A Brilliant Novel in the Works (18 page)

When she picks up the phone, I say, “It’s getting worse, isn’t it?” I
do it like they do it in the movies. I don’t say hello. I don’t give any
introductions. I don’t clear my throat. I just say what I need to say.

“He’s moving out,” Ally tells me. “I gave him a requirement
and he couldn’t live up to it.”

“What do you mean? You have to look out for him.” I can’t
imagine that this is really Ally, the person who takes care of the
Fatty Lumpkins of the world. Shmen is like a thousand Fattys.

“I have to look out for Maddy,” she says. “I can’t live with a
man who vomits in my daughter’s bed while reading bedtime
stories.” She says it like all the boundaries in the world are so
simple. And maybe they are.

Ally tells me that Shmen is moving into a nearby apartment.
That she’ll still do what she can to help him. They aren’t even
breaking up. This relieves me and makes me think that they’ll
work things out. Especially if I can get him drinking less. But
in the same breath, she says that she’s working toward having
Maddy less attached to Shmen.

“Traitor,” I tell her. But I say it so quietly and so empty
of confidence, really I’m just trying out that word to see if it
works. And it doesn’t quite work.

“Yuvi,” the traitoress says, “we can’t force Shmen to take
care of himself.”

There’s a growing pile of pages on my desk.

I’ve been unable to spend time with Shmen. He is away from
his house most of the time and even though he still calls me late
at night, it’s clear he doesn’t want to hang out with me or Julia,
which freaks Julia out even more than me. He keeps saying he
needs more time but he doesn’t say what he needs time for. It’s
like he is building a nuclear weapon in that apartment.

Julia walks into my office and looks at the pile. She
probably thinks it’s for her, which it sort of is, but I’m still too
scared to share it. It’s not ready. It’s never ready.

But also, I just thought of a way to get another perspective
on this book. And it doesn’t even require begging a Palestinian/
Clevelandian man who’s smarter than me. It doesn’t require anyone
but me. And my manuscript. And a shitload of clothespins.

Julia kisses me on the crown of the head. And then she
takes the whole pile off the table—all thirty-seven chapters.
She takes the pile before I even have time to think about
whether or not I’m ready to give it to her.

“Now,” she says, “let me see what the hell else you’ve been
writing about all these months.” Her smile is a sneaky one.

Julia puts the pile of papers in her purse, which gives you
an idea of the size of her purse, and her heels click their way
to the front door.

“Wait!” I say.

The clicking stops.

“Can I do one more thing?” I say. “Can you leave the pages
with me? I promise that they will be ready for you by the end
of the week.”

“Who do I need to crucify to finally get to see this thing?”
It’s her tired voice, and the tired voice is a very bad sign at 9
am, especially after a cup of coffee.

“Give me a few more days,” I say.

“Yuvi,” she says, “we’re on the same side.”

“I know,” I say, and I think about whether I know this.

My wife pulls the pile of a novel out of her purse. She holds
the thing tight, wiggles it in her hand. She squats down and
carefully places the pile on the floor.

“Friday,” she says to the pile on the floor. “End of business
Friday. Last chance.” And then she clicks her way right out of
the house.

Shmen still calls. Late. Too late.

Oh, he has important things to say. Aibohphobia is the
fear of palindromes. “Spiro Agnew” and “grow a penis” are
anagrams. So are “Desperation” and “A rope ends it.”

Some of them are repeats, but at this hour, who’s counting?
We still laugh even though he only allows for anagrams
and palindromes and none of my awkward prodding about
his health. Except at this hour, it’s easier for me to let go of
prodding and just enjoy whatever he gives me.

He also keeps talking about my novel.

“Here’s your problem,” he tells me. “You’re getting there
with the book, but you’re not out of the woods yet. Your train
is still rickety. There’s a big matzo ball ahead.”

Even though it’s the telephone, I nod. He hasn’t read my novel and his metaphors
are dripping with
meshugas
, but I can’t disagree with him either.
He knows me. He knows my problems. And my problems are my novel’s problems.
Even so, I’m scared to ask him for more information.

“How are you feeling?” I say.

He says, “Well, it’s time to go.”

The phone goes click before I say goodbye.

I listen to that dial tone for a sign of things to come. And I
worry that this is it. That he will be gone before we meet again.

Here is how it goes: I hammer two nails on opposite walls. I
tie a string between the two. Now I’ve got a clothesline going
across my living room. I hammer two more nails. Another
clothesline. And two more nails. Eventually the living room
is covered with rows of strings. I open up six bags of fifty
clothespins each. I bring in my thirty-nine-chapter novel and
I hang each damn page up on its own clothespin. This ritual
is an easy one. It only takes twenty minutes, and I don’t think
much of it until I stand back against the wall farthest from the
pages and look at what I’ve got.

It’s absurd to imagine this big room full of my pages
crammed into a little electronic book reading device. Maybe
someone else’s book might fit in one of those contraptions.
But my bulging, unformed mess of a book doesn’t even fit in
our goddamn living room.

What I’ve got is a thirty-nine-chapter conceit. I could have
been busy trying to make millions or to save the world or to
save just one soul or even to kill a dragon or even to slay the
hero. What I’ve chosen to do is write this thing that requires
16 clotheslines, 32 nails, and 261 clothespins.

I grab all the childhood pictures of Julia I’ve stolen and
hidden under the mattress. This includes the one with her
sideways-face-smile and the one with her birthday hat that
says “Everyone Loves Me” on it and the one where she has a
finger up her mom’s nose. I tack them up on the living room
wall. And then I put the picture I stole from Yousef of his father
on the wall. And then I grab those napkins I’ve collected, Save
Me, Julia, which turned out to be from Shmen, and I put them
up on the wall, too.

I push my desk into the living room. It involves some
twisting and turning and it results in some cuts up and down
my arms and hands and the taste of salt in my mouth from
sucking the blood. But these are unintentional cuts, I should
remind you. I feel like a vampire who has tried to become
good and has stopped killing people but then comes across
someone recently killed and so he sucks what’s left of their
blood but he has to keep reminding himself that he hasn’t
done anything wrong. It feels just like that.

I get a beer out of the refrigerator and then open it and
then I pour the entire contents of the beer into the sink and
then I hold the empty beer bottle in my hand, just for comfort.
The day is getting warm and the air inside the house feels stale
and I decide not to open a window. I stand up on my desk
with my empty beer and look at what’s in front of me.

I don’t remember much in the way of Hebrew teachings from
Hebrew school, but what I do remember is a rabbi talking to us about Moses.
How, in the end, he wasn’t allowed to enter the Promised Land. Not in his
lifetime. But he was able to stand on Mount Pisgah and see it. “Imagine it!”
this rabbi cried out to us. “Moses could taste it between his teeth, but he
couldn’t swallow it!” Of course, none of us appreciated his words because
we just wanted class to end. But I still remember how intense he was about
this story. And from then on, I started getting dreams about Moses. No joke.
I dreamed about him. Except I screwed the whole story up. In my dreams, he
was standing on Stone Mountain—that granite mountain in Atlanta with the ninety-by-two-hundred-foot
carving of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson on their
horses. In the dream, Moses stood on the carving of Lee’s horse (on the horse’s
nose actually), and he was looking out toward something that I couldn’t quite
see. There was something he wanted so badly and it was just out of reach.
But in my dreams, it didn’t seem like he was looking at a place exactly. It
was more about people than place. Maybe he was just missing an old girlfriend,
some gorgeous Egyptian lady with long legs that he hadn’t seen in forty years.
But in my dream, I never found out what he was looking for. I always woke
up empty-handed.

When my wife walks in, I’m sitting on the floor in the middle
of the room and I jump to attention.

She says, “Jesus H. Tap-dancing Christ.” And then she
looks around the living room in silence.

“I know,” I say, about her silence. And about the reference
to her tap-dancing savior.

My wife walks up and down the aisles as if browsing at
a secondhand store. She’s in that pretty black dress with the
hemline down below her knees and the hem floats off her skin
as she walks. When she looks up on the wall and sees these
pictures of her from thirty years ago, I hear a little gasp inside
her little mouth. But she still doesn’t say anything. And then
she walks right up to me.

I try to play the role of the detached cashier, only mildly
interested in whether she wants to buy anything. “Can I help
you with anything?” I say to my dear wife.

She is almost crying. It’s not that there are tears. And it’s not
that her eyes look moist. And it’s not that she is making a crying
face. But it’s still there. The lips tremble if you look closely. The
eyelids aren’t completely opened. Her hand rests on my wrist,
and she says, “You can’t help me right now. Not yet.”

I nod. It’s all I can do. Just that one vague, three-letter
gesture.

“You’ve written a lot,” Julia says.

“Come here,” I say to my wife, even though she is standing
right next to me. And I grab her by her hand, which is warm
from the outside world, and I bring her to the desk. We’re in a
particular state of mind at this point. I know this because I’m
not worried about anything right now. And because Julia has
not said a word about my desk being in the wrong damn room.
I lift her hand and she understands this means to get up on the
desk and so she gets up there. She’s shaved her legs today and
they are smooth except for the one little scab at the ankle.

“What do I do now?” she asks from up high on the desk.

“Look at this mess,” I say, and I point all around the room
for effect. “What do you see?”

“It is a mess,” Julia says from up on the desk. “No wonder your
people wandered so many years in the desert.”

“Thank you,” I say. It’s harder to hear someone else say it’s a
mess even though I’ve been using that word all these months.

Julia steps back down from the desk and then straightens
out her dress. “But it’s a mess with heart.” When she looks at
me, I understand that she has already read my novel, somehow,
and that she knows exactly what happens, somehow.

“Thank you for saving my brother from the piano,” she
says to me.

“I couldn’t let it happen to him.”

“That’s good,” she says. “Because he’s coming over for
dinner and he’s bringing the food.”

“You convinced him to come over?” I ask. I’ve been having
no luck with anything other than late-night calls and I’m
nervous at the idea of seeing him. Feels like it’s a blind date to
prepare for. “Is he okay? Is it bad?”

“No,” Julia says. “He actually sounds good. He said he just
needed some time after moving out of Ally’s place.”

I’m quiet. She’s quiet. We both want to believe this. But
we both don’t know if we should. “Good,” I say, almost like a
question.

“So let’s see here,” Julia says, browsing my manuscript again.

My wife walks among the pages. She starts at the beginning
and walks along the first row while looking quickly at each
page, as if speed-reading my novel. She continues along each
row until she gets to the end. And then she goes back to the
first row and yanks a page from the clothespin.

“Here’s a problem,” she says.

It’s that part where I mention my mother was buried in
Israel and my father was cremated—a part I tried to pull out
of the damn book except whenever I pulled it out, the rest of
the book kept unraveling.

“What’s wrong with it?” I say.

“You haven’t closed off the loose ends.”

“You mean you see some ends around here?” I say, thrilled
by the prospect that my novel has something worth closing.
But also not excited to hear what I have to do. Probably she’ll
tell me that it’ll take some actual work.

“First of all, you have to reconcile some things with your
father,” she says.

“Haven’t I been doing that the whole time?”

“Sort of,” she says.

Even though I’m a professional narcissist, I’ve learned
some things about my wife at this point in the novel. Like
the fact that “sort of ” is a synonym for “Hell no, you stupid
schmuck.”

She says, “You can’t just mention that a Jew gets cremated
and not tell about it.”

“I thought I already told about it.” In this context, “I
thought” is a synonym for “Stop making me feel like an even
bigger schmuck than I am.”

She crumples the page she is holding, drops it on the floor
(clearly proving who wears the pants in this manuscript),
and then walks over to the end of the novel. She goes right to
Chapter 41. “Oy,” she says with the guttural sound of an old,
fat Ashkenazi wise man. “You can’t just leave it this way. The
first step in finishing this is for you to go back to that river. See
where it takes you.”

I look at all the pages across this room and I consider
ripping them up. I can’t imagine that I have the energy to do
this and I wonder why I write this stuff in the first place.

But my wife, she is unwavering. Her gentile red hair and
her gentile freckles, they know me better than I know me.

Just then, I see a sadness in Julia’s eyes. She says, “I can’t
rewrite the fact that I slept with another man. I can’t rewrite
the story of my mother. You can’t rewrite your parents into
existence. But you still have the chance to reshape your novel.”

She puts a hand on her stomach. Carefully, like she doesn’t
want to disturb anything. I could swear that her belly has a
different shape to it. And I try to think when was the last time
she had a period. I realize that for all I know she hasn’t had a
period for the whole novel. This novel is period free. But still,
something is going on in her body.

Fuck. I know I should feel a joy in all of this, but I don’t.
You know what I feel? Terror. Another terror on top of all the
other terrors. Fuck.

“Forget it,” I say, “I can’t do this.”

I’m not looking at her anymore. I’m looking at my pages.
I grab pages from the clotheslines and I pull them out so fast
that the clothespins don’t even notice. So many pages on the
floor that I’m slipping on them as I try to bring the whole
novel down. Worse than bananas in a cartoon.

I fantasized we would be one of those couples who struggles
across three years to have a baby. I wanted us to be frustrated
and exhausted and required to learn all about crazy fertility
issues that neither of us ever wanted to know about. I wanted
that whole emotionally and financially costly mess. Because it
would have bought me some more time.

“Yuvi!” the wife yells at me. “Stop it!”

She grabs me from behind and holds me so that I can’t
move my arms enough to grab more pages. Gentiles can be
quite strong. And I stop struggling, the heat from her body
pressed against me.

I take deep breaths. I know this novel can’t withstand me
struggling with the idea of being a parent. I haven’t even told
you about my nightmares where it rains foreskins. And then
the idea of a little neurotic, redheaded Yuvi running around,
whining even louder than me. It’s too much.

“It’s going to be fine,” she says to me. I don’t actually believe
her, but I like her confidence. She must be right even if I’m
sure she’s wrong. If only she followed around my stream of
consciousness everywhere it went.

She says, “Just take this one step at a time.”

It’s a tired cliché, I could never get away with a line like that
in my novel, but when she says it, it feels fresh. First I go back
to the river, then I finish this novel, then I learn how to change
a shit-filled diaper. I don’t have to do it all at once.

And then my confident wife says, “Come on. It’s time to
take a break. We have two hours before Shmen will be here.
So let’s go to bed.” She grabs me by the hand, and we leave the
sixteen clotheslines and all those clothespins behind.

Except for two. Because you never know when you might
need a pair of makeshift nipple clamps.