Here I Am (8 page)

“Next time is right now,” she said—an offering and a summoning.

“And I'm supposed to just churn them out?” With a wink: “Churn?”

“Yes, I get it.”

“Your stoicism is a butter pill to swallow.”

“So give me something good.”

“I know what you're thinking:
Bad butter puns, how dairy!
”

That got a chuckle. She reflexively tried to withhold her laughter (not from him, but herself) and felt an unexpected desire to reach across the table and touch him.

“What? You can't believe it's not better?”

Another chuckle.

“Butter precedes essence.”

“That one I don't get. What do you say we move on to bread puns, or maybe even dialogue?”

“Have I milked it too much?”

“Relent, Jacob.”

“Who ya gonna call? Goat's Butter!”

“Best yet.
Definitely
the one to end it on.”

“Just to clear the dairy air, I'm the funniest man you've ever known?”

“Only because Benjy isn't yet a man,” she said, but the combination of her husband's overwhelming quickness and his overwhelming need to be loved brought waves of love, pulled her into its ocean.

“Guns don't kill people, people kill people. Toasters don't toast toast, toast toasts toast.”

“Toasters toast bread.”

“The margarine for error is too small!”

What if she'd given him the love he needed, and she needed to give, if she'd said, “Your mind is making me want to touch you”?

What if he'd been able to make the right joke at the right time, or better still, be still?

Another glass of rosé.

“You stole a clock from the desk! I just remembered that!”

“I did not steal a clock.”

“You did,” Julia said. “You totally did.”

The only time in his life he impersonated Nixon: “I am not a crook!”

“Well, you definitely
were
. It was a tiny, folding, cheap nothing. After we made love. You went to the desk, stopped the clock, and put it in your jacket pocket.”

“Why would I have done that?”

“I think it was supposed to be romantic? Or funny? Or you were trying to show me your spontaneity credentials? I have no idea. Go back and ask yourself.”

“You're sure you're thinking of me? And not some other man? Some other romantic night at an inn?”

“I've never had a romantic night at an inn with anyone else,” Julia said, which shouldn't have required saying, and wasn't true, but she wanted to care for Jacob, especially right then. Neither knew, only a few steps onto that invisible bridge, that it never ended, that the rest of their life together would require steps of trust, which only led to the next step of trust. She wanted to care for him then, but she wouldn't always.

They stayed at their table until the waiter, in splutters of profuse apology, explained that the restaurant was shutting down for the night.

“What was the name of that movie we didn't watch?”

They would have to go to the room.

Jacob put the duffel on the bed, just as he had. Julia moved it to the bench at the foot of the bed, just as she had. Jacob removed the toiletry bag.

Julia said, “I know I shouldn't, but I wonder what the kids are doing right now.”

Jacob chuckled. Julia changed into her “fancy” pajamas. Jacob watched her, unaware of anything that had changed about her body in the decade since they'd last been there, because he'd seen her body nearly every day since. He still stole peeks, like a teenager, at her breasts and ass, still fantasized about what was both real and his. Julia felt herself being watched, and liked it, so took her time. Jacob changed into boxers and a T-shirt. Julia went to the sink and ritually craned her neck back, a worn habit, examining herself as she gently pulled on a lower eyelid—as if she were about to insert a contact lens. Jacob produced both toothbrushes and applied toothpaste to each, resting hers, bristles up, on the sink.

“Thanks,” Julia said.

“Do. Not. Mention. It,” Jacob replied in a funny robot voice whose
utterly random arrival could only have been an expression of anxiety about the emotions and actions now expected of them. Or so Julia thought.

Jacob brushed his teeth and thought,
What if I don't get hard?
Julia brushed her teeth, searching the mirror for something she didn't want to see. Jacob applied five seconds of Old Spice to each armpit (despite being an inert and sweatless sleeper), washed his face with Cetaphil Daily Facial Cleanser for Normal to Oily Skin (despite having Normal to Dry Skin), then applied Eucerin Daily Protection Moisturizing Face Lotion, Broad Spectrum SPF 30 (despite the sun having disappeared hours ago, and despite sleeping under a ceiling). He gave an extra squirt of Eucerin to his trouble spots: around the alas (a word he knew only from neurotic Google searches—
Alas, poor Yorick, the alas of your missing nose
), and between the eyebrows and the tops of the upper eyelids. Julia's regimen was more complex: a face wash with S.W. Basics Cleanser, application of Skin-Ceuticals Retinol 1.0 Maximum Strength Refining Night Cream, application of Laneige Water Bank Moisture Cream, gentle tapping application of Lancôme Rénergie Lift Multi-Action Night cream around her eyes. Jacob went to the bedroom and did the stretches that everyone in the family made fun of, despite the chiropractor's insistence that they were necessary for someone with such a sedentary lifestyle, and the fact that they actually helped. Julia flossed with an Oral-B Glide 3D Floss Pick, which, despite being both an environmental nightmare and a rip-off, spared her from gagging. Jacob returned to the bathroom and flossed with the cheapest thing he could find at CVS, string being string.

“You already brushed?” Julia asked.

Jacob said, “Beside you. Just a minute ago.”

Julia made a dollop of hand cream disappear in her palms.

They moved to the bedroom, and Jacob said, “I have to pee,” as he always did at that moment. He went back into the bathroom, locked the door, performed his nightly solitary ritual, and flushed the unused toilet to complete the charade. When he reentered the bedroom, Julia was propped against the headboard, applying L'Oreal Collagen Re-Plumper Night Cream across the thigh of her bent leg. Jacob often wanted to tell her that it wasn't necessary, that he would love her as she was, just as she would love him; but wanting to feel attractive was who she was, just as it was who he was, and that, too, should be loved. Julia tied back her hair.

Jacob touched a tapestry, a depiction of a naval battle beneath the bannered
words “The American Situation: War of 1812,” and said, “Nice.” Did she remember?

Julia said, “Please tell me not to call the kids.”

“Not to call the kids.”

“Of course I shouldn't.”

“Or call them. We're not vacation fundamentalists.”

Julia laughed.

Jacob was never immune to her laughter.

“Come,” she said, patting the bed beside her.

Jacob said, “We have a big day tomorrow,” illuminating several emergency exit paths at once: they needed rest; tomorrow was more important than tonight; it wouldn't be a disappointment if she acknowledged her tiredness.

“You must be beat,” Julia said, redirecting things slightly by putting the onus on him.

“I am,” he said, almost as a question, almost accepting his role. “And you must be, too,” asking her to accept hers.

“Come,” she said, “hold me.”

Jacob turned off the lights, placed his unfolded glasses on the bedside table, and got into bed, beside his wife of a decade. She turned onto her side, bringing her head into her husband's armpit. He kissed the North Pole of her head. Now they were on their own, without history, no dead stars to navigate by.

If they'd said what they were thinking, Jacob would have said, “To be honest, it's not as nice as I remembered.”

And she would have said, “It couldn't have been.”

“When I was a boy, I used to ride my bike down a hill behind the house. I'd narrate each run. You know, ‘Jacob Bloch, set to attempt a new land speed record. He grips his handlebars. Can he do it?' I called it ‘The Huge Hill.' More than anything else in my childhood, it made me feel brave. I went back the other day. It was on the way to a meeting, and I had a few minutes. I couldn't find it. I found where it was, or should have been, but it wasn't there. Only the gentlest slope.”

“You grew,” she would have said.

If they'd said what they were thinking, Jacob would have said, “I'm thinking about how we're not having sex. Are you?”

And without defensiveness or hurt, Julia would have said, “Yeah, I am.”

“There's nothing I'm asking you to say here. I promise. I just want to tell you where I am. OK?”

“OK.”

And risking another step onto the invisible bridge, Jacob would have said, “I'm worrying that you don't want to have sex with me. That you don't desire me.”

“You don't need to worry,” Julia would have said as she would have brought her hand to the side of his face.

“I always desire you,” he would have said. “I was watching you undress—”

“I know. I felt it.”

“You look every bit as beautiful as you did ten years ago.”

“That's plainly untrue. But thank you.”

“It's true to me.”

“Thank you.”

And Jacob would have found himself in the middle of the invisible bridge, above the chasm of potential hurt, at the farthest point from safety: “Why do you think we aren't having sex?”

And Julia would have stood beside him and, without looking down, said, “Maybe because the expectation is so great?”

“Could be. And we're genuinely tired.”

“I know I am.”

“I'm going to say something that isn't easy to say.”

“You're safe,” she would have promised.

He would have turned to her and said, “We never talk about how I can't get hard sometimes. Do you ever think it's you?”

“I do.”

“It isn't you.”

“Thank you for saying that.”

“Julia,” he would have said, “it isn't you.”

But he didn't say anything, and neither did she. Not because the words were deliberately withheld, but because the pipeline between them was too occluded for such bravery. Too many small accumulations: wrong words, absences of words, imposed quiet, plausibly deniable attacks on known vulnerabilities, mentions of things that needn't be mentioned, misunderstandings and accidents, moments of weakness, tiny acts of shitty retribution for tiny acts of shitty retribution for tiny acts of shitty retribution for an original offense that no one could remember. Or for no offense at all.

They didn't recede from each other that night. They didn't roll to opposite sides of the bed, or withdraw into two silences. They held each other and shared a silence in the darkness. But it was silence. Neither suggested they explore the room with their eyes closed, as they'd done the last time they were there. They explored the room independently, in their minds, beside each other. And in Jacob's jacket pocket was the stopped clock—a decade of 1:43—which he'd been waiting for just the right moment to reveal.

i'll keep making you cum after you beg me to stop

In the hardware gallery parking lot, she sat in her car—her Volvo like everybody else's, in a color she knew was wrong the second after it was impossible to change her mind—not knowing what to do with herself, knowing only that she had to do something. She wasn't sufficiently adept with her phone to waste the kind of time she needed to waste. But she could squander at least a little. She found the company that made her favorite architectural model trees. They weren't the most realistic, they weren't even well made. She didn't like them because they evoked trees but because they evoked the sadness that trees evoke—the way an out-of-focus photograph might best capture its subject's essence. It was extremely unlikely that the manufacturer intended any of that, but it was possible, and it didn't matter.

They were featuring a new line of autumn trees. Who could be the market for such things? Orange Maple, Red Maple, Yellow Maple, Autumn Sycamore, Light Orange Aspen, Yellowing Aspen, Turning Maple, Turning Sycamore. She imagined a tiny, younger Jacob, and a tiny, younger Julia, in a tiny, scratched and dinged Saab, driving shoelace roads bordered by an infinity of tiny, turning trees, under an infinity of tiny, massive stars, and like the trees, the tiny young couple weren't realistic, or well made, and they didn't evoke their bigger, older selves, but they evoked the sadness that they would grow to evoke.

Mark tapped her window. She tried rolling it down and realized the car needed to be on, but the key wasn't in the ignition or in her hand, and she didn't have it in her to go through her bag, so she clumsily opened the door.

“I'll see you at the Model UN trip.”

“What?”

“In a couple of weeks. I'm the male chaperone.”

“Oh. I didn't know that.”

“So we can continue our talk then.”

“I don't know how much more there is to say.”

“There's always more to say.”

“Sometimes not.”

And then, on her day off, wanting only to get as far away from her life as possible, she found herself trampling a desire line home.

it's enough when i say it's enough

At any given time, there are forty times in the world. Another interesting fact: China used to have five time zones, but now it has only one, and for some Chinese people the sun doesn't rise until after ten. Another: long before man traveled into space, rabbis debated how one would observe Shabbat there—not because they anticipated space travel but because
Buddhists strive to live with questions and Jews would rather die. On Earth, the sun rises and sets once each day. A spaceship orbits Earth once every ninety minutes, which would require a Shabbat every nine hours. One line of thinking held that Jews simply shouldn't be in a place that raises doubts about prayer and observance. Another, that one's earthly obligations are earthbound—what happens in space stays in space. Some argued that a Jewish astronaut should observe the same routine he would on Earth. Others, that Shabbat should be observed by the time set on his instruments, despite the city of Houston being about as Jewish as the Rockets' locker room. Two Jewish astronauts have died in space. No Jewish astronaut has observed Shabbat.

Sam's dad gave him an article about Ilan Ramon, the only Israeli ever to go into space. Before leaving, Ramon went to the Holocaust Museum, to find an artifact to take with him. He chose a drawing of Earth by a young, anonymous boy who died in the war.

“Imagine that sweet child scribbling away,” Sam's dad said. “If an angel had landed on his shoulder and told him, ‘You're going to be killed before your next birthday, and in sixty years a representative of the Jewish state is going to carry your drawing of Earth as seen from space
into space—
”

“If there were angels,” Sam said, “he wouldn't have been killed.”

“If the angels were good angels.”

“Do we believe in bad angels?”

“We probably don't believe in any angels.”

Sam enjoyed knowledge. The accumulation and distribution of facts gave him a feeling of control, of utility, of the opposite of the powerlessness that comes with having a smallish, underdeveloped body that doesn't dependably respond to the mental commands of a largish, overstimulated brain.

It was always dusk in Other Life, so once every day the “other time” corresponded to the “real time” of its citizens. Some referred to that moment as “The Harmony.” Some wouldn't miss it. Some didn't like to be at their screens when it happened. Sam's bar mitzvah was still a ways off. Samanta's bat mitzvah was today. Did the drawing simply immolate when the space shuttle exploded? Are any small pieces of it still orbiting? Did they fall to the water, descend, over hours, to the ocean floor, and veil one of those deep-sea creatures that are so alien they look like they came from outer space?

The pews were filled with everyone Samanta knew, people Sam had never met. They came from Kyoto, Lisbon, Sacramento, Lagos, Toronto, Oklahoma City, and Beirut. Twenty-seven dusks. They were sitting together in the virtual sanctuary of Sam's creation—they saw the beauty; Sam saw all that was wrong with it, all that was wrong with him. They came for Samanta, a community of her communities. As far as they knew, it was a happy occasion.

No one ever asked Sam why he took a Latina as an avatar, because no one, other than Max, knew that he had. The choice might have seemed odd. Some might even have thought it was offensive. They would be wrong. Being Sam was odd and offensive. Having such prolific salivary and sweat glands. Being unable not to think about walking while walking. Backne and buttne. There was no experience more humiliating or existentially dispiriting than shopping for clothes. But how to explain to his mom that he would rather have nothing that properly fit than have it confirmed to him, in a mirrored torture chamber, that nothing ever
would
fit? Sleeves would never end at the right place. Collars would never not be too pointy, or rise too high, or angle improperly. The buttons of every button-down shirt would always be spaced such that the penultimate one from the top made the neck opening either too constrictive or too revealing. There was a point—literally a single location in space—where a button might be positioned to create the natural feel and effect. But no shirt had ever been made with such button placement, probably because no one's upper-body proportions were as disproportionate as his.

Because his parents were technological fucktards, Sam knew that they periodically checked his search history, the regular sweeping of which only rubbed his blackheaded nose in the patheticness of being a preteen with a Y chromosome who watched button-sewing tutorials on YouTube. And in those evenings behind his locked bedroom door, when his parents worried that he was researching firearms, or bisexuality, or Islam, he took to moving the penultimate buttons and slits of his loathsome shirts to the only endurable position. Half the things he did were stereotypically gay. In fact, probably a far greater proportion, if you were to remove the activities, such as walking an average-size dog and sleeping, that had no quality of straightness or gayness. He didn't care. He had not even the smallest issue with gay people, not even aesthetically. But he would have liked to correct the record, because he had the largest of all issues with being misunderstood.

One morning at breakfast, his mom asked if he'd been removing and
resewing the buttons on his shirts. He denied it with nonchalant vehemence.

She said, “I think it's neat.”

And so from then on, the upper half of his daily, all-seasons uniform shifted to American Apparel T-shirts, even though they broadcast the tits mysteriously sprouting from his otherwise collapsed torso.

It felt odd to have hair that never once, despite repeated and generous applications of product, rested properly. It felt odd to walk, and he often found himself slipping into an over- (or under-) stylized catwalk stride, whereby he swung his ass out to each side and pounded his feet into the ground as if trying not only to kill insects but to perpetrate an insect genocide. Why did he walk like that? Because he wanted to walk like nothing, and the extreme effort to do so generated a horrible spectacle of horrible perambulation by someone who was such a human cowlick he actually used the word
perambulation
. It felt odd to have to sit in chairs, to have to make eye contact, to have to speak with a voice that he knew to be his own but did not recognize, or only recognized as belonging to yet another self-appointed Wikipedia sheriff who would never possess a biographical entry visited, much less edited, by someone who wasn't him.

He assumed that there were times, other than while masturbating, when he felt at home in his body, but he couldn't remember them—maybe before he smashed his fingers? Samanta wasn't his first Other Life avatar, but she was the first whose logarithmic skin fit. He never had to explain the choice to anyone else—Max was wide-eyed or righteous enough not to care—but how did he explain it to himself? He didn't wish he were a girl. He didn't wish he were a Latina. Then again, he didn't
not
wish he were a Latina girl. Despite the near-constant regret he felt about being himself, he never confused himself for the problem. The problem was the world. It was the world that didn't fit. But how much happiness has ever resulted from correcting the record on the culpability of the world?

Sam thought about texting Billie, seeing if she might want to join him at a modern dance performance (or show, or whatever they're called) on Saturday. It sounded cool, as she'd written about it in her diary, which he'd removed from her unattended backpack while she was in gym, concealed behind his far larger, far less interesting chemistry textbook, and perused—a word that means the exact opposite of what most people think it means. He didn't like texting, because he had to look at his thumb—
the finger that got it worst, or healed least well. The one people tried not to notice. Weeks after the other fingers had regained their color and approximate shape, the thumb was black, and askew at the knuckle. The doctor said it wasn't taking, and would have to be amputated to protect the rest of the hand from infection. He said this in front of Sam. Sam's dad said, “You're sure?” His mom insisted they get another opinion. The second opinion was the same, and his dad sighed, and his mom insisted they get another. The third doctor said there was no immediate risk of infection, and kids are almost superhumanly resilient, and “almost always these things just find a way to heal themselves.” His dad didn't trust the sound of that, but his mom did, and within two weeks, the darkness was receding toward the thumb's tip. Sam was nearly eight. He doesn't remember any of the doctors, or even the physical therapy. He barely remembers the accident itself, and sometimes wonders if he's just remembering his parents' memories.

Sam doesn't remember screaming, “Why did that happen?” as loud as he could, not out of terror, or anger, or confusion, but because of the size of the question. There are stories of mothers lifting cars off their trapped children, he remembers that, but he doesn't remember his mom's superhuman composure when she met his wild eyes and subdued them, promising, “I love you, and I'm here.” He doesn't remember being pinned while the doctor reattached the ends of his fingers. He doesn't remember waking up from his five-hour post-surgery nap to find that his dad had filled his room with the contents of Child's Play. But he remembers the game they used to play when he was a child:
Where is Thumbkin? Where is Thumbkin? Here I am! Here I am!
They never played it with Benjy after the injury, not once, and never once acknowledged that they had stopped playing it. His parents were trying to spare Sam, not understanding that the shame suggested by the silence was the one thing he could have been spared.