All I Love and Know (11 page)

His father made an admonishing sound, and Lydia winced. “Don't say that,” she said. “I hate that word.”

“It's what we are, Mother,” he said. “No matter how respectable we are, how well-behaved, to them we're just
queers
.”

Matt sat next to him on the couch and put a hand on his arm. Lydia rose frostily and took Sam's hand, and said, “I'm not going to listen to this. We'll let you calm down.”

When they'd left, Matt slid the door shut.

“It's true,” Daniel insisted.

“You're preaching to the choir, honey,” Matt said. He tried to take him into his arms, but Daniel shook him off.

“Where
were
you? I looked all over for you.” His face was exhausted and ashy, crusted with layers of dried tears, and Matt's heart went out to his poor, tired spirit.

“I'm sorry, baby,” he said gently. “I left the house for a little while and went for a walk.” He was proud of himself for not mentioning that Daniel himself had sent him away.

“A little while?! I'm sitting here getting tortured by my parents, who can't believe I'm capable of raising a child, and on top of that facing
losing
the kids . . . Have you been
drinking
?” He paused, letting out a shaky sigh. “It's just that I have to know if I'm going to be able to depend on you.”

Matt's face contorted with disbelief. “What are you talking about?” he cried. “That's so unfair!”

“It isn't about fair or not fair, Matt,” Daniel said. “It's about being there to help.”

Matt's hand was gripped over his heart, wrinkling his shirt. “Hey, I'm a nice, helpful guy, but I'm not a magician,” he protested. “I can't be sent away and be there for you at the same time.” There was no reply. “You've hardly let me near you in the past couple of days. You've hardly even acknowledged me! Ilana's father asks who I am every time he lays eyes on me. And you know what? This is my life, too; you're not the only one who's going to be raising those kids.” He was thinking,
If we even get them
—and he had no idea how he felt about the prospect of not getting them. He remembered Daniel's return from Israel last year, and how, as he unpacked, his hands paused over the opened suitcase on his bed and his face took on a solemnity that Matt had never seen before, and which was so much the cartoon essence of solemnity—his eyes shining and his face drawn long—that Matt thought at first that he was about to joke about something. When Daniel told him that Joel and Ilana wanted their kids to live with them if something happened to them, Matt's heart had tumbled all over itself to join him in the sense that a wonderful honor had been bestowed upon them. And he had felt that all along, on Daniel's behalf, but also on his own. It seemed a sign of tremendous trust and love, and he had a sense of how subversive it was too, how deeply it went against the grain of the Israeli ideology of populating the land with Jewish children. He had never imagined that it would come to fruition; and when it did, he veered madly between excited pride and dread.

“It's my name in the will,” Daniel countered, “and I'm the one who will have to go to court.”

“And no doubt you'll keep me as far away from those proceedings as possible,” Matt said.

Daniel stood and smacked his pants to smooth them. “You know what?” he said, drawing himself up. “I'm not having this conversation.”

“Come on, Dan,” Matt pleaded, standing between Daniel and the door. In the tiny room he could hear the labored breathing of his partner, could feel stress and sweat radiating off his body. “I don't want to fight.”

Daniel refused to meet his eyes. They stood like that for a minute, and then Matt spoke. “This is awful,” he said. “This is the most awful time in our entire lives. So let's be friends, okay? Otherwise, we're not going to survive this.”

Daniel looked quickly at him, thinking,
We?
He took a shaky breath. “It's just that . . . I looked all over for you,” he said, his eyes filling with tears.

Matt leveled him with a stare, knowing he should put his arms around him, even if he got pushed away again and again. But how much could you get blamed for not being there before you decided to just stop being there?

Daniel sat back down and covered his face with his hands. “I just wish I could talk to you,” he said. “I come to bed wanting to curl up and talk to you. But I can't. You just don't get it.”

Matt sat back down. “What don't I get?” he asked softly.

“The whole thing,” Daniel said, waving a hand helplessly.

Matt shut his mind down, like a computer on sleep mode, and waited a few beats, willing himself to be patient. “What whole thing?”

Daniel looked at him. “I know how you feel about Israel, and about Joel and Ilana living here.”

“And?” Matt asked, knowing that Daniel was referring to arguments they'd sometimes had, in which Matt had argued that Joel and Ilana should leave the country as long as it was an occupying power. He'd written his senior thesis on South Africa during apartheid, under a South African professor he admired who had gone into exile; and even though Daniel insisted over and over that the comparison didn't hold, South Africa was Matt's model for what the Israelis were doing. “In exile!” Daniel would exclaim. “I'm sorry, but who are you to tell people where to live?” It was the biggest bone of contention between them, and Matt thought it was stupid and a waste, since he and Daniel actually felt pretty much the same way about Israel, and because, when it came down to it, why should he be that invested in it anyway?

“I know you don't really feel this,” Daniel said now, “but sometimes I think you might feel they deserved what they got.”

Matt inhaled sharply. “Are you kidding me?” he said. “
Are you kidding me?
”

“I know it's not really true,” Daniel said.

“You know it's not
really
true, but you think it may be a
little
true? Is that what you're saying?”

“Well, is it?” Daniel asked, looking up with a sudden challenge.

“Stop projecting, dude,” Matt said, giving him a cool look. “Stop taking out your fucked-up feelings about this country on me.”

Daniel flushed and sank onto the couch. He shot Matt a look of mingled anger and confusion. “I don't know what the hell I'm supposed to be feeling. I mean, I know what I'm
supposed
to be feeling. Righteous indignation at the terrorists for killing innocent people, and all of that.” He looked quickly at Matt, then down again.
Aha
, thought Matt,
that's what he's mad about
. If you believed that the Occupation was itself a form of constant terrorism—because what else could you call humiliating Palestinian civilians, subjecting them to a thousand petty and infuriating regulations, stealing their land, depriving them of their livelihood, blowing up their homes? If you believed that, what the hell
were
you supposed to feel at this moment?

But it wasn't fair to take out his anger on him! Matt called it pulling the goy card. Because Matt wasn't Jewish, Daniel always claimed that he couldn't understand the depth of Daniel's misery over it, over the historical irony that his people had overcome oppression by becoming an occupying force. Once, a few years ago, he had made Matt read Leon Uris's
Exodus
. “Every Jewish kid of my generation read it,” he'd told Matt. He wanted him to get a sense of Israel's prehistory, however distorted it was by the novel: how it came into being in the wake of the Holocaust, and how Jewish warriors smuggled into Palestine the refugees no other nation would save. He also wanted Matt to feel the romance of Israel, which Daniel had learned to feel in Jewish camp as a teenager, and which he thought the book would evoke in a passionate gay man. The Jewish soldiers were so manly and self-reliant, and there were many scenes of beautiful Jewish teenage warriors dancing the hora around campfires, eyes flashing. Matt gulped the book down, and reported that it gave him a total boner. “But do you get what I mean about what Jews love about Israel?” Daniel insisted as Matt nibbled his neck, whispering, “You be the handsome, emotionally damaged underground fighter, and I'll be the haughty girl in charge of the refugee camp in Cyprus.” And then, when Daniel, laughing, pushed him, “Yes, I get it, I get it!”

Now Matt nodded warily. He knew that if Daniel couldn't have this conversation with him, he couldn't have it at all. He reached for Daniel's shoe, removed it, and took his foot into his hands, began massaging it gently over the sock.

“When my dad started talking about how innocent Joel and Ilana were . . . I mean, they
were
innocent. But you know what I mean. . . .”

“Yeah, I've been thinking about it. That whole innocence thing,” Matt mused. “It kills me.” His lip curled a little. “Your dad—you know, he was just doing his thing, he's devastated. But do you think anyone ever called Jay innocent when he died?”

Daniel snorted.

Matt's hands stopped.

“Don't stop,” Daniel said. He opened his eyes. “What?”

Matt's eyes were blinking very rapidly, and his lips were pressed together.

“It's not the same thing,” Daniel said.

Anger wormed into Matt's throat. Daniel's tone was so final and derisive. He sat still, fuming, and Daniel propped himself up on his elbow.

“Oh, come on, Matt,” he said, incredulous. “It's not.”

“Why?” Matt asked. “Because Jay was just fucking without a condom, while your brother was heroically drinking a latte?”

That stunned them both into silence. Then Daniel scrambled back into a sitting position and shouted, “Go to hell!” He glanced in the direction of the kitchen, where his parents were sitting, and lowered his voice to a vicious whisper. “Go to hell! I knew I couldn't talk to you!”

“You
can
talk to me,” Matt cried. “Just don't insult my friend! Why do you have to insult him? I know you think he was just a silly queen, but he was a good person, Dan.” He sat on the couch, his chest heaving, ashamed that he had insulted his partner's dead brother, and yet so hurt and furious he couldn't help it. For some reason, he remembered going to the movies with Jay, and how Jay always made Matt be absolutely quiet—not even a whisper or a snide comment here and there—even though when they'd watch TV together they could talk as much as they wanted. It was a rule. Jay hadn't had any long-term relationships till Kendrick, and he wasn't a breeder, and he didn't live in a majestic holy city at the center of a world-historical conflict. But did that make him unimportant? And why did Daniel have to be such a huge homophobe?

“This isn't about Jay! This isn't about you!” Daniel hissed.

But it had an impact on him! How could he say that? Just then the door slid open and Gal came in. She was chewing on a piece of bread wadded in her hand, and wore a bead necklace around her neck. The hair around her face had been pulled back and tied with a fancy hair band, clearly Gabrielle's work. She looked at them curiously as they quickly wiped their eyes and tried to compose their faces.

“Hey, Boo,” Matt said, his voice hoarse. “Did you play with beads at Leora's?”

“Yeah,” she said faintly, being cooperative with an interrogating adult while she eyed Daniel, who had turned his back to them and was wiping his eyes with his forearms. “Why Uncle Dani crying?” she asked.

Matt looked at Daniel. “He's sad,” he told her. “He misses your
ema
and
abba
.” He hoped it was okay to bring it up when she was having a break from mourning.

She shot Daniel a suspicious look, then backed up till she was standing against the doorjamb. “Why did the bad man hate the Jews?” she asked.

Daniel looked at Matt sharply and sat down beside him. “Who told you that?” he asked.

“Savta.”

Matt waited, bitter mirth surfacing in his nose and sinuses; this one was
so
up to Daniel.

“Some Arabs hate the Jews,” Daniel said, clearing his throat, “because when the Jews came to Israel, they lived on land that the Arabs say was theirs.”

“Was it theirs?”

“Lots of it was,” Daniel said. “The Israelis and the Arabs are not good at sharing.”

She considered this. Then she asked, without looking at Daniel, “Is that why he killed Ema and Abba? Did they live on his land?”

Daniel and Matt looked at each other, eyes still, minds racing.

“No,” Daniel said, “they didn't. He was just a very bad, angry man.”

Gal gnawed off another piece of bread. “Leora's scared of taking a shower by herself,” she reported to Daniel in Hebrew.

“Really? How come?” he asked, shrugging at Matt when her eyes darted away for a moment.

“She's afraid that water will go up her nose. She doesn't know how to breathe through her mouth,” Gal said, and slipped out of the room.

Daniel and Matt sat there, looking at each other stupidly, until Matt rose and slid the door shut. “That was pretty lame,” he said. “We better get our story straight.”

Daniel laughed a little, and sighed a wide-eyed, shuddery sigh.

“I liked the part about the Jews and the Arabs not being good at sharing,” Matt said, and when Daniel looked sharply at him, he protested, “No, really, I'm serious. What did she say there at the end?”

Daniel told him about Leora's fear of the shower, and they shrugged and laughed.

Matt snuck his hand onto Daniel's knee and pressed lightly. When Daniel looked into his face, his eyes were bright and intense. “Dan,” he said, “I'm sorry.”

Daniel breathed in and then out again, his breath like a small parcel he was picking up and putting down. He wasn't sure what Matt was saying—whether he was apologizing for what he'd said or just expressing general sorrow about the whole sad situation. And he did not forgive him. But it was hard, because Matt looked beautiful as feeling suffused his face and lent radiance to his eyes and mouth, and because, for better or for worse, he was the safest harbor Daniel knew.