Here I Am (4 page)

“You're romanticizing racism, misogyny, and homophobia.”

“Have you even
read
Caro's—”

“I saw the movie.”

“I'm trying to get my grandson out of a bind. That's so wrong?”

“If he shouldn't get out of it.”

Benjy trotted back into the room: “Is it
married
?”

“Is what married?”

“The n-word.”

“That begins with an
m
.”

Benjy turned and trotted back out.

“What your mother said before, about you and Julia needing to approach this together? That was wrong. You need to defend Sam. Let everyone else worry about what actually happened.”

“I believe him.”

And then, as if noticing her absence for the first time: “Where is Julia, anyway?”

“Taking the day off.”

“Off from what?”

“Off.”

“Thank you, Anne Sullivan, but in fact I heard you. Off from
what
?”

“From
on
. Can you just let it be?”

“Sure,” Irv said, nodding. “That's an option. But let me speak some words of wisdom that not even Mother Mary knows.”

“Can't wait.”

“Nothing goes away. Not on its own. You deal with it, or it deals with you.”

“This too shall—?”

“Solomon wasn't perfect. In all of human history, nothing has ever gone away on its own.”

“Farts do,” Jacob said, as if to honor Sam's absence.

“Your house stinks, Jacob. You just can't smell it, because it's yours.”

Jacob could have pointed out that there was Argus shit somewhere within a three-room radius. He'd known it as soon as he opened the front door.

Benjy came back into the room. “I remembered my question,” he said, despite having given no indication of trying to remember anything.

“Yes?”

“The sound of time. What happened to it?”

Julia liked the eye being led where the body can't go. She liked irregular brickwork, when one can't tell if the craftsmanship is careless or masterly. She liked the feeling of enclosure, with the suggestion of expansiveness. She liked it when the view wasn't centered in the window, but also liked remembering that views are, by nature's nature, centered. She liked doorknobs that one wants to keep holding. She liked steps up, and steps down. She liked shadows laid upon other shadows. She liked breakfast banquettes. She liked light woods (beech, maple), and didn't like “masculine” woods (walnut, mahogany), and didn't care for steel, and hated stainless steel (until it was thoroughly scratched), and imitations of natural materials were intolerable, unless their fakeness was declared, was the point, in which case they could be quite beautiful. She liked textures that the fingers and feet know, even if the eye doesn't. She liked fireplaces centered in kitchens centered on the main living floor. She liked more bookshelves than are necessary. She liked skylights over showers, but nowhere else. She liked intentional imperfections, but she couldn't bear nonchalance, but she also liked to remember that there could be no such thing as an intentional imperfection. People are always mistaking something that looks good for something that feels good.

you're begging me to fuck your tight pussy, but you don't deserve it yet

She didn't like uniform textures—they aren't how things are. She didn't like rugs centered in rooms. Good architecture should make one
feel as if one is in a cave with a view of the horizon. She didn't like double-height ceilings. She didn't like too much glass. The function of a window is to bring in light, not to frame a view. A ceiling should be just out of reach of the extended fingers of a raised hand of the tallest occupant standing on tiptoes. She didn't like carefully placed trinkets—things belong where they don't. An eleven-foot ceiling is too high. It makes one feel lost, forsaken. A ten-foot ceiling is too high. She felt that everything was out of reach. Nine feet is too high. Something that feels good—safe, comfortable, designed for living—can always be made to look good. She didn't like recessed lighting, or lamps controlled by wall switches—so sconces, chandeliers, and effort. She didn't like concealed functions—refrigerators behind panels, toiletries behind mirrors, TVs that descend into cabinets.

Every architect has fantasies of building her own home, and so does every woman. For as long as she could remember, Julia had felt a secret thrill whenever she passed a small parking lot or an undeveloped slice of land:
potential
. For what? To build something beautiful? Intelligent? New? Or simply for a home that might feel like home? Her joys were shared, not fully hers, but her thrills were private.

She had never wanted to become an architect, but she always wanted to make a home for herself. She disposed of the dolls to free the boxes they came in. She spent a summer furnishing the space under her bed. Her clothes covered every surface in her room, because closets shouldn't be wasted with utility. It wasn't until she started designing homes for herself—all on paper, each a source of pride and shame—that she came to understand what was meant by “herself.”

“This is so great,” Jacob said while being led through a floor plan. Julia never shared her personal work with him unless he explicitly asked. It wasn't a secret, but the experience of sharing always seemed to leave her feeling humiliated. He was never enthusiastic enough, or not in the right ways. And when his enthusiasm came, it felt like a gift with too precious a bow. (The
so
ruined everything.) He was filing away his enthusiasm for future retrieval the next time she said he was never enthusiastic about her work. And it humiliated her, also, to need his enthusiasm, even to want it.

What's wrong with such wanting and needing? Nothing. And the yawning distance from where you are to what you'd always imagined does not have to suggest failure. Disappointment need not be disappointing. The wanting, the needing, the distance, the disappointment: growing, knowing, committing, aging beside another. Alone, one can live perfectly. But not a life.

“It's great,” he said, so close his nose almost touched the two-dimensional rendering of her fantasy. “Amazing, actually. How do you think of these things?”

“I'm not sure I do think of them.”

“This is what, an interior garden?”

“Yeah, the stairs will rise around a light shaft.”

“Sam would say, ‘
Shaft
…' ”

“And you would laugh, and I would ignore it.”

“Or we'd both ignore it. Anyway, this is really, really nice.”

“Thank you.”

Jacob touched his finger to the floor plan, moved it through a series of rooms, always through the doors. “I know I'm no good at reading these things, but where would the kids sleep?”

“What do you mean?”

“Unless I'm misunderstanding something here, which is probably the case, there's only one bedroom.”

Julia tilted her head, squinted.

Jacob said, “You know the one about the couple who get divorced after eighty years of marriage?”

“No.”

“Everyone asks, ‘Why now? Why not decades ago, when there was still life to live? Or why not just see it through to the end?' And they respond, ‘We were waiting for the grandchildren to die.' ”

Julia liked calculators that printed—the Jews of the office store, having stubbornly out-survived so many more-promising business machines—and while the kids assembled school supplies, she would tap out feet of numbers. Once, she calculated the minutes until Benjy went to college. She left it there, as evidence.

Her homes were just stupid little exercises, a hobby. She and Jacob would never have the money, nor the time and energy, and she'd done enough residential architecture to know that the desire to wring out a
few more drips of happiness almost always destroyed the happiness you were so lucky to have, and so foolish never to acknowledge. It happens every time: a forty-thousand-dollar kitchen remodel becomes a seventy-five-thousand-dollar kitchen remodel (because everyone comes to believe that small differences make big differences), becomes a new exit to the garden (to bring more light into the enhanced kitchen), becomes a new bathroom (if you're already sealing off the floor for work…), becomes stupidly rewiring the house to be smart (so you can control the music in the kitchen with your phone), becomes passive-aggression over whether the new bookshelves should be on legs (to reveal the inlaid floor borders), becomes aggressive-aggression whose origin can no longer be remembered. One can build a perfect home, but not live in it.

do you like my tongue pushing its way between your tight lips?

show me

cum on my mouth

There was a night, early in their marriage, at a Pennsylvania inn. She and Jacob shared a joint—the first time either had smoked since college—and lay in bed naked, and promised to share everything, everything without exception, regardless of the shame or discomfort or potential for hurt. It felt like the most ambitious promise two people could make to each other. Basic truth telling felt like a revelation.

“No exceptions,” Jacob said.

“Even one would undermine everything.”

“Bed-wetting. That kind of thing.”

Julia took Jacob's hand and said, “Do you know how much I'd love you for sharing something like that?”

“I don't happen to bed-wet, by the way. I'm just establishing boundaries.”

“No boundaries. That's the point.”

“Past sexual encounters?” Jacob asked, because he knew it was the address of his greatest vulnerability, and so the place such sharing would have to go. Always, even after he'd lost the desire to touch or be touched by her, he abhorred the thought of her touching or being touched by another man. People she'd been with, pleasure she'd given and received, things she'd moaned. He was not an insecure person in other contexts, but his
brain was compelled, with the magnetism of someone unable to escape the perpetual reliving of a trauma, to imagine her being sexually intimate with others. What did she say to them that she also said to him? Why would such repetitions feel like the ultimate betrayal?

“Of course they would be painful,” she said. “But the point isn't that I want to know everything about you. It's that I don't want anything about you withheld.”

“So I won't.”

“And I won't.”

They passed the joint back and forth a few times, feeling so brave, so still-young.

“What are you withholding right now?” she asked, almost giddily.

“Right now, nothing.”

“But you
have
withheld?”

“Therefore I am.”

She laughed. She loved his quickness, the oddly comforting warmth of his mind's connections.

“What's the last thing you withheld from me?”

He thought about it. Being stoned made it harder to think, but easier to share thoughts.

“OK,” he said. “It's a little one.”

“I want all of them.”

“OK. We were in the apartment the other day. It was Wednesday, maybe? And I made breakfast for you. Remember? The goat cheese frittata.”

“Yeah,” she said, resting her hand on his thigh, “that was nice.”

“I let you sleep in, and I secretly made breakfast.”

She exhaled a column of smoke that held its form for longer than seemed possible, and said, “I could eat a lot of that right now.”

“I made it because I wanted to take care of you.”

“I felt that,” she said, moving her hand up his thigh, making him hard.

“And I made it look really nice on the plate. That little salad beside it.”

“Like a restaurant,” she said, taking his cock in her hand.

“And after your first bite—”

“Yes?”

“There's a reason people withhold.”

“We're not people.”

“OK. Well, after your first bite, instead of thanking me, or saying it was delicious, you asked me if I'd salted it.”

“So?” she asked, moving her fist up and down.

“So that felt like shit.”

“That I asked if it was salted?”

“Maybe not felt like shit. It annoyed me. Or disappointed me. Whatever I felt, I didn't share it.”

“But I was just asking a matter-of-fact question.”

“That feels good.”

“Good, love.”

“But can you see how, in the context of the effort I was making for you, asking if it was salted conveyed criticism rather than gratefulness?”

“It feels like an effort to cook breakfast for me?”

“It was a special breakfast.”

“Does this feel good?”

“It feels amazing.”

“So in the future, if I think a food needs more salt, I should keep that to myself?”

“Or it sounds like I should keep my hurt to myself.”

“Your
disappointment
.”

“I could already come.”

“So come.”

“I don't want to come yet.”

She slowed down, slowed to a grip.

“What are you withholding right now?” he asked. “And don't say that you're slightly hurt, annoyed, and disappointed by my hurt, annoyance, and disappointment, because you're not withholding that.”

She laughed.

“So?”

“I'm not withholding anything,” she said.

“Dig.”

She shook her head and laughed.

“What?”

“In the car, you were singing ‘All Apologies' and you kept singing, ‘I can see from shame.' ”

“So?”

“So that's not what it is.”

“Of course that's what it is.”

“Aqua seafoam shame.”

“What!”

“Yup.”

“Aqua. Seafoam. Shame?”

“My hand upon the Jewish Bible.”

“You're telling me that my perfectly sensical phrase—sensical on its own,
and
in its context—is actually just a subconscious expression of my repressed whatever, and that Kurt Cobain intentionally strung together the words
aqua seafoam shame
?”

“That is what I'm telling you.”

“Well, I cannot believe that. But at the same time, I'm extremely embarrassed.”

“Don't be.”

“That usually works when someone's embarrassed.”

She laughed.

“That shouldn't count,” he said. “Hobbyist withholding. Give me something good.”

“Good?”

“Something really difficult.”

She smiled.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Sure sounds like something.”

“OK,” she said. “I'm withholding something. Something really difficult.”

“Excellent.”

“But I don't think I'm evolved enough to share.”

“So went the dinosaurs.”

She pressed a pillow over her face and scissored her legs.

“It's just me,” he said.

“OK,” with a sigh. “OK. Well. Lying here, stoned, our bodies naked, I just had a desire.”

He instinctively reached his hand between her legs, and found that she was already wet.

“Tell me,” he said.

“I can't.”

“I bet you can.”

She laughed.

“Close your eyes,” he said. “It will make it easier.”

She closed her eyes.

“Nope,” she said. “Not easier. Maybe if you close yours?”

He closed his eyes.

“I'm having this desire. I don't know where it comes from. I don't know why I'm having it.”