A Brilliant Novel in the Works (11 page)

Shmen gives Julia an update about his situation. And Shmen
has it pretty well together and speaks clearly and tells her
everything. Except he doesn’t tell her how he’s horny. And Julia
takes a deep breath and sits next to him and holds his hand just
like I was holding his hand a moment before. She says “I’m with
you” a couple times. And after a minute she looks at me as if she
had forgotten I was in the room.

“You’re looking well,” I say to her in my best formal,
detached, robotic, unsuggestive, strong, confident, goyishe
voice.

“So are you,” she says to me in a better detached voice.
“Thank you,” I say, and I lift a pretend hat off my head.
Shmen seems like he is going to space out again, but he

doesn’t, he just waits and lets the awkwardness sit around for
a while, and just before it kills all of us, he says in a violent
whisper, “Jesus Christ! Would you guys shut the fuck up and
get back together and start fucking each other and have a
goddamn kid already!”

We’re all silent for a while. I try to remember what it was
that caused our marriage to get so mixed up and I can’t exactly
remember it or understand it. For a moment, I wonder if
there is no problem at all. Maybe we got stuck worrying about
a nonexistent problem. Maybe she could come home with me
right now, after Shmen gets better. I wonder why it took Julia
so long to get over here. The only explanation I can come up
with is that Julia didn’t get here earlier because she wasn’t at
her apartment all night.

“It’s not that simple,” I say to Shmen.

“It’s not,” she says.

It’s a nice feeling to be on the same side as Julia, as we try
to persuade Shmen that our relationship is a mess.

“Yes it is that goddamn simple,” Shmen says. “At least your
anus isn’t swollen and you don’t need steroids and you have a
working digestive system.”

He has a point. My intestines are a lot more capable than
his. I have no answer for him. And Julia doesn’t either. And
Julia looks at me and I see that same sweetness inside of her like
in the olden days, even if she keeps her protected expression
on at the same time, and I hope she sees something decent
inside of me too. But there’s nothing to say. It’s the wrong time
to say anything. Right now, it’s about Shmen, and we shouldn’t
et Shmen trick us into worrying about ourselves.

But I get stuck worrying about ourselves. And so I kiss
Shmen on the forehead and tell him that I’m off to get a cup
of coffee.

Shmen does start improving as the day progresses. The steroids
bring down the swelling all over his body. And it’s pretty
thrilling to see him coming back from the dead. He complains
as they take him off the painkillers, but you can tell that he’s
glad to have his normal sense of the world back, even if he does
try once or twice to get a few prescriptions he doesn’t really
need. I take that as a sign that he’s becoming himself again.

While the nurse checks Shmen’s vitals, the rest of us sneak
out of the room and plan how we’re going to force Shmen

to get back on track. Ally will make him go to his various doctors. Julia
will force him to perform his physical therapy. And I will force him to eat
better and drink less. We talk about Shmen as if he’s a childish
shmendrik
and I want to protest. But I’m also scared about what will happen if we don’t
do it this way.

Julia and I are cordial to each other, though it’s not easy.
Every minute the feeling is different. I either want to hug her
or give her a good kick in the face. Sometimes two kicks. And
sometimes two hugs.

The doctor says he’s lucky he didn’t die this time and that
his life expectancy can either be a little shorter than average
or a lot shorter, depending on how he plays it. The doctor then
takes off to get more Fritos.

Before they release him from the hospital, I go back into
the room to say goodbye to Shmen. I tell him that I’ll be
visiting him at home soon. And that I’m going to force him to
stay in better health once he gets out.

“Okay,” he says with too much enthusiasm. “Sounds like
a plan. I’m in full agreement. Totally on board. I’m with you.
Yep. I smell what you’re shitting.”

My editor told me to send some of my stories out for publication
in literary journals. She said that I needed a more impressive publication
history during this long hiatus between books. She also suggested that if
I worked really hard, we could get my novel published in next year’s fall
list. And so I sent out that story I wrote back in Chapter 4, the one about
Shmen’s pooping problems that I wrote from Ally’s perspective. And I got it
published at a website called
www.poopreport.com
—
“All the poop that’s fit to print.”

“If you search the web for ‘Yuvi poop report,’” I tell my editor, “it’ll
take you right to my story. Isn’t that cool?”

Responses to my story accumulated on the website. The first response
was: “This story blows.” The next couple of people also felt that it blew.
One person said that it lacked poo-etry. But a few people liked it. One person
said that the writer had poo-tential. One person—bless her soul—said it was
sweet. And then fifteen more people hated it. And even though I billed it
as fiction, everyone treated the story as if it were true and as if I were
the woman narrating the story. Loads of people said that I should dump my
deadbeat boyfriend and find a better man.

I was tempted to tell them that this was a piece of fiction and that
they should stop giving all this personal advice. And then I was tempted to
explain that Shmen was worth all the effort. And then I worried that I must
have portrayed him inaccurately. And I felt like a terrible writer. And then
I regretted the arrogance in me that attempted to write this from Ally’s perspective.

My editor told me that sending stories to the Poop Report was as helpful
for my career as taking a shit. And when I disagreed, she said to me, “Kush
meer in tuches,” all proud of her Yiddish research.

I was impressed with her for that—she was a more capable editor than
I had originally figured. So I said, “Here’s a more advanced one: Aht noheged
kmoh safta sheli dofeket.”

“What’s it mean?” she asked.

“You tell me,” I said.

I thought I was dreaming about another one of those forever-ringing phones that I can never get to. In my dreams, I always
have some kind of disability that prevents me from doing
what I need to do. If I need to pick up the phone, then I have
no hands. If I need to scream for help, then I have no voice.
But this is a real phone that is really ringing and when I pick
up the phone, there is a real person on the other line.

It’s worse than a real person. Her voice is serious and
impatient before we’ve even begun. It’s like she’s talking to a
credit card company about canceling her card.

“So what is it?” I say. I take a deep breath and try to relax
my chest.

“I need a favor,” Julia says.

“From me?”

“For Shmen.”

“Okay,” I say. “What do you need?”

“Can you take him to the hospital for his colonoscopy?”

“Yes,” I say. “I’d love to.”

She gives me the details and I’m glad to do it. In fact, I
was already wishing I could be there for him. And I’m even
thrilled to hear her voice. Even her cold and serious voice.
I want to crawl into the telephone line and hide under her
vocal cords.

“Are you going to be busy fucking someone again while
your brother is in the hospital?”

Click.

“Please, Yuvi,” my editor said on the phone. “This is
getting a bit ridiculous. It’s a mess. So his wife left him and may be cheating
on him. So what? You promised me a death and I’m already twenty chapters into
it. I don’t see how you’re going to pull it off. There is no movement.”

My editor was breathing heavily. I imagined her falling from a skyscraper
as she spoke to me. She wants a movement. She wants a death. She wants a lot
of things. But she doesn’t want what I give her.

“The italics are driving me crazy,” she said. “What’s the point? They’re
distracting. And how do you sustain a slow-moving front-story with all that
italicky whining about your past? There is no way you could sustain this story
for three hundred pages.”

“I take it you don’t like it so far.”

“It’s all falling apart,” she said. “And how come you’ve suddenly started
writing all the parts with the editor in italics?”

“What about eBooks?” I said. “What about iBooks? What about uBooks? What
about the Kindle? You’re stuck on page numbers. Three hundred pages doesn’t
even make sense, electronically speaking. Pages are ancient history.”

I felt smart all of sudden. Like I was keeping up with the times. Not
that I really was. I had gone out of my way to find a cell phone that couldn’t
do a single thing other than be used as a phone. I had gone out of my way
to avoid any references to technology in this story. I still thought of my
computer as a calculator and a word processor. But when you’re avoiding bigger
issues, talking about technology is a convenient distraction. “Do you even
understand why you’ve structured your novel this way? Do you know what you’re
doing here?”

“Of course I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“And why,” she finally said, “have you put me in the past tense?”

“It’s not often that you get the opportunity to walk to the
hospital,” Shmen said.

And so we walk to the hospital.

We even have extra time to make the walk more leisurely.
He’s not due at the gastroenterologist for another forty-five
minutes. And so we walk and we talk.

“Are you serious?” I keep asking him.

“Yep,” he says. “Not a drop.”

This is the fourth time I’ve asked this question. I’ve been
having trouble accepting the good news. When Shmen said he
hadn’t had a drop of alcohol, I expected him to say, “But I’ve
picked up a cocaine habit instead.”

The walk to the hospital is about twenty uphill blocks
of residential streets. There are dueling trendy coffee shops
at all major intersections. I decide that my next failed book
should be written from a coffee shop. Maybe it’ll come out
different—the narrator might spend less of his time alone in
his underwear.

As we walk, I’m happy in a way I don’t deserve to be
happy, and maybe I’m this kind of happy because Shmen isn’t
limping any longer. He walks like a regular person. He looks
good even. He looks great. He tells me he’s started coaching
Maddy’s soccer team. He tells me sex is so good with Ally
these days that he doesn’t even bother masturbating. He tells
me he only has to shit twice during the night. He tells me that
he loves eating oranges cut like a grapefruit and grapefruits
peeled like oranges.

I say to Shmen, “You were supposed to die in my novel.
That’s how it was supposed to go down. I told my editor that
you would die and she liked the idea of your death. It would
force me to have a story arc, she figured, which is something
that doesn’t really exist in my book. But I couldn’t kill you.”

“I could die if you want me to,” he says. “It does make
sense.”

“Don’t,” I beg him. “I wouldn’t survive it.”

“But I will die eventually,” he says.

“I know,” I say. “But don’t do it right now.”

Shmen nods, and I feel some kind of relief.

“So have you talked to my sister lately?” he asks. “Am I
going to have to almost die again or are you two going to get
back together?”

“We haven’t spoken,” I say. Julia and I have been apart long
enough that on some days, or at least during some hours, or
at least across some minutes, I don’t even think about her. I’m
dreadfully accustomed to waking up and not having someone
criticize my pantslessness. But the problem is that when I do
think about her, it burns just as bad as ever, even worse, because
things get more clear as they get further away. “I think,” I say to
my estranged wife’s brother, “there’s a bigger problem.”

And just as I say the word “problem,” I feel the earth
shaking. I look over to Shmen to see if he feels it too. I’ve
never fabricated an earthquake, but it seems like something I
would do.

Shmen has both arms away from his body as if he is also
expecting to fall down at any moment.

And then a full-size upright piano rolls down the sidewalk,
heading right for us. The thing is half a block away and is
going faster than a slow car.

“Clear the way!” we hear someone yell. “Runaway piano!”

“Fuck me,” Shmen says, and he stands right there, watching
this thing coming at us.

“This can’t be happening,” I say. But it is. So I grab Shmen’s
hand and pull him toward an apartment building. We crouch
there behind a row of bushes.

Shmen pulls me back up so that we can watch the sight of
a runaway piano. The piano rolls down the street and then hits
the curb on the other side of the street. It falls over into a front
yard and breaks apart with a tremendous and melodious bang.

“Fuck me,” Shmen says.

We stare in silence for a few seconds. And then we start
walking across the street. Shmen is walking faster than I
am and when he reaches the center of the road, we hear the
rumbling sound all over again.

Three more pianos all shoot down the street, and I once
again grab Shmen and pull him off the road. They all crash
onto the same yard. With three more melodious bangs. It’s a
quartet of suicide pianos.

“Fuck me,” Shmen says.

Chunks of piano wood and strings and brass all over the
yard. Some pedals have made their way onto this person’s
welcome mat.

“It’s beautiful,” Shmen says. And we race across the street
to see what a four-piano collision looks like.