A Brilliant Novel in the Works (7 page)

The age: eight years old. For both Ezra and me. And for
Adam Silver, whose birthday party it was. The setting: Adam Silver’s house.
Adam’s father, dressed as a bad clown (with a sweet smell coming off his skin
that I’d later connect to alcoholics), had just finished his performance and
we were all sitting on the living room floor playing with the twisted balloon
objects he had given us. He claimed that they were elephants and giraffes
and houses but they were just tangled messes. Even so, his excitement while
naming these tangled creatures gave us the authority to twist them up further
and call them whatever we wanted: a racing car, a naked girl hanging from
the jungle gym, Tyrannosaurus rex. We were loving it.

By we, I mean all the kids but one. The one not playing was Ezra, who
had recently crawled over to the corner of the room and sat there quietly,
hoping to disappear. Ezra had pissed in his pants so badly that his jeans
were wet down to his knees.

But I didn’t see him in the corner. I was too wrapped up in the sound
of twisting the narrow balloons around each other, and how amazing it was
that they seemed unpoppable. There were boys at the party, there were girls
at the party, but I actually don’t remember a single face or name. All I remember
is Ezra Roth in the corner, whom I wasn’t even watching at the time.

Until I heard Adam Silver yell, “Hey! Look! Ezra peed in his pants!”
Adam yelled this out even though he knew that Ezra had gotten him Mousetrap
for his birthday, as he’d asked. And just like that, all ten of us jumped
Ezra Roth.

Imagine this: (1) My best friend red-faced and ashamed, completely silent,
sitting in the corner with his knees in the air higher than his slouchy body.
(2) Nine children trying to spread Ezra’s legs, boys and girls laughing and
making fun of how wet he was. “What a baby!” they yelled. (3) And then me,
one little boy, crying and trying to squeeze Ezra’s legs together, whining,
“Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” like the act of closing his legs could make this
whole unpleasant scene disappear.

Throughout all this craziness, Ezra didn’t say a word; he just let his
legs open and close like they weren’t part of his body. Eventually, Adam’s
mother ran into the room and broke up the party. She took Ezra with her while
Adam’s dad tried to distract us—he did an impeccable imitation of John Belushi
as a king bee from Saturday Night Live, which none of us understood. A few
minutes later Ezra walked out of the bathroom with a pair of Adam’s sweatpants—Adam’s
favorite pair, apparently.

I wouldn’t explain to my mother why I was crying so badly when she picked
me up. When we got home, she had to call Adam’s mother to get the story. And
then my mother looked at me, all confused, as if she wished I had wet my pants
as well, so as to explain my hysteria.

The next day, nobody said anything, not a word about this whole event.
Even Ezra acted like nothing had happened. And so I kept my mouth shut. But
I cried that next night as well. When my mom came into my bedroom, I told
her that I had a cold, and so she gave me some chewable Tylenol, a remedy
she used for many of my bouts of angst.

Ezra would later become a highly acclaimed surgeon. He’d be famous for
his success in performing high-risk operations on children. I’ve been toying
with calling him one of these days. It’s a little tricky to know how to phrase
something like, “Remember that time when you pissed in your pants and I was
trying to force your crotch closed? Because I think about that all the time!”

It’s not that I’m scared to call him. I don’t call him because I know
what he’ll say: “I guess I just don’t remember that.” It’s not because he
has blocked out the event. It’s not because he is in denial or has some part
of him that is stuck in his childhood. It’s not a deficiency. He doesn’t remember
because it wasn’t a memorable event for him. It was one of a thousand blips
along the road of his childhood. Ezra Roth is a man who has to go up to a
young couple in the waiting room and say to them that he has just seen their
five-year-old son die on the operating table. And then he has to go back into
the operating room and do it all over again with another child. Ezra Roth
can’t afford to dwell on how he pissed his pants in 1980.

I don’t have to do the things in a day’s work that Ezra has to do. Some
days, I don’t interact with a single person. But I do often think about Ezra
Roth. And sometimes I even think about Adam Silver’s dad in those days when
he looked so happy. And I imagine the sound of balloons squeaking when twisted
into absurd shapes, expecting them to pop
.

A few weeks into living with the knowledge that napkin men
don’t exist, I catch Julia moping on the couch.

It’s a rare sight to actually catch Julia feeling down. For
Julia, feeling down causes her to move faster, to do more, to be
more than her already-complete self, to save twenty families
rather than just ten. Down keeps her up on her feet. As for me,
down is down. So when I see her in the living room lying on
the couch, staring at the ceiling, looking nearly as helpless as
me, I’m pretty damn scared.

“Julia,” I say. “What happened?” I expect her to tell me a
story of how one of her alcoholics has died, so it scares me
even more when she reaches out for my hand and pulls me
toward her. Her hand is warm and sweet and soft and I don’t
know what to do with it.

She says to me in a quiet and scratchy voice, “When my mom
would try to get Joel and me to bed, she’d do this thing where
she’d have us hide under the sheets. She’d leave the room for a few
seconds, and then she’d run in and tickle us through the sheets.”

I put my hand in Julia’s hair and scratch her head. “It
sounds awfully scary,” I say.

“It’s one of the happiest moments I can remember.”

It takes an adjustment in my mind to make this scene happy. I
have to make the sounds and colors and smells a little bit different.
I have to change the mood of the characters. I have to think of
Joel and Julia so pleased to be hiding together. I have to put that
gorgeous giggle on Julia’s face. And suddenly, I can picture the
scene just as sentimental and beautiful as she meant it.

“I want a family,” Julia says to me. “I want to have a family.”

I stop scratching her head.

There’s the fact that we haven’t had anything that approaches
baby-making sex in years. There’s the fact that our communication
is nearly as tangled and broken as Shmen’s large intestine when
the surgeons pulled it out of his body. There’s the fact that Julia
didn’t exactly say that she wants a family with me, she just wants a
family. I might not be in the picture at all. And there’s the fact that
I feel a terror somewhere deep in my chest when thinking about
being responsible for another thing that breathes.

I could ask her to expand on what she wants. I could discuss
this subject further. I could explain my various thoughts about
family—some positive and some terrified. But what I do is
something more self-involved and more cowardly, something
less sincere and less open to discussion.

I say, “I don’t want a fucking kid because I’ll be an asshole
like my dad.” And then I walk out of the room. I walk out of
the house and don’t come back for hours.

This is how my dad dealt with complicated subjects when
I was a kid. Except when he walked out of the room, I always
pictured that he had an unwavering feeling about the matter,
that he was convinced of being right.

But I now understand that my father walked away from
discussions with the exact feeling I get after walking away—
an instant sense of regret, confident that I’ve dealt with the
situation poorly, and wondering why the hell I always fuck
everything up for no good reason.

My father did this thing with children where he pretended
he could lay eggs. After the first time he did it to me, I asked him to do
it again and again. And he did this trick for years and years. I best remember
when he did it to my little cousin, David. At the time I was maybe sixteen
or eighteen and David was maybe six or eight. It was at my aunt and uncle’s
place after dinner; we were celebrating someone’s birthday or mourning someone’s
death or celebrating some Jewish holiday or perhaps atoning for our many sins.

My father came out of the kitchen and sat with David on the living room
couch. “You know,” my father whispered. “I can lay eggs.”

David thought about this for a moment and then said, “Nuh-uh!”

“It’s true. I could lay one for you right now.”

“Only birds lay eggs,” David said. A boy who had clearly read a book
or two about who lays eggs and who doesn’t. “Mommies make babies a different
way. Eggs aren’t the way.”

“Now, normally I’d agree with you,” my dad said, “but I can sit here
right next to you and lay an egg on this couch. I could make you an omelet
with my eggs.”

“Show me,” David said, still skeptical.

My father scrunched his face tight. He opened his mouth and groaned loud
enough for people in the kitchen to come into the living room to see what
was going on. And then my father stood up.

“He did it!” David said, and he stood up off the couch and pointed and
yelled. “He did it he did it he did it he did it!” David grabbed the egg and
ran around the house showing everybody what my father had just given birth
to.

We left the party soon after that, with David in the corner of the living
room grunting, trying his best to lay an egg.

About two hours later, we got the call. My mother picked up the phone
and listened to my uncle’s situation. “You need to get your tuches back there.
David has already made kahkee into two pairs of pajamas.”

My father drove those fifteen miles for the second time in order to reveal
his trick, which David would end up using on his own children twenty years
later.

And that’s one of the things I loved about my dad. He had a charm that
was powerful enough to cause you to shit your pants twice in one night, trying
to lay a damn egg
.

“Dude, I need a favor.”
It’s a reflex of mine to look for my checkbook
when Shmen calls. But then he says, “I’m supposed to pick Maddy
up from school today, except that my knee isn’t behaving.”

And as I try to formulate a question about the behavior
of his knee, he says, “Someone needs to be at her school in
twenty-five minutes.”

Ally has told me it’s a ritual that her daughter loves. She runs
out of the school giggling whenever Shmen picks her up.

I don’t even know if she’ll recognize me. I’ve only met her a
few times. But when I step into the school and look around the
after-care area, this cute little blonde-haired girl runs up and
hugs me. She squeezes me tightly and I’m tempted to explain
to this girl all the reasons that I’m not such a huggable person:
I’m a coward. I worry all the time. I’m a poor communicator.
I can’t stop thinking about my dead father, even while my wife
is trying to seduce me. I obsess over napkins. I can’t please my
wife. I’m a narcissist.

But when Maddy stops hugging, I’m tempted to ask her to
do it again.

“I guess you know who I am,” I say.

“Of course!” She holds my hand and begins to drag me out
of the school. “You’re Joelly’s brother!”

Maddy is carrying a book with her called
The Gorilla Did
It
. When I ask her about it, she says it’s great because it’s about a
gorilla that wakes up a sleeping boy and convinces him to mess up his room.
When the boy gets in trouble, he explains to his mother that the gorilla did
it.

I start to wonder how I might use this phrase. For instance,
if I’m standing on my desk in my underwear and my wife
comes in, pissed off that I didn’t pick up the groceries like
I promised, I could say, “It’s not me, the gorilla did it.” And
when my wife puts her hand down my pants and feels that soft
and scared little organ, I could say, “The gorilla did it!” When
my editor asks for the novel, I’ll tell her, “The gorilla took it.”

It would solve a lot of problems.

On the drive home, Maddy tells me story after story about
her day as if I were a part of her family and it makes me feel so
glad to be around her. She tells me the rules of Everybody’s It
Tag and she explains how boys smell more like dirt and how
girls smell more like flowers and she tells me that her teacher’s
father died last week and she tells me that her best friend has
four cats, three ferrets, and twenty-seven tomatoes. And then
she asks me how to spell Poop Mobile.

“Poop Mobile?” I ask. “What’s that?”

“It’s the truck that picks you up when you have to poop so
bad that you need to go to the hospital.”

“Does Joelly ever go to the hospital?” I ask, trying to sound
casual even while I’m scared to hear the answer.

“Not really,” she says. “And did you know that the Poop
Mobile is made out of bulletproof glass?”

“Well that makes sense,” I say.

“And did you know,” she tells me, “you can’t spell husband
without anus?”

Maddy pretty much controls the conversation the whole
car ride home. She’s under ten and she’s more confident than
the me that my therapist makes me write about when I’m
trying to pretend I’m overconfident.

“I have a crush on a boy,” she says.

“You do? Already?”

“What do you mean already? He is my fourth, if you count
D avid.”

“Let’s count him,” I say.

“Me and Jeffrey are going to buy a four-bedroom house.
We’ll need three cars so that we can always have one for our
friends. And we want three kids—two girls. We’re going to
Hawaii for our honeymoon.”

“Wow,” I say. “You’ve got more plans than I’ve ever had.”

I glance her way and see that she is pondering this
observation. That she has it more together than a so-called
adult. “Where did you go,” she says, “on your honeymoon
with Aunt Julia?”

“Oh,” I say. “We went to cremate my father in North
Carolina.” It comes out without me thinking about it. I see
Maddy try to parse my answer. But, fortunately, not try too
hard.

“Does North Carolina have a beach?” she says.

“Better you should tell me more about you and Jeffrey,” I
say, scared of what I might tell her next.

As I’m sitting there enjoying her breathlessly told stories,
she asks me if Aunt Julia is still mad at me.

“Mad about what?” And then I realize I’m using a seven-year-old
to get to the crux of my relationship issues.

“You know,” she says. “About your problems.”

“Which ones?”

I take a few wrong turns, which suits Maddy just fine. I could
take a 2,500-mile wrong turn and she’d have plenty to talk
about.

“Tell me about when you and Joelly were kids,” she says.

I think about explaining to her how I didn’t grow up with
Joel. That we’re not related. I think about explaining the
difference between blood relatives and in-laws.

And then I say, “You know Hawaii is actually made up of
seven different islands.”

When I finally drop Maddy off at her mother’s barn, Ally gives
me a big hug. It’s a more adult version of Maddy’s hug but
just as comforting. We agree that the four of us should go out
again. And then Ally says something else: “You should come
back here soon. Just you. When you have time. I want to show
you my horses.”

Ally isn’t a tall woman. She is probably five feet tall in
regular life. But standing beside her barn, as she points to it,
as she wears those big boots, as she gives me a half smile, she
seems a foot taller than me. Her hair is messy from whatever
it is she does in her barn.

It feels like she’s coming on to me. A secret. In a barn. Just
me, her, and the horses. How can that not be wrong? But I
know that I’m misunderstanding something. Sometimes I just
feel too dumb to understand this world.

When I was a kid, my dad kept a jar sitting on the bookshelf
that said “Great Truths” on it. When I asked him what that
meant, he said it was a joke, because no truth is greater than
another. For years, I walked around our house wondering
what was so funny about that.

“Yes, I’d like that,” I say to Ally, “but right now I’ve got to
meet Julia.”

Which is a “Great Lie.”

My dad kept nothing but paperclips inside that jar of truths. I wonder what
Ally keeps inside that barn of hers. But I still leave. I leave faster than
you can say
Oy veyshmir
.

But as I’m running away from Ally and her barn, I still
manage to hear a nice goodbye from Maddy. She says, “See
you later, Shmuvi!” And she says it like Shmuvi has always
been my name.