by Yuvi Zalkow
Just then a song starts playing. It isn’t screeching like before. It’s a regular song. In fact, it is a song that his mother used to sing to him when he was a child. “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.” It was the song he was humming earlier. How much he misses his mother and her soothing raindrop voice.
“Ahh,” the monkey says. “They fixed it. We wanted to play something that would make you feel sentimental during these last moments of life for your species. This song is playing all across Earth in your honor.”
The song gives our hero a strange feeling inside of himself. It is a feeling he hasn’t remembered feeling for a long time. He wants to cry. Not because he is sad. But because he just wants to cry.
“We have always liked you,” the JuLef says, “and we wanted to make you more comfortable in these last few seconds than the stinky mess of your species.” Although our hero isn’t impressed with his own species, he doesn’t often think of them as stinky. It is the JuLef species that stinks. In fact, they smell like the ass of a rat if you get in close enough. Which he tries not to do often. He considers telling his companion a few of the famous “Smelly JuLef ” jokes that humans tell, but then thinks again.
The JuLef takes a moment to smell his own chest and shoulders and armpits and then looks at our hero again.
“We even thought,” the JuLef continues, “to bring your father back to life, so that you could enjoy watching him suffer one last time. But we decided that that would be too ghoulish.”
In real life, our hero doesn’t get quite this much respect from his coffee shop companion. In real life, our hero’s wife asks our hero to stop weeping. In real life, our hero is on his knees begging until his wife has to leave the café. The meeting is over within five minutes, and our hero is left alone again. He feels like a giant meteor has blown straight through his heart and lungs. Unfortunately, the real life solar system is not in the least bit of danger.
In the science fiction story, at the sound of his father’s name alongside his mother’s song, our hero is filled with a rage for this JuLef creature. He feels a lifetime of anger bubbling over. He hates this creature for trying to evoke a feeling inside of him. He is particularly offended that this creature would suggest it knows how our hero feels about his own father. That our hero would want his own father to suffer more, regardless of what he has done in the past.
Just then, the monkey sits more erect. He makes a gesture as if he smells something bad. He takes a few more sniffs. The air is still wrong. “This can’t be,” the monkey says with a surprise our hero has never seen in a JuLef before.
(To be continued…)
Chapter Sixteen
Life Without Her
This morning I’ve read three stories from the book my father got me back when he was diagnosed with cancer. One is about a man afraid that he’d be considered a pervert if he waved to the schoolgirls across the street. One is about a boy who can’t stop himself from lying no matter how much his mother begs him to stop. And the other is about a man who isn’t allowed to wear clothes or sit on any furniture while he’s at his girlfriend’s apartment. I wonder if my father read these stories before he gave them to me.
It’ll get worse before it gets better. You hear that a lot, but sometimes it’s still a good thing to remember. It took me a lot of days of weeping and pacing around in my underwear and staring at the phone and banging the phone against my head and cutting myself on my ass, until I finally decided, mahspeek. Enough. It took me eighty-six days if you want to know the number.
It’s easy to realize this after the fact, but drinking bourbon and apple juice for breakfast every morning is sometimes a sign you’re off track. The Cali King bed felt so big to me that I decided to pile a bunch of old pots and pans on one side of the bed to occupy some of the space. I even took to writing my own messages on napkins. And then throwing them away again.
• Spank me, Julia
•Yuvi’s Bloody Underwear Sensation
•Yuvi and the Flaccid Penises
In other words, things have gotten adequately pathetic around here. And worst of all, I find myself missing BLTs far more than I ever despised them.
The news from the Middle East is as hopeless as ever. Just as peace talks were getting started, they fell apart again. Killing on both sides. Blame on every side. And it falls apart again.
It’s amazing to me to imagine what it’s like to live in the middle of all that. Once I asked my mother how her family can live there with all the craziness. “What you do,” she said, “is just what you do with anything else: you pick your tuches up off the ground and you start doing whatever it is you’ve got to start doing.”
And so, even though I live in the easy land of Portland, I pick my tuches up off the ground, and I start doing what I’ve got to start doing. I start writing articles for local magazines to pay the bills. I start writing stories again. I start working on my novel again.
I keep in touch with Shmen. He says Julia’s still pretty shaken about the whole thing and I get silent while I enjoy thinking about her shaken. “Don’t worry,” he tells me. “I’ll think of something to get you guys together.”
I tell him there isn’t anything different in me that would change her mind. I tell him to forget it. I tell him not to worry about me. I tell him that I’m fine.
I ask Shmen about his health. I ask him about his limp. I ask him if he’s seen a specialist for the inflammations that are spreading across his body.
He says, “I’ll think of something,” still thinking about me and his gentile sister.
I make myself another glass of bourbon juice.
My editor said this situation might be good for the novel. And so I told her, “Kush meer in tuches.” When she asked what it meant, I told her it meant, “Thank you very much.”
POTTY TALK
I was sitting on the toilet and pissing in the women’s bathroom of the Righteous Room when she walked in. She was tall and she smiled like she already knew me. Her lips were full for such a skinny woman and I wanted that smile to last forever.
“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry.” And left the bathroom so fast that as I washed my hands, I couldn’t remember if the event had really taken place.
But when I saw her at the bar, I went right for her, as if I were a man with confidence. She was drinking bourbon on the rocks and so I ordered the same thing.
“I shouldn’t have been in there,” I told her. “I just had to pee so badly.”
“Well,” she said, “if you do it sitting down, maybe you’re just right for the women’s bathroom.”
She was doing a crossword puzzle and so I sat there and told her about my urination urges. “I can’t pee standing up,” I said. “I get nervous. I try counting sheep while I’m standing there but it’s not that easy in public. Sitting is easier.”
She smiled and her teeth were bright in that dark bar. “Is this how you pick up all your women?”
As is typical with me, my confidence grows stronger the more I’m insulted and so I said, “I can tell that this is a clear example of anti-Semitism.”
She drank up the last of her bourbon. “I wasn’t in the bathroom long enough to tell one way or another.”
“The Nazis started out the same way,” I said. “First they criticized our bathroom habits. And then they nearly wiped us out.”
She laughed. Which was a relief. You’re not always guaranteed a laugh when you accuse someone of being a part of the Third Reich.
I asked her why she was doing a crossword puzzle in a bar full of neurotic Jews, and we both looked around, because it didn’t look like there were any other neurotic Jews besides me. She explained that she was waiting for her brother, who was the real crossword puzzle expert. She tried to get as much of the crossword puzzle done as she could before her brother devoured it. I looked at the puzzle, dying to get something right, but they were all too difficult. Except one.
“Quinine,” I said.
“What?”
“Used to treat malaria. 7 letters.”
“You’re good at this,” she said.
“Not really,” I said. “Just good with diseases. My people know
disease.” My insides clenched up like I was getting my own case of malaria. In fact, the excitement from meeting her would make it hard for me to keep food down for more than two weeks.
The bartender brought out a steak and mashed potatoes for her.
“So are you from Nebraska?” I asked.
“Now look at who’s being the bigot here,” she said. And I was sure it was over. That she’d walk out of the bar and I’d never see her again. But she didn’t walk out.
“Iowa, actually,” she said. Her hair was red and shined even redder in the dimness of the bar and I imagined the state of Iowa as red and beautiful and not nearly as scary a place as I had once imagined it. She had a shy smile and her look was no longer witty or sarcastic and I didn’t feel witty or sarcastic either and I enjoyed all of the cute and the shy that she was at that moment.
“Please,” I said, like some kind of idiot. “Do it again.”
“You want to reenact our whole bathroom scene?” “No,” I said. “Just that smile. It makes me feel so tolerable.” She didn’t smile. “You’re cute for a paranoid, neurotic Jew.” And so I said, “You’re lovely for a Protestant, Midwestern Jew hater.”
And that’s how I met Julia. And a few minutes later, Shmen.
Chapter Seventeen
Belly of the Horse
The barn smells like a wet horse. And it smells of horse shit. And wood. Rotting wood. But it also smells of tangerines, which, I learn, is one of Ally’s obsessions. Eating tangerines every morning in the barn with her horses. I can smell it in the air.
If I have to remain a writer, then I wish I were one of those writers who has to go out into the world and do and see interesting things in order to write. I could meet a murderer or a preacher or a porn star. I could surf and travel and hike and, if I’m lucky, I could break my collar bone in a sports injury. But instead, I’m the kind of writer who is impotent, who pops Xanax pills, who hides underneath the bed looking at his wife’s baby pictures while his wife is gone, out of the picture.
Today, Ally will show me her favorite horse. I called her about this in advance. I asked her if she was still interested in me dropping by. After all, she gave me the invitation back in Chapter 14.
“I didn’t expect you to come by,” she said when I arrived. “Me neither,” I said.
She sits on a small wooden stool in the corner of the barn.
She’s wearing solid boots and a thick, knitted orange hat, which I learn is another of her interests: knitting hats while in the barn. There are strips of various colors of yarn all around her chair. Looking at her hat makes my head feel cold.
I wonder why I came at all. I wonder why she invited me. And I wonder about the difference between these two whys. There must be a reason I’m standing inside my estranged wife’s brother’s girlfriend’s barn. I sure hope it isn’t that I want to get into her pants—though they are nice pants. Rugged gentile jeans. Perhaps I just want to get into her hats.
Somewhere, an old radio plays AM and the callers on the program are upset about social security and health care and immigration and welfare and of course, about war, about the trouble in the Middle East.
“Horses love politics,” she tells me. Two horses stick their heads out of their stalls at the sound of Ally’s voice. One horse is perfectly white and has cheeks so big that it seems like it’s got four tennis balls in its mouth. The other horse is brown with a mane that is gray from age and it neighs before disappearing again.
Ally peels the tangerine carefully and the skin comes off in one piece. She lets the spiral fall to the ground. “You want one?”
She has made this place too cozy. It’s too perfect. I look at my bare wrist as if I’m checking the time.
“You’re not going anywhere,” she says. She smiles. She hands me three slices of the tangerine, which I take. Her hand is warm and the tangerine is cold.
“There’s a horse I want to show you,” she says.
It’s a fifteen-hundred-pound version of show and tell.
#
The horse is big and brown and chubby. Ally walks up to the horse and pats him hard on his big belly. I want to warn her that this chunky creature is much larger than her and that it could crush you before you could say the word shmendrick. But, of course, we’re on her turf, and a scrawny Jew has no business giving horse-related advice.
He is healing from a leg wound. The horse also has a brain tumor that will kill him in less than six months. She calls this fat horse Fatty Lumpkin even though that’s not what the owners named him. “It sounds better than Howard, don’t you think?”
I nod. I didn’t expect to be so shy around Ally and the horse. I’m the one who’s supposed to come up with names for things. She is the one that’s supposed to be shy.
She scratches his neck with fast, hard strokes and the horse makes grunting sounds. I can feel a tingle in my own neck. “Come and touch him,” she says to me.
I step backward until my back is up against the door of the stall. I try to convince myself that I’m not really in a barn with this big, old horse, that I’m just looking at a metaphor to be used for my novel. But this metaphor is too big and smelly for my taste.
Ally laughs, and waves me closer. She thinks this is funny. Bringing some suburban Jew into a horse stable.
I picture the way my mom teased me when I was scared of something. “Oof!” she’d say. “Mah ha-ba-ah-ya? What’s the problem?” As if it were the simplest thing in the world, as if you shouldn’t be afraid of your big tall Israeli uncle who had two heart attacks, a stroke, and speaks of the Six Day War as if it were six days of intercourse.
“Why do you do it?” I ask with my back against the wall.
“I love horses,” Ally tells me, and she kisses Fatty against his neck. Her lips are warm, even though I don’t really know this.
“I mean sick ones,” I say. “Why don’t you get a healthy one?”
“You’re all screwed up.” She says it in a friendly way, like she just complimented my eyebrows. And then she’s quiet for a few moments.
I think about Ally’s warm lips. And then I think about Shmen.
Ally takes a few deep breaths, as deep as the horse’s. “Just because it’s hopeless, it doesn’t mean you give up. You’ll end up like my ex-husband. Too self-absorbed to see anything around you.”
I have no idea what she’s talking about. So I nod in complete agreement.
“Come and touch him,” she says. “You’re not the coward you think you are.” Her voice is throaty, and I wonder if she always sounds this way or if she just has a sore throat. “Come and touch him.”
“What kind of coward am I?” I say.
#
His belly is warm. And his breathing is large. I keep my hand on him and relax just like that. His legs occasionally lift up, and then drop back down to the same place. It’s either a sign of being relaxed or a sign of being uneasy. Each time he moves, I’m tempted to jump away. But Ally stands behind me. There’s no way out.
“Let’s take him for a ride,” Ally eventually says. Even though I’m busy holding my hand against the horse’s belly.
#
When we’re outside, Ally tells me to hold Fatty by the reins, and Fatty looks at me, as if to say, What the hell do you want? But I obey, and I hold Fatty by the reins while Ally disappears back into the barn.
There’s a breeze, It feels colder than autumn and my face itches as I hold this fat, dying horse, who looks at me out of the corner of his eye.
“What’s it like to be dying?” I say to the horse.
Why should I tell you? the horse says.
#
Ally brings back her stool from the barn and places it on the ground beside the horse. But she doesn’t say anything. I know what she is telling me. I’ve seen pictures of this kind of thing. Bu
t a man should be able to mount a horse without a stool. It is the child that needs a stool.
And so I stand on the stool. And from the stool, I feel tall. I can see how big this field is, and I wonder if Ally owns all this land. I think I can see a vineyard in the distance. I wonder if I can just stay on the stool forever.
But just then, she pushes me a little bit. Less playful and more like someone saying, Get off my goddamn stool! But she pushes me in the direction of the horse. This big, fat, dying thing with a saddle that would surely chafe me in places where I don’t necessarily want to be chafed.
The horse looks over at me. He says to me, Are you going to get on already? He says, Horses love politics. He says, You probably are even more of a coward than you think you are.
I stick my foot in the stirrup closest to me and while closing my eyes, I push my other leg over the horse. My intention is to gracefully slide my other foot into the other stirrup, but I miss. And I brace myself for the fall.
But I don’t hit the ground. Ally grabs onto my secured leg and she pulls me back on the horse. She manages to make this gesture look like a small thing. She also manages not to laugh at me. But Fatty snorts.
I eventually get my feet in both stirrups. I hear the horse say, Hang on, you scrawny little Jew! And then Ally pats Fatty’s tuches and Fatty starts moving.
It’s not a trot or a gallop or even a gait. It’s more of a slow, tepid walk. But sitting on a big, fat horse feels like standing on the top of a thirteen-story building. I hang on tight to the horse’s neck. I press my ear against his warm neck and squeeze him like a lover. I try to think about something calm. I think about Ally sitting in that barn knitting me a hat. I think about her tangerines. The air seems so clean out here. I take deep breaths and feel my lungs expand against the horse’s body.
As I squeeze the horse, and as I breathe and bounce with this horse, and as I think about my new hat, there’s something I notice: I’m getting hard.