The Color Master: Stories (17 page)

“True,” said the rabbi.

“So is God far?”

“I don’t think those distance terms apply in the same way,” she said.

“Then I don’t understand the example.”

“It’s not—” she said, clasping her hands together around the giraffe. “It’s not so literal.”

“I am literal,” he said. “I think literally. The moon is also unresponsive.”

She shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s hard to find the right example. I’m not saying pray to the moon,” she said. “Truly. I’m just trying to think up a way to talk about why there’s no queue, you know?”

“You don’t think God has ears?”

She sat back in her chair. “Not like our ears.”

He laughed, short. “I’m a doctor,” he said, putting all the folded T-shirts into a neat stack.

She resettled herself. Her face was warm, flushed.

“And are these prayers to be answered?” he said.

She seemed to be resting now, the urgency quieting, and he could see her shifting modes, back to her regular rabbi self, her teacher self, returning to the statements she said maybe once a week, twice a week, to different audiences. “In Judaism we pray for a variety of reasons,” she said, gently tucking the giraffe next to a few worn teddy bears. She closed her eyes. “Out of gratitude. Out of despair, asking for comfort. Out of confusion. Out of anger, in defiance. To be with. To share oneself. Not for results, tangible material results, especially on Shabbat—isn’t that interesting? We’re not to ask for anything tangible on Shabbat, which is, I think, one of the nicest times to pray all together.”

He flashed on an image of a hamburger, at a drive-through near his home, in a tinfoil pocket.

“Right now it might be helpful,” she said. “That’s all I’m saying.”

He wiped his hands clear on his pants. “I still think it’s hokum.”

“Okay,” she said. She opened her eyes. Her forehead relaxed. “That’s okay. I’ll stop. I just wanted to talk it through with you. I’m glad you stayed.”

He wiped his forehead with his sleeve. It was hot in her office.

“I apologize for being so stubborn.”

“You weren’t stubborn,” she said, leaning over and unpeeling the tape on a new box. “You were actually pretty open. In a way, in my book, we just did it.”

“Did what?”

“Prayed, in a way,” she said. “Wrestled with it.”

“Why do you say that?” He sat up taller. For some reason, the thought made him angry.

“Because you’re leaning in,” she said, unfolding the box flaps. “Because I am tired, in a way that I recognize. Because you seem to be fighting up from under some water. Into what, I don’t know. Into something. Because we were talking about it deeply,” she said. “I could feel it.”

“We were having an argument!” he said. He stood up, but her office was too small to pace, so he turned away, and stepped away, and found himself going through the door and going down the hall to use the bathroom. Down the long, dark, narrow hallway, with its closed office doors, and framed yarn art telling stories of the Old Testament. Once he was inside the bathroom, the motion sensor light clicked on; it was the end of the day, and no one had been in for over an hour. The space held the loneliness particular to an unused bathroom, the glare of fluorescent lights, the echo of sink and crumpling paper, the tired isolation of one person in an office building, alone, at night, working too late. He used up ten paper towels on his face and neck, until he was sufficiently dry. He washed his hands carefully in the sink. He took the back exit.

The rabbi sat in her office for forty-five minutes, unpacking the last donation boxes, to see if he would return, but he did not return, and so she shouldered her bag and walked the seven blocks home.

The doctor found his car in the parking lot, one of the last three there, and joined the flow on the street. He drove with his air-conditioner fan on full blast, into traffic as the sun set, into dusk, with the full moon rising in his rearview
mirror, almost taunting him with her big presence in his car alone and every car around and none of it being how he liked to think or was interested in thinking. And yet. Why did he love the rabbi? He loved her. He got home and looked through the mail, and he had driven past the drive-through, so instead he sent out for a meatball sandwich, which he ate in pieces, because it was too unwieldy to eat all at once, and even the bread he cut into bite-sized parts. He could feel it, just feel it, the glimmer of something that he did not understand. He would never call it God. He would not call it prayer. But just beyond his sandwich, and the four TV shows he watched back to back, and his teeth brushing, and his face washing, and his nighttime reading of a magazine, and his light switching off, just the faint realization that there were many ways to live a life and that some people were living a life that was very different than his, and the way they lived was beyond him and also didn’t interest him and yet he could sense it. Comfort and fear rose together inside him. Like standing in the middle of a meadow, where no one had his back.

I can’t remember the words of things. The words for words. I have lost my words. What’s this from? Is it the Internet? Texting? E-mail? I see it in kids, too; it’s not an aging thing. An aging issue. I do know that at the supermarket yesterday, I asked the guy where the weighing thing was, the thing that weighs other things, flailing around with my hands, indicating, and he crumpled up his forehead and said, “You mean the scale?”

“Yes”—I said, beaming, pumping his hand—“the scale!” As if he was the winner of an SAT prize giveaway.

At the doctor’s office, I told my doc that it was sore.

“What’s sore?”

I pointed to my neck. “This.”

“Your throat,” he said.

“Of course,” I said.

We went over my symptoms. He gave me a subscription.

With hand gestures, you can fill in a lot of gaps, and the words
thing
and
stuff
and
-ness
also help:
patientness
instead of
patience
,
fastness
instead of
speed
,
honestness
instead of
honesty
. With these choices, many words can be indicated, and pointing or gesticulating usually works. At the shoe store, I watched a lady walk up to the mini socks and point right at them, and
the salesguy knew just what she wanted. Plus, who knows what those flimsies are called anyway.

“Cavemen point,” said Susan, my neighbor, one Saturday morning. “You can always point at what you want, but you’d be returning to Neanderthal standards.”

“Well, maybe we’re going back to caveman times,” I said, pouring a circle of wet pancake into the pan. “Tech forward, language back.”

“Reverting,” she said.

“What?”

“
Reverting
to caveman times.”

“That’s not my word choice,” I said, picking up the flipper thing. “I said ‘going back’ on purpose. I don’t like that word,
reverting
.”

“If it was on purpose, then fine,” she said, standing a fork on its end.

I flipped the pancake. “Oh, fuck off,” I said.

Once the edges were all gold, I put one on her plate. A perfect goldy circle. She smiled at me. But not a thank-you smile, no: a self-satisfied one. She always looks so smug. Smug, smug, smug. I like that word very much, and I won’t forget it easily.

Susan calls social Web sites silly distractions. She refuses to even look at an electronic book, because she says she must have pages, must. Fine; I read pages, too. I too enjoy the book smell everybody goes on and on about. Time for the perfumists to wake up, right? A perfume called Book? With its cologne follow-up, Newspaper? The question is, does she have to be so goddamn righteous about it? Does she have to raise her eyebrows like that, when I mention an app? She looked
over my shoulder once while I was texting, which was already annoying, and when I wrote
lol
she made a very clear point to me about how I was silent and not laughing out loud, not at all. I said it was just an expression, and that I was laughing out loud inside my own mind. She rolled her eyes then, way back into her head. She’s not even my girlfriend. We did sleep together once, right when I moved in, but then it sort of drizzled away. We both got busy and I woke up to the neighbor problem. The neighbor-lover problem. And, sure, fine, I do check my phone about every two minutes, but so do a lot of people, and it’s better than smoking, that’s what I say. It’s the new, lung-safe cigarette.

“Those breathing things,” a student of mine said last week, gesturing at her chest. She was trying to explain to me why she had to miss the history test. I nodded. I got it.

“Pneumonia,” she said.

“You okay?”

“I think so,” she said. “The doctor gave me drugs.”

“Drugs?”

She thought for a second. She made that little wheeze sound. “Antirobotics?”

I couldn’t help smiling. “So you will not become a robot,” I said.

“Hope not,” she laughed.

In the daytime, I work at a school where I teach junior-high-school history. I have been working there for eight years, since I had a crisis of identity in law school and realized I hated reading red and beige books. Teaching’s way better. I teach American history, and, true, we do spend a lot of time
on the Revolutionary War, more than on any other war, but junior-high-school kids like the idea of people throwing tea in the water.

You’d think in school it might be better with the words, but it’s worse. When we have a good class discussion, my students will sometimes raise their hands with enthusiasticness, jumping up and down in their seats, but by the time I get around to calling on them, most of them say, “I forgot what I was going to say.” A good 50 percent of the time. I have taught now for a long time and this did not happen even five years ago. It is new.

“Where did it go?” I ask.

“Where did what go?”

“Your point?”

They shrug. “Don’t know,” they say. They hold up their cell phones. “Sorry. We are holding a lot of small things in our heads.”

“What things?” I say.

“Things,” they say. “In our …”

They point to their heads.

“We are holding a lot of them.”

I’d be irritated, except as soon as they leave I have a thing I am planning to do and I walk into the center of the room to do it and whatever it was flies away. Half my days I find myself standing in the centers of rooms.

In some study, they say phones and computers are replacing our cerebral cortexes, externalizing our thoughts so that we do not need to think them—the same way certain couples will have one quiet, meeky person who trails off all the sentences and one overeager type who leaps in to finish. We’re the
trailer-offer, Google’s our jumpy mate. Susan is worried about this, but is it so bad? Sure, Shakespeare knew ten thousand words, or a million words, just a lot of words, and he was real good at what he did, but also no women were allowed in his shows and if you got sick with pneumonia you’d just die, probably in two days, and only half the children made it to age ten. So it’s a trade-off, is what I say.

Susan shook her head. “It’s no trade,” she said. She was over again, with wine. “Meaning,” she said, “you can improve your vocabulary and still get your amoxicillin and vote. It’s not like there’s a checklist and for each era we only get ten helpful options, and everything else goes to shit.”

“I like that word,
option
,” I said.

“Are you kidding me?”

“
Optional
,” I said. “
Opt. Opting
. Nice.”

She poured herself a second glass of wine.

“I’m so sick of dating,” she said, leaning back in her chair and lifting up her legs to sit cross-legged.

“Online?”

“Yeah,” she said, sighing. “Even me. Even me, online. Fine. I hate picking a name for myself, you know? Yesterday I saw a man and his Internet name was Fido. What am I supposed to do with that?”

“What’d you name yourself?”

“Nothing.”

“You have to name yourself something,” I said. “Or they don’t let you on the site.”

She finished her wine. Eyed the bottle. I refilled both of us, so it looked like it wasn’t just her.

“Wordkeeper,” she said.

“Your dating name is Wordkeeper?”

“Shut up,” she said.

“Sex-y,” I said.

“Well, maybe to someone it will be.” She took off her glasses, and touched the middle top of her nose, a geste she does that I do like.

“It has a little bit of a dom tone,” I said, sipping. “Like you’re hoarding all the words and you’ll give them out when you feel like it. Some guys will like that.”

She had her eyes closed. She was thinking something private.

“Some guys,” she said.

I went to open a bag of peanuts and poured them into a bowl. Susan and I have talked about dating since that one thing, but I have always said no. I’m not completely sure why. We’re like the couple on the sitcom that has good sparks but never get together for the sake of ratings.

“You know I can’t,” I said, putting the bowl on the table. “I’m your neighbor.”