochs would sooner renounce air travel than refer to it as Reagan National. NPR was on, because Irv sought confrontations with what he loathed, and to his extreme revulsion there had been a balanced segment on new settlement construction in the West Bank. Irv loathed NPR. It was not only the wretched politics, but the flamboyantly precious, out-of-no-closet sissiness, the wide-eyed wonder coming from the you-wouldn't-hit-a-guy-with-glasses voices. (And all of them—men, women, young and old—seem to share the same voice, passing it from one throat to another as necessary.) The virtues of “listener-supported radio” don't alter the fact that no one with self-respect uses the word
satchel
, much less an actual satchel, and anyway, how many subscriptions to
The New Yorker
does a person need?

“Well, now I'll have an answer,” Irv said, with a self-satisfied nod that resembled davening or Parkinson's.

“To what?” Jacob asked, unable to swim past the bait.

“When someone asks me what was the most factually erroneous, morally repugnant, and also just boring radio segment I've ever heard.”

Irv's knee-jerk response triggered a reflex in Jacob's brain's knee, and within a few exchanges they were rhetorical Russian wedding dancers—arms crossed, kicking at everything but anything.

“And anyway,” Jacob said, feeling that they'd taken things far enough, “it was a self-described
opinion piece.”

“Well, that stupid idiot's opinion is
wrong—”

Without looking up from his iPad, Max defended National Public Radio—or semantics, in any case—from the backseat: “Opinions can't be wrong.”

“So here's why that idiot's opinion is idiotic…” Irv ticked off each “because” on the fingers of his left hand: “Because only an anti-Semite can be
provoked to anti-Semitism
—a hideous phrase; because the mere
suggestion
of a willingness to talk to these freaks would just be throwing Manischewitz on an oil fire; because—not for nothing—
their
hospitals are filled with rockets aimed at
our
hospitals, which are filled with
them;
because at the end of the day,
we
love kung pao chicken and
they
love death; because—and this really should have been my first point—the simple and undeniable fact is…we're
right
!”

“Jesus, watch your lane!”

Irv removed his other hand—balancing the wheel on his knees—to acquire another rhetorical finger: “And because anyway, why should
our
yarmulkes bunch over a troop of Goy Scouts earning protest patches in front of the Berkeley Co-op, or simians in keffiyehs doing a little urban stone-skipping in Gaza so-called City?”

“At least
one
hand on the wheel, Dad.”

“I'm getting in an accident?”

“And find a better word than
simians.”

Irv turned to face his grandson while continuing to drive with his knees: “You gotta hear this. You put a million monkeys in front of a million typewriters and you get
Hamlet
. Two billion in front of two billion and you get—”

“Watch the
road
!”

“The Koran. Funny, right?”

“Racist,” Max muttered.

“Arabs aren't a
race
, bubeleh. They're an
ethnicity.”

“What's a typewriter?”

“Let me also say this,” Irv said, turning to Jacob and pointing his spare index finger while continuing to hold up the other six fingers. “People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, but people with no homeland
really
shouldn't. Because when those stones of theirs start breaking Chagall windows, don't expect to see us on our knees with a dustpan. Just because we're smarter than those lunatics doesn't mean they have a monopoly on insanity. The Arabs have to understand that
we've
got some stones, too,
but
our
slingshot's in Dimona, and the finger on the button is connected to an arm with a string of numbers tattooed on it!”

“You're finished?” Jacob asked.

“With what?”

“If I can host you back on the Blue Planet for just a second, I was thinking we should take Tamir around to see Isaac on the way back.”

“Why?”

“Because he's obviously depressed about the move and—”

“If he were capable of depression, he would have killed himself seventy years ago.”

“Fucking shitcock!” Max said, shaking his iPad like an Etch A Sketch.

“He's not
depressed,”
Irv said. “He's
old
. Age presents like depression, but isn't.”

“Sorry,” Jacob said, “I forgot: no one is depressed.”

“No,
I'm
sorry,
I
forgot:
everyone
is depressed.”

“I assume that's a dig at my therapy?”

“What belt are you up to, anyway? Brown? Black? And you win when it's around your neck?”

Jacob was weighing whether to give it back or let it go. Dr. Silvers would call that binary thinking, but Dr. Silvers's reliance on the binary critique was, itself, binary. And this was too demanding a morning to become nuanced with his anvil of a father. So, as always, he let it go. Or rather, he absorbed it.

“It's a tough change for him,” Jacob said. “It's ultimate. I'm just saying we should be sensitive—”

“He's a human callus.”

“He's an internal bleeder.”

Max pointed to the light: “Green is for go.”

But instead of driving, Irv turned to press the point from which he'd strayed: “Here's the deal: the world population of Jews falls within the margin of error of the Chinese census, and everyone hates us.” Ignoring the honking coming from behind him, he continued: “Europe…now,
there's
a Jew-hating continent. The French, those spineless vaginas, would shed
no
tears of sadness over our disappearance.”

“What are you talking about? Remember what the French prime minister said after the attack on the kosher market? ‘Every Jew who leaves France is a piece of France that is gone.' Or something like that.”

“Bull-
merde
. You know he had a bottle of Château Sang de Juif 1942 airing out backstage to toast France's missing piece. The English, the Spanish, the Italians. These people live to make us die.” He stuck his head out the window and hollered at the honking driver: “I'm an
asshole
, asshole! I'm not deaf!” And then back to Jacob: “Our only reliable friends in Europe are the Germans, and does anyone doubt that they'll one day run out of guilt and lampshades? And does anyone really doubt that one day, when the conditions are right, America will decide we're noisy, and smelly, and pushy, and way too smart for anybody else's good?”

“I do,” Max said, opening up a pinch to zoom in on something.

“Hey, Maxy,” Irv said, trying to catch his eye in the rearview mirror, “you know why paleontologists look for bones and not anti-Semitism?”

“Because they're paleontologists and not the ADL?” Jacob suggested.

“Because they like to dig. Get it?”

“No.”

“Even if everything you say is true,” Jacob said, “which it
isn't—
”

“Resolutely is.”

“It
isn't—
”

“Is.”

“But even if it
were—”

“The world hates Jews. I know you think the prevalence of Jews in culture is some kind of counterargument, but that's like saying the world loves pandas because crowds come to see them in zoos. The world
hates
pandas. Wants them dead. Even the cubs. And the world hates Jews. Always has. Always will. Yeah, there are more polite words to use, and political contexts to cite, but the hatred is always hatred and always because we're Jewish.”

“I like pandas,” Max chimed in.

“You don't,” Irv corrected.

“I would be psyched to have one as a pet.”

“It would eat your face, Maxy.”

“Awesome.”

“Or at least occupy our house and subject us to its sense of entitlement,” Jacob added.

“The Germans murdered one and a half million Jewish children because they were Jewish children, and they got to host the Olympics thirty years later. And what a job they did with that! The Jews win
by a
hair
a war
for our survival
and are a permanent pariah state.
Why
? Why, only a generation after our near-destruction, is the Jewish will to survive considered a will to conquer? Ask yourself:
Why
?”

His
why
wasn't a question, not even a rhetorical one. It was a shove. A stiff arm in a time of forced hands. Everything had an aspect of coercion. Isaac didn't want to move; they were forcing him to. The singular sense in which Sam wanted to become a man was sexual relations with a person who wasn't himself, but they were forcing him to apologize for words he said he didn't write, so that he could be forced to chant memorized words of unknown meaning before family he didn't believe in, and friends he didn't believe in, and God. Julia was being forced to shift her focus from ambitious buildings that would never be built to the bathroom and kitchen renovations of disappointed people with resources. And the phone incident was forcing an examination that the marriage might not survive—their relationship, like all relationships, dependent on willful blindness and forgetting. Even Irv's descent into bigotry was guided by an invisible hand.

Nobody wants to be a caricature. Nobody wants to be a diminished version of herself. Nobody wants to be a Jewish man, or a dying man.

Jacob didn't want to coerce or be coerced, but what was he supposed to do? Sit on his hands waiting for his grandfather to shatter his hip and die in a hospital room as every abandoned old person is destined to do? Allow Sam to snip a ritualistic thread that reached back to kings and prophets, simply because Judaism as they practiced it was boring as hell and overflowed with hypocrisy? Maybe. In the rabbi's office he'd felt ready to use the scissors.

Jacob and Julia had batted about the notion of having the bar mitzvah in Israel—the Jewish coming-of-age version of eloping. Perhaps that would be a way to do it without
doing
it. Sam objected on the grounds of it being a terrible idea.

“Terrible why?” Jacob asked, knowing full well why.

“You really don't see the irony?” Sam said. Jacob saw many ironies, and was curious to hear which one Sam was thinking of. “Israel was created as a place for Jews to escape persecution. We would be going to escape Judaism.” Nicely put.

So the bar mitzvah would be at the synagogue they paid twenty-five hundred dollars per visit to be members of, and officiated by the hip young
rabbi who wasn't, by any reasonable definition, hip, young, or a rabbi. The party would be at the Hilton where Reagan was
this close
to being put out of our misery, and where Julia and Sam were representing Micronesia. The band would be capable of playing both a good horah and good rock. Of course, such a band has never existed in the history of live music, but Jacob knew that at a certain point you just crunch the capsule you've been hiding in your cheek and hope not to feel too much. The theme—handled with delicacy and taste—would be Sam's Family's Diaspora. (This was Julia's idea, and insofar as a bar mitzvah theme could ever be a good idea, it was sufficiently OK.) They would have tables representing each of the countries the family had been dispersed to—America, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Australia, South Africa, Israel, Canada—and instead of seating cards, each guest would receive a “passport” to one of the nations. The tables would be designed to reflect regional culture and landmarks—this is where delicacy and taste were most severely challenged—and the centerpieces would include a family tree, and photographs of relatives currently living in those places. The buffet would feature stations of regionally specific foods: Brazilian feijoada, Spanish tapas, Israeli falafel, whatever they eat in Canada, and so on. The party favors would be snow globes of the various locales. There are more wars than snowfalls in Israel, but the Chinese are smart enough to know that Americans are dumb enough to buy anything. Especially Jewish Americans, who will go to any length, short of practicing Judaism, to instill a sense of Jewish identity in their children.

“I asked you a question,” Irv said, bringing Jacob back to the argument that only Irv was having.

“Did you?”

“Yes:
Why?”

“Why
what
?”

“The
what
doesn't even matter. The answer is the same to every question about us:
Because the world hates Jews.”

Jacob turned to face Max. “You realize that genetics aren't destiny, right?”

“Whatever you say…”

“In much the same way that I escaped the baldness that ravaged your grandfather's head, you have a fighting chance of dodging the insanity that transformed a passable human into the man who married my mother.”

Irv gave a deep, dramatic exhale, and then, with the full force of his faux sincerity: “Would it be all right if I offered an opinion?”

Both Jacob and Max laughed at that. Jacob liked that feeling, that spontaneous father-son camaraderie.

“Listen, don't listen, it's up to you. But I want to get this off my chest. I think you're wasting your life.”

“Oh,
that's
all?” Jacob said. “I was bracing for something big.”

“I think you are an immensely talented, deeply feeling, profoundly intelligent person.”

“The zayde doth protest too much, methinks.”