Here I Am (13 page)

Julia was at her bathroom sink, Jacob at his. Side-by-side sinks: a much-sought-after feature in old Cleveland Park houses, like intricate borders framing the parquet floors, original mantels, and converted gas chandeliers. There were so few differences between the houses that the small differences had to be celebrated, otherwise everyone was working too hard for too little. On the other hand, who actually wants side-by-side sinks?

“You know what Benjy just asked me?” Jacob said, facing the mirror above his sink.

“If the world goes on for long enough, will there be fossils of fossils?”

“How did you—?”

“The monitor knows all.”

“Right.”

Jacob almost always flossed when there was a witness. Forty years of sometimes flossing, and he'd had only three cavities—all that saved time. Tonight, his wife his witness, he flossed. He wanted to spend a little time at those side-by-side sinks. Or spare a little time in that one bed.

“When I was a kid, I created my own postal system. I made a post office out of a refrigerator box. My mom sewed a uniform for me. I even had stamps with my grandfather's face on them.”

“Why are you telling me this?” she asked.

“I don't know,” he said, a thread between his two front teeth. “I just thought of it.”

“
Why
did you just think of it?”

He chuckled: “You sound like Dr. Silvers.”

She didn't chuckle: “You love Dr. Silvers.”

“I had nothing to deliver,” he said, “so I started writing letters to my mom. It was the system I was drawn to; I didn't care about the messages. Anyway, the first one said, ‘If you're reading this, our postal system works!' I remember that.”

“
Our
,” she said.

“What?”

“
Our
.
Our
postal system. Not
my
postal system.”

“Maybe I wrote
my
,” he said, unwinding the thread from his fingers, revealing the impressions of rings. “I can't remember.”

“You can.”

“I don't know.”

“You
can
. And that's why you're telling it to me.”

“She was a great mom,” he said.

“I know that. I've always known that. She manages to make the boys feel that no one in the world is better than them, and that they aren't better than anyone. That's a hard balance.”

“My dad doesn't strike it.”

“There is no balance that he strikes.”

The impressions were already gone.

Julia picked up a toothbrush and handed it to her husband.

Jacob tried to force something that wouldn't come, and said, “We're out of toothpaste.”

“There's another in the cabinet.”

A moment of quiet while they brushed. If they spent ten minutes every night getting ready for bed—and surely they did, surely at least that much—it would be sixty hours a year. More hours getting ready for bed together than being awake on vacation together. They had been married for sixteen years. In that time, they had spent the equivalent of forty full days getting ready for bed, almost always at the sought-after and lonely side-by-side sinks, almost always quietly.

A few months after moving out, Jacob would create a postal system with the boys. Max was receding. He laughed less, scowled more, always sought the seat closest to the window. Jacob could deny it to himself, but then others started to notice and mention it—Deborah took him aside one brunch and asked, “How does Max seem to you?”

Jacob found vintage hanging mailboxes on Etsy and affixed one to each kid's bedroom door, and one to his own. He told them they would have their own secret postal system, to be used for those messages that felt impossible to say aloud.

“Like how people used to leave notes in the Wailing Wall,” Benjy suggested.

No
, Jacob thought, but he said, “Yes. Kind of like that.”

“Except you're not God,” Max said, which, although plainly obvious, and the position Jacob would want his children to take (as atheists, and people who don't fear their parents), still stung.

He checked his mailbox every day. Benjy was the only one who ever wrote: “World peace”; “Snow day”; “Bigger TV.”

So much about parenting alone was difficult: the logistics of getting three kids ready for school with only two hands, the Heathrow controltower volume of transportation to coordinate, having to multitask the multitasking. But most challenging was finding time to talk intimately with the kids. They were always together, there was always commotion, something always needed to get done, and there was no one with whom to share the load. So when one-on-one situations arose, he felt both a need to make use of them (however unnatural it might be at the time) and a concentrated dose of the old fear of saying too much or too little.

One night a few weeks after the creation of the postal system, Sam was reading to Benjy before bed, and Max and Jacob found themselves peeing into the same toilet.

“Don't cross the streams, Ray.”

“Huh?”

“From
Ghostbusters.”

“I know that's a movie, but I've never seen it.”

“You're kidding.”

“No.”

“But I remember watching with—”

“I haven't seen it.”

“OK. Well, there's a great scene in which they fire their proton-whatevers for the first time, and Egon says, ‘Don't cross the streams, Ray,' because it would result in some sort of apocalyptic moment, and ever since, I've always thought about it when peeing in the same toilet with someone. But we both seem to be finished, so now it really makes no sense.”

“Whatever.”

“I noticed you haven't put anything in my mailbox.”

“Yeah. I will.”

“It's not an assignment. I just thought it might be a helpful way to get some things off your chest.”

“OK.”

“Everyone holds things in. Your brothers do. I do. Mom does. But it can make life really difficult.”

“I'm sorry.”

“No, I meant for you. I've spent my life making huge efforts to protect myself from the things I most fear, and in the end it wouldn't be right to say that there was nothing to fear, but maybe the realization of my worst fears wouldn't have been so bad. Maybe all of my efforts were worse. I remember the night I left for the airport. I kissed you guys like it was any other trip, and said something like ‘See you in a week or two.' As I was getting ready to go, Mom asked me what I was waiting for. She said it was a big deal so I must be feeling big things, and you guys must be, too.”

“But you didn't come back and say anything else.”

“I was too afraid.”

“What were you afraid of?”

“There was nothing to be afraid of. That's what I'm trying to tell you.”

“I know there was nothing actually to be afraid of. But what were you afraid of?”

“Making it real?”

“Going?”

“No. What we had. What we have.”

Julia tucked her toothbrush deep in her cheek and brought her palms to the sink. Jacob spit, and said, “I'm failing my family just like my father failed us.”

“You're not,” she said. “But it's not enough to avoid his mistakes.”

“What?”

She removed the brush and said, “You're not. But it's not enough to avoid his mistakes.”

“You're a great mom.”

“What made you say that?”

“I was thinking about how my mom was a great mom.”

She closed the vanity, paused, as if considering whether to speak, then spoke: “You aren't happy.”

“What made you say
that
?”

“It's the truth. You seem happy. Maybe you even think you're happy. But you aren't.”

“You think I'm depressed?”

“No. I think you put enormous emphasis on happiness—your own and others'—and find unhappiness so threatening that you would rather go down with the ship than acknowledge a leak.”

“I don't think that's true.”

“And yes, I think you're depressed.”

“It's probably just mono.”

“You're tired of writing a TV show that isn't yours, and that everyone loves but you.”

“Not everyone loves it.”

“Well,
you
definitely don't.”

“I like it.”

“And you hate only liking what you do.”

“I don't know.”

“But you
do
know,” she said. “You know there's something inside of you—a book, or show, or movie, whatever—and if it could only be released, all of the sacrifices you feel you've made wouldn't feel like sacrifices anymore.”

“I don't feel that I've had to make—”

“See how you changed the grammar? I said, the sacrifices you feel you've
made
. You said,
had to make
. See the difference?”

“Jesus, you should really get some accreditation and a couch.”

“I'm not kidding.”

“I know.”

“And you're tired of pretending to be happily married—”

“Julia.”

“—and you hate only liking the most important relationship in your life.”

Jacob often resented Julia, sometimes even hated her, but there was never a moment when he wanted to hurt her.

“That isn't true,” he said.

“You're too kind or scared to admit it, but it's true.”

“It's not.”

“And you're tired of being a dad and a son.”

“Why are you trying to hurt me?”

“I'm not trying to. And there are worse things than hurting each other.” She arranged the various anti-aging and anti-dying products on the shelf and said, “Let's go to bed.”

Let's go to bed
. Those four words differentiate a marriage from every other kind of relationship. We aren't going to find a way to agree, but let's go to bed. Not because we want to, but because we have to. We hate each other right now, but let's go to bed. It's the only bed we have. Let's go to our sides, but the sides of the same bed. Let's retreat into ourselves, but together. How many conversations had ended with those four words? How many fights?

Sometimes they would go to bed and make one more effort, now horizontal, to work it through. Sometimes going to bed made things possible that weren't possible in the infinitely large room. The intimacy of being under the same sheet, two furnaces contributing to the shared warmth, but at the same time not having to see each other. The view of the ceiling, and all that ceilings make one think about. Or perhaps it was at the back of the brain, where all the blood then pooled, that the generosity lobe was located.

Sometimes they would go to bed and roll to the edges of the mattress that they independently wished were a king, and independently wish it would all just go away, without having enough bones in their forefingers to hold down the word
it
.
It
the night?
It
the marriage?
It
the entire predicament of this family's family life? They went to bed together not because they didn't have a choice—
kein briere iz oich a breire
, as the rabbi would say at the funeral in three weeks;
not to have a choice is also a choice
. Marriage is the opposite of suicide, but is its only peer as a definitive act of will.

Let's go to bed…

Just before easing himself onto the bed, Jacob gave a puzzled look, patted his boxer briefs' nonexistent pockets, as if suddenly realizing he didn't know where his key was, and said, “I'm just going to pee.” Exactly as he did every night at that moment.

He closed and locked the door, opened the middle drawer of the medicine cabinet, lifted the stack of
New Yorkers
, and removed the box of hydrocortisone acetate suppositories. He laid out a bath towel on the floor, rolled another into a pillow, rested himself on his left side with his right knee bent, thought about Terri Schiavo, or Bill Buckner, or Nicole
Brown Simpson, and gently pushed it in. He suspected that Julia knew what he did every night, but he couldn't bring himself to ask her, because that would first require admitting to having an entire human body. Almost all of his body was sharable almost all of the time, as was almost all of hers almost always, but sometimes some parts had to be hidden. They had spent countless hours parsing the bowel movements of their children; directly applied Desitin with bare forefingers; twirled rectal thermometers, at Dr. Donowitz's instruction, to stimulate the sphincter in an effort to relieve a baby's constipation. But when it came to each other, some denial was required.

you don't deserve to get fucked in the ass

The asshole, with which every member of the Bloch family was, in his or her own way, obsessed, was the epicenter of Jacob and Julia's denial. It was necessary for life, but never to be spoken of. It was what one had, but had to hide. It was where everything came together—the cinch of the human body—and nothing, especially not attention, and
especially
not a finger or cock, and
especially, especially
not a tongue, could go. There were enough matches by the toilet to both light and fuel a bonfire.

Every night, Jacob excused himself to pee, and every night Julia waited for him, and she knew he hid the suppository wrappers in balls of toilet paper at the bottom of the lidded can, and she knew that when he flushed he flushed nothing. Those minutes of hiding, of silent shame, had walls and a ceiling. Just as their Shabbats, and those whispered confessions of pride, had made architecture of time. Without having hired any men with lumbar braces, or sent change-of-address cards, or even replaced one key on their heart's ring with another, they had moved from one house to another.

Max used to love playing hide-and-seek, and no one, not even Benjy, could tolerate it. The house was too well known, too thoroughly explored, the game was as done as checkers. So it was only on special occasions (a birthday, as a reward for an act of extreme menschiness) that Max was able to force a game. And they were always as boring as everyone anticipated: someone was holding his breath behind Julia's blouses in the closet, someone was flat in the bath or crouched under the sink, someone
was hiding with his eyes closed, unable to overcome the instinct that it made him less visible.