by Yuvi Zalkow
Maybe these big rainstorms only come when you’re trying to work something out inside yourself—something big about who you are or what you believe in. And they don’t let up until you’ve made some kind of movement. In my narcissism, I wonder if this rainstorm is trying to tell me something.
The metal hooks on the restraints make little clicking sounds as I walk. Which causes my wife to turn around and see me standing there like a horny little golem— standing there naked with restraints and her belt. She is deep into her work and it takes some time for her to take in the situation. If there is a message in this rainstorm, then I hope I can still receive it while being handcuffed to the bedpost and spanked.
My wife takes a deep breath. My poor wife; I know she isn’t crazy about doing these things to me. She wants regular sex like in the early days of our marriage. But I can’t give that to her right now. Shame is all that turns me on these days.
Save Me, Julia.
“Do you need to be taught a lesson?” she asks me with the seriousness of someone who’s been doing tedious accounting.
I love those reading glasses of hers.
The wind blows hard. The rain bangs against the window. Even indoors, it seems that we should be wearing raincoats, that we need protection from all that we’re up against.
TALKING TO GOD
When I was six years old, I had a vivid picture in my mind that God was dressed in a thick yellow raincoat with a yellow rain hat shaped like an origami boat. I don’t know where this image came from, but it was something I was sure of. And so, I felt blessed one afternoon when Mom and I were sitting on the front steps of our apartment, after that vicious rainstorm, and I saw a tall man in just that outfit coming toward us. The sky had cleared up in a matter of minutes and the sun was shining bright, even with the ground still wet. The yellow of his raincoat was the purest yellow I could imagine. His bangs were thick and curly and completely gray. He had a limp in his walk, but it also made him pop up with every other step in a way that seemed more certain than typical walking.
My mother wasn’t looking at him, she was looking out at the parking lot. I think we were waiting for someone to pick us up for some event, a birthday party or a trip to the mall. I tugged on my mother’s sweater—she often wore thick sweaters with a lot of material to grab. She leaned toward me and said, “What is it, mameleh?” in her gentle voice. She used Hebrew words instead of English for all the warmest and coldest things.
I tried to be subtle about the way I pointed in the man’s direction. He was getting closer and humming a tune and he made little coughs at the high notes. I asked my mother, “Is he God?”
“What?” my mother said. She was smiling, already knew her son was about to say something she’d be amused by. I said, “Is the man in the raincoat Adonai?”
My mother looked at me, then she looked at this man—he
was almost in front of us—and then she looked back at me, and then she looked back at the man. I figured that my mother was sincerely considering this insight of mine.
The man stopped in front of us, as if we had called for him. I was sure that he knew exactly what we had been speaking about—an easy thing for God to know.
“What is it, Tziona?” the man said. I didn’t know at the time that my mom had already met this man before, that this man was a neighbor of ours. His voice had a scratchiness that made me think he was very wise—rather than that he had smoked two packs a day for forty years.
I still believed this man was God, but I also had the feeling that if my mother revealed my question to this man, it would destroy whatever power I had given him.
My mother looked down at me one last time. I’m sure I had some kind of desperation on my face, and then she looked back up at our neighbor, David Watts. “My son asked me if you are G o d .”
David put his hand above his eyes to block the glare of the sun and gave me a good look. “You want to know if I am… God?”
Both of them—Mom and David—had that gut-busting kind of laugh; they were clutching their stomachs from the pain, wiping the tears from their faces. This was one hell of a moment. I wanted to get away from the two of them but my body wouldn’t move. I couldn’t even manage to cover my face with my hands. I was stuck there watching.
After a few minutes of this, David scratched my head forcefully, messed up my hair that way I hated, and then he limped away, coughing and laughing at the same time. When he was nearly out of sight, I heard him say, “Goddamn, that’s a great line. I’ll have to remember that one.”
I vowed never to say anything personal to my mother again. I regretted everything important I ever told her. The wind started blowing and I remember being cold, sitting there in the wet sunny weather.
My mom put her arm around me. She tried to shake me in a playful way. But when she saw that I wouldn’t budge, she squeezed me instead. She put her lips to my forehead—they were warm and moist—and she said so that it vibrated right through my forehead, “It’s okay, mameleh.”
And just like that, I was glad to be going to the mall with my mother.
Chapter Six
Noah
My wife unhooks me from the bed and says, “I hope that did the trick.”
It did. It’s the closest thing that we have to sex these days. She’s got all her clothes on and I’m in my boxers with my ass burning from all that spanking. Not one orgasm within a five-mile radius of our bedroom.
Julia isn’t looking at me; she’s looking out the dark window. She is trying to decide if she can do more work or if it’s time to finally get to bed. She needs to have a business plan together by the end of the week. I shouldn’t have interrupted her work.
It’s still raining and it feels like the rain has gone on for too long. I think of saying something about how we’re like Noah and his wife, but I already know how that conversation goes. We’re not the best example of the male and female of the species. And I haven’t read anywhere about Noah having a predilection for being spanked by his wife.
“It’s not normal,” she says to the window.
I rub my wrists to get the blood circulating again. “The rain has been going on for too long,” I say.
“I’m talking about you,” she says. “When are we going to have normal sex again? It’s been three years. I don’t like doing this stuff to you.”
“It’s not my fault,” I tell her. What I want to tell her is that it is my fault. That somehow everything feels like my fault and I want to be punished for it all. That I can’t imagine normal sex with her because when we’re pressed up against each other, all I think about are the things that are wrong in our lives. Like that other man who writes her messages on napkins and sticks them in her pants.
I track down a pair of pants from the closet. It’s strange putting on a fresh pair at four in the morning. “It’s not my fault,” I say again, with my pants on I feel more comfortable deflecting, “the problem has to do with mistakes made by the government.”
“If you blame the Bush administration one more time,” my wife says, “I will never tie you up again.”
It’s true. I love to blame the Bush administration. They did so many things wrong—why not tack on a little problem of sexual intimacy? At one point in my life, I blamed my father for all my problems. But I got over it. Besides, my father had charm. That’s more than what you could say for the Bush administration.
It’s red around Julia’s eyes and her hair is messy and she sighs a little too much. Her lips move slightly but I know she isn’t about to say anything. She’s got her hand buried inside her hair and she scratches her scalp to get the itch out.
“You’re getting crazier than the characters in your stories,” she says.
I take a deep breath. I try to relax. What we need is one of those coming-to-Jesus moments. I’ve always wanted a coming-to-Jesus moment. Non-believers deserve them too. And I can tell that Julia and I need to get back on track somehow. It didn’t used to be this crooked with us.
I
say, “Julia. Do you want the real story? Do you want the whole megillah?” And I prepare myself for something that I’m not exactly prepared for.
She takes a deep breath. She tries to relax. She closes her eyes. I can see her eyeballs moving underneath as if she were asleep. And when she opens her eyes again, she says, “I’m sorry. Not tonight,” and then steps out of the room with her leather belt and her exasperation, leaving me alone on the bed with my disappointment and my relief.
MATCHBOX CARS AND RAINBOW TROUT
I was bouncing up and down on the hotel bed, banging matchbox cars into each other. I was making too much noise in too small a room on too ugly a day. I knew it was wrong, but it was a strange moment for me—I had seen tears in my dad’s eyes for the first time ever—so jumping on the bed and banging cars seemed as good a way as any to pass the time until things returned to normal.
He almost never hit me; his anger mostly circled in the realm of nasty words and nasty eyes. But those eyes were big and brown and bloodshot. And this was the day of his mother’s funeral, with me jumping on the bed and banging cars together and yelling “Deathtrap!” whenever two cars crashed into each other.
I’m not saying that I deserved it, but if he were ever going to lose control, this was as good a day as any. His belt flew off his waist so fast I could hear it cut through the air. It was made of three intertwined pieces of leather and made a web-like pattern on my thigh. I was crying instantly, just as instantly as my dad stormed out of the hotel room (his belt still on the bed), just as instantly as my mom was at my side, holding my hand, saying, “It’s okay, mameleh. It’s okay, darling.” With her Israeli accent, darling sounded like dahling, which still seems to me a far sweeter word.
#
In my twenties, I started cutting myself. Little slits on my chest, on my arm, sometimes on my hip exactly where the waistband of my boxers would chafe as I walked. On my ass, so that every time I sat down I would remember. I loved feeling that burn during the worst days of my depression. “But you have nothing to be depressed about,” is what my friends would tell me. So I stopped talking to my friends. They didn’t understand how I burned, feeling inadequate and unloved no matter what I did. I learned how to cut myself, how to stare at the blood in the mirror at three in the morning, and then to sit back and relax to a Simpsons episode, ideally a season five or six episode, when the writers figured out how to get the best out of the characters, but before they got desperate for a story.
#
When my father hit me that day, I cried, but there was relief in the smack as well. Usually, there was just that rage in his eyes and in his words, and since we never spoke of it, and since he never apologized, it was hard to know if it was real. Our arguments became blurred dreams afterward, vague enough that I sometimes thought I made them up. Except on the morning he hit me—I had this beautiful bruise right on my thigh. It was as many colors as the skin of a fish when you looked at it in the right light.
My dad came back to the room after an hour. Nobody spoke. My parents prepared for the funeral, I stayed in the room with a babysitter, and they were off, the belt still on the bed.
When we returned home to Atlanta, he bought me the exact three matchbox cars that I wanted—even the hard-to-find one with the black widow spider on the hood, that red hourglass mark showing on its abdomen.
This smack of the belt was not a pivotal event for me. One smack isn’t such a messy thing for a child to overcome if you think about how much worse it could be. He had good days and he had bad days, just like anyone else.
It was two dozen years later, when I was thirty-four and he was seventy-six, that my father spoke to me about this event, which I had nearly forgotten. Imagine my father at seventy-six: that gray beard, those long bony arms, with my mother dead, his sister dead, most of his friends dead, after his open heart surgery, after surviving cancer, after he turned to fly fishing like a religion.
I was already living in Portland, but I still came to visit him in North Carolina twice a year. He had moved back to the area where he grew up—the Pisgah National Forest. During these trips, we spent the mornings outdoors, then came back home in the afternoon for a martini or two, depending on how he felt that day. He brought up the day in the hotel while we were walking along the Davidson River. It was his favorite stretch, where you could walk down to the water and step right in if you wanted.
“Come on,” my father said, and waved me into the water. He was wearing a pair of tennis shoes older than me. It was the first time I noticed how little hair he had on his legs, and I wondered when that change had happened. His movements were not of the fragile man I thought him to be. He stepped with ease on rocks that were covered in slippery moss, never lost balance.
I was wearing my favorite black pair of shoes, but I followed him into the water anyhow.
It was so cold at first I had to squeeze my eyes shut. But after a few seconds, the pain went away and it felt more like a tickle. I started walking in the river.
“We need a good rain,” he said loud enough for me to hear him downstream, and he squatted to touch the water. He put his wet fingers up to his nose. My father, smelling the river.
“It feels so good in the water,” I said. It was strange to walk into a river, it seemed wrong and freeing, like driving around without a seatbelt. The water was shallow—barely up to my ankles—but it was moving fast and I had a continuous feeling that I was about to fall.
“I tell people,” my father yelled back to me, “that the only reason I fish is to have an excuse to be standing knee deep in a river.”
I made my way with awkward steps up to where my father was squatting and I squatted next to him. He had a small rock in his hand and he turned it over, as if reading its backside. He said, “I never forgave myself for hitting you after my mama died.”
It took me a few moments to recollect what happened in that room. I remembered my father crying about his mother and the way he covered his eyes with his bony fingers—and then I remembered the belt on the bed, and that bruise on my thigh. As I watched my father turn that rock over and over, I understood how many times my father had replayed that scene in his head, how many times he regretted what happened with the belt.
“Hell,” he said. He threw his little rock upstream as far as he could throw it. “It all seems so easy when you’re sitting in the middle of a river.”
I looked down at the water and said nothing. As we squatted there, I was struggling not to fall over, but my father was firmly planted. He reached over and rubbed my back and massaged my neck. It made me feel safe the way it did when I was a kid, even though it became that much harder to keep my balance.
And then, as if someone had called to him, my dad stood up. And so I stood up as well, looking and listening for signs. All I could hear was the river.
Upstream, I could see a big rock against the shore. From where we stood, the rock looked so much like a grand piano that I wondered if someone had carved into it to make this effect.
“I like to stand on that rock,” my father said, “and fish into the water just below. They love wooly buggers down there in Piano Pond.”
I thought of him standing there, so tall on that piano.
“You know,” my father said, “when I wake up in the morning, all I pray for is to be able to get out on the river one more time.”
He kept looking at that rock, squinting as if he could almost make out a person playing it. But the more I looked at the rock, the more it just looked like a rock.
“You got a lousy deal that day,” he said. “I wish I could take it back.”
I wanted to reach out to him so badly. To say something. Even if I conjured up a cliché, it would have felt better than saying nothing. Even now, as I sit at my computer 2,200 miles away from that river, I’m still trying to make the memory of myself say something to my father, just one truth about how I felt about him.
#
The first time Julia caught me cutting myself, my pants and unde
rwear were on the floor, and I was standing on the bathroom counter, my ass toward the medicine cabinet mirror. I had a razor in my hand.
I don’t remember what I was worried about that day, but it was surely something catastrophic and forgettable.
I pressed the razor hard against my ass and slid the razor vertically so that the blade had a chance to make long, continuous contact with my skin. I did this several times in a row. At first, there was no visible mark. But there was a beautifully sharp pain that tingled from my ass to my head to my toes. There were twenty or more seconds before the blood finally rose to the surface. And then they appeared: those gorgeous, bright red lines across the flesh.
When a wife enters the house expecting to surprise her husband with his favorite lunch (pastrami on rye from Zook’s Deli), it is not a fabulous feeling for her to see her husband balancing on the bathroom counter with streaks of blood across his ass.
She covered her mouth with her hand. And through her skinny fingers she said, “What in God’s name.” She wouldn’t look up at me at first, just down at the floor, where my pants were, where my feet should have been planted. And then she looked up.
It took that look in her eyes for me to know how abnormal this situation was. It sure felt like a normal thing to do on a day when my writing wasn’t going well or when I missed my father or when the mailman was annoyed with me about our rickety mailbox.
I told her that I wouldn’t cut myself again. That was three years ago. When I stopped cutting, I lost the ability to have sex with her—a notable side effect. Even though I’ve started cutting myself again, the other problems still haven’t gotten better. Things have only gotten worse, because now I feel guilty about cutting on top of all the other things.
When I climbed down from the counter, I noticed drops of blood by the sink. Bright and rounded like little ladybugs. I was careful not to smudge them.