Here I Am

  “It’s been a long time since anyone has.”

  “What did you used to tell them?”

  “That we realized we were just really good friends, good co-parents.”

  “Aren’t those reasons not to get divorced?”

  She smiled and said, “I had a hard time explaining it.”

  “Me, too. I always sounded like I was hiding something. Or guilty about something. Or just fickle.”

  “It’s not really anyone else’s business.”

  “What do you tell yourself?”

  “It’s been a long time since I asked myself.”

  “What did you used to tell yourself?”

  She picked up my spoon and said, “We got divorced because that’s what we did. It’s not a tautology.”

  While the waiters were bringing dinner to the final tables, the first tables were being brought dessert.

  “And the boys?” I asked. “How did you explain it to them?”

  “They never really asked me. Sometimes they’d trace the outline, but they’d never enter. With you?”

  “Never once. Isn’t that odd?”

  “No,” she said, a bride in her dress. “It’s not.”

  I looked at my boys being silly children on the dance floor and said, “Why did we put them in the position of having to ask?”

  “Our love for them got in the way of being good parents.”

  I ran my finger around the rim of my glass, but no music came.

  “I’d be a much better father if I could do it again.”

  “You can,” she said.

  “I’m not going to have any more kids.”

  “I know.”

  “And I don’t have a time machine.”

  “I know.”

  “And I don’t believe in reincarnation.”

  “I know.”

  “Think we could have made it?” I asked. “If we’d tried harder? Gone back into things?”

  “Made what?”

  “Life.”

  “We made three lives,” she said.

  “Could we have made one?”

  “Is that the question?”

  “Why not?”

  “Making it. Not failing. There are more ambitious things to do with life.”

  “Are there?”

  “I hope so.”

  On the drive to the party, I’d listened to a podcast about asteroids, and how unprepared we are for the possibility of one heading toward us. The physicist being interviewed explained why none of the possible contingencies would work: nuking it would just turn a cosmic cannonball into cosmic buckshot (and the debris would likely re-form in a few hours due to gravity); robotic landers could deflect the asteroid with mounted thrusters, if such things existed, which they don’t and won’t; similarly implausible would be sending up an enormous spacecraft as a “gravity tractor,” using its own mass to pull the asteroid away from Earth. “So what would we do?” the host asked. “Probably nuke it,” the physicist said. “But you said it would only break it into lots of asteroids that would hit us.” “That’s right.” “So it wouldn’t work.” “Almost certainly not,” the physicist said, “but it would be our best hope.”

  Our best hope.

  The expression didn’t awaken anything in me at the time. It took Julia’s hope attaching itself to the other terminal of my mind to jumpstart my sadness.

  “Remember when I smashed the lightbulb? At our wedding?”

  “Are you really asking me that?”

  “Did you like that moment?”

  “That’s a funny question,” she said. “But yes, I did.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I don’t even know what it’s supposed to symbolize.”

  “I’m glad you asked.”

  “I knew you would be.”

  “So, some people think it’s to remind us of all the destruction that was necessary to bring us to the moment of our greatest happiness. Some people think it’s a kind of prayer: let us be happy until the shards of this lightbulb reassemble. Some people think it’s a symbol of fragility. But the interpretation I’ve never heard is the most straightforward one: this is what we’re like. We are broken individuals, committing to what will be a broken union in a broken world.”

  “It’s less inspiring your way.”

  It’s not, I thought. It’s more inspiring.

  I said, “There is nothing more whole than a broken heart.”

  “Silvers?”

  “In fact, the Kotzker Rebbe.”

  “Listen to you.”

  “I’ve been studying with the rabbi who did my grandfather’s funeral.”

  “Curiosity converted the cat.”

  “Meowzel tov.”

  How I loved her laugh.

  I looked at Julia, and in that moment I knew we never could have made it. But I also knew that she had been my best hope.

  “Isn’t it strange?” I said. “We had sixteen years together. They felt like everything when we were in them, but as time passes they will account for less and less of our lives. All of that everything was just a…what? A chapter?”

  “That’s not how I think about it.”

  She tucked her hair behind her ear, as I’d seen her do tens of thousands of times.

  I asked, “Why are you crying?”

  “Why am I crying? Why aren’t you crying? This is life. I’m crying because this is my life.”

  Just as the sound of the scooper going into Argus’s dog food used to bring him running from wherever in the house he was, the boys seemed almost telepathically drawn to their mother’s tears.

  “Why’s everyone crying?” Sam asked. “Did someone win a gold medal?”

  “Are you sad?” Benjy asked me.

  “You don’t have to worry about me,” I told him.

  “It’s OK,” Julia said. “Let it be OK.”

  There was nothing more painful than being the center of attention at my wife’s wedding, save for continuing to think of her as my wife.

  “Overjoyed?” Max asked, handing Benjy the maraschino cherry from his Shirley Temple.

  “No.”

  “Flabbergasted? Cattywampussed? Diaphanous?”

  I laughed.

  “So, what?” Sam asked.

  What? What was the feeling? My feeling?

  “Remember when we talked about absolute value? For physics, maybe?”

  “Math.”

  “And do you remember what it is?”

  “Distance from zero.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Benjy said.

  Julia pulled him onto her lap and said, “Neither do I.”

  I said, “Sometimes feelings are like that—not positive, not negative, just a lot.”

  No one had any idea what I was talking about. I didn’t know what I was talking about. I wished I could get Dr. Silvers on the phone, put him on speaker, and ask him to explain me to myself and my family.

  After the divorce, I had a series of brief relationships. I was lucky to have met those women. They were smart, strong, fun, and giving. My explanations of what went wrong always came down to an inability to live fully honestly with them. Dr. Silvers pushed me to explore what I meant by “full honesty,” but he never challenged my reasoning, never suggested that I was self-sabotaging or creating definitions that were impossible to meet. He respected me while feeling sorry for me. Or that’s what I wanted him to feel.

  “It would be very difficult to live like that,” he told me. “Fully honestly.”

  “I know.”

  “You would not only open yourself to a great deal of hurt, you would have to inflict a great deal of hurt.”

  “I know.”

  “And I don’t believe that it would make you happier.”

  “I don’t, either.”

  He swiveled his chair and looked out the window, as he often did when thinking, as if wisdom could be found only in the distance. He swiveled back and said, “But if you were able to live like that…” And then he stopp
ed. He removed his glasses. In my twenty years of knowing him, it was the only time he’d ever removed his glasses. He held the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “If you were able to live like that, our work here would be finished.”

  I was never able to live like that, but our work finished a year later, when he had a fatal heart attack while jogging. I got a call from one of the therapists who had an office in the same suite. She invited me to come and talk about it, but I didn’t want to talk to her. I wanted to talk to him. I felt betrayed. He should have delivered the news of his death.

  And I should have delivered the news of my sadness to the kids. But just as his death precluded Dr. Silvers from sharing his death with me, my sadness kept my sadness from them.

  The band members had assumed their positions, and forgoing any musical foreplay, went straight into “Dancing on the Ceiling.” The sea bass that was once in front of me no longer was; it must have been taken away. The glass of wine that was once in front of me no longer was; I must have drunk it.

  The boys ran to the dance floor.

  “I’ll slip out,” I told Julia.

  “Islip,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Islip out.” And then: “I’m sorry. I didn’t—”

  When we visited Masada, my father filled his pockets with rocks, and without knowing what he was doing, knowing only my need for his approval, I filled mine. Shlomo told us to put them back. It was the first time I’d ever heard him say no to one of us. He said that if everyone took a rock, Masada would be dispersed across mantels and bookshelves and coffee tables, and there would be no Masada. Even as a boy, I knew that was ridiculous—if anything is permanent, mountains are.

  Islip out.

  I walked to my car beneath a sky clotted with near-Earth objects.

  Somewhere in the wedding guest book are my children’s signatures. They developed their handwriting on their own. But I gave them their names.

  I parked out front with two wheels on the curb. I might not even have closed the front door behind me.

  Here I am, writing in my half-buried office while my family is dancing.

  How many synagogues did Sam end up building? Did any survive? Even a wall?

  My synagogue is made of words. All the spaces allow it to shift when the ground moves. At the threshold of the sanctuary is the mezuzah, a doorframe nailed to the doorframe: the growth rings of my family. Inside the ark are the broken and the whole: Sam’s crushed hand, beside the hand that reached for his “I-know”; Argus lying in his own shit, beside the ever-panting tail-wagger who would pee as soon as Max entered the house; Tamir from after the war, beside Noam from before the war; my grandfather’s never-unbending knees, beside my kiss on his great-grandson’s nonexistent boo-boo; my father’s reflection in a mirror draped with black cloth, beside my sons falling asleep in the rearview mirror, beside the person who will never stop writing these words, who spent his life breaking his fists against the door of his synagogue, begging to be allowed in, beside the boy who dreamed of people fleeing the enormous bomb shelter for the safety of the world, the boy who would have realized that the heavy, heavy door opens outward, that I was inside the Holiest of Holies all along.

  VIII

  HOME

  In the long aftermath of the destruction of Israel, Jacob moved into his new house. It was a nice, if slightly less nice, version of his old house: slightly lower ceilings; slightly less old and less wide planked floors; a kitchen with hardware that if it was called bespoke was called that by Home Depot; a bathtub that probably leached BPA, and was probably from Home Depot, but held water; melamine closets with nearly level shelves that performed their function and were nice enough; a faint, not-pleasant attic smell filling the atticless house; Home Depot doorknobs; middle-aged, rotting sub-Marvin windows that served as visual thresholds rather than as barriers against the elements or sound; walls wavy with un-charming trapped moisture; ominous peeling at the corners; subtly sadistic wall colors; unflush light switch plates; a faux-porcelain Home Depot vanity with wood-grained melamine drawers, in a bathroom the color of discharge, whose toilet paper roll was out of reach of anyone who wasn’t imported from Africa to dunk without jumping; ominous separation everywhere: between the molding components, between the crown molding and the ceiling, the floor molding and the floor, separation of the sink from the wall, the mantel of the nonfunctioning fireplace from the wall, the unflush electrical plates from the wall, the doorframes from the wall, the more-plastic-than-plastic Home Depot rosettes from the jaundiced ceiling, the floorboards from one another. It didn’t really matter, but it didn’t go unnoticed. He had to admit that he was more bourgeois than he’d have liked to admit, but he knew what was important. Those things were separating, too.

  There was time, there was suddenly a life of it, and Jacob’s needs were taking the shape of his needs, rather than his ability to fulfill them. He was declaring his independence, and all of it—from the interminable wait for the hot-water Messiah to the unflush plate through which not enough threads of the cable nipple were exposed—filled him with hope. Or a version of hope. Jacob might have forced her hand, but it was Julia who chose the separation. And while his return from Islip could be understood as the claiming of an identity, it could at least as easily be understood as the forfeiture of one. So maybe he didn’t write his declaration of independence, but he was happy to sign it. It was a version of happiness.

  Forty-two is young, he kept telling himself, like an idiot. He could hear his own idiocy loud and clear, and yet he couldn’t stop announcing it. He would remind himself of advances in medical technology, of his own efforts to eat less unhealthily, of the gym to which he had a membership (albeit ceremonial), and of that fact Sam had once shared: with each passing year, life expectancy increases by a year. Everyone who didn’t smoke would live to be one hundred. Practitioners of yoga would outlive Moses.

  In time, his house would resemble his home—some rugs, better hardware, wall colors in keeping with the Geneva Convention, paintings and photos and lithos, calming lamplight, art books stacked on surfaces, throws not thrown but crisply folded and laid over sofas and chairs, maybe a wood-burning stove in the corner. And in time, everything that was possible would be actual. He’d get a girlfriend, or not. Buy an unexpected car, or probably not. Finally do something with the television show he’d been emptying his soul into for more than a decade. (The soul being the only thing that requires dispersal to accumulate.) Now that he no longer needed to protect his grandfather, he’d stop writing the bible and get back to the show itself. He’d take it to one of those producers who used to be interested in what he was doing, back when he was doing things that could be shared. A lot of time had passed, but they’d still remember him.

  There had been more than one reason to keep the pages in a drawer—he wasn’t only protecting others. But once there was nothing left to lose, even Julia would see that the show wasn’t an escape from the challenges of family life, but a redemption of his family’s destruction.

  Israel wasn’t destroyed—at least not in the literal sense. It remained a Jewish country, with a Jewish army, and borders only negligibly different from before the earthquake. Infinite debate corkscrewed the question of whether those new borders were good for the Jews. Although, tellingly, the expression most often used by American Jews was good for the Israelis. And that, the Israelis thought, was bad for the Jews.

  Israel had been made weaker, but its enemies were made weaker still. Not much comfort can be taken, when sifting through your rubble with a bulldozer, in the knowledge that your enemy is sifting through his rubble by hand. But some comfort can be taken. As Isaac would have said, “It could be worse.” No, he would have said, “It is worse.”

  Maybe he was right. Maybe it was worse to have survived, if continuing to be required destroying the reason to be. It’s not as if American Jews stopped caring. They continued to vacation and bar mitzvah and find themselves in Israel. They winced as their
small cuts were first touched by Dead Sea water, winced as their hearts were first touched by “Hatikvah,” crammed folded wishes between the rubble of the Wailing Wall, recounted back-alley hummus spots, recounted the thrill of distant rocket strikes, winced as their eyes were first touched by the sun at Masada, recounted the perpetual thrill of seeing Jewish garbagemen, and Jewish firefighters, and Jewish homeless. But the feeling of having arrived, of finally finding a place of comfort, of being home, was disappearing.

  For some, it was the inability to forgive Israel’s actions during the war—even a massacre or two would have been easier to accept than the complete and explicit abdication of responsibility for non-Jews—the withdrawal of security forces and emergency personnel, the stockpiling of medical supplies that had urgent use elsewhere, the withholding of utilities, the rationing of food even amid a surplus, the blockade of aid shipments to Gaza and the West Bank. Irv—whose once-daily, occasionally inflammatory blog had become a rushing river of provocation—defended Israel at every step: “If it were a family in a time of emergency, and not a country, no one would judge parents for keeping food in the fridge and Band-Aids in the medicine cabinet. Things happen, especially when your death-loving neighbors hate you to death, and it is not unethical to care more about your own children.”

  “If the family lived only in its own house, you might almost be right,” Jacob said. “And you might almost be right if every family were equally able to give preferential treatment to its own. But that’s not the world we live in, and you know it.”

  “It’s the world they created.”

  “When you look at that girl, Adia, your heart doesn’t go out to her?”

  “Of course it does. But like every heart, mine is of limited size, and if it came down to Adia or Benjy, I would pull the food from her hands to put into his. I’m not even arguing that that’s right or good. I’m just saying it isn’t bad, because it isn’t a choice. ‘Ought implies can,’ right? To be morally obliged to do something, you have to be able to do it. I love Noam, Yael, and Barak, but I cannot love them as much as I love Sam, Max, and Benjy. It’s impossible. And I love my friends, but I can’t love them as much as I love my family. And believe it or not, I am fully capable of loving Arabs, but not of loving them as much as I love Jews. These are not choices.”