A Brilliant Novel in the Works (3 page)

My first girlfriend told me that she loved me more than
anyone else in the whole world. My first therapist told me I was incapable
of love but that I should keep a journal of my emotions.

My second girlfriend told me that I could give her a hotter orgasm than
anyone in the world. My second therapist told me that my emotional growth
was stunted at the oral phase of development and that I should find out if
I was breastfed.

My third girlfriend loved how I stayed up as late as she did even though
I had class so early in the morning. My third therapist told me that I had
to get on medication so I could finally get some sleep.

My fourth girlfriend told me that she loved doing happy hour with me.
My fourth, fifth, six, and ninth therapists told me that I had a drinking
problem.

My fifth girlfriend told me that she really enjoyed our alone time. My
fifteenth therapist told me that I needed to get out more.

My sixth girlfriend told me that I’m a coward, especially in the bedroom.
My eighteenth therapist told me that I had narcissistic personality disorder
but that I also had nice, full lips.

My wife tells me that I’m the most insecure person she’s ever met. My
twenty-first therapist tells me to reconsider my writing career
.

I keep the window open as my wife drives us home so I can
feel the specks of drizzle against my arm. It feels like it’s been
drizzling for years. I’m glad Julia loves to drive, because I’d
rather get another circumcision than drive at night, in the
rain, under the influence of however many martinis.

Even in my real life, I lose track of the plot. I can never
remember names or places or details. I have no idea whether
to turn left or right. I don’t know what time we arrived or
what time we left. All I remember is how everyone felt when
whatever happened happened. And even if nothing happens,
it still feels to me like something happened. “
Oof!
” my mom
used to say when I was a kid, “you care too much about how
everyone feels.
Hakol Beseder
. It’s all okay. If you don’t relax,
you’ll be dead before you can help anyone anyway.”

I wave my arm up and down in the windy rain until Julia
says, “Roll the window up. We’re getting wet.”

“But I’m having a poignant moment,” I say to her.

“Have your poignant moment while I’m still dry.”

Julia pats my thigh a few times and it’s a sweet enough
gesture for me to forget about how much we sound like a
mother and son and so I roll up the window.

Julia doesn’t talk much about her mother and her father,
but I know how those two are deep inside her. And I know
that she watches her brother carefully for the signs. Whether
he’ll turn into the vicious mess of their father or the catatonic
mess of their mother. And I know she grows tired of me and
my insecurities. She is tired of how I look at every gorgeous
man on the street with the quiet threat that he might be the
one to steal my wife from me— as if my wife has no say in
the matter. And she is worried about her own aspirations,
whether we can really afford this nonprofit project that she
is taking on alongside my overdue-contractual-obligation of
a career, whether our rainy day fund can last through a rainy
season that seems to be going on forever.

I say to Julia, “I really like your brother.”

“Me too,” she says.

It’s a rare moment. There’s no humor in our words. There’s
no irony or sarcasm. It’s not a quote from a Woody Allen film.
There are no secrets underneath what we say out loud.

If there’s anything underneath, it’s a mutual worry about
her brother’s health. Protestants sometimes act like they’re
invincible. Jews, we’re nothing if not for our diseases and how
we talk about them.

Her brother has a disease that is more commonly found
in Jewish genes. In my own twisted way, I feel both honored
and guilt-ridden about this fact, this kid from Iowa with a
Mediterranean disease. But I don’t talk about his health much to
Julia because I know Julia’s invincible Protestant
tuches
will kick
my weak Semitic
tuches
if I talk about it as much as I want to talk
about it. So I talk about nothing—
shtuyot
, as my mom called it.

“For you,” I say, “it doesn’t count as much to like him,
because you two are related.”

“No,” she tells me. “Related makes it even more impressive.”

I sometimes forget: this is a woman who didn’t even go to
her father’s funeral.

Even though I once pegged myself as a lousy secret keeper,
I’ve gotten shamefully good. It started out as helping her
brother pay one late gas bill that he was too ashamed to talk
to Julia about, and by the end of the year, I had paid for a
transmission for his car and two surgeries for his intestines
and now I’m the one too scared to tell Julia.

But under the influence of a few martinis, I want to tell her
about it. I want to tell her everything. Spill my intestines out
on the dashboard and see where that takes us. We could even
clean up the mess with cocktail napkins that have messages on
them from all her beautiful, muscular, non-balding, gentile
lovers. But I’m sober enough to realize that I’m too scared to
let out so much of my intestines. “Don’t be such a coward,”
she once said to me over a game of Monopoly when I wouldn’t
buy Marvin Gardens.

She was right about Marvin Gardens.

I say to my wife, “I should write a story about Shmen and Ally.”

“Don’t write about my brother,” she says, even though she
doesn’t need to say anything with how tightly she is squeezing
my thigh.

“No,” I explain, “I can write it from Ally’s perspective. With
that scientific mind of hers. It would be fun. I bet she has an
interesting story to tell. And I’d like to show how good Shmen
is with the kid.”

And then Julia squeezes my thigh even tighter.
I start thinking seriously about their story. I start thinking
how much I’d like to tell it, if only for a few pages. But Julia
still doesn’t let go of my thigh.

Julia looks over at me and then back at the blurry road.
“I’ve been thinking,” she says, “about a baby.”

“You mean the constipated one next door that drools on
everything?”

“Have you thought about a baby?”

“No,” I say. It’s not exactly the truth and it’s not exactly
a lie. The truth is that I
have
thought about a baby, and I’ve
decided that it’s something I don’t want to think about. Even
saying the word “baby” is something I can’t handle for at least
another couple dozen martinis. Not tonight. Maybe not in my
lifetime.

She lets go of my thigh. I hear that familiar sound of her
blowing the frustrated air out of her mouth.

It’s a typical situation for me: the plot gets too twisted too
quickly and now I can’t find my way out.

Or even worse: I can’t find a way in.

I roll the window down, just a crack, to get some fresh air.

“Yeah,” I say. “I should really write a story about Shmen and Ally.”

If I told you the fact that my boyfriend and my seven-year-old daughter
performed a strip show in the living room—swinging their shirts in the air
before throwing them at each other—you’d probably get the wrong impression.

FACT: The average human colon is five and a half feet
long and is composed of four main sections: the sigmoid, the descending, the
transverse, and the ascending.

It’s morning. We’re at my boyfriend’s apartment. My boyfriend
and I are fooling around in bed when he sees the time and realizes that he
needs to get ready for his job interview. We’re usually too busy to fool around,
but not the kind of busy that brings in money.

FACT: My boyfriend is five and a half feet tall. He has
no colon. He lives on the third floor of a six-story apartment complex. He’s
not good at keeping jobs.

My boyfriend grabs three shirts on hangers from the closet.
He holds one shirt in each hand and hangs one on his erection and says, “Honey,
which of these three do you prefer?”

FACT: I have my daughter from Thursdays to Sundays and
her father gets her the rest of the week. Today is Saturday and, while my
boyfriend hangs a shirt on his cock, my daughter is in the living room, which
we converted into her bedroom.

My daughter doesn’t like the apartment where I live. She
says it’s boring. She always wants to go to my boyfriend’s apartment instead.
I feel the same way, and we do spend most of our time at his place, but I
often argue on the side of my apartment because it feels wrong not to stand
up for where I’m from.

My daughter said that my boyfriend is down to earth. I
said, “What do you mean down to earth? Where did you get those words from?”
She said, “You know, he treats me like a regular person. And he’s good at
freeze tag.” I thought to say, “Too bad freeze tag doesn’t pay fifteen or
twenty bucks an hour.”

My daughter is awake. I hear her singing from the other
room. She’s changed the lyrics to her favorite pop song so that it goes like
this: “I love the way you poop when you poop with me.”

FACT: Before I knew him, my boyfriend went into the hospital
on thirty-one occasions during the two years that he was sick before the big
surgery.

I tell my boyfriend that it’s his fault that my daughter
is always talking about poop. My boyfriend blames his affection for words
like poop on his lack of a colon. It’s “poop envy,” he explains.

FACT: My boyfriend has what is known as a “J Pouch.” Through
the magic of surgery, they reconnected his insides so that his small intestine
now has a pouch in it to mimic his missing colon. The only problem is that
he has to go to the bathroom a lot. When things get inflamed in there, which
happens every few months, it’s called “pouchitis” and it makes bathroom visits
less than pleasant for him. “Another case of the itis,” he’ll tell me.

My boyfriend told me that the nurses would come visit
him even after their shift, that they would play cards and joke for hours
with him. My boyfriend’s parents never understood why overworked nurses would
stick around the hospital like that, playing hearts with my boyfriend.

My daughter has no patience for board games but will play
with a deck of cards for hours. She wanted to know why one king had a knife
in his head. I thought to say that it was because the queen caught him cheating
on her but then my boyfriend said that it was because nobody would let the
guy poop. I’m glad he spoke up first.

FACT: My daughter’s father slept with a blonde blackjack
dealer when my daughter was one year old. I didn’t find out for another year.
We didn’t divorce for another year.

FACT: In the last interview, my boyfriend was asked what
his weaknesses were, and he told the guy that he was lazy and sleepy and had
digestive problems and that he was a bit of a drunk. Then he made the drinky
drinky motion. He didn’t get the job.

My boyfriend’s disease is not getting better. Sometimes,
while he is in the bathroom trying to deal with the inflammation and scar
tissue deep inside of him, I cry in the bedroom, begging for a simpler life.
When he comes out of the bathroom, he always has a smile on his face, like
he was just awarded some kind of prize. It makes me angry that he isn’t more
upset.

FACT: I have a picture of my boyfriend and my daughter
doing push-ups. Except that their pants are pulled down so you can see both
their butts. One is bony and hairy. One is cute and chunky. It’s true that
I was amused enough to take the picture, but it was my boyfriend who put it
on the fridge door.

My mother was horrified at the sight of this picture.
I tried to explain to her that it was all in good fun. That my boyfriend is
as sweet as any adult has ever been to my daughter. But my mother didn’t look
my boyfriend in the eyes all through dinner.

Before he leaves the room, my boyfriend is looking good
with his tie and his shiny shoes. He gives me a kiss and tickles me in those
places he knows about. I can hear a grumble in his stomach and I know it’ll
be hard for him to last through the interview without running to the bathroom.
When he walks away from me, I see that he is limping slightly— even though
he denies it.

On his way out of the room, I say, “Break a leg,” and
he comes crashing down on the hardwood floor of the living room. I suspect
that he fell harder than his joke intended. But my daughter is clapping and
giggling from the other room.

FACT: My daughter loves that man.

When I first kissed him, it was on the balcony of a friend’s
place. We were the only two people outside because the keg was inside and
outside was cold and windy. He whispered in my ear, “It’s not true to say
that I don’t want to entertain the idea of not avoiding something with you.”
He looked at me with his lips and eyes smiling and not smiling. It’s magic
that way he can hold onto something sweet in a mess of crazy. He was so soft
about how he touched my cheek with two fingers and then held my neck and kissed
me on the lips. But I started to laugh and he didn’t separate from me. He
laughed too, with our lips still together like that, and then we stopped laughing,
and we were just breathing again, but with our lips together, not really kissing.
Just breathing.

Even back then, he warned me that he had a nasty little
disease, that he was up to his ears in debt from all that scar tissue. But
back then, I didn’t care, because he was so lovely. And now, I do care, because
he is so lovely.