A Brilliant Novel in the Works (2 page)

We buried my mother in a Jewish cemetery in Atlanta. As she
was dying, she forgot how to speak English. It was Hebrew all
the way down. She was from Israel. She met my father there,
moved with him to Atlanta, and they raised me in the States.
Matrilineally, my mother was the seventh generation born in
Jerusalem. Her father lived and died in Jerusalem, but he was
born in Iraq, in Basra, back when there was a Jewish community
in that land.

I scattered my father’s ashes in the Davidson River, in the
Pisgah National Forest, in North Carolina, where he was
born. He lived in many places, including Atlanta and Israel.
His parents were born in Poland. They escaped Hitler, passed
through Ellis Island, and lived out their days in this North
Carolina forest.

I was born in the Negev desert in Israel. I grew up in Atlanta.
And now I live in Portland, Oregon, where Israel feels further
away than Uranus. I like to tell people that I’m lost between
worlds, but I don’t really know which worlds I’m between
.

A year before he died, my father told me he wanted to be
cremated. This isn’t something typically done by Jews, especially
after the Holocaust, but it was what he wanted. These mountains
feel like my home, he said to me. We were standing by his
favorite river and we listened to the water for some time before
he spoke again. Maybe we’re a lot like salmon, he said. At this
point in his life, he was a fly fisherman more than anything else
and he felt that everything could be better understood through
fishing metaphors. I asked him what he meant about us being
like salmon because I often didn’t get his metaphors. Just like
salmon, he told me, we want to come back to where we started.
We want to make a mark on this earth. And once we make some
kind of mark, we’re ready to die
.

“Get your pants on,” Julia tells me. “We’re going out.”

“I don’t want to put my pants on,” I say. “Why don’t you
take your pants off?”

She says, “If you want me to be pantsless at the Righteous
Room in front of my brother and his girlfriend, then just say
t he word.”

It’s a game of chicken and she knows I can’t win. I already
get jealous of the men who stare at her when we go out in
public.

“Okay,” I say. “You win. Pants all around.”

She’s right that I need to put on my pants. She’s right that
I’m not as Jewish as I advertise. My wife is right that my
writing is getting too desperate these days. She’s right about
a lot of things.

But I’ve got a pretty good list of things that she doesn’t
know. She doesn’t know that I give her brother $300 a month
for his debts. She doesn’t know that I found a note on a
cocktail napkin in her pants pocket that said in a mess of a
man’s handwriting, “Save me, Julia.” Scribbled by one of those
men who can no longer distinguish between capital and
lowercase, cursive and print, married and single. She doesn’t
know that the dreams about my dad are getting so bad that
I’ve been using her brother’s painkillers to get some sleep. My
wife doesn’t know I’ve started making cuts on my ass with a
razor blade (again) so that when I sit down, I feel the burn
something awful. She doesn’t know I’ve quit going to my most
recent therapist. She doesn’t know exactly how desperate I’ve
become.

You should know: I’m not an asshole. I don’t want to keep
these things from her. It’s just that one little thing became two
little things, and then, five years later, we are living our lives
within the secrets behind our lives. Even meaningless ones—I
don’t tell my wife that I hide pictures of her as a child under
the mattress. In one picture, she’s in pigtails and making a
frowny face like someone stole her lollipop. I look at them
every morning after she goes to work.

“You need to get out of the house more,” my wife keeps
telling me. “It’s not good for you to be here all the time. Who
knows what happens all those hours that I’m gone. Go to a
café. Hang around other people. Maybe you’ll meet another
writer who’s as scared to put on their pants as you are.”

“Maybe,” she continues, “if you got out of the house more,
you’d stop brooding so much about your damn editor and get
something done.”

I will need to pay back the advance that I received—money
I no longer have—if I don’t deliver her a novel.

My editor also says that I can’t keep whining about my
therapists, like in my other stories, and I can’t keep talking
about masturbation and my childhood and my family. Enough
about my father and his fishing already.

My novel can’t be about me writing a novel.

For some reason, my editor also doesn’t want to read
another story about my recent bout of impotence or my desire
to be spanked while tied up or my preferred method for using
a razor to make cuts on my ass.

She warned me: my novel can’t be a collection of essays
masquerading as a novel.

When I didn’t respond to her requirements, she said, “Yuvi,
this isn’t an unreasonable request. I know you can do this.”

When I didn’t respond to that, she said, “Yuvi, what are
you so scared of?”

When I didn’t respond to that, she said, “Hello? Yuvi? Are
you there?”

And then she hung up.

“Yuvi? Yuvi? Can you hear me? Are you there? Did it work?”

I could hear him, but I couldn’t respond. I smiled. I know I was smiling,
but my eyes were closed and would not open.

Through my tube socks, I could feel the Lego pieces I was stepping on.
Every corner of my room had wandering pieces that never made it back to the
shoebox.

I was standing against the wall. I was standing in my bedroom. I mostly
knew that this was the case. And Ezra’s hands were pressed against my chest.
I could feel the heat from his palm, though that heat seemed to come from
some kind of fire inside of me.

There was also a part of me that wasn’t in my bedroom, was floating with
the clouds and looking down at our houses, free from everything I wanted to
be free from. The clouds were fluffy and cartoony, the kind you can really
lounge around on.

Ezra and I were about ten at the time, and he lived across the street
from me. We played together every day after school—at his house, at my house,
in the forest, wherever—until we each had to go home for dinner. That day,
he had just learned this cool trick, one we had been trying on each other
all afternoon.

Here were his instructions: Lean against the wall. Bend over with your
head hanging upside down for at least three minutes. Stand up faster than
hell and hold your breath while the other person presses both their hands
as hard as they can against your chest. If things go well, then you go limp
within twenty seconds.

“I promise I’ll catch you if you fall over,” Ezra said to me. And when
I didn’t respond, he said, “Trust me, you won’t die. I’ll even go first.”

I was thinking that this was the coolest thing I’d ever heard anyone
tell me. I loved how it went when people blacked out in the movies, the look
in their eyes like they just came back from being a different person from
a different world. I was thrilled with the idea of having that moment where
I’m so lost that I need to say, “Where am I? Who am I?”

We fought over who would go first. He argued that it was his idea to
do this in the first place, and I couldn’t refute that. But I still couldn’t
get him to black out no matter how hard I pressed on his chest. And then he
couldn’t get me to black out. And then I tried it on him again. And so on,
until my third time, when I hovered over those cartoony clouds in my semiconscious
trance.

When I came to, Ezra told me that I was in a trance for a full minute.
He said I was smiling this goofy smile like I was dreaming about Nari Tanaka.
Nari was the Japanese girl in my class that I was in love with that year—and
for six more years— without ever doing a thing about it.

As a kid, I worried. There were always at least one or two horrible,
embarrassing things that kept me up at night. At various times, these worries
included: too much hair growing out of my armpits, too ticklish to ever have
a girlfriend, a tumor in my brain/arm/leg/butt, a crooked penis, a crooked
stream of piss, being Jewish around a bunch of beautiful suburban WASPs, an
inability to kick a kickball, having skin the color of a Middle Eastern terrorist,
and my dumb smile.

For one minute, this trance made my world of armpit hair, crooked penises,
and dumb smiles completely disappear. I let myself slowly fall down to a squatting
position and stared at Ezra like he and I were both dead and calmly waiting
for whatever was to happen next.

“You have GOT to tell me what that felt like.”

I was still smiling and spaced out and had barely said a thing when my
mother stormed into the room, claiming that she had been calling for us for
five minutes. Apparently Ezra’s mother was in the car outside, pissed and
waiting for him. And just like that, he was gone, with me still dazed on the
floor and my mother looking at me with that what-the-hell-were-you-two-up-to
look. I told my mom that we were just playing with Legos. I picked up some
of the pieces that were under my butt. “Oof!” she said in her Israeli accent,
then she shook her head and left me alone. And slowly, second by second, my
world of worries came back. Another item on my list: the shame of my mother’s
disappointment.

As I sat there over dinner with my parents, listening to them talk about
the latest tragedy in the Middle East, it was clear to me that there was only
one thing to do. And so I started making a mental list of household items
that could—without anyone’s help—knock me unconscious
.

Shmendrik and Ally are fabulous people. It’s always fun when
we go out with them. We drink. We laugh. We drink more. We
laugh more. We can tell dirty secrets and dirty jokes and blur
them all together until we’ve poured our hearts out like we’ve
been blending one of my mother’s gazpachos and it’s two in
the morning and we’re not ready to leave the damn bar until
they kick out the four crazy adults who are acting like they’re
seventeen.

I like seeing how much Julia cares about Shmen, even if
sometimes it means tension about his drinking or his inability
to hold onto a job, or my fear that, in his inebriation, he’ll spill
the
borscht
to Julia about our little low-interest, never-really-pay-back
loan structure.

So, naturally, I’m resentful about going out with them
when I could’ve been brooding alone at home with a blank
piece of paper in front of me.

When we get to the Righteous Room, Shmen and Ally are,
as usual, already there. There are four untouched martinis at
the table. Hellos and kisses go all around, Julia admires Ally’s
sexy little boots, Ally admires Julia’s hair, which gets longer
and seems redder each time, I tell Shmen that he’s getting too
skinny, and Shmen tells me that I’m getting too bald. We each
take sips of our martinis, a few words about the weather—
that crazy rain—and then Shmendrik points out that beside
my glass and Julia’s glass there are napkins with handwritten
numbers on them. I have 12 and Julia has 10.

Shmen has to elbow Ally, who smiles in that shy way that
she smiles, and then she explains Shmen’s game to us. One
number is the number of horses Ally has owned and the other
is the number of men she’s kissed. “That is,” she says, “before
I fell in love with this man,” and she puts her arm around
Shmen.

“You’ve got ten seconds to figure it out,” Shmendrik tells us.
And that’s how the night begins.

Ally takes care of injured horses and brings them back to
health for almost no pay. Imagine it: this skinny little woman
calming a fifteen-hundred-pound horse. But this explains
how she handles Shmen and her daughter, who both have
more energy than a dozen injured horses.

It turns out that Ally has owned more horses than she has
kissed men and that Shmen has had more surgeries than apples
and that when Julia was a kid, she wrote 9 unanswered letters
to Frank Sinatra and 7 to Johnny Cash. When it’s my turn, I put
the number 21 on a napkin and give it to Ally and then give
the number 7 to Shmen. I say, “One number is the number of
therapists I’ve had. The other is the number of lovers.”

My wife sighs. “No brainer,” she says, and she takes a sip of her drink.

The martinis are a thing I started. It’s always gin, always
straight up, always dry, always three olives. Not two, not
one. Sometimes they pretend that they don’t like this drink,
especially my wife. She’ll make a face, like it’s a nasty medicine
for a nasty disease, but I know she loves something about it.
The hint of berry, the clean burn down the throat, and the
pleasure of taking on a ritual that comes from a generation
that is mostly just a shadow in our world. I got this habit
from my father. That man drank at least one martini a day for
fifty years. Toward the end of his life, when the doctor said
he shouldn’t drink so much, he began drinking even more,
realizing that he didn’t have much more time left to enjoy
them. The martinis at the Righteous Room are good, though
it took a little constructive guidance to get them to make it
just right: be careful with the vermouth, dry off the olives first,
don’t let the gin sit too long in the shaker. My dad used to say
that it’s not hard to make a damn good martini, but it’s damn
easy to screw one up.

drink 1

Shmendrik explains to us about the dance he and Ally’s
daughter have learned. Shmen and Ally have been dating for
less than two years, but her daughter fell in love with Shmen
instantly.

“The trick,” he says, “is to wave your clothes around in the
air before you throw them at Mommy.” He rubs Ally’s back
and Ally rolls her eyes while she drinks her martini. This is
the life of Ally and Shmen. On paper, it sounds like Shmen is
doing all the wrong things. But there’s something about their
family that’s not on paper.

Julia says, “This sounds an awful lot like stripping.”
“Oh,” Shmen says. “It is.” He puts his hand on his sister’s
hand. “But you have to understand, we don’t take off our
underwear.”

Ally puts down her martini. “Yes you did,” she says and
gives him a punch in the shoulder.

“Oh yeah,” he says. “I did.”

drink 2

Ally tells me that a horse’s instinct—even after an injury—is
to keep running.

I say, “Really?” and I can see that she is trying to gauge
whether I’m pulling her leg, this goofy Jew who is rarely serious,
but her stories always do this to me. If I were dropped from an
airplane right in the middle of Kansas, I’d barely be able to tell the
difference between a horse and a cow and a pig, but sitting here
in this bar listening to Ally talk, I can’t get enough horse sense.

“Even when they break a bone in their leg,” Ally tells me,
“they’ll run on it if you don’t stop them.”

And while I sit there learning about injured horses, I
hear Shmen and Julia talk about Shmen’s latest plan to get a
psychology degree. Julia is always supportive even while she
knows that he is unlikely to finish any degree. As long as I’ve
known him, Shmen has always been halfway through a degree
in something. Even though he has troubles following through
with a degree, he reads like a monster and is able to say things
like, “You can’t read Ulysses for the third time until you’ve
read it twice,” and he can even make it sound funnier than it
is arrogant. I’m supposedly the writer, but he’s the one who is
obsessed with language. He will call me at four in the morning
to tell me that you can’t spell “husband” without “anus.”

It’s one of those hipster bars we’re in, with exposed pipes and
exposed air vents, and I pretend that I’m up in the pipes rather
than down here where all the regular people are. And from up in
that maze of pipes, I can see Shmen, with his love of language,
his love of obscure words and phrases, but without a clear
plan to make use of this love, other than calling friends in the
middle of the night. But then again, he might be the happiest
man I know. And Julia. This is a woman who comes home after
having a cigarette with an alcoholic who just died in her lap
while apologizing to her because he thought she was his dead
wife whom he had deceived for twenty-seven years. “Forgive me,
Cassandra,” this man kept saying to Julia, and Julia kept forgiving
until the man finally died, and then, after this kind of day, Julia is
still able to help me get my pants on and go out for drinks. This
is also a woman who loves these fabulous masculine singers like
Frank and Johnny and Elvis and then marries a scrawny little
Jew who writes scrawny little stories. And there’s Ally, who talks
about such real-world things like listening to the heartbeat of a
horse who has just broken his spine but still tries to get up. And
while she speaks with such sympathy for this creature, I wonder
if it’s wrong of me to think: metaphor.

After savoring the metaphor for a while longer, I come down from the pipes
to have another drink.

drink 3

“I just don’t like the name,” Ally says to me. She grabs my hand
from across the table and squeezes it a little. She has a solid
hold of me, and she looks me straight in the eyes.

“It’s been a year now,” she says. “And I still don’t like it.”

I don’t know what she is talking about, but I enjoy her
touch too much to ask.

Shmendrik starts massaging her neck. It makes them
both seem so sweet. “The woman doesn’t like the name
you christened me,” he says. “She thinks Shmendrik isn’t
appropriate.”

“But it’s perfect,” I say.

“The word means fool,” she says. “I looked it up. And it’s
a Yiddish word,” she says. “Joel isn’t a fool and he’s got blonde
hair and blue eyes.”

“I know,” I say. “That’s why I love it.”

Shmen smiles without talking, which is a rare sight, because
he’s always got something to say. Even when he has nothing to
say, he’s got something to say, and so I realize that this subject,
for whatever reason, is a touchy one between them. Every
relationship has an area that is tricky even if it has no right
to be tricky—one of those arguments that seems ridiculous
when you recount it to someone later, but somehow, at the
time, it taps into something nasty. So I decide to keep my
mouth shut and let Ally and Joel work it out, even though Joel
totally doesn’t look like a Joel—his own sister admits that.

“When Yuvi gets stuck on a name,” Julia says, “there’s
nothing you can do about it.” And then she lists off some
of the people in our world that I’ve permanently named:
our friend, Jason Shiffer, now known as Shiffer Brains; my
disturbingly flirtatious aunt, known posthumously as Nafkeh;
our postman, the Nazi.

Ally lets go of my hand and she looks seriously at Julia and
me. Me and my wife, sitting there next to each other in the
Righteous Room. Ally tries to size us up. I know from Shmen
that she’s an expert sizer-upper. This woman knows firsthand
what a disaster a marriage can be and she’s probably trying
to understand where Julia and I fit into this spectrum. If we
tease each other because we love each other or because we’re
hiding something.

And then Ally says to Julia, “Why hasn’t he given you a name?”

last call

It’s late into the night and Shmen is two to four drinks ahead
of everyone else when he orders a gin and tonic to try and
sober up.

The good-looking waiter with the gentile blue eyes keeps
glancing over at my wife and I re-remember about that little
note I found in her pocket. I had forgotten about it for hours,
but the dread inside of me has returned. The contractions are
getting more frequent and I wonder how much longer I can
carry this napkin inside of me.

Julia says, “How you feeling, Shmen?”

I’ve seen Julia’s pretty freckly face get more serious the
more drinks Shmen orders. Between Shmen’s little digestive
disease and the way their mother drank when she was alive, it
isn’t easy for Julia to watch him drink like that.

“Great,” Shmen says. “I feel like a million dollars’ worth of
intestinal surgery.”

I press my hand on Julia’s thigh. I squeeze it and feel the
tightness in her muscles.

“Let’s quit drinking,” she suggests. “I think it’s enough.”

“For you or for me?” he asks and doesn’t look her in the eyes.

It’s about ten seconds of silence at the table until Ally says,
“Actually, I think I’m ready to go home myself. We still have to
take the babysitter home.”

And that’s how tension inflates and deflates with a
Protestant family. Not that I’m the prototype for direct
communication, with all my secrets and fears and worries, my
inability to write even the first page of a novel, all the ways I
have of joking around any problem, how I can turn a concern
about the stability of my marriage into a discussion about
whether I should wear the beige pants to dinner, how I can
suggest that we hold off serious discussions until the tensions
in the Middle East are over.

Before we leave that night, Julia and Shmen give each other
hugs that last too long and I hear Julia say “I love you” to her
brother and I hear her brother say to his only sibling, “You’re
one of my favorite older sisters.”

Ally and Shmen leave the bar first. Shmen is limping. It’s
something I’ve noticed over the weeks—not quite a limp as
much as a hint of a limp—and I hadn’t consciously thought
about it until just now. Even so, I don’t say anything about it
to Julia.

“Let’s go, honey,” she says to me. “You’re looking far too
happy.”