A Brilliant Novel in the Works (6 page)

There was a period when I rebelled against being Jewish.
When I thought I could get out of the organization for good. I told my mom
that I wasn’t Jewish. That I thought the Torah was a big bunch of implausible
shtuyot. I told her that I could never be a believer and I wanted to be a
Buddhist. This is was what I told her on my first visit from college. With
her pretty, Israeli accent, she said, “I can’t believe you’d say this to me.
What am I to do with this information? Mah la-asot?”

“Nothing,” I told her. “I just wanted to be honest with you.” “What about
your heritage?” she asked. “What about your culture?” She was nearly crying
and I wished that I hadn’t started the discussion. But once I started, it
was tough to stop.

“I can still eat a Passover Seder,” I said. “But you don’t have to be
Jewish to eat and drink like that.”

My mother teared up and put her hand to her chest. “You’re breaking my
heart,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said to her, “but that’s how I feel.”

At the time, I thought this was the most mature way to communicate. This
was my new understanding—to stick the knife inside, with no sense of timing
or grace, and wiggle it.

It was then that I noticed my father hovering outside the living room.

When he walked in, he was shaking a finger at me like he had been giving
this speech long before coming in to the room. “So you think you’re no longer
a Jew?” He spoke quietly—the voice he saved for when he was too angry to yell.

“Yes,” I said, pretending to be confident.

“Well I’ve got news for you,” he said. “If you’re on an airplane and
your plane gets hijacked and they get one look at your passport and see that
your name is Yuval and that you were born in Israel, then I don’t give two
shits what you believe in. You’ll be killed like a goddamn Jew.”

No one said any more in that discussion. We each left the room and went
to separate parts of the house. It’s not that what he said sat perfectly right
with me, but I never again tried to claim that I wasn’t Jewish, no matter
what I believed in
.

So here is how it goes: Julia isn’t home as usual. I’m at home
and restless as usual. The novel is going poorly as usual. But
unlike usual, she leaves her purse on the kitchen table. I don’t
know how this can be, and for a second I think to worry
that something has happened to her, but then I come to the
conclusion that she must be fine because if anyone is going to
get in trouble, it will surely be me.

So I eat a roast beef sandwich beside her purse. Her purse
is black and has lots of compartments. I got it for her thirty-three-and-one-third
birthday, which she found strange. But
she loved the purse.

After the roast beef sandwich, I’m still hungry, but I
decide not to make another. And I keep staring at her purse.
I can’t stop looking at it. And then I think about Save Me,
Julia. And I can’t stop thinking about Save Me, Julia. And so
I try to leave the room. I try to pretend to write like usual but
all that appears on the page is Save Me Julia Save Me Julia
Save Me Julia Save Me Julia Save Me Julia Save Me Julia Save
Me Julia.

And so I go back to the purse and I do exactly what I
should not do.

Inside, just as expected, there are overflowing receipts
that she’ll eventually throw away but can’t bring herself to
toss quite yet. For the first time in our relationship, this habit
annoys me. And so I keep pulling out receipts.

I get down on the kitchen floor and pour out her entire
purse. It’s a big mess of receipts and dollar bills. There’s a
wallet and a cell phone and some lipstick and eyeliner and a
checkbook.

I spread everything out so no two items are on top of each
other and it is then that I find a few crumbled napkins.

And on the napkins is that same crazy handwriting. Only
this time, the phrases are even more obscure:

•   Julia’s Sexy Toes

•   Julia and Her Babies

•   Julia’s Honor System Snack Box

I stare at these napkins, expecting to find the magic explanation
to all my marital problems buried within these words. I look for a pattern.
The S’s are all so big and the J’s are all so small. It must mean something.
The man is surely a Jew hater. Julia’s name is written quickly, as if this
man is very familiar with her. And the phrase, Sexy Toes, is written all wiggly,
like the man has just been sucking Julia’s toes.

I could make up a million stories about these napkins. But I’d have confidence
in none.

I first notice Julia’s black pumps right there on the floor. And
then her stockings. And her dress. And there she is. Standing
above me, watching me rummage through her purse.

“Honey,” I say. “You’re home.”

“Honey my ass,” she says. And she has a point.

I’m not saying that you would get yourself into this mess.
But even so, what would you do in this situation? You could
respond by getting angry at your tall, gentile wife. You could
accuse her of sleeping with other men: “You whore!” you
could announce. Or you could respond to her by apologizing
for invading her privacy: “I’m so sorry for going through your
purse. I’m ashamed of myself.” Or you could mix these two
responses. You could say: “I shouldn’t have been going through
your purse but what the hell are these napkins about?” Or you
could dodge the whole issue and get to something deeper: tell
her that you want to have a baby.

All these responses seem reasonable. But I choose none
of them. I use a different kind of response, which involves
curling your body around your beautiful wife’s legs and saying
directly to her black pumps, “I didn’t do it.”

She takes in a deep breath. I can hear it all the way down
on the cold floor. Then she shakes me off her foot and leaves
the room.

I do eventually get up, and I do eventually find my wife in the
bedroom. It’s our bedroom, but at the moment, it feels like
hers. She is sitting on the side of the bed and I sit next to her
and she lets me.

I’m holding the napkins in my hand even though I don’t
remember picking them up. I sort them in alphabetical order
because I don’t know how to begin, and Julia is staring at the
wall, doing a good job of not helping me out. She is angry.
I can tell by how stiffly she sits. But she is still giving me an
opportunity to say something. An opportunity that I hardly
deserve or know what to do with.

Maybe she doesn’t want me to talk. Maybe she’s ashamed
about whatever she is involved in. It’s all too much to think
about. Her napkin-based affair.

“I’m worried about Shmendrik,” I tell her. “He isn’t looking
so good.” I put my hand on Julia’s lap. “He can’t beat this thing
with just alcohol and steroids.”

My wife puts her head against my shoulder. Slowly, piece
by piece, her body begins to slump, and she cries. And then
it’s not just crying. It’s wailing. And I realize that I’ve never
witnessed her cry for more than a fraction of a second.
Usually, when she cries, she walks away fast, goes into the
bathroom, flushes the toilet once or twice, and comes out
asking me about lunch or overdue library books. Protestants
have this uncanny ability to flush their problems in one toilet
visit. Even the baggage she carries about her mother stays in
the bathroom most of the time. But now Julia cries like it’s
all she knows how to do. And I squeeze her into my shoulder
and chest. We’ve never been in this situation. And so I keep
squeezing her. I rub her back. I let this woman cry.

It finally happened. Her mother finally left her father.
There was no question that it was necessary. What took Julia until fifteen
to realize (and run away from) took her mother until fifty-nine.

Her mother was beautiful—the way her gray hair rolled past her shoulders
like some kind of rainstorm and the way her cheeks swelled from a laughter
that could have been from a joke either minutes or decades passed. But there
was little laughter for this woman who left a man after spending so many years
of her life serving his needs. After you cut off a problem limb, what do you
use to replace it? For her mother, it turns out that it required a flask full
of Monopolowa—potato-based and only $16 a liter.

Julia had just bought a new house. Two-car garage. Three bedrooms. And
she was single again. Loads of space. Why not invite her mother to live with
her? They loved each other. They watched Marlon Brando films together. They
ordered Picasso and Van Gogh prints. They danced to Frank Sinatra together.
They bought season passes to the museum and to the symphony. They could share
the gas bill and complain together about the neighbor’s pro-Republican front-yard
signage.

But it turns out vodka couldn’t completely fill her mother’s missing
limb. It took Julia herself to fill the hole. And why shouldn’t Julia help?
It was a chance for them to get reacquainted as two adults.

Her mother could dance the way a weeping willow sways in a breeze. And
she was great about listening to Julia complain about working too many hours
as a marketing manager at whatever corporation she was working at. Julia could
even tell such unmeaningful stories like how her coworker Joseph started sleeping
with her other coworker Joseph. Her mother would listen.

As a loyal daughter, Julia kept away from dating men for a year, made
sure her mother had settled into her new life. That kind of change isn’t easy.
But it’s not easy to be single and taking care of Mama when you’re thirty
either.

After the first date that Julia went out on, she thought her mother’s
worry was a normal concern. After all, the man had sent a suspiciously large
bouquet of flowers the day before and who knows what that could have meant.
And so it seemed okay that her mother drank a little too much that night and
that she was in tears when Julia came home.

But every time Julia went out, she had to confront another panic, even
over men who were tediously unthreatening. Julia’s brother could go out with
drug addicts and her mother didn’t care, but for Julia, even a librarian was
dangerous material. Her relationships fell apart before they could start.
But after all, she did love her mother more than these men of questionable
intentions. And so she accepted this predicament. That she’d have to calm
her mother frequently, that sometimes she’d have to chase her mother down
the street, that sometimes she’d have to hear her mother call her a whore.
Her poor mother, she thought. All those years with a man who read the TV Guide
more than he spoke with his wife.

When we met, she had already learned to preface the first date with a
warning about her baggage: “It’s like I’m carrying around the Empire State
Building in my purse.” But baggage or no baggage, a girl who could so easily
outwit me, who could practically tolerate my neuroses, who could sneak a hand
on my lap while telling me about Brando and Sinatra was a woman that I wanted
to stick with. That night I was completely unconcerned about her 365,000-ton
purse.

We learned to work around the issues. We saw each other when we could.
But our trysts were short and they ended abruptly; we had to sneak around
like fifteen-year-olds. Within six months, it began to bother me. I was dying
for her to spend the night at my place. I was dying for us to take a trip
together. I grew to resent her beautiful damn mother, who called every time
I got even one finger in Julia’s pants.

Julia realized that something had to change. Maybe she wanted more than
one finger in her pants. I had plenty other fingers to spare. So she told
her mother, “You need to let me have my own life.” Her mother couldn’t say
no to something this reasonable, so she said, “Yes,” even though inside her
chest, she was yelling NO in languages that she had never spoken before. I
know this feeling.

Julia and I finally got our time alone together, though Julia noticed
the signs of her mother’s collapse. She saw the poorly cleaned vomit stains
on her mother’s bedroom floor. She smelled the fermentation on her mother’s
skin. She noticed the way her mother had trouble remembering the things that
seemed unforgettable.

Julia has not once blamed me for anything that happened to her mother,
even though I feel this burden any time that Julia gets sad. That perhaps
it was me that killed her mother. Because it was me that convinced Julia that
it was okay for the two of us to go to Oaxaca. It was me who convinced Julia
at the airport that she didn’t need to worry about the unlocked cabinet with
the vodka in it. I remember it clearly, how I took Julia in my arms and said
with an insincere sort of confidence, “Honey, it’ll be fine. Your mother can
take care of herself,” and, for that blissful week in Mexico, we left all
365,000 tons behind
.

Julia has basically cried into all the napkins before either of
us remembers how this whole thing got started. She tells me
about how she’s so worried about her brother and how he’s so
stubborn about his health and how she’s scared to bug him
any more about it. And I agree with her, because I agree with
her. And after she has ruined the unfaithful napkins with her
tears and snot, I take them out of her hands and put them in
my pocket.

“Julia,” I say to my wife. “I need to talk to you.”

Her crying slows. And then it’s just funny breathing. And
then I begin talking. “I’ve been giving Shmen money every
month for his debts,” I say. “I’ve been pulling money out of
what’s left of my parents’ inheritance without telling you. I’ve
been cutting myself again.”

I can’t gauge Julia’s reaction because she’s still sniffling
and I’m not sure if she’s upset about Shmen’s health or if it’s
now about the money or about me or us or the purse or the
napkins or the fact that I don’t like BLTs no matter how many
times she makes them. I’ve lost track of the emotional steps
and now I’m terrified of saying anything. This is why I once
asked my wife if we could conduct our relationship through
letters only. In person, there is too much to interpret and
worry about.

But she does eventually look up at me and what I see
isn’t the friendliest face in the world. “Since you’ve been
going through my purse,” she says. “Did you notice anything
addressed to you?”

“You mean like a napkin?” I say.

“No. I mean like a check.”

I leave my weepy wife at the bed and run into the kitchen.

I know exactly where I placed that check on the kitchen floor.
I even remember acknowledging—in some foggy part of
my brain—that it was addressed to me. So I grab the check
and come back into the room. The check from Shmen is big
enough that I assume it covers all that he owes me.

And, in a way, I’m disappointed. Just like that—
poof
—my horrible
beautiful insane secret has disappeared.

“Have you known for a while?” I ask.

She doesn’t say anything. She stares at the wall as seriously
as Orthodox Jews stare at the Wailing Wall when they pray.
Except my wife and I aren’t the praying type. So I assume that
she’s waiting for me to ask the real question. When they pray
to that wall in Jerusalem, Jews sometimes put little crumbled
pieces of paper inside the cracks. These have their hopes and
wishes and dreams on them. I often wonder what kind of
message I would put inside this wall, if I were the praying
type. But I keep coming up blank. And so I pull the crumbled
napkins out of my pocket and hand them to Julia.

“Who are you
shtuping?
” I ask.

She points to one of the restraints, which is still hanging
from the bedpost. “Pretty much no one,” she says.

My gentile wife is more familiar with my culture than I give her credit for.
She understands the nuance of the Yiddish language. For instance, she understands
that spanking your husband is not technically
shtuping
. It falls
more in the realm of
meshuganah
.

“Then who is writing these notes?” I ask.

“You don’t recognize the handwriting?” She gives them
back to me.

I try to open one up and look at it but the ink is smudged
and wet. “No.”

“Well then look at that check,” she says.

And that’s when it hits me. Shmen and his obsession with
obscure band names. He can spend hours Googling for band
names—that’s how he got fired from his last job. My wife is
looking at me. I know she’s wondering how it’s possible an
idiot like me could’ve scored a 1390 on the GRE. And so I try
to think of something to say. I try to come up with some way
to explain why I’ve been brooding for months about money
and napkin dilemmas that don’t even exist. I need to give my
wife an eloquent explanation for my madness.

And so I say, “Oh.”

“Jesus, Yuvi!” she says. She gets up fast. “This is how you
live your life?” Julia grabs my pants and pulls them down
enough to see the cuts on my ass. Then she lifts them back up.
“No wonder you have no plot in your novel! You get fixated on
the smallest things and can’t move forward.”

I know I deserve this, and so I sit down on the bed and
take it. Julia is pacing the bedroom. I’m expecting a big, long
speech and I’m preparing to apologize. But instead of it going
the way I expect and prepare for, she suddenly slows down. She
walks up to me. My body tightens up and I squint, preparing
for the explosion, hoping that if I wish hard enough, I might
disappear. I’d even be willing to pray for it to work out.

And then Julia leans over me and she kisses me on the top
of my head. “I sure do love you,” she says to me.

And that’s when I know that things are far worse than I
ever suspected.