by Yuvi Zalkow
I will need to pay back the advance that I received—money I no longer have—if I don’t deliver her a novel.
My editor also says that I can’t keep whining about my therapists, like in my other stories, and I can’t keep talking about masturbation and my childhood and my family. Enough about my father and his fishing already.
My novel can’t be about me writing a novel.
For some reason, my editor also doesn’t want to read another story about my recent bout of impotence or my desire to be spanked while tied up or my preferred method for using a razor to make cuts on my ass.
She warned me: my novel can’t be a collection of essays masquerading as a novel.
When I didn’t respond to her requirements, she said, “Yuvi, this isn’t an unreasonable request. I know you can do this.”
When I didn’t respond to that, she said, “Yuvi, what are you so scared of?”
When I didn’t respond to that, she said, “Hello? Yuvi? Are you there?”
And then she hung up.
BLACKING OUT
“Yuvi? Yuvi? Can you hear me? Are you there? Did it work?”
I could hear him, but I couldn’t respond. I smiled. I know I was smiling, but my eyes were closed and would not open.
Through my tube socks, I could feel the Lego pieces I was stepping on. Every corner of my room had wandering pieces that never made it back to the shoebox.
I was standing against the wall. I was standing in my bedroom. I mostly knew that this was the case. And Ezra’s hands were pressed against my chest. I could feel the heat from his palm, though that heat seemed to come from some kind of fire inside of me.
There was also a part of me that wasn’t in my bedroom, was floating with the clouds and looking down at our houses, free from everything I wanted to be free from. The clouds were fluffy and cartoony, the kind you can really lounge around on.
Ezra and I were about ten at the time, and he lived across the street from me. We played together every day after school—at his house, at my house, in the forest, wherever—until we each had to go home for dinner. That day, he had just learned this cool trick, one we had been trying on each other all afternoon.
Here were his instructions: Lean against the wall. Bend over with your head hanging upside down for at least three minutes. Stand up faster than hell and hold your breath while the other person presses both their hands as hard as they can against your chest. If things go well, then you go limp within twenty seconds.
“I promise I’ll catch you if you fall over,” Ezra said to me. And when I didn’t respond, he said, “Trust me, you won’t die. I’ll even go first.”
I was thinking that this was the coolest thing I’d ever heard anyone tell me. I loved how it went when people blacked out in the movies, the look in their eyes like they just came back from being a different person from a different world. I was thrilled with the idea of having that moment where I’m so lost that I need to say, “Where am I? Who am I?”
We fought over who would go first. He argued that it was his idea to do this in the first place, and I couldn’t refute that. But I still couldn’t get him to black out no matter how hard I pressed on his chest. And then he couldn’t get me to black out. And then I tried it on him again. And so on, until my third time, when I hovered over those cartoony clouds in my semiconscious trance.
When I came to, Ezra told me that I was in a trance for a full minute. He said I was smiling this goofy smile like I was dreaming about Nari Tanaka. Nari was the Japanese girl in my class that I was in love with that year—and for six more years— without ever doing a thing about it.
As a kid, I worried. There were always at least one or two horrible, embarrassing things that kept me up at night. At various times, these worries included: too much hair growing out of my armpits, too ticklish to ever have a girlfriend, a tumor in my brain/arm/leg/butt, a crooked penis, a crooked stream of piss, being Jewish around a bunch of beautiful suburban WASPs, an inability to kick a kickball, having skin the color of a Middle Eastern terrorist, and my dumb smile.
For one minute, this trance made my world of armpit hair, crooked penises, and dumb smiles completely disappear. I let myself slowly fall down to a squatting position and stared at Ezra like he and I were both dead and calmly waiting for whatever was to happen next.
“You have GOT to tell me what that felt like.”
I was still smiling and spaced out and had barely said a thing when my mother stormed into the room, claiming that she had been calling for us for five minutes. Apparently Ezra’s mother was in the car outside, pissed and waiting for him. And just like that, he was gone, with me still dazed on the floor and my mother looking at me with that what-the-hell-were-you-two-up-to look. I told my mom that we were just playing with Legos. I picked up some of the pieces that were under my butt. “Oof!” she said in her Israeli accent, then she shook her head and left me alone. And slowly, second by second, my world of worries came back. Another item on my list: the shame of my mother’s disappointment.
As I sat there over dinner with my parents, listening to them talk about the latest tragedy in the Middle East, it was clear to me that there was only one thing to do. And so I started making a mental list of household items that could—without anyone’s help—knock me unconscious.
Chapter Three
Righteous Room
Shmendrik and Ally are fabulous people. It’s always fun when we go out with them. We drink. We laugh. We drink more. We laugh more. We can tell dirty secrets and dirty jokes and blur them all together until we’ve poured our hearts out like we’ve been blending one of my mother’s gazpachos and it’s two in the morning and we’re not ready to leave the damn bar until they kick out the four crazy adults who are acting like they’re seventeen.
I like seeing how much Julia cares about Shmen, even if sometimes it means tension about his drinking or his inability to hold onto a job, or my fear that, in his inebriation, he’ll spill the borscht to Julia about our little low-interest, never-really-pay-back loan structure.
So, naturally, I’m resentful about going out with them when I could’ve been brooding alone at home with a blank piece of paper in front of me.
When we get to the Righteous Room, Shmen and Ally are, as usual, already there. There are four untouched martinis at the table. Hellos and kisses go all around, Julia admires Ally’s sexy little boots, Ally admires Julia’s hair, which gets longer and seems redder each time, I tell Shmen that he’s getting too skinny, and Shmen tells me that I’m getting too bald. We each take sips of our martinis, a few words about the weather— that crazy rain—and then Shmendrik points out that beside my glass and Julia’s glass there are napkins with handwritten numbers on them. I have 12 and Julia has 10.
Shmen has to elbow Ally, who smiles in that shy way that she smiles, and then she explains Shmen’s game to us. One number is the number of horses Ally has owned and the other is the number of men she’s kissed. “That is,” she says, “before I fell in love with this man,” and she puts her arm around Shmen.
“You’ve got ten seconds to figure it out,” Shmendrik tells us. And that’s how the night begins.
#
Ally takes care of injured horses and brings them back to health for almost no pay. Imagine it: this skinny little woman calming a fifteen-hundred-pound horse. But this explains how she handles Shmen and her daughter, who both have more energy than a dozen injured horses.
It turns out that Ally has owned more horses than she has kissed men and that Shmen has had more surgeries than apples and that when Julia was a kid, she wrote 9 unanswered letters to Frank Sinatra and 7 to Johnny Cash. When it’s my turn, I put the number 21 on a napkin and give it to Ally and then give the number 7 to Shmen. I say, “One number is the number of therapists I’ve had. The other is the number of lovers.”
My wife sighs. “No brainer,” she says, and she takes a sip of her drink.
#
The martinis are a thing I started. It’s always gin, alwa
ys straight up, always dry, always three olives. Not two, not one. Sometimes they pretend that they don’t like this drink, especially my wife. She’ll make a face, like it’s a nasty medicine for a nasty disease, but I know she loves something about it. The hint of berry, the clean burn down the throat, and the pleasure of taking on a ritual that comes from a generation that is mostly just a shadow in our world. I got this habit from my father. That man drank at least one martini a day for fifty years. Toward the end of his life, when the doctor said he shouldn’t drink so much, he began drinking even more, realizing that he didn’t have much more time left to enjoy them. The martinis at the Righteous Room are good, though it took a little constructive guidance to get them to make it just right: be careful with the vermouth, dry off the olives first, don’t let the gin sit too long in the shaker. My dad used to say that it’s not hard to make a damn good martini, but it’s damn easy to screw one up.
#
drink 1
Shmendrik explains to us about the dance he and Ally’s daughter have learned. Shmen and Ally have been dating for less than two years, but her daughter fell in love with Shmen instantly.
“The trick,” he says, “is to wave your clothes around in the air before you throw them at Mommy.” He rubs Ally’s back and Ally rolls her eyes while she drinks her martini. This is the life of Ally and Shmen. On paper, it sounds like Shmen is doing all the wrong things. But there’s something about their family that’s not on paper.
Julia says, “This sounds an awful lot like stripping.” “Oh,” Shmen says. “It is.” He puts his hand on his sister’s hand. “But you have to understand, we don’t take off our underwear.”
Ally puts down her martini. “Yes you did,” she says and gives him a punch in the shoulder.
“Oh yeah,” he says. “I did.”
#
drink 2
Ally tells me that a horse’s instinct—even after an injury—is to keep running.
I say, “Really?” and I can see that she is trying to gauge whether I’m pulling her leg, this goofy Jew who is rarely serious, but her stories always do this to me. If I were dropped from an airplane right in the middle of Kansas, I’d barely be able to tell the difference between a horse and a cow and a pig, but sitting here in this bar listening to Ally talk, I can’t get enough horse sense.
“Even when they break a bone in their leg,” Ally tells me, “they’ll run on it if you don’t stop them.”
And while I sit there learning about injured horses, I hear Shmen and Julia talk about Shmen’s latest plan to get a psychology degree. Julia is always supportive even while she knows that he is unlikely to finish any degree. As long as I’ve known him, Shmen has always been halfway through a degree in something. Even though he has troubles following through with a degree, he reads like a monster and is able to say things like, “You can’t read Ulysses for the third time until you’ve read it twice,” and he can even make it sound funnier than it is arrogant. I’m supposedly the writer, but he’s the one who is obsessed with language. He will call me at four in the morning to tell me that you can’t spell “husband” without “anus.”
#
It’s one of those hipster bars we’re in, with exposed pipes and exposed air vents, and I pretend that I’m up in the pipes rather than down here where all the regular people are. And from up in that maze of pipes, I can see Shmen, with his love of language, his love of obscure words and phrases, but without a clear plan to make use of this love, other than calling friends in the middle of the night. But then again, he might be the happiest man I know. And Julia. This is a woman who comes home after having a cigarette with an alcoholic who just died in her lap while apologizing to her because he thought she was his dead wife whom he had deceived for twenty-seven years. “Forgive me, Cassandra,” this man kept saying to Julia, and Julia kept forgiving until the man finally died, and then, after this kind of day, Julia is still able to help me get my pants on and go out for drinks. This is also a woman who loves these fabulous masculine singers like Frank and Johnny and Elvis and then marries a scrawny little Jew who writes scrawny little stories. And there’s Ally, who talks about such real-world things like listening to the heartbeat of a horse who has just broken his spine but still tries to get up. And while she speaks with such sympathy for this creature, I wonder if it’s wrong of me to think: metaphor.
After savoring the metaphor for a while longer, I come down from the pipes to have another drink.
#
drink 3
“I just don’t like the name,” Ally says to me. She grabs my hand from across the table and squeezes it a little. She has a solid hold of me, and she looks me straight in the eyes.
“It’s been a year now,” she says. “And I still don’t like it.”
I don’t know what she is talking about, but I enjoy her touch too much to ask.
Shmendrik starts massaging her neck. It makes them both seem so sweet. “The woman doesn’t like the name you christened me,” he says. “She thinks Shmendrik isn’t appropriate.”
“But it’s perfect,” I say.
“The word means fool,” she says. “I looked it up. And it’s a Yiddish word,” she says. “Joel isn’t a fool and he’s got blonde hair and blue eyes.”
“I know,” I say. “That’s why I love it.”
Shmen smiles without talking, which is a rare sight, because he’s always got something to say. Even when he has nothing to say, he’s got something to say, and so I realize that this subject, for whatever reason, is a touchy one between them. Every relationship has an area that is tricky even if it has no right to be tricky—one of those arguments that seems ridiculous when you recount it to someone later, but somehow, at the time, it taps into something nasty. So I decide to keep my mouth shut and let Ally and Joel work it out, even though Joel totally doesn’t look like a Joel—his own sister admits that.
“When Yuvi gets stuck on a name,” Julia says, “there’s nothing you can do about it.” And then she lists off some of the people in our world that I’ve permanently named: our friend, Jason Shiffer, now known as Shiffer Brains; my disturbingly flirtatious aunt, known posthumously as Nafkeh; our postman, the Nazi.
Ally lets go of my hand and she looks seriously at Julia and me. Me and my wife, sitting there next to each other in the Righteous Room. Ally tries to size us up. I know from Shmen that she’s an expert sizer-upper. This woman knows firsthand what a disaster a marriage can be and she’s probably trying to understand where Julia and I fit into this spectrum. If we tease each other because we love each other or because we’re hiding something.
And then Ally says to Julia, “Why hasn’t he given you a name?”
#
last call
It’s late into the night and Shmen is two to four drinks ahead of everyone else when he orders a gin and tonic to try and sober up.
The good-looking waiter with the gentile blue eyes keeps glancing over at my wife and I re-remember about that little note I found in her pocket. I had forgotten about it for hours, but the dread inside of me has returned. The contractions are getting more frequent and I wonder how much longer I can carry this napkin inside of me.
Julia says, “How you feeling, Shmen?”
I’ve seen Julia’s pretty freckly face get more serious the more drinks Shmen orders. Between Shmen’s little digestive disease and the way their mother drank when she was alive, it isn’t easy for Julia to watch him drink like that.
“Great,” Shmen says. “I feel like a million dollars’ worth of intestinal surgery.”
I press my hand on Julia’s thigh. I squeeze it and feel the tightness in her muscles.
“Let’s quit drinking,” she suggests. “I think it’s enough.”
“For you or for me?” he asks and doesn’t look her in the eyes.
It’s about ten seconds of silence at the table until Ally says, “Actually, I think I’m ready to go home myself. We still have to take the babysitter home.”
And that�
�s how tension inflates and deflates with a Protestant family. Not that I’m the prototype for direct communication, with all my secrets and fears and worries, my inability to write even the first page of a novel, all the ways I have of joking around any problem, how I can turn a concern about the stability of my marriage into a discussion about whether I should wear the beige pants to dinner, how I can suggest that we hold off serious discussions until the tensions in the Middle East are over.
Before we leave that night, Julia and Shmen give each other hugs that last too long and I hear Julia say “I love you” to her brother and I hear her brother say to his only sibling, “You’re one of my favorite older sisters.”
Ally and Shmen leave the bar first. Shmen is limping. It’s something I’ve noticed over the weeks—not quite a limp as much as a hint of a limp—and I hadn’t consciously thought about it until just now. Even so, I don’t say anything about it to Julia.
“Let’s go, honey,” she says to me. “You’re looking far too happy.”
LOVERS AND THERAPISTS
My first girlfriend told me that she loved me more than anyone else in the whole world. My first therapist told me I was incapable of love but that I should keep a journal of my emotions.
My second girlfriend told me that I could give her a hotter orgasm than anyone in the world. My second therapist told me that my emotional growth was stunted at the oral phase of development and that I should find out if I was breastfed.
My third girlfriend loved how I stayed up as late as she did even though I had class so early in the morning. My third therapist told me that I had to get on medication so I could finally get some sleep.