The Book of Jonah (24 page)

“It's so wrong,” he said, his lips beside her ear.

“Yup, right, got it.”

She waited a few more moments—but the essential sensation was not being felt. She opened her eyes to see him looking down in a troubled way at her naked body. She reached down to his dick. “You have got to be fucking kidding me.” She pushed him away with her leg. She considered masturbating, but could there be a more pathetic end to this day? She sat up and hunched forward. He had started to cry into his hands, but she felt an extreme lack of sympathy. They sat like that, naked, side by side, for several minutes. At one point his phone started to ring—he took it out of his pocket without looking at it and tossed it onto the coffee table. Someone named Brett was calling him; she watched the phone vibrate its way across the glass. “Okay, I know this is stupid,” she finally said, “but it's not because I'm not shaved, right?” That only made him cry harder. She went back into the kitchen, retrieved her spoon, and ate some peanut butter. Then she went into the bathroom and put on her bathrobe, went back into the living room. He had his pants and shirt on, was smoking a cigarette.

“Don't do that in here, okay?” she said. He looked at her a little skeptically, but when she didn't smile he put it out in one of the four ashtrays on the coffee table. As if to further make her point, she picked his jacket up off the floor, folded it sharply, and slung it over the back of the couch. “This suit sucks, by the way,” she told him. He didn't answer, just stared vacantly ahead, and there hadn't been any satisfaction in insulting him. There wasn't going to be any satisfaction of any kind today, she could tell by now.

“What are you doing here, Yonsi?” she asked him, feeling like crying herself. “I mean, seriously, what are you doing here?”

“We're all naked, Zoey,” he answered. “The body is clothed, but…”

It suddenly struck her how strange it all was—the state of his clothing, his generally harried appearance, that he'd shown up unannounced outside her door.

“Nothing happened, did it?” she asked anxiously. She sat down next to him on the couch, put her hand on his knee. “You're okay, right? Nobody died or anything?”

“I wanted to prove what an asshole I am.”

“Who said they still needed proof?” She'd said it as a joke—a fairly witty one, in her estimation—but the look on his face was so defeated that she immediately regretted it. “You're not an asshole, Yonsi.”

“I just … I just wanted to prove that nothing had changed. Y'know?”

At this she pulled her robe a little more closed over her chest. “Don't worry, Yonsi,” she said. “Nothing's changed.”

His phone was ringing again—this time
Schlampe
was calling him. When it had stopped, he asked, “Do you still keep those tools under your sink?” She nodded, her eyes on the pile of crap on her coffee table. She heard him get up and shuffle around in the kitchen; she heard him go into the hall and nail the
mezuzah
back into place.

When he came inside, he said, “I'm really sorry. I won't bother you anymore.”

“Yeah, I kind of figured that.”

“You are hotter than
Schlampe
,” he said to her. “And Katie Porter. It has nothing to do with being shaved, or whatever.”

He seemed about to go, so she said, “Are those really going to be the last words?”

They looked at each other—as though across an ocean of memory and missed opportunity and regret and—Dr. Popper's skepticism notwithstanding, emotional well-being notwithstanding—love, she thought.

After a pause, he said, “Maybe in the beginning. Maybe that September,” he went on, “I sometimes think if it hadn't been for—”

This brought on the tears—and she sobbed with all the force of the orgasms she hadn't had. He remained in the doorway until the tears had been exhausted. “I shouldn't have said that,” he said. “I'm really sorry.” And then he left.

She felt she could have successfully argued with any lung surgeon, public-health advocate, or cancer survivor in the world her case for having a cigarette right now. And for that reason she cleaned her apartment up a little bit and then put her yoga clothes back on. She figured she would never see him again. Then Zoey went to the gym.

8.
JUDITH AGONISTES

Judith did not, as was universally recommended to her, take any time off from college. What exactly, she wondered, did people think she would do with time off? Her entire life, she had been prepared—absurdly, she saw now—to do only one thing: go to college. Just because she'd recognized the fallacy—the naïveté—of all this preparation didn't mean she knew how to do anything else.

But the attorney handling her parents' estate made it clear that she was the only one “empowered” to make the important decisions—and so Judith spent several weeks after the funeral in her hometown, if only so she would never have to return there again. She stayed at an anonymous Holiday Inn twenty minutes down the highway: She didn't want to be recognized where she stayed, she didn't want to sleep in her childhood bed—and the thought of sleeping in her parents' bed struck her as monstrous.

She could not avoid the house entirely, though. She had to be there for the assessment, she had to be there to tell the movers what to put into storage and what to leave for the estate sale, she had to search for papers in the filing cabinet in her father's office. The details to be attended to seemed only to accumulate, to multiply grotesquely. Her aunt Naomi might have helped with some of this, but immediately after the funeral she had absented herself to California. Margaretha, her only cousin, hadn't been able to attend at all. She sent her condolences, her aunt informed her, from Amsterdam.

One Sunday, Judith came to the house to see that three copies of the Sunday
New York Times
waited in their blue plastic bags on the stoop. It was the remnant of their little eccentricity: one copy of the Sunday crossword puzzle for each of them. Looking at the three untouched newspapers, Judith realized that the Bulbrooks had been more peculiar—rarer—than she had ever given them credit for. And now she was the last one. Walking through the house that day—great cardboard boxes everywhere with their tops gaping open, the china in the dining room encased in bubble wrap, the mattress on her parents' bed already thrown away, leaving only the wooden frame, the silence in all the rooms making the lack of occupants of the house somehow palpable—she felt as if she were making her way among the remains of some lost civilization.

Gabe reappeared around this time. He was not at the funeral, and later she wouldn't be able to remember if he'd arrived before the ceremony and hadn't been able to stay, or if he hadn't been able to make it out in time to attend. The days of her forced residence in her hometown blended together in her memory—were to her all equally funereal. And, in general after her parents' death, events would become progressively harder for her to sequence, to partition into discrete days, months, years.

She remembered, though, that she was at the house to pack up her mother's jewelry when they met. It was nighttime, and they spoke on the porch in the front of the house. The
FOR SALE
sign was already in the front yard; flies and moths circled the single porch light above their heads. Neither made a move to hug the other when they said hello.

“They really were wonderful people,” Gabe told her.

“I know,” she said. Out of respect for what they had once shared, she spared him the facile smile she'd mastered, which the people who said such things to her seemed so much to appreciate seeing. She figured if they were old friends, old lovers, she might as well do him the courtesy of showing him on her face all the comfort such words gave her. The calls she'd received from the president of Yale, from the president of the college where David and Hannah had taught, from the governor of the state and both its senators; the letter she got, signed in actual ink, from George W. Bush; the memorial service at which dozens of former students of the Professors Bulbrook came to pay their respects; the compliments everyone piled on her parents whenever they saw her, the carefully worded offers of sympathy: none of it was any more or less consoling. It was all, equally and unequivocally: Not Consoling. Her grief appeared incontrovertible to her in those days—she was even a little awed by its magnitude.

“I know they—well, I know they loved you.” She nodded. “You know, you still…” he began, but trailed off. She had come to expect people to trail off when they spoke to her. It made her feel sorry for them—which she found another sad, dull irony.

“How's California?” she asked him. “Are you still writing?”

He nodded, but said, “No, not as much as I used to … I'm actually thinking about going to law school.” She thought he was searching for her reaction to this idea—maybe even hoping for her approval—but the truth was she couldn't locate much of an opinion either way. Finally he said, “And you chose Yale, I heard.”

“It seemed like a good fit,” she answered—another rote response, which happened to be true.

A silence followed. He looked at her regretfully. “What have you been reading?” he asked with a sudden earnestness of caring, the same she sometimes heard when people asked her if she was eating. He looked older, she thought—a little heavier, a little balder. But, all things considered, if he'd walked into her English class that day and read a Whitman poem, and she'd still been a fifteen-year-old girl at Gustav's, she would have probably fallen in love with him all over again. But she was not a fifteen-year-old girl, and he was invoking a world—the world of the creek—that no longer existed for her, if she could believe it had ever existed at all.

“It was all pretty cliché, wasn't it?” she said to him. “You and me. A prep school girl and her English teacher. It felt so … important at the time. But we really weren't doing anything a thousand other people weren't doing, too.”

“Judith…” he said.

“Anyway, thanks for coming by,” she said to him.

He put his hand on her shoulder. “You're still going to have a wonderful life in the end,” he told her.

Such sentiments, too, she believed served mostly as comfort for the comforters. It seemed as if people needed to think that she would be okay in the end. But what did okay mean? And, as she now asked him, “The end of what?”

They stood there for a moment, his hand on her shoulder—something that would have meant so much to her once, but was now so mutely, so sorrowfully unimportant. Then she thought of something else—went into her room for a minute, returned with the leather case from under her bed. “These are the letters you wrote me. I need to clean out the house, I wasn't sure what to do with them.” He took the case, looked at it uncertainly. “Thanks for coming by,” she repeated, and they said goodbye—again without hugging—and that was the last time she saw him.

*   *   *

As quickly as possible, she put whatever she deemed worth storing into storage, mostly photos and mementos she could neither look at nor bear to see thrown away. The rest she liquidated, sold. Then she returned to Yale.

Being a few weeks behind in her classes was actually a challenge she welcomed, though her professors fell all over themselves offering to make accommodations. She declined all these offers—just as she declined to be interviewed by
Yale Daily News,
or by
USA Today,
or to appear with other 9/11 orphans on
Good Morning America,
or on the
Today
show, or on
Oprah
; declined to sit in a luxury box at Yankee Stadium, declined to attend as an honored guest televised memorial services in New York or D.C. She had no intention of embodying for the public The Girl Whose Parents Died on 9/11: dressed in black, laying a wreath, brave in the face of tragedy. Even if she'd thought such gestures possible for her, her instinctive abhorrence of cliché—stronger than ever, as she'd found with Gabe—would not allow it.

She resumed her Philosophies of Religion class with the brilliant professor, went back to reading
À la recherche du temps perdu
. But there was none of the ecstasy she'd formerly felt in any of it; only a somewhat comforting familiarity in diligence, the minor satisfaction that she could get A's at Yale, too. Milim Oh, her roommate, seemed afraid of her at first, as did most of the others she'd met prior. Milim at least got over it enough to act like her friend, though in Judith's estimation their relationship would always have more of the outward gestures of friendship than genuine affection. Judith understood that Milim had judged it very important that they remain friends, and it was just this judgment that made authentic friendship impossible. The rabbi at the campus Hillel reached out to her—but her belief in God had blinkered out along with her parents. “Any God worth believing in wouldn't have let my parents be murdered,” she told the rabbi. She knew this opinion was as much a cliché as anything—but she forgave herself for it, because it felt so manifestly true.

She'd expected when she'd started college to major in English. But reading literature, writing about literature, required something of her she was no longer capable of offering. All it took was one B on a paper on
The Canterbury Tales
—her professor explaining the grade by saying she had “failed to engage honestly with Chaucer's work”—to convince her she needed another subject in which to specialize.

It was a class she took called American Art and the Postmodern World that made her settle on art history. The other students struggled with the features of postmodernism: the piled layers of abstraction, the slipperiness of context. But Judith discovered she had an instinct for it, was not put off by the sterility, the abstruseness her classmates sensed. And she found that staring at art—staring at it until she could see it as merely an amalgamation of influences, intentions, trends and counter-ends—was somehow aligned with her present state of mind: something she could do honestly.