Here I Am (11 page)

Samanta looked up.

What on earth would it take for a fundamentally good human being to be seen? Not noticed, but seen. Not appreciated, not cherished, not even loved. But fully seen.

She looked out upon the congregation of avatars. They were trustworthy, generous, fundamentally nice unreal people. The most fundamentally nice people she would ever meet were people she would never meet.

She looked simultaneously at and through the stained-glass Jewish Present.

Sam had overheard every word from the other side of Rabbi Singer's door. He knew that his father believed him, and that his mother didn't. He knew that his mother was trying to do what she thought was best, and that his father was trying to do what he thought was best. But best for whom?

He'd found the phone a full day before his mother had.

Many apologies were due, but he didn't owe any apology to anyone.

With no throat to clear, Samanta began to speak, to say what needed to be said.

The older one gets, the harder it is to account for time. Children ask: “Are we there yet?” Adults: “How did we get here so quickly?”

Somehow, it was late. Somehow, the hours had gone somewhere. Irv and Deborah had gone home. The boys had eaten an early dinner, taken an early bath. Jacob and Julia had managed to collaborate in avoidance: You walk Argus, while I help Max with his math, while you fold laundry, while I search for the Lego piece on which everything depends, while you pretend to know how to fix a running toilet, and somehow, the day that began as Julia's to have to herself ended with Jacob ostensibly out at drinks with someone-or-other from HBO and Julia definitively cleaning up the day's mess. So much mess made by so few people in such little time. She was doing the dishes when Jacob entered the kitchen.

“That went later than I thought,” he said preemptively. And to further compact his guilt: “Very boring.”

“You must be drunk.”

“No.”

“How do you have drinks for four hours without getting drunk?”

“Just a drink,” he said, draping his jacket over the counter stool, “not drinks. And only three-and-a-half.”

“That's some awfully slow sipping.” Her tone was pointed, but it could have been sharpened by a number of things: her lost day off, the stress from the morning, the bar mitzvah.

She wiped her brow with the first part of her forearm that wasn't soapy, and said, “We were supposed to talk to Sam.”

Good, Jacob thought. Of the conflicts available, this was the least terrifying. He could apologize, make it right, get back to happiness.

“I know,” he said, tasting the alcohol on his teeth.

“You say ‘I know,' and yet it's night and we're not talking to him.”

“I just walked in. I was going to have a glass of water and then go talk to him.”

“And the plan was to talk to him together.”

“Well, I can spare you from having to be bad cop.”

“Spare him from having a bad cop, you mean.”

“I'll be both cops.”

“No, you'll be a paramedic.”

“I don't know what that means.”

“You'll apologize for having to correct him in any way, and the two of you will end up laughing, and I'll be left as the annoying, nitpicking mother again. You get your seven-minute wink, and I get a month of resentment.”

“None of what you just said is true.”

“Right.”

She scrubbed at the charred residue on a burnt pan.

“Max is asleep?” he asked, aiming his lips at hers and his eyes to the side.

“It's
ten thirty.”

“Sam's in his room?”

“One drink for four hours?”

“Three and a half. Someone else showed up halfway through, and it just—”

“Yes, Sam is up in his emotional bomb shelter.”

“Playing Other Life?”

“Living it.”

They'd grown so afraid of not having the kids to fill the void. Sometimes Julia wondered if she let them stay up only to protect herself against the quiet, if she called Benjy onto her lap to be a human shield.

“How was Max's night?”

“He's depressed.”

“Depressed? No he's not.”

“You're right. He must just have mono.”

“He's only
eleven
.”

“He's only
ten
.”

“
Depressed
is a strong word.”

“It does a good job of describing a strong experience.”

“And Benjy?” Jacob asked while looking through a drawer.

“Missing something?”

“What?”

“You're searching around.”

“I'll go give Benjy a kiss.”

“You'll wake him up.”

“I'll be a ninja.”

“It took him an hour to fall asleep.”

“Literally an hour? Or it felt like an hour?”

“Literally sixty minutes thinking about death.”

“He's an amazing kid.”

“Because he's obsessed with dying?”

“Because he's sensitive.”

Jacob looked through the mail while Julia filled the washer: Restoration Hardware's monthly Yellow Pages of gray furniture, the ACLU's weekly infringement of privacy, a never-to-be-opened financial appeal from Georgetown Day, a flyer from some broker with orthodontics broadcasting how much he just sold the neighbor's house for, various paper confirmations of paperless utilities payments, a catalog from a children's clothing manufacturer whose marketing algorithm wasn't sophisticated enough to realize that toddlerhood is a temporary state.

Julia held up the phone.

Jacob held up his body, although everything inside fell—like one of those bottom-weighted inflatable clowns that keep coming back for more punches.

“Do you know whose this is?”

“It's mine,” he said, taking it. “I got a new one.”

“When?”

“A few weeks ago.”

“Why?”

“Because…people get new phones.”

She put too much soap in the machine and closed it too firmly.

“There's a password on it.”

“Yeah.”

“Your old phone didn't have a password.”

“Yes it did.”

“No it didn't.”

“How do you know?”

“Because why wouldn't I?”

“I guess so.”

“Is there something you need to tell me?”

Jacob was busted for plagiarism in college. This was before computer programs that could search for it, so getting caught required flamboyant stealing, which his was. But he wasn't caught; he accidentally confessed. He'd been called into his “American Epic” professor's office, asked to take a seat, made to ferment in the halitosis while waiting for the professor to finish reading the last three pages of a book and then clumsily shuffle through papers on his desk in search of Jacob's work.

“Mr. Bloch.”

Was that a statement? A confirmation that he had the right guy?

“Yes?”

“Mr. Bloch”—shaking the pages like a lulav—“where do these ideas come from?”

But before the professor was given a chance to say, “Because they're sophisticated far beyond your years,” Jacob said, “Harold Bloom.”

Despite his failing grade, and despite the academic probation, he was grateful to have made the blunder—not because honesty was so important to him in this case, but because there was nothing he hated more than exposed guilt. It made a terrified child out of him, and he would do anything to relieve it.

“New phones ask for a password,” Jacob said. “I think they require one.”

“That's a funny way of saying no.”

“What was the question?”

“Is there something you need to tell me?”

“There's always a lot of things I want to tell you.”

“I said
need.”

Argus moaned.

“I don't understand this conversation,” Jacob said. “And what the hell is that smell?”

So many days in their shared life. So many experiences. How had they managed to spend the previous sixteen years unlearning each other? How had all the presence summed to disappearance?

And now, their first baby on the brink of manhood, and their last asking questions about death, they found themselves in the kitchen with things finally worth not talking about.

Julia noticed a small stain on her shirt and starting rubbing at it, despite knowing it was old and permanent.

“I'm guessing you didn't bring home the dry cleaning.”

The only thing she hated more than feeling like she was feeling was sounding like she was sounding. As Irv had told her Golda Meir had told Anwar Sadat: “We can forgive you for killing our children, but we will never forgive you for making us kill yours.” She hated the person Jacob forced her to sound like: pissy and aggrieved, unfun, the nagging wife she would have killed herself to avoid becoming.

“I have a bad memory,” he said. “I'm sorry.”

“I have a bad memory, too, but I don't forget things.”

“I'm sorry, OK?”

“That would be easier to accept without the OK.”

“You act as if I only ever make mistakes.”

“Help me out,” she said. “What, in this house, do you do well?”

“You're serious?”

Argus let out a long moan.

Jacob turned to him and gave a bit of what he wasn't capable of giving to Julia: “Chill the fuck out!” And then, not appreciating the joke he was making at his own expense: “I never raise my voice.”

She appreciated it: “Isn't that right, Argus?”

“Not at you or the kids.”

“Not raising your voice—or not beating me or molesting the children, for that matter—doesn't qualify as something you
do well
. It qualifies as basic decency. And anyway, you don't raise your voice, because you're repressed.”

“No I'm not.”

“If you don't say so.”

“Even
if
that's why I don't raise my voice, and I don't think it is, it's still a good thing. A lot of men scream.”

“I'm jealous of their wives.”

“You want me to be an asshole?”

“I want you to be a person.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Are you sure there isn't something you need to tell me?”

“I don't understand why you keep asking me that.”

“I'll rephrase the question: What's the password?”

“To what?”

“To the phone you're clenching.”

“It's my new phone. What's the big deal?”

“I'm your wife.
I'm
the big deal.”

“You're not making sense.”

“I don't have to.”

“What do you want, Julia?”

“Your password.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to know what it is you can't tell me.”

“Julia.”

“Once again, you have correctly identified me.”

Jacob had spent more waking hours in his kitchen than in any other room. No baby knows when the nipple is pulled from his mouth for the last time. No child knows when he last calls his mother “Mama.” No small boy knows when the book has closed on the last bedtime story that will ever be read to him. No boy knows when the water drains from the last bath he will ever take with his brother. No young man knows, as he first feels his greatest pleasure, that he will never again not be sexual. No brinking woman knows, as she sleeps, that it will be four decades before she will again awake infertile. No mother knows she is hearing the word
Mama
for the last time. No father knows when the book has closed on the last bedtime story he will ever read:
From that day on, and for many years to come, peace reigned on the island of Ithaca, and the gods looked favorably upon Odysseus, his wife, and his son
. Jacob knew that whatever happened, he would see the kitchen again. And yet his eyes became sponges for the details—the burnished handle of the snack drawer; the seam where the slabs of soapstone met; the Special Award for Bravery sticker on the underside of the island's overhang, given to Max for what no one knew was his last pulled tooth, a sticker Argus saw many times every day, and only Argus ever saw—because Jacob knew he would one day wring them out for the last drops of these last moments; they would come as tears.

“Fine,” Jacob said.

“Fine what?”

“Fine, I'll tell you the password.”

He put the phone on the counter with a righteous force that might, just
might
, have jarred loose the workings, and said, “But know that this lack of trust will always be between us.”

“I can live with that.”

He looked at the phone.

“I'm just trying to remember what the password even
is
. I lost it right after I got it. I don't even think I've
used
it yet.”

He picked up the phone and stared at it.

“Maybe the password the Blochs use for everything?” she suggested.

“Right,” he said. “That's definitely what I would have used:
t-h-i-s-2-s-h-a-l-l-p-a-s-s. And
…nope.”

“Hm. I guess not.”

“I can probably have the store unlock it.”

“Maybe, and this is just a stab in the dark, you could capitalize the first letter, and type
t-w-o
instead of the numeral?”

“I wouldn't do it like that,” he said.

“No?”

“No. We always do it the same way.”

“Give it a try.”

He wanted to escape this childish terror, but he wanted to be a child.

“But I wouldn't do it like that.”

“Who really knows what one would do? Just try it.”

He examined the phone, and his fingers around it, and the house around them, and with an unmediated impulse—as reflexive as the kicked leg of a hammered knee—he hurled it through the window, shattering the glass.

“I thought it was open.”

And then a silence that struck bedrock.

Julia said, “You think I don't know how to get to our lawn?”

“I—”

“And why wouldn't you just create a sophisticated password? One Sam wouldn't be able to guess?”

“Sam looked at the phone?”

“No. But only because you're incredibly lucky.”

“You're sure?”

“How could you have
written
those things?”

“What things?”

“It's
way
too late in this conversation for that.”

Jacob knew it was too late, and absorbed the gouges in the cutting board, the succulents between the sink and window, the kids' drawings blue-taped to the backsplash.

“They didn't mean anything,” he said.

“I feel sorry for someone who is capable of saying so much and meaning nothing.”

“Julia, give me a chance to explain.”

“Why can't you mean nothing to
me
?”