A Brilliant Novel in the Works (5 page)

It’s nearly dawn when the phone rings. I grab it and take it out
of the bedroom before picking up.

“Hello?” I say.

“It’s Shmen. What’s up?”

Whenever the phone rings at night, I first think that it’s my
father, that something has happened to him, or my mother,
calling from Israel, that there’s been an emergency with life
or death at stake. Even now that they’re dead, the reflex won’t
go away.

Shmen double-checks about borrowing some money. I say,
“Of course,” and then he tells me his latest palindrome.

When I come back to the bed, Julia asks me who it was.

“Wrong number,” I say.

“Liar,” she says in a groggy whisper muffled by her pillow.

It’s our usual ritual when Shmen calls at night. I lie. She
accuses. It shows love, even though I can’t explain to you how.

My ass burns from the cuts I gave myself earlier, followed
by all that spanking. And now that insane palindrome of his is
chattering in my head. Between the burn and the chattering, I
feel terrible. I can’t keep one coherent thought in my head. So
now maybe I can finally get some sleep.

I, madam, I made bone of live flesh.
Ah self, evil foe, no bed!
Am I mad?

Am I?

She’s been working more. Her organization is just getting
off the ground. She has thirty-seven volunteers in just three
months helping thirty-two alcoholics in twenty-nine families
of need. She believes that it’s not about alcoholism, it’s about
hopelessness. How’s that for an impossible-sounding task: to
instill hope. I’d rather try to rip someone’s colon out through
their ear. She’s been on the local radio. She even has a catchy
mission statement with sincere nouns like “community”
and “generosity” in it. And while she generously helps the
community, I spend my time thinking thoughts like: She
could be humping any member of this generous community
while I sit at home like an idiot.

I try to write. I have a novel that is a steaming pile of
personal essays with no plot except one about an author who
has no idea how to write a novel. And that is how it looks on
the very best of days. My editor is frustrated with me as if she
expected so much more out of me. And I want to please her. I
tell her that I just need to do a little more research.

“Research what?” she asks.

In my research, I’ve found out that two blue Xanax pills
take me from dangerously antsy to too antsy. And that three
pills take me to very antsy and that four pills take me to a nap.
Vicodin shoots me through the whole antsy spectrum and
lands me smack in the middle of a brilliant apathy. Followed
by a monstrous headache.

In my research, I’ve also found that staring at the baby
pictures of Julia does not help my antsiness. It makes me long
even more for something that I do not have.

The good news is that Julia’s busyness has replaced any
talk of her wanting a baby. Which simplifies my worries and
failings to less than forty-five line items.

It’s ten in the morning on a Tuesday, and while I’m sitting
at my desk, I hear the lock on the front door clicking. Then
there’s the sound of someone breaking into the house. It’s a
murderer, I decide. Someone has come to rob my house and
kill me. My first thought: poor intruder, they’ll hardly find
anything of value in this house. I can’t even sell my own books,
so what is the murderer going to do with them?

The murderer is getting closer to me. I hear heels clicking
against the hardwood floor. And then the murderer steps into
my office.

“Jesus,” the murderer says. “You’ve been in nothing but
that same pair of underwear for a week now. This place smells
like rotten coffee grinds. I think you’ve gone three steps past
stir crazy.”

The murderer is in that beautiful black dress that I bought
her a year ago. The one that looks abominably wrinkled in a
way that only she could make sexy. I knew it would be great
on her before she even tried it on. She’s shaved her legs today.
I see the eyeliner. And that long red hair that only gets redder.

“My brother wants to meet you for lunch,” the murderer
says. “Get the hell out of this house for a change.”

It’s gotten heartbreaking to see her these days. I fake naps
and fake writing just to avoid her. I tell her that it’s the novel
that is killing me.

But it’s her.

Or the things I find in her pants.

Our communication skills are at an all-time low. We’ve

created a new language just to avoid talking about what we
need to talk about. I’m tempted to tell her about the failed
sign language I created as a kid. But that would involve
communicating with her.

“You’ve got to get your act together,” she tells me.
“Hush, woman!” I say to her. “There’s a brilliant novel in
the works!” And then I close the door and call the murderer’s
brother.

My fifth grade class at the Hebrew Academy was unusually
imbalanced. Out of the thirty students in our grade, there were only two girls.
Our whole grade was stunted by the imbalance. No one thought to approach these
girls in a “going out with a girl” kind of way even though our counterparts
at the nearby public school had moved on to kissing and touching and even
a few isolated stories of going all the way.

Recess at our school was kickball and jungle gyms and playing on the
swings and capture the flag and hopscotch. It was trading stickers and trading
baseball cards. Getting in trouble for picking on the younger kids. Running
away from the older kids. But for Ezra and me, it was hiding behind the four
biggest pine trees in the back of the field and talking about girls. Both
of them. It turned out that Ezra liked Shayna Eisenberg better and I liked
Nari Tanaka better.

“I daydream about her all the time,” he said to me. “I think about her
naked all the time. I touch her boobs over and over and over and then I take
off all her clothes and then we do it. I can’t stop thinking about doing it.
I’m dying to do it.”

Ezra was smacking his hand on the bark of the tree as he told this to
me and pieces of bark fell to the ground.

“I know exactly what you mean,” I said to him, even though I had no idea
what he meant. It wasn’t that my daydreams were way different than his, but
they were different. I didn’t dream about doing it. I dreamed that Nari would
strip me to my underwear, that she’d tie me up, that she’d throw me face down
on the ground and then step on me with her dirty tennis shoes and then sit
on me as I lay there helpless and begging for her to stop, with her butt cheeks
rubbing on my spine. She’d explain all the ways that I had misbehaved. If
I had enough time in my fantasy, perhaps we’d eventually get to the point
where she’d put her hand in my underwear, and sometime after that, maybe she’d
take off her clothes too, maybe I’d touch her once in a while, and there was
an off chance that we might eventually do it. But I rarely got past the excitement
of her strength and my shame. So I said to Ezra, “Yeah. I think about doing
it all the time too.”

“We’ve got to do something about it,” he said, looking at the bark all
over the ground.

With all this excitement about these two girls, Ezra and I did what any
two boys would do in a lopsided, Jewish elementary school when they liked
two girls. We formed a group of only boys and created a fully formed sign
language to discuss these girls behind their backs
.

Our sign language was a disaster. The only functional
part of the language was that holding up one finger in the air represented
Shayna, and two fingers meant Nari. But we also had signs for more than a
hundred words plus every letter of the alphabet. And as much as we tried to
train everyone in the group, it never worked the way we wanted it to. For
example, in the middle of class, I’d want to tell Ezra that I could see Nari’s
black underwear when I dropped my pencil on the floor and went to pick it
up. But he’d never understand what I was trying to say. “What?” he’d whisper.
“You ate Nari’s black pencil?” So I’d have to whisper the whole thing to him
or write him a note, which were both dangerous propositions. So I’d give up
on trying to explain it and would just keep dropping my pencil on the floor—having
to enjoy this incommunicable treat alone.

It was only a week or two later while I was running across the field
to meet Ezra by the trees when Nari stopped me. “We know your little secret
and find it very immature.” She was wearing her Members Only jacket and she
pulled her camera out from her pocket and took a picture of me.

“What secret?” I asked. I could think of a million secrets that I didn’t
want her to know. And I believed that she knew every one of them.

“Your language,” she said. “It’s very immature.”

The language. Our precious useless language.

“Whatever.” I ran for the pine trees as fast as I could. I didn’t understand
what she meant. I didn’t get how our

language was immature. How else would you behave? At the time, I couldn’t
think of a single way to act more mature. A month later, she gave me a copy
of the picture of my immature face. I had the look of someone watching an
alien spaceship land.

When I told Ezra about the news, he said, “I know.” And he wasn’t banging
his hand against the tree when he said, “I told Shayna after she let me kiss
her.”

“What?” I said. “We swore not to tell anyone. The language was ours!”

“Yeah,” he said. “I know. But I just didn’t see the point.”

I didn’t speak with him for two weeks. It’s true that I did get over
the loss of our whole silly language, and that we went back to being best
friends, but it felt awfully important on that first night as my mom kept
yelling for me to finally get out of the bathroom and start doing my homework.
For Ezra, this language was a little game to play while he thought about a
more satisfying way to behave. For me, this was all you could ask for: a broken
way to communicate that was virtually unusable and still worth protecting
at all costs
.

Shmen steps into the restaurant, his smile exaggerated to
cover up his limp. He sits down and asks, “How’s it hanging?”
I ask him about the limp.

“You’re supposed to say low and lazy,” he tells me. “Or at
least you might suggest a hang to the left. Unless you’ve got a
center predilection, which suggests either a very small or very
durable penis.”

We order two burgers and two bourbons. This restaurant
has mediocre food. The service is terrible. The place smells
like rotten fries and the carpet is sticky from old beer. It takes
forever to get your order, and consider yourself lucky if they
get the order right. You walk out of here with a stomachache
and smelling like beer-battered halibut—and they don’t even
serve fish. We both love coming here for lunch.

After telling him which way I’m hanging, he tells me
about the limp. It turns out it’s a new disease related to his old
disease. The new disease is something that people often get a
few years after being diagnosed with the old disease. At best,
it means that he has something like rheumatoid arthritis. At
worst, his joints and his spine will fuse together and his bones
will eventually shatter.

“Enough about my diseases,” he says. “Tell me about your
diseases.”

“What are you going to do about it?” I say.

He sips his bourbon and makes the sound of getting things
out between his teeth. “They say physical therapy can help.
The doc gave me some steroids which definitely help,” he says.
“Especially if I double the dose.”

The scarier the story gets, the bigger he smiles.

“Does Julia know?” I ask. “Does Ally know?”

“Yes,” he says. “She’s worried,” as if I just asked about one
person. He sips on his empty glass.

“My novel very nearly has a plot,” I tell him. “I’ve very
nearly told Julia about the money I give you. I’ve very nearly
stopped dreaming about my father. I’ve very nearly found a
way to get out of my book deal. I’ve very nearly figured out
how to live my life in my underwear while standing on my
desk.” I don’t mention anything about Julia’s thoughts of a
baby because I’ve got nothing to very nearly say about it.

“It’s very nearly good news,” he says, and we toast to this
nearly good news. But I can’t keep my smile going for long.
There’s an image in my head of his spine fused together and I
can’t get rid of it.

After some silence and some staring at our empty glasses,
Shmen says, “If you need more plot, why don’t you have
someone die? They say that death must come before rebirth
any how.”

“Who is they?” I ask.

We get our burgers and our second drinks and then a woman
on her way out the door approaches Shmen.

“Joel?” she says. “I can’t believe it. I was just thinking about
you!” The woman is so tall and so skinny and so blonde and
has such red lipstick on her lips that for a second I imagine
that she’s a cardboard figure of a woman. When Joel sees this
woman he stands up and they hug and kiss two or three times
and they express how nice it is to see each other and then they
say bye but not before she makes Shmen promise to call her
soon and then Shmen sits down as if nothing ever happened
except that he sits down slowly because of his new disease and
as he sits, I hear Shmen’s grunt that is virtually unhearable.

“Do all six-foot-tall blondes do that to you?” I ask.

“That was Jessie,” he says. “We worked at the university
library together.”

“Some library,” I say.

He explains to me that last year he had a crush on her.
That she had a crush on him. And I suggest that she still has a
crush and he enjoys the accusation. And then I ask him what
the hell a crush is anyway and he says it’s when you get excited
to see someone each day. It’s when you send them too many
e-mails and you fantasize about them, sometimes dream of
having sex with them.

I don’t say anything in response. I don’t say anything for a
good, long time.

“Crushes aren’t bad,” he says. “We didn’t have sex or
anything.”

“But it’s like cheating,” I say. “Writing love letters and
fantasizing about fucking like that. It’s cheating,” I say.

“No, it isn’t,” he says. “It’s harmless. Pretty soon you forget
about the crush anyhow. Maybe you can bring some of that
crush energy into the relationship.”

“The fuck you can,” is what I say. And suddenly I can tell
from Shmen’s tightened forehead that I don’t look so normal
and so I try to breathe normally. I try to stop thinking about
the napkin message.

“You should tell Julia,” he says to me.

“What?” I say.

“You should tell Julia about the money.” He finishes his
drink. “And you should stop loaning me the money.”

My face probably looks as overcooked as the burgers we
both tried to finish.

“I should go,” he says to me. “I’ve got to fail another
interview.” He gets himself out the chair. Then this man kisses
me on the top of my head. “Take care of yourself, Yuval,” he
says. And then my brother-in-law leaves me at the table to pay
for our tab. I notice that he not only limps on his way out, but
that he can’t turn his head without moving his chest too. Even
his charming smile to the hostess is impeded.

It’s been years since anyone has called me by my full Israeli
name and it makes me feel like a child to hear it.