A Brilliant Novel in the Works

by Yuvi Zalkow

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  When someone sees something that defies everything they thought they understood about the planet Earth, it’s a pretty amazing thing to witness. The first expression on my wife’s face was joy. It was short-lived, sure, but it was there. It was the “Oh, honey, what a nice surprise!” moment and it lasted about as long as it takes for the light to go on after you flick the switch.

  After joy, we quickly moved on to shock. This is the sensation one feels when the world is turned upside down. It can happen when you come home to find your house has been crushed by a flaming meteor, for example. The shock occurs before there is any kind of personal connection to the situation—it is just a confused feeling, as if your inner compass has malfunctioned. I had about two seconds to sit tight in this phase before things got worse.

  Then we moved on to anger. This is the “Holy Christ! My husband is a sick, disgusting, despicable, shameless, shameful pervert and I wish his parents never had intercourse and never introduced something like him into our species” moment and it isn’t a fun thing to witness. Particularly if you’re the pervert in question.

  My wife dropped her purse. Her hand went over her mouth, except it missed her mouth completely and smacked her nose.

  Now you should know right away that I felt horrible about this whole situation. I was ashamed of my predicament. I felt terrible for the discomfort that I caused my wife. I had utter affection for my wife. I loved the way she squeezed me tight when she came home from work; I loved the way she could imitate my father’s Southern accent and my mother’s Israeli accent perfectly even though she was from Iowa; I loved the way she bought me popsicles from the ice cream man when he went down our street.

  There are just certain things that can’t be digested properly. Things a human body cannot take in. My wife’s brother doesn’t have a large intestine and he must watch what he eats. If he eats cabbage, for example, his body doesn’t know what to do with it, and it’ll come out of his system undigested.

  So there was my wife, frozen in time, looking at me, and here is what I said to my beloved: “Honey, there’s something I’d like to talk to you about.”

  And on that note, my dear and patient and peaceful wife kicked me in the face and left the room. She kicked me awfully hard. I was lying with my face on the floor, still tied up with her belt. It was the kind of feeling where it hurts so much you can’t even tell what kind of damage has been done, but you know for sure it isn’t the place that is bleeding you have to worry about.

  Chapter Thirty

  Not the Worst Kind of Nightmare

  After we have sex for the first time in at least three years (it sounds crazy to say that phrase: after we have sex, after we have sex, after we have sex), I tell my wife, “Wow.” And she says, “Wow.”

  The crazy thing about the missionary position is that it is so warm and comfortable and nice when you’re pressed against another body that wants to be pressed against you. I tell her that her people have a brilliant way about pulling off this so-called sex thing.

  “It wasn’t me,” my wife says.

  It burns in all the places where our bodies are touching, her breasts against my bony chest, the heat of her thighs, and I can feel her kneecaps pressed against my legs. We kiss while we talk. It’s some kind of horrible, sentimental nightmare we’re living in. But as far as nightmares go, it’s not the worst kind of nightmare.

  I say, “If it wasn’t you, then who was it?” And I know my breath must smell like the breath of a man who hasn’t left his house in months.

  She spends some time thinking about this. She looks out the window. She looks at the ceiling. She looks at me. She looks at that messy pile of papers on the floor which I try so fucking hard to call my novel.

  And she says, “The gorilla did it.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Home

  It’s quieter with Julia in the house than before. I tiptoe to the kitchen so I don’t wake her up.

  I put my manuscript on the kitchen counter and I sit on a stool and read the manuscript while eating a BLT. With the lights off. Just the moonlight. And the smell of Julia in the house. And a thumping ache in my temples. I also put that photograph of Yousef ’s father on the table. It’s funny. The more I look at the photograph, the more it resembles my father. Put this guy in a river and replace the apple with a fishing rod and it’s the same smile. It’s the same thumbs-up.

  I don’t know how much time goes by, but I’m able to read over everything I’ve written in this novel.

  It’s funny, my novel. I see that. But there needs to be more. It’s me on the page all the time. I leave no room for anything else. And Shmen was right: the novel does go off the tracks. But hopefully I’ve begun putting it back on track.

  My editor may never like the novel, I may have to take out a loan to pay back the advance, I may have to take an actual day job to pay my debts, but all those things seem like simple problems once I realize I might soon like this crazy fucking novel of mine.

  You really shouldn’t stalk someone thinking he can save your novel. Even though I got terrified too soon for Yousef to see me, I still suspect that he knows that I was at his house. He smells the cowardly afterglow of my Jewy presence. He knows.

  Yousef must still be fresh in the grief of his father. I wonder if he died on the operating table just like I told him he wouldn’t. I wonder if Yousef has friends and family around him.

  “Still with the no sleep?” she says. Julia sits on a stool next to me. She’s got something between her fingers and it takes me a while to register that it is a cigarette. She lights the thing and then takes a long drag. Then she grabs my empty plate and lets the cigarette rest on it.

  “You smoke?” I say.

  “A new hobby,” she says.

  “It’ll kill you,” I tell her.

  “Will you let me read it?” she says, looking at the manuscript. This was a boundary we had not yet crossed. It was as if

  my writing was nothing more than secret diary entries. Unless something got published. But most of my stories never made it out of the “maybe_a_story” subdirectory on my computer. And so she knew very little of what I wrote.

  “I’m serious,” she says to me. “I’d like to read your novel.”

  I think about this for a moment. I’m not talking about just a literary moment, I mean some substantial time goes by. Long enough for my wife to fix herself a BLT. Long enough for me to wash our dishes. Long enough for her to light another cigarette.

  And finally, I say, “Give me a few weeks to clean some things up.”

  “Why wait?” she says. I see her suspicious look. She expects one of my typical, idiotic ways of weaseling out of things. Once I refused to go out with her and her friends until she pulled down her pants and sang “Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head.” Once I asked her to put her hands in my pants during dinner for some reason that I can no longer remember.

  I tell my wife I’m honing in on the core problem with my novel. I tell her that I see its fundamental flaw.

  She looks at me for a good while. “Homing,” she says.

  “What?”

  “You hone your skills, and you home in on an issue. But there is no honing in.”

  “Home, hone, horn, porn. Just give me a few more weeks.”

  I grab her cigarette and take a long drag. It’s such a clean feeling. To have her cigarette smoke in my lungs. And after I blow it all out, I kiss Julia like a man with a confident schmeckel.

  Book 5

  IN THE END

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Yummy

  Julia and I have gotten accustomed to being together again. Three months ago, I thought I’d never see her again. And now I feel like she’s mine again. I know this assumption is dangerous again.

  She appreciates that I wasn’t so hard on her for her little infidelity, the gentilfidelity, and we’ve found a way to have sex, but there’s more to a relationship than just fucking and forgiveness. There are needs and wants
. She wants a baby. She wants a family. She wants a stable companion. She wants both more space and more attention. She wants to read my novel. I need to give her answers. We’re good to each other again, but I still need to connect with her better. I have to decide about family. I know that subject has to come back around. And I still want to look out for Shmen. I still need this novel to go further. I still haven’t had the courage to visit Yousef. I want to talk to him. And I still want to be spanked.

  I’ve given you one kinky erection, one impossible colonoscopy, one missing prostate, some leather restraints, a whole mess of pianos, one ridiculous story about Uranus, a deceptive napkin, no shortage of kahkee and schmeckel references, a Palestinian in mourning, and even sex with Julia.

  But that’s just a list of my dirty laundry. Something’s got to give. I can hear the clock ticking. Julia won’t wait forever for us to get back on track. Gentilfidelity guilt can only be carried so many miles. And then real change needs to take place. And this novel will fall apart if I’m not careful, or if I’m too careful. I’m missing some pieces to this Jewy puzzle. And Shmen, well, I don’t know how many visits to the hospital he can stand. Or I can stand.

  Who knows how many pages I have left to clean this all up, but it can’t be many.

  I still look at the razor blades and think, “Yummy.” Just a couple more cuts wouldn’t harm anyone. And on some mornings—like on this morning—as I wait for Julia to get out of the shower, I realize I miss her more now that she’s with me. And I don’t understand why that is. I still wake up some mornings and think, “Shit. I’m me again.”

  I’ve also begun thinking about that gentile of hers. At first, it was relieving for me—like a hypochondriac who is blessed with a fatal illness—to know she fucked someone else, but the blessing has begun to wear off. What will stop her from going back to him and his healthy foreskin?

  I also didn’t tell her about Yousef. Because then I’d need to explain to her that I have been stalking a Palestinian/ Clevelandian man I barely know and that I’m doing it to save my book. I’ve hidden the photo of his father along with my hidden pictures of Julia.

  You’d think there would be more growth at this point in the novel.

  As I wait for Julia’s shower to end, I do something knowingly crooked. I call the brother of the person I really ought to be talking to right now.

  “Shmuvi,” he says. “It’s you. I need a drink.”

  What I want to say is, “You’re on!” But what I do say is: “You can’t drink. We quit. It’s 9 am. It’ll kill you. Julia will kill both of us. No more drinking. It’s bad. We’ll never be able to stop. Take up smoking or snorting.”

  “I need a drink and a sitter,” he says.

  “What’s wrong?”

  I’m wanting to know why he needs a drink, but instead he

  says, “Next Saturday night. We need a babysitter.”

  “I’ll do it,” I say to him. This seems like the perfect thing for me. “You mean with Maddy, right? You mean for money, right?”

  THROAT CLEARING

  I need to finish off this novel. And I think I know one way to do it. It’s going to be a little bumpy. It’s a long shot. But I don’t have much time. It involves a pee pee scene, a few palindromes, several overly symbolic anagrams, sixteen clotheslines, another visit to a purple apartment that may change the course of a book. It also involves a small, insignificant mountain with a giant horse on it.

  How many of you have I lost already?

  I hate to think of it.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Bad Dates

  When Yousef opens the door, he is surprised to see me. Surprised, as in, he doesn’t recognize me. He looks too sleepy for noon. He is red in the eyes. He has lost weight. His beard is too thick.

  “Yes,” he says. “Hello,” he says, but he still doesn’t open the door all the way to let me in.

  “We spoke at the hospital waiting room many months ago.” I take off my backpack and reach into a pouch and pull out his business card, which is all bent-up by now, and I pass it to him, as if that is some kind of proof. I imagine my mom saying, “Oof! Yuvi! Why are you so awkward when you introduce yourself?”

  “Oh,” Yousef says, looking at his own bent up card and back to my face. I see his mind go back to that moment. Back to when his father was alive.

  “I’m sorry about your father,” I say to him.

  He is too dazed to know exactly how I know this information, but he appreciates that I’ve acknowledged it. I know this because he opens the door all the way and points me to the couch. I’ve officially been invited into his house, which is one notch better than last time. I sit down and he sits down next to me and lets out a big sigh. I put my backpack against my legs. I’ve got my mess of a novel inside that bag.

  There is still a photo album and those poisoned dates on his coffee table though the photos of his dad are gone. I almost tell him that I was in his apartment three months ago but I can’t imagine that going well: Hello, grieving stranger. I broke into your apartment three months ago while you were shitting and stole a picture of your dead dad. Can I come in again?

  “Yeah,” Yousef says as if we were in the middle of a conversation, “it’s still hard without him.”

  I want to put my hand on his shoulder or pat him on the back or just express some form of guyish intimacy. I put my hand gently on the table.

  “I know this doesn’t help,” I say, “but it took me some time to stop feeling like my life was over when my father died. It’s nice to imagine that you can read some holy book or whack off or punch someone and have the feeling go away, but it doesn’t work that way.”

  He scratches his beard and smiles, though I know he’s not finding anything too funny. “When do you get over it?” he says. It’s a question everyone asks—or wants to ask—when someone close to them dies.

  “You don’t.”

  He makes a grunting sound, which I think is good. I had the same fear when my parents died: thinking that I was supposed to completely get over that ache. But it gets easier when you finally just let it stay there.

  “You want a date?” he says.

  I grab a date and toss it in my mouth. I try to do it in slow motion like Indiana Jones, but it just goes up in the air and drops on the couch. And so I grab the date off the couch and stick it in my mouth the regular way. They are sweet and soft and totally not poisonous-tasting.

  He puts his hand on the photo album. He begins to open it. But then he closes it and looks back at me. I wonder for a second if he is on medication. He’s got Xanax eyelids.

  “Is this a bad time to visit?” I say.

  He ignores my question and keeps staring at me. “You do not seem much like an Israeli.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Well,” he says, “you’re too fragile and sensitive.”

  I don’t know whether to be flattered or offended. Or both. Or neither.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t stereotype.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “When I saw those dates, my first thought was that they were poisoned.”

  Yousef smiles. “Raiders of the Lost Ark?”

  “Yes,” I admit, with my head down.

  “Have you ever been to Egypt?” he asks.

  “No,” I admit, with my head down. I know the “Let my people go” Egypt. I know a little about the 2011 protest against Mubarak. But I don’t honestly know what life is like in Egypt. I remember as a kid my dad telling me about Sadat and Begin and the Camp David Peace Treaty. I also know that Sadat was assassinated. But I don’t know much else.

  I can see he almost says something to me. Maybe he almost tells me about pollution in Cairo. He almost tells me about the beauty of the Red Sea. He almost tells me about the Nile. And about the camels that are sold at a Bedouin market.

  “Never been there either,” Yousef says. “But a great movie.” I feel like this is good enough to know that he still accepts me, with all my ignorance.
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  We are silent for too long.

  Just as I consider whipping out my novel, he reaches for the photo album again, as if that were his manuscript. He flips through the pages until he comes to one of a girl, maybe sixteen. It’s an old picture, at least fifty years old, a faded black and white, only about two inches by two inches, with jagged edges. The girl has long hair, longer than the picture can show, and she is smiling and looking below the camera and there is a tree she is leaning against. A tree that is too tall to see.

  “This is my grandmother,” he says.

  “She’s beautiful,” I say. And I don’t just say that because it’s polite to say that. I say it because his grandmother is smiling like the photographer just told her a fabulous joke. An inside joke that no one is still alive to tell.

  “Yes,” he says. “She was special.”

  He shows me another picture. This time it’s his grandmother with her four sisters. And two brothers. And her mother. They are all lined up against a stone wall that is cracked behind them. In one of the cracks, a shrub growing out of the wall.

  Here’s the thing: her brothers are wearing yarmulkes.

  “Your grandmother was a Jew?” I say.

  WHAT TO DO WITH SHOSHANA?

  Every day, she went with her father to buy fruit from the Arab man. She wasn’t supposed to go. She was a young girl of fifteen. A girl who was almost ready to be married. She had no business leaving the Jewish part of Jerusalem. She had no business going to the Arab market. “A woman’s place is in the home,” her father had said. “A woman prepares for Shabbat. It is the man who brings home the food.” But she pushed and she begged and she cried.