by Yuvi Zalkow
My fourth girlfriend told me that she loved doing happy hour with me. My fourth, fifth, six, and ninth therapists told me that I had a drinking problem.
My fifth girlfriend told me that she really enjoyed our alone time. My fifteenth therapist told me that I needed to get out more.
My sixth girlfriend told me that I’m a coward, especially in the bedroom. My eighteenth therapist told me that I had narcissistic personality disorder but that I also had nice, full lips.
My wife tells me that I’m the most insecure person she’s ever met. My twenty-first therapist tells me to reconsider my writing career.
Chapter Four
Getting Wet
I keep the window open as my wife drives us home so I can feel the specks of drizzle against my arm. It feels like it’s been drizzling for years. I’m glad Julia loves to drive, because I’d rather get another circumcision than drive at night, in the rain, under the influence of however many martinis.
Even in my real life, I lose track of the plot. I can never remember names or places or details. I have no idea whether to turn left or right. I don’t know what time we arrived or what time we left. All I remember is how everyone felt when whatever happened happened. And even if nothing happens, it still feels to me like something happened. “Oof!” my mom used to say when I was a kid, “you care too much about how everyone feels. Hakol Beseder. It’s all okay. If you don’t relax, you’ll be dead before you can help anyone anyway.”
I wave my arm up and down in the windy rain until Julia says, “Roll the window up. We’re getting wet.”
“But I’m having a poignant moment,” I say to her.
“Have your poignant moment while I’m still dry.”
Julia pats my thigh a few times and it’s a sweet enough gesture for me to forget about how much we sound like a mother and son and so I roll up the window.
Julia doesn’t talk much about her mother and her father, but I know how those two are deep inside her. And I know that she watches her brother carefully for the signs. Whether he’ll turn into the vicious mess of their father or the catatonic mess of their mother. And I know she grows tired of me and my insecurities. She is tired of how I look at every gorgeous man on the street with the quiet threat that he might be the one to steal my wife from me— as if my wife has no say in the matter. And she is worried about her own aspirations, whether we can really afford this nonprofit project that she is taking on alongside my overdue-contractual-obligation of a career, whether our rainy day fund can last through a rainy season that seems to be going on forever.
I say to Julia, “I really like your brother.”
“Me too,” she says.
It’s a rare moment. There’s no humor in our words. There’s no irony or sarcasm. It’s not a quote from a Woody Allen film. There are no secrets underneath what we say out loud.
If there’s anything underneath, it’s a mutual worry about her brother’s health. Protestants sometimes act like they’re invincible. Jews, we’re nothing if not for our diseases and how we talk about them.
Her brother has a disease that is more commonly found in Jewish genes. In my own twisted way, I feel both honored and guilt-ridden about this fact, this kid from Iowa with a Mediterranean disease. But I don’t talk about his health much to Julia because I know Julia’s invincible Protestant tuches will kick my weak Semitic tuches if I talk about it as much as I want to talk about it. So I talk about nothing— shtuyot, as my mom called it.
“For you,” I say, “it doesn’t count as much to like him, because you two are related.”
“No,” she tells me. “Related makes it even more impressive.”
I sometimes forget: this is a woman who didn’t even go to her father’s funeral.
Even though I once pegged myself as a lousy secret keeper, I’ve gotten shamefully good. It started out as helping her brother pay one late gas bill that he was too ashamed to talk to Julia about, and by the end of the year, I had paid for a transmission for his car and two surgeries for his intestines and now I’m the one too scared to tell Julia.
But under the influence of a few martinis, I want to tell her about it. I want to tell her everything. Spill my intestines out on the dashboard and see where that takes us. We could even clean up the mess with cocktail napkins that have messages on them from all her beautiful, muscular, non-balding, gentile lovers. But I’m sober enough to realize that I’m too scared to let out so much of my intestines. “Don’t be such a coward,” she once said to me over a game of Monopoly when I wouldn’t buy Marvin Gardens.
She was right about Marvin Gardens.
I say to my wife, “I should write a story about Shmen and Ally.”
“Don’t write about my brother,” she says, even though she doesn’t need to say anything with how tightly she is squeezing my thigh.
“No,” I explain, “I can write it from Ally’s perspective. With that scientific mind of hers. It would be fun. I bet she has an interesting story to tell. And I’d like to show how good Shmen is with the kid.”
And then Julia squeezes my thigh even tighter. I start thinking seriously about their story. I start thinking how much I’d like to tell it, if only for a few pages. But Julia still doesn’t let go of my thigh.
Julia looks over at me and then back at the blurry road. “I’ve been thinking,” she says, “about a baby.”
“You mean the constipated one next door that drools on everything?”
“Have you thought about a baby?”
“No,” I say. It’s not exactly the truth and it’s not exactly a lie. The truth is that I have thought about a baby, and I’ve decided that it’s something I don’t want to think about. Even saying the word “baby” is something I can’t handle for at least another couple dozen martinis. Not tonight. Maybe not in my lifetime.
She lets go of my thigh. I hear that familiar sound of her blowing the frustrated air out of her mouth.
It’s a typical situation for me: the plot gets too twisted too quickly and now I can’t find my way out.
Or even worse: I can’t find a way in.
I roll the window down, just a crack, to get some fresh air.
“Yeah,” I say. “I should really write a story about Shmen and Ally.”
I LOVE THE WAY YOU POOP WHEN YOU POOP WITH ME
If I told you the fact that my boyfriend and my seven-year-old daughter performed a strip show in the living room—swinging their shirts in the air before throwing them at each other—you’d probably get the wrong impression.
#
FACT: The average human colon is five and a half feet long and is composed of four main sections: the sigmoid, the descending, the transverse, and the ascending.
#
It’s morning. We’re at my boyfriend’s apartment. My boyfriend and I are fooling around in bed when he sees the time and realizes that he needs to get ready for his job interview. We’re usually too busy to fool around, but not the kind of busy that brings in money.
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FACT: My boyfriend is five and a half feet tall. He has no colon. He lives on the third floor of a six-story apartment complex. He’s not good at keeping jobs.
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My boyfriend grabs three shirts on hangers from the closet. He holds one shirt in each hand and hangs one on his erection and says, “Honey, which of these three do you prefer?”
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FACT: I have my daughter from Thursdays to Sundays and her father gets her the rest of the week. Today is Saturday and, while my boyfriend hangs a shirt on his cock, my daughter is in the living room, which we converted into her bedroom.
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My daughter doesn’t like the apartment where I live. She says it’s boring. She always wants to go to my boyfriend’s apartment instead. I feel the same way, and we do spend most of our time at his place, but I often argue on the side of my apartment because it feels wrong not to stand up for where I’m from.
#
My daughter said that my boyfriend is down to earth. I
said, “What do you mean down to earth? Where did you get those words from?” She said, “You know, he treats me like a regular person. And he’s good at freeze tag.” I thought to say, “Too bad freeze tag doesn’t pay fifteen or twenty bucks an hour.”
#
My daughter is awake. I hear her singing from the other room. She’s changed the lyrics to her favorite pop song so that it goes like this: “I love the way you poop when you poop with me.”
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FACT: Before I knew him, my boyfriend went into the hospital on thirty-one occasions during the two years that he was sick before the big surgery.
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I tell my boyfriend that it’s his fault that my daughter is always talking about poop. My boyfriend blames his affection for words like poop on his lack of a colon. It’s “poop envy,” he explains.
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FACT: My boyfriend has what is known as a “J Pouch.” Through the magic of surgery, they reconnected his insides so that his small intestine now has a pouch in it to mimic his missing colon. The only problem is that he has to go to the bathroom a lot. When things get inflamed in there, which happens every few months, it’s called “pouchitis” and it makes bathroom visits less than pleasant for him. “Another case of the itis,” he’ll tell me.
#
My boyfriend told me that the nurses would come visit him even after their shift, that they would play cards and joke for hours with him. My boyfriend’s parents never understood why overworked nurses would stick around the hospital like that, playing hearts with my boyfriend.
#
My daughter has no patience for board games but will play with a deck of cards for hours. She wanted to know why one king had a knife in his head. I thought to say that it was because the queen caught him cheating on her but then my boyfriend said that it was because nobody would let the guy poop. I’m glad he spoke up first.
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FACT: My daughter’s father slept with a blonde blackjack dealer when my daughter was one year old. I didn’t find out for another year. We didn’t divorce for another year.
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FACT: In the last interview, my boyfriend was asked what his weaknesses were, and he told the guy that he was lazy and sleepy and had digestive problems and that he was a bit of a drunk. Then he made the drinky drinky motion. He didn’t get the job.
#
My boyfriend’s disease is not getting better. Sometimes, while he is in the bathroom trying to deal with the inflammation and scar tissue deep inside of him, I cry in the bedroom, begging for a simpler life. When he comes out of the bathroom, he always has a smile on his face, like he was just awarded some kind of prize. It makes me angry that he isn’t more upset.
#
FACT: I have a picture of my boyfriend and my daughter doing push-ups. Except that their pants are pulled down so you can see both their butts. One is bony and hairy. One is cute and chunky. It’s true that I was amused enough to take the picture, but it was my boyfriend who put it on the fridge door.
#
My mother was horrified at the sight of this picture. I tried to explain to her that it was all in good fun. That my boyfriend is as sweet as any adult has ever been to my daughter. But my mother didn’t look my boyfriend in the eyes all through dinner.
#
Before he leaves the room, my boyfriend is looking good with his tie and his shiny shoes. He gives me a kiss and tickles me in those places he knows about. I can hear a grumble in his stomach and I know it’ll be hard for him to last through the interview without running to the bathroom. When he walks away from me, I see that he is limping slightly— even though he denies it.
#
On his way out of the room, I say, “Break a leg,” and he comes crashing down on the hardwood floor of the living room. I suspect that he fell harder than his joke intended. But my daughter is clapping and giggling from the other room.
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FACT: My daughter loves that man.
#
When I first kissed him, it was on the balcony of a friend’s place. We were the only two people outside because the keg was inside and outside was cold and windy. He whispered in my ear, “It’s not true to say that I don’t want to entertain the idea of not avoiding something with you.” He looked at me with his lips and eyes smiling and not smiling. It’s magic that way he can hold onto something sweet in a mess of crazy. He was so soft about how he touched my cheek with two fingers and then held my neck and kissed me on the lips. But I started to laugh and he didn’t separate from me. He laughed too, with our lips still together like that, and then we stopped laughing, and we were just breathing again, but with our lips together, not really kissing. Just breathing.
#
Even back then, he warned me that he had a nasty little disease, that he was up to his ears in debt from all that scar tissue. But back then, I didn’t care, because he was so lovely. And now, I do care, because he is so lovely.
Chapter Five
Restraint
It’s three in the morning and it feels like forever since we were out with Shmen and Ally, even though it was only a few hours ago. Julia and I are both awake (at opposite ends of the house) when I start thinking about the nylon restraints in the bottom drawer of my desk.
I love these nights when the rain is so hard you think you can feel it thrashing in your temples. Julia’s been doing paperwork in the living room and I’ve been reading and re-reading an Isaac Bashevis Singer story in my office. Julia is getting ready to start her own nonprofit that helps families affected by alcoholism and I’m trying to figure out how the son of the rabbi in this story is able to stare at a sexy woman’s legs for so many paragraphs. Does Singer get away with it because of the boy or because of the legs?
When we got married, we both agreed that babies were not on our radar. The idea of someone depending on me while I walk around in my underwear not writing sounds too terrifying to think about. I’d rather keep my failures to myself.
My editor suggested that I amp up the tension in my stories to make them more interesting. “You know,” she says. “Put a birth or a death in there. Put a murder in the story. Or even better, connect your story to the struggles of Israel and Palestine.” I think about this for a good long moment. It’s true that I’ve got Israeli blood inside of me, but I don’t know how to write about a seemingly hopeless struggle where no one is speaking the same language. So I say to my editor, “Fine. Send me the complete manuscript you want me to write.”
I’m desperate to do anything other than confront my novel. I’ll write page after page of poop stories about my brother-in-law to avoid my novel. So far, my novel is about nothing. It’s about worse than nothing: it’s about not being able to write. I start making clawing gestures with my hands and I know it’s a sign that it’s not going to be a great night.
I miss my father, and I haven’t even told his story yet. He’s in plenty of my short stories and essays, but I can’t show you those. Because I’m a novelist. Or a faux-novelist. A fauxvelist. So you don’t know how I felt about that man—that man who died without a prostate and with stents in his arteries and with enough fly rods to build a cathedral.
It’s another of my failings.
I keep expecting my wife to bug me about something, you know, about the bills or needing to get to bed or needing to check that the gutters aren’t clogged or if I’m hungry or needing help with some of the accounting, but she hasn’t checked on me in two hours. I can still hear papers shuffling, imagine her with those reading glasses on, doing research about 401c’s or 407d’s or 501k’s…I’m dying for her to bug me about something. Anything. Almost anything.
I can’t stop thinking about the words on that napkin: Save Me, Julia. If it weren’t written in someone else’s handwriting on someone else’s napkin, then I would have suspected myself of writing it.
Julia and I sometimes pretend that we have little affection for each other, but when we eventually make our way to the bed, when we get too sleepy to keep our gua
rd up, we do slowly, eventually, end up close to each other, maybe holding hands, maybe a little deep-sleep spooning, or maybe we sleep for an hour with my lips against her back, or her arm around my waist. But as it gets close to morning again, we separate, go back to opposite sides of the bed. And when we wake up, we’re back to our protected selves. That’s how it goes with us.
But even with our guard up, we have an understanding about each other’s needs. There are some things needed just for survival. So I open my drawer, the bottommost drawer, and pull out the nylon restraints I bought at a sex shop a few years ago. I take off all my clothes. Then I remember about the scabs on my ass that I don’t want her to see. Because I supposedly stopped doing those kinds of things. So I put my boxers back on. And then I fasten the nylon straps to each arm and each leg, making sure the Velcro fasteners are nice and tight. I grab the rest of the equipment that she’ll use to strap me to the bed. I grab my wife’s leather belt from the bedroom. And I make my trek to the living room.