A Brilliant Novel in the Works (14 page)

Without any morphine, he said: “They should’ve killed me in that operating
room.”

With one dose, it was: “I’m a slave to their science.”

And with two doses, he said to us: “All these years and we’re still wandering
in the desert.”

So here’s what I do: I look up Yousef ’s address and I drive
to his house and I sit in my car, waiting. It’s like a stakeout,
except I don’t have any reason to be staking out.

His house isn’t a house. It’s an apartment. It’s in an old
apartment complex, which is a bright purple building. I park
in the lot a few spots away from his front entrance and wait.

Here is why I’m doing this: I have no idea.

Here is a more honest reason: Because Shmen told me to
take my novel further. For a month I’ve been going nowhere
with this suggestion and so I thought Yousef could help. A
man with such a different background. It’s got to help. My
editor will love it. Maybe I can even convince Yousef to help
me write a whole storyline about a Muslim character who
bumps up against the main Jew in the novel and teaches him
some insightful
meshugas
about some insightful topic. It
could give the book more depth, more foreskin.

Here is a more honest reason I’m here: I’m lost and desperate.

After four hours of no activity, I realize that something has
to give. Jews don’t have the constitution for a stakeout. I
haven’t even brought Fritos or coffee. And so I go inside the
apartment complex. I climb the stinky, stained, old-carpety
stairs and knock on his door.

The door squeaks open all by itself, like a movie door, like it’s
playing a part, and I’m sure I’ll see a dead body on the floor.
Except there’s no body at all.

The room is dark and all the furniture is brown or gray.
It smells of lavender or maybe sandalwood. Whatever it is,
it makes the air feel thick. He is using one of those big, old
trunks as a coffee table. On this table, there’s a bowl of dates.
I think about that
Raiders of the Lost Ark
scene, that poisoned
date flying up in the air in slow motion and how we’re so
worried for our hero. There’s also a black photo album on
the table. The kind my folks used to have. The kind they had
before digital cameras made each individual photograph so
much less precious.

Beside the photo album are three 4x6 photographs. I know
immediately that the man in these pictures is Yousef ’s father.
He’s got Yousef ’s charming, crooked smile, but he also has
gray hair and wrinkles. A sweet-looking man. The way the
pictures are laid out on the table, I know that the man is dead.

I didn’t expect it to happen so fast.

I walk toward the pictures and pick one up. His father is
holding a half-eaten green apple in one hand and giving a
thumbs-up with the other hand. He’s smiling, a delicious bite
of apple still in his mouth. I look on the back for a description
or a date, but there’s nothing.

A toilet flushes. The sink starts running.

And so I start running. And it’s not until I’m in the car that
I see I still have his photograph in my hand.

On the way home, I get a drink at the bar, a drink that I
shouldn’t get because I’m supposed to be getting off the wagon,
or on the wagon, or whichever is the one that is less fun. I hide
in the corner of the bar and drink. The first martini burns in
the best possible way. And the second one doesn’t burn at all.

Yousef must have known that there wouldn’t be much time
left for his father. But still there is no way to prepare for it.
He’ll need more time.

It was stupid to steal that photo. I’m not a thief normally.
Usually my problem is that I leave too much of myself on the
table. But I love the picture. I love that half-chewed apple and
that smile. I don’t want to give it back.

When I get home, my house is completely dark. But I
rarely turn off all the lights. Even the light that has a broken
switch—the one in the bathroom, the one you have to stand
on the sink and unscrew to turn off—is off. The digital clocks
are still running, so I know it’s not a power outage.

My first thought is: thief, burglar, rapist, terrorist, maybe
it’s Yousef getting back at me for stealing the photo, or maybe
there’s a sleeper cell in my bathroom. Or all of the above.

My next thought is Julia.

Which is far scarier to consider.

You drew a picture of your father once. It was a penciled
sketch of a father and daughter walking through an empty parking lot. You’re
no artist—and it was just one momentary impulse to sketch—but this picture
is as clear to me as any photograph. You in pigtails with each tail sticking
out in frizzy balls that were so thick in the penciled sketch that some of
it rubbed off on my finger when I touched it. I should have been more careful.

I wouldn’t have figured that stick in your mouth was a spoon except that
you told me so. The cup of mint chocolate chip ice cream wasn’t even in the
sketch. But your father was there—a giant next to little you—with your hand
reaching up to hold onto his. His eyebrows were down low and he was walking
ahead of you so it looked like you were being pulled along. You were looking
up at him, or maybe you were looking up at the sun or some planet that existed
outside of that sketch.

I was lying next to you when I first saw the sketch. We were newlyweds,
or at least recentlyweds. Remember how the two of us would lie underneath
that heavy comforter, the one that made getting up so fabulously impossible?
The sketch was on my side of the bed, underneath the Kleenex and the aspirin,
like this new sketch was already trying to get buried.

You were deep into some glossy magazine. That was your favorite thing
back then, before you became so driven by your work. If cigarettes were your
thing, then you’d have been smoking one right there. If you were in a Fellini
film, then you’d be reading a magazine while tapping your cigarette against
an ashtray that would have been between us.

“You were such a cute girl,” I said. “Even in a sketch.”

In a typical situation, it would’ve been a reasonable thing to say. But
I should have known better.

The magazine went down. Your face came up. The half-closed eyes, the
half-tightened forehead. You squinted at that sketch in my hand because of
the way you have trouble seeing things after reading.

“Oh,” you said. “That.” Your imaginary cigarette: it got crushed into
that imaginary ashtray. You turned away, you slipped out of the bed without
the comforter moving a bit, and there was the backside of your body—so bright
from the morning sun—walking out of the room, leaving me alone with your sketch.
It was like you had to go, like you had something to do, like your naked body
was off to the bank.

And I was left with the pencil smudges on my fingers, left with that
sketch in my hand. There wasn’t much else in the drawing, just you two in
the parking lot with those parking lines where the cars were supposed to be.
Underneath the drawing you had written the words, “A Face Like That.”

“Julia?” I call out. “You there?”

No answer.

“
Ani poh-ched
,” I whisper, which is what I would say to my

mom when I was scared in my crib. But my crib is now bigger
and darker and potentially full of redheaded gentiles. Not the
kind of thing a mom prepares you for.

It’s dusk. The world outside is so full of shadows and my throat
burns and I can’t remember how many times I’ve called out for
her. This is how it goes in my bad dreams—for years it’s been
the same way. The world is too dark, my voice doesn’t work, the
shadows cover up the things making the shadows. Sometimes
the things themselves no longer exist: it’s just shadows. And then
sometimes I see someone dead in my dreams. Usually my father.
The skin and body look alive, but all the important things are
gone. And when I wake up from these dreams, my throat aches
and I have to remember who and what I am.

In real life, in my dark house, I see that Julia is on my bed.
She is curled up in the fetal position. This is in real life. My
estranged wife is in a t-shirt and shorts and curled up in the bed
that we used to share. Right next to all the pots and pans I put
on the bed to replace her. And I can see Julia clearly, even in the
dark, her beautiful, gentile skin. A bright spot in the room. She’s
breathing, she’s alive. This isn’t one of those dreams.

I sit next to her. She doesn’t move. But when I touch her,
real gently on the back, her body somehow shakes my hand
off of her.

“Don’t touch,” she says through her clogged nose.
“What is it?”

“Fuck you,” she says. “You probably hate me.”

I think about this for a minute. I can think of a boatload of

arguments; there were fights, annoyances, secrets. Deception.
Frustration. Communication issues. Impotence. But no hate.
Maybe it’s the clarity of the darkness, but all I see is two
crooked people who still care for each other.

“No hate,” I say. I rub her back and she lets me this time. I
want to say the word “love” out loud, but it still doesn’t come,
so I have to settle for the negation of hate.

“Julia,” I say. “You left me, remember?” There is snot all
over her face and when I reach to caress, to get my hand right
in the snotty mess, she grabs my hand and pushes it away. She
won’t look at me, and I know she doesn’t want me to look at
her. Even so, I can’t stop looking at her, the way it seems that
her cheekbone is trembling underneath her skin.

“I have something to tell you,” she says. “And you’re not
going to like it.”

I already know what it is that she’s going to tell me. The
way she doesn’t look at me. The way I can sense the burden
in her bones. I know it before she needs to say anything. My
staring at her only adds to the shame she feels. I saw it in
the hospital and I see it here and even though I don’t usually
know the difference between my worries and reality, this time
I know that they are the same thing.

So I look away. I look down on the floor. At that pile of
scattered papers. It’s my novel. Or my non-novel. Or whatever
it is that you call all that stuff that I write every day. Last week
my editor said it was “even worse than desperate.” Some days,
it’s just me talking to the people who can’t (or don’t/won’t) talk
to me anymore.

I’m not surprised when my wife tells me that she’s slept
with another man. Not a fake napkin man. A real man this
time. With two strong arms. A full head of hair. And— I
assume—an enormous, uncircumcised cock.

It was a week later when I found the sketch in the trash
can. I knew it would make it to the trash eventually, and so I waited, patiently,
for it to arrive. I’m a man who looks in the garbage for insight.

I placed the sketch between two clean pieces of clear plastic and kept
it under the bed so you wouldn’t be able to throw it away again.

Your father had taken you to the mall for ice cream. I knew at least
that. But there was more.

The ice cream was too cold and it hurt your teeth and you asked him why
ice cream had to be so cold, and he said because it’s ice and ice has to be
cold. And you asked why does ice have to be cold and he said, “Just because,”
but he said it like he had coughed up something solid.

When you looked up at him, you expected to see his mean eyebrows, but
he was smiling one of those gorgeous sneaky smiles that you loved to see.
This was common: to find him beautiful and scary at the same time.

But it turns out he wasn’t even looking at you, he was looking at a woman
with high heels and a tight red skirt and a hoop in each ear as big as your
head. She was smiling at him too. Neither of them said anything, but when
she walked past, it smelled like your favorite kind of Hubba Bubba bubble
gum, the one your dad said was so bad for you.

You asked him why he was smiling like that and why she was smiling like
that and if he knew her from somewhere. Without answering your questions,
he said that if you don’t learn how to smile then nobody will want to be with
you.

And you wondered what that had to do with him smiling at this woman and
you wondered what he meant by “nobody will want to be with you.” But you didn’t
look up at him because you knew you had done something that you weren’t supposed
to do and your face was hot from his staring at you.

And then he said in the cruel way he could say things, “Especially with
a face like that.”

Here’s the deal. When Julia tells me that she’s been sleeping
with another man, I don’t like it. But when I see how close she
is to crying. When I see how ashamed she is. When I look at
her beautiful face. There’s no anger. For a goddamn instant,
I’m not dwelling on myself. I hold onto her, and I tell her it’s
okay. I tell her I made plenty of mistakes that got us to this
point just the same. I tell her I’m not offended that she went
off with a beautiful gentile man.

“How did you know he was gentile?” she asks.

I smile at her and her look reminds me of the way she used to
look at me when we first met. “You have that goyishe smell to you.”

In fact, I feel more affection for Julia than I’ve ever felt.
And I don’t know what to do with the feeling because I’m
scared it’ll go away. It feels so clean. I’m almost tempted to ask
her to do this to me again so that she can come back again and
I can feel this clean feeling again.

“It’s darker than you realize,” she says.

“What?” I say. “What’s darker?” And I look around the
room so that I can ground myself on a particular object. I
look down at the floor at the pages of my novel.

“Me,” she says. She pauses for too long. “I’m so insecure.”

I don’t expect this. I picture her occasionally frustrated and
never insecure. I want to ask her more. I wonder if I should
look again at her sketch of her and her father. Perhaps there
was anger on her face too.

Her breathing isn’t right. Her hands are shaking. “I hated
him for cheating on my mother,” she says. “And now I’m no
better.”

I’m sitting up on the bed and Julia lies down on my lap and
I put one arm around her and rub her shoulder. “Your father,”
I say, “deceived your mother for years and then left his family
without an explanation. That’s a lot different.” I find a knot in
her shoulder and press on it to get the muscle to relax. “We’ve
got some cleaning up to do, but it’s not such a long way for us
to get back on the bus.”

“What bus?” she says with a seriousness that has no room
for my terrible metaphors.

“I just mean we can still fix things if you want to.”

“Do you want to?” She’s as small as the little girl in her
sketch.

I rub my knuckles softly against her cheeks. And then she
looks up at me so sweetly. She reaches a hand up to my face
and gently rubs her fingers below my eyes.

I lean toward her. And we kiss.

And it’s funny because we’re suddenly affectionate in a
way that we haven’t been in a long time. We’re like a normal
couple.

But she pulls away. “I don’t mind spanking you if that’s the
way it has to be. But I wish there were another way.”

“I know,” I tell her. “I’m totally attracted to you, even if my
schmeckel doesn’t always get the message.”

Julia hops out of the bed right in the middle of my
ridiculous explanation and grabs me by the hand and pulls me
off the bed so fast I suspect she’s saving us from a live grenade.
She says, “I have an idea,” and then she pushes all the pots and
pans off the bed without asking why they were there in the
first place. They crash onto the floor, on top of the scattered
mess that is my novel.

“First of all,” she says in a big rush, “take off your clothes.” And then she
has to clarify: “That includes your underwear.”