Here I Am (6 page)

She took it back out of the case and pinned it to her sweater.

“And it's not heavy? It doesn't pull on the fabric?”

“It's quite light.”

“Is it fancy?”

“You could wear it with a dress, or on a jacket, or sweater.”

“And you would be happy if someone gave it to you?”

Distance begets distance, but if the distance is nothing, what is its origin? There was no transgression, no cruelty, not even indifference. The original distance was closeness: the inability to overcome the shame of subterranean needs that no longer had a home aboveground.

Only in the privacy of her own mind could Julia wonder what her own home would look like. What she would gain, and what she would lose. Could she live without seeing the kids every morning and evening? And what if she were to admit that she could? In six and a half million minutes, she would have to. No one judges a mother for letting her children go to college. Letting go wasn't the crime. The crime was choosing to let go.

you don't deserve to get fucked in the ass

If she built a new life for herself, so would Jacob. He would remarry. Men do. They get over it, and get on with it. Every time. It was easy to imagine him marrying the first person he dated. He deserved someone who didn't build imaginary homes for one. He didn't deserve Julia, but he
deserved better than Julia. He deserved someone who stretched upon waking, rather than recoiled. Someone who didn't sniff food before eating it. Someone who didn't see pets as burdens, who had a pet name for him, and made jokes in front of friends about how much she liked being fucked by him. Some new, unclogged pipeline to a new person, and even if it were doomed to ultimately fail, at least the failure would be preceded by happiness.

now you deserve to get fucked in the ass

She needed a day off. She would have loved the feeling of not knowing how to fill the time, of wandering without a destination in Rock Creek Park, of actually savoring a meal of the kind of food that her kids would never tolerate, and reading something longer and of more substance than a sidebar about how better to organize emotions or spices. But one of her clients needed help selecting door hardware. Of course it had to be a Saturday, because when else could someone who was able to afford bespoke hardware have time to sample it? And of course no one needs help to look at door hardware, but Mark and Jennifer were unusually helpless when it came to negotiating their incompatible lacks of taste, and a doorknob was exactly unimportant and symbolic enough to require mediation.

Compounding Julia's irritation was the fact that Mark and Jennifer were the parents of one of Sam's friends, and thought of Jacob and Julia as
their
friends, and wanted to have a coffee after to “catch up.” Julia liked them and, insofar as she could muster enthusiasm for extrafamilial relations, considered them friends. But she couldn't muster much. At least not until she could catch up with herself.

Someone needed to invent a way to be close to people without having to see them, or talk to them on the phone, or write (or read) letters, or e-mails, or texts. Was it only mothers who understood the preciousness of time? That there was none of it, ever? And you can't just have coffee, even and especially not with people you rarely see, because it takes half an hour to reach the café (if you're lucky), and half an hour to return home (if you're lucky again), not to mention the twenty-minute tax you pay just to get out the door, and a quick coffee ends up being forty-five minutes in the Olympic scenario. And there was the horrible rigmarole at Hebrew school that morning, and the Israelis were coming in less than
two weeks, and the bar mitzvah was saying its goodbyes in the ICU, and while it's entirely possible to get help, help feels bad, help shames. One can order groceries online and have them delivered, but that feels like a failure, an abdication of motherly duty—motherly privilege. Driving farther to the store with good produce, selecting the avocado that will be perfectly ripe at its moment of use, making sure it doesn't get crushed in the grocery bag and that the grocery bag doesn't get crushed in the cart…it's a mother's job. Not job, but joy. What if she could accomplish the job but not the joy?

She never knew what to do with the feeling of wanting more for herself: time, space, quiet. Maybe girls would have been different, but she had boys. For a year she held them against her, but after that sleepless holiday she was at the mercy of their physicality: their screaming, wrestling, table drumming, competitive farting, and endless explorations of their scrotums. She loved it, all of it, but needed time, space, and quiet. Maybe if she'd had girls, maybe they'd have been more contemplative, less brutish, more constructive, less animalistic. Even approaching such thoughts made her feel unmotherly, although she always knew she was a good mother. So why was it so complicated? There were women who would spend their last pennies to do the things she resented. Every blessing that was promised the barren heroines of the Bible had fallen into her open hands like rain. And through them.

i want to lick the cum out of your asshole

She met Mark at the hardware gallery. It was elegant, and it was obnoxious, and in a world where the bodies of Syrian children washed up on beaches, it was unethical, or at least vulgar. But her commissions added up.

Mark was already handling samples when she arrived. He looked good: a tightly cropped, gray-dusted beard; clothes that were intentionally snug and not bought in sets of three. He had the physical confidence of someone who doesn't know within one hundred thousand dollars the contents of his bank account at any given moment. It wasn't attractive, but it wasn't ignorable.

“Julia.”

“Mark.”

“We seem not to have Alzheimer's.”

“What's Alzheimer's?”

Innocent flirtation was so revitalizing—the gentle tickling of language that gently tickled one's ego. She was good at it, and loved it, always had, but grew to feel guilty about it in the course of her marriage. She knew there was nothing wrong with such playfulness; she wanted Jacob to have it in his life. But she also knew of his irrational, uncontainable jealousy. And frustrating as it could be—she never dared to mention a romantic or sexual experience from her past, and needed to overclarify any remotely misinterpretable experience in the present—it was part of him, and so something she wanted to care for.

And it was a part of him that drew her in. His sexual insecurity was so profound, it could only have sprung from a profound source. And even when she felt that she knew everything about him, she never knew what created his insatiable need for reassurance. Sometimes, after deliberately omitting something innocent that she knew would upset his brittle peace, she would look at her husband with love and think,
What happened to you?

“Sorry I'm late,” she said, adjusting her collar. “Sam got in some trouble at Hebrew school.”

“Oy vey.”

“Indeed. Anyway, I'm here. Physically and mentally.”

“Maybe we should go get that coffee first?”

“I'm trying to quit.”

“Why?”

“Too dependent on it.”

“That's only a problem if there isn't coffee around.”

“And Jacob says—”

“That's only a problem if Jacob's around.”

Julia giggled at that, unsure if she was giggling at his joke or her girlish inability to resist his boyish charm.

“Let's earn the caffeine,” she said, taking a too-distressed bronze knob from his hand.

“So I have some news,” Mark said.

“Me, too. Should we wait for Jennifer?”

“We shouldn't. And that's my news.”

“What do you mean?”

“Jennifer and I are getting divorced.”

“What?”

“We've been separated since May.”

“You said
divorced
.”

“We've been separated. We're getting divorced.”

“No,” she said, squeezing the knob, further distressing it, “you haven't.”

“Haven't what?”

“Been separated.”

“I would know.”

“But we've been together. We went to the Kennedy Center.”

“Yes, we were at a play.”

“You laughed, and touched. I
saw
.”

“We're friends. Friends laugh.”

“They don't touch.”

Mark extended his hand and touched Julia's shoulder. She reflexively recoiled, eliciting a laugh from each of them.

“We're friends who were married,” he said.

Julia organized her hair behind her ear and said, “Who still
are
married.”

“Who are about not to be.”

“I don't think this is right.”

“Right?”

“Happening.”

He held up his ringless hand: “It's been happening for at least long enough to erase a tan line.”

A skinny woman approached.

“Anything I can help with today?”

“Maybe tomorrow,” Julia said.

“I think we're OK for now,” Mark said, with a smile that appeared, to Julia, as flirtatious as the one he'd given her.

“I'll just be over there,” the woman said.

Julia put down the knob with a bit too much force and picked up another, a stainless octagon—ridiculously effortful, repulsively masculine.

“Well, Mark…I don't know what to say.”

“Congratulations?”

“Congratulations?”

“Sure.”

“That doesn't feel right at all.”

“But it's
my
feelings we're talking about here.”

“Congratulations? Really?”

“I'm young. Just barely, but still.”

“Not just barely.”

“You're right. We're resolutely young. If we were seventy it would be different. Maybe even if we were sixty or fifty. Maybe then I'd say,
This is who I am. This is my lot
. But I'm forty-four. A huge portion of my life hasn't happened. And the same is true for Jennifer. We realized we would be happier living other lives. That's a good thing. Certainly better than pretending, or repressing, or just being so consumed with the responsibility of playing a part that you never question if it's the part you would choose. I'm still young, Julia, and I want to choose happiness.”

“Happiness?”

“Happiness.”

“
Whose
happiness?”

“My happiness. Jennifer's, too. Our happiness, but separately.”

“While we pursue happiness, we flee from contentment.”

“Well, neither my happiness nor contentment is with her. And her happiness definitely isn't with me.”

“Where is it? Under a sofa cushion?”

“In fact, under her French tutor.”

“Holy
shit
,” Julia said, bringing the knob to her forehead harder than she'd intended.

“I don't know why you're having this reaction to good news.”

“She doesn't even
speak
French.”

“And now we know why.”

Julia looked for the anorexic clerk. Anything to look away from Mark.

“And
your
happiness?” she asked. “What language are you not learning?”

He laughed. “For now, I'm happy to be alone. I've spent my whole life with others—my parents, girlfriends, Jennifer. Maybe I want something different.”

“Loneliness?”

“Aloneness isn't loneliness.”

“This doorknob is very ugly.”

“Are you upset?”

“Too little distress, too much distress, it isn't rocket science.”

“That's why they save rocket scientists for rocket science.”

“I can't believe you haven't even mentioned the kids.”

“It's painful.”

“What this is going to do to them. What seeing them half the time is going to do to you.”

She pressed into the display case, angled herself a few degrees. No amount of adjusting could make this conversation comfortable, but it would at least deflect the blow. She put down the knob and picked up one whose only honest comparison would be the dildo she was given at her bachelorette party, sixteen years before. It had resembled a penis as little as this knob resembled a knob. Her girlfriends laughed, and she laughed, and four months later she came upon it while searching her closet with the hopes of regifting an unopened matcha whisk, and she found herself bored or hormonal enough to give it a shot. It accomplished nothing. Too dry. Too unwillful. But holding the ridiculous doorknob, then, she could think of nothing else.

“I lost my interior monologue,” Mark said.

“Your
interior monologue
?” Julia asked with a dismissive grin.

“That's right.”

She handed him the knob: “Mark, it's your interior monologue calling. He was mugged by your id in Nigeria and needs you to wire it two hundred fifty thousand dollars by the end of the day.”

“Maybe it sounds silly. Maybe I sound selfish—”

“Yes and yes.”

“—but I lost what made me
me
.”

“You're an adult, Mark, not a Shel Silverstein character contemplating emotional boo-boos on the stump of a tree whose trunk he used for a dacha, or whatever.”

“The harder you push back,” he said, “the more sure I am that you agree.”

“Agree? Agree with what? We're talking about
your
life.”

“We're talking about the endless clenched-jaw worrying about the kids all day, and the endless replaying of unhad fights with your spouse all night. You wouldn't be a happier, more ambitious and productive architect if you were alone? You wouldn't be less
weary
?”

“What, me weary?”