Here I Am (5 page)

“But you're having it.”

“I am.”

“Tell me.”

“I'm having this desire.” She laughed again, and nuzzled her face into his armpit. “I want to spread my legs, and I want you to move your head down and look at me until I come.”

“Only look?”

“No fingers. No tongue. I want your eyes to make me come.”

“Open your eyes.”

“And you open yours.”

He didn't say a word or make a sound. With enough but not too much force, he rolled her onto her stomach. He intuited that what she wanted involved her inability to see him looking at her, for that final safety to be given over. She moaned, letting him know he was right. He moved his body down her body. He parted her legs, then spread them farther. He tucked his face close enough to smell her.

“You're looking at me?”

“I am.”

“Do you like what you see?”

“I want what I see.”

“But you can't touch it.”

“I won't.”

“But you can jerk yourself off while you look at me.”

“I am.”

“You want to fuck what you're looking at.”

“I do.”

“But you can't.”

“No.”

“You want to feel how wet I am.”

“I do.”

“But you can't.”

“But I can see.”

“But you can't see how tight I get when I'm about to come.”

“I can't.”

“Tell me what I look like and I'll come.”

They came together, without touching, and it could have ended there. She could have rolled onto her side, put her head on his chest. They could have fallen asleep. But something happened: she looked at him, held his gaze, and once again closed her eyes. Jacob closed his eyes. And it could have ended there. They could have explored each other in the bed, but Julia rose and explored the room. Jacob didn't see her—he knew not to open his eyes—but he heard her. Without saying anything, he also got up. They each touched the bench at the foot of the bed, the desk and the cup with its pens, the tassels on the curtain tiebacks. He touched the peephole, she touched the dial that controlled the ceiling fan, he pressed his palm against the mini-fridge's warm top.

She said, “You make sense to me.”

He said, “You, too.”

She said, “I really love you, Jacob. But please just say ‘I know.' ”

He said, “I know,” and felt along the walls, along the mounted quilts, until he came to the light switch. “I think I just made it dark.”

Julia became pregnant with Sam a year later. Then Max. Then Benjy. Her body changed, but Jacob's desire didn't. It was their volume of withholding that changed. They continued to have sex, although what had always arisen spontaneously came to require either an impetus (drunkenness, watching
Blue Is the Warmest Color
on Jacob's laptop in bed, Valentine's Day) or muscling through the self-consciousness and fear of embarrassment, which usually led to big orgasms and no kissing. They still occasionally said things that, the moment after coming, felt humiliating to the point of needing to physically remove oneself to get an unwanted glass of water. Each still masturbated to thoughts of the other, even if those fantasies bore no blood relationship to lived life and often included another other. But even the memory of that night in Pennsylvania had to be withheld, because it was a horizontal line on a doorframe:
Look at how much we've changed
.

There were things Jacob wanted, and he wanted them from Julia. But the possibility of sharing desires diminished as her need to hear them increased. It was the same for her. They loved each other's company, and
would always choose it over either aloneness or the company of anyone else, but the more comfort they found together, the more life they shared, the more estranged they became from their inner lives.

In the beginning, they were always either consuming each other or consuming the world together. Every child wants to see the marks ascend the doorframe, but how many couples are able to see progress in simply staying the same? How many can make more money and not contemplate what could be bought with it? How many, approaching the end of child-bearing years, can know that they already have the right number of children?

Jacob and Julia were never ones to resist convention on principle, but neither could they have imagined becoming quite so conventional: they got a second car (and second-car insurance); joined a gym with a twenty-page course offering; stopped doing their taxes themselves; occasionally sent back a bottle of wine; bought a house with side-by-side sinks (and house insurance); doubled their toiletries; had a teak enclosure built for their garbage bins; replaced a stove with one that looked better; had a child (and bought life insurance); ordered vitamins from California and mattresses from Sweden; bought organic clothing whose price, amortized over the number of times it was worn, all but required them to have another child. They had another child. They considered whether a rug would hold its value, knew which of everything was best (Miele vacuum, Vitamix blender, Misono knives, Farrow and Ball paint), consumed Freudian amounts of sushi, and worked harder so they could pay the very best people to care for their children while they worked. They had another child.

Their inner lives were overwhelmed by all the living—not only in terms of the time and energy required by a family of five, but of which muscles were forced to strengthen and which withered. Julia's unwavering composure with the children had grown to resemble omnipatience, while her capacity to express urgency to her husband had shrunk to texted Poems of the Day. Jacob's magic trick of removing Julia's bra without his hands was replaced by the depressingly impressive ability to assemble a Pack 'n Play as he carried it up the stairs. Julia could clip newborn fingernails with her teeth, and breast-feed while making a lasagna, and remove splinters without tweezers or pain, and have the kids begging for the lice comb, and compel sleep with a third-eye massage—but she had forgotten how to touch her husband. Jacob taught the kids the difference between
farther
and
further
, but no longer knew how to talk to his wife.

Their inner lives were nurtured in private—Julia designed houses for herself; Jacob worked on his bible, and bought a second phone—and a destructive cycle developed between them: with Julia's inability to express urgency, Jacob became even less sure that he was wanted, and more afraid of risking foolishness, which furthered the distance between Julia's hand and Jacob's body, which Jacob had no language to address. Desire became a threat—an enemy—to their domesticity.

When Max was in kindergarten, he used to give everything away. Any friend who would come over for a playdate would inevitably leave with a plastic car or stuffed animal. Any money that he somehow acquired—change found on the sidewalk, a five-dollar bill from his grandfather for having made a persuasive argument—would be offered to Julia in a checkout line, or to Jacob at a parking meter. He invited Sam to take as much of his dessert as he liked. “Go on,” he would say when Sam demurred. “Take, take.”

Max wasn't responding to the needs of others, which he seemed as capable of ignoring as any child. And he wasn't being generous—that would require the knowledge of giving, which was precisely what he lacked. Everyone has a pipeline through which he pushes what he is willing and able to share of himself out into the world, and through which he takes in all of the world that he is willing and able to bear. Max's conduit wasn't bigger than anyone else's, it was simply unclogged.

What had been a source of pride for Jacob and Julia became a source of concern: Max will be left with nothing. Careful not to suggest that there was anything wrong with the way he lived, they gently introduced notions of worth, and the finitude of resources. At first he resisted—“There's always more”—but as children do, he came to understand that there was something wrong with the way he lived.

He became obsessed with comparative value. “Could you get one house for forty cars?” (“It depends on the house and the cars.”) Or, “Would you rather have a handful of diamonds or a houseful of silver? A hand the size of yours, a house the size of this one.” He started trading compulsively: toys with friends, belongings with Sam, deeds with his parents. (“If I eat half of this kale, will you let me go to bed twenty minutes later?”) He wanted to know if it was better to be a FedEx driver or a music teacher, and became frustrated when his parents challenged his use of
better
. He wanted to know if it was OK that his dad had to pay for an extra ticket when they took his friend Clive to the zoo. “I'm wasting my life!”
he would often exclaim when not engaged in an activity. He crawled into bed with them, too early one morning, wanting to know if that's what being dead is.

“What's that, baby?”

“Having nothing.”

The withholding of sexual needs between Jacob and Julia was the most primitive and frustrating kind of withdrawal, but hardly the most damaging. The movement toward estrangement—from each other, and from themselves—took place in far smaller, subtler steps. They were always becoming closer in the realm of doing—coordinating the ever-expanding routines, talking and texting more (and more efficiently), cleaning together the mess made by the children they made—and farther in feeling.

Once, Julia bought some lingerie. She'd placed her palm atop the soft stack, not because she had any interest, but because, like her mother, she couldn't control the impulse to touch merchandise in stores. She took five hundred dollars out of an ATM so it wouldn't show up on the credit card bill. She wanted to share it with Jacob, and tried her best to find or create the right occasion. One night, after the kids were asleep, she put on the panties. She wanted to descend the stairs, cap Jacob's pen, not say a word, but communicate:
Look how I can look
. But she couldn't. Just as she couldn't bring herself to put them on before bed, fearing his not noticing. Just as she couldn't even lay them on the bed for him to come upon and ask about. Just as she couldn't return them.

Once, Jacob wrote a line he thought was the best he'd ever written. He wanted to share it with Julia—not because he was proud of himself, but because he wanted to see if it was still possible to reach her as he used to, to inspire her to say something like “You're my writer.” He took the pages into the kitchen, laid them facedown on the counter.

“How's it going?” she asked.

“It's going,” he said, in precisely the way he most hated.

“Progress?”

“Yes, just not clear it's in the right direction.”

“Is there a right direction?”

He wanted to say, “Just say, ‘You're my writer.' ”

But he couldn't cross the distance that didn't exist. The vastness of their shared life made sharing their singularity impossible. They needed a distance that wasn't a withdrawal, but a beckoning. And when Jacob
returned to the line the next morning, he was surprised and saddened to see that it was still great.

Once, Julia was washing her hands at the bathroom sink, after having cleaned up yet another Argus shit, and as she observed the soap forming webs between her fingers, the sconce flickered but persisted, and she was unexpectedly overwhelmed by a kind of sadness that didn't refer to or mean anything, but whose weight was punishing. She wanted to bring that sadness to Jacob—not with the hope of his understanding something that she couldn't understand, but with the hope that he might help carry something that she couldn't carry. But the distance that didn't exist was too great. Argus had shit on his bed, and either didn't realize it or couldn't be bothered to move; it got all over his side and tail. While Julia scrubbed it off with human shampoo and a damp T-shirt from some forgotten soccer team that once broke hearts, she told him, “Here we go. It's OK. Almost finished.”

Once, Jacob considered buying a brooch for Julia. He had wandered into a store on Connecticut Avenue—the kind of place that sells salad bowls turned from reclaimed wood, and salad tongs with horn handles. He wasn't looking to buy anything, and there was no upcoming occasion for which a gift would have been appropriate. His lunch date had texted that she was stuck behind a garbage truck, he hadn't thought to bring along a book or newspaper, and every chair in Starbucks was occupied by someone who would finish his thinning life before finishing his thinly veiled memoir, leaving Jacob no place to go deep into his very thin phone.

“Is that one nice?” he asked the woman on the other side of the case. “Dumb question.”

“I love it,” she said.

“Right, of course you do.”

“I don't like that,” she said, pointing at a bracelet in the case.

“It's a brooch, right?”

“It is. A silver cast of an actual twig. One-of-a-kind.”

“And those are opals?”

“They are.”

He walked to another section, pretended to examine an inlaid cutting board, then returned to the brooch. “It's nice, though, right? I can't tell if it looks costumey.”

“Not at all,” she said, taking it from the case and putting it on a velvet-lined tray.

“Maybe,” Jacob said, not picking it up.

Was it nice? It was risky. Did people wear brooches? Was it cornily figurative? Would it end up in a jewelry box, never to be seen again until it was bequeathed as an heirloom to one of the boys' brides so that she could put it in a jewelry box until it was one day passed down again? Was seven hundred fifty dollars an appropriate price for such a thing? It wasn't the money that concerned him, it was the risk of getting it wrong, the embarrassment of trying and failing—an extended limb is far easier to break than a bent one. After lunch, Jacob went back to the store.

“Sorry if I'm being ridiculous,” he said, returning to the woman who had been helping him, “but would you mind putting it on?”