by Judith Frank
Daniel shot him an aggrieved look, then sighed and stood, approached the men. Eitan was talking intently to the young woman whose cousin was killed in Jenin. An opening presented itself in front of Ibrahim, so Daniel stepped into it and extended his hand.
Ibrahim had the soft handshake of the Middle Easterner.
“Thank you for your work,” Daniel said.
Ibrahim nodded and said, “You’re very welcome.” Daniel looked at him for a sign that this handshake meant anything at all to him, that he was open to being touched by something Daniel might say. But what he saw was the somewhat distracted politeness of a man who has done this presentation a hundred times and shaken many hands, and is perhaps thinking ahead to dinner, or to being able to take his pants off in his hotel room. He held Ibrahim’s gaze for a moment, then turned around, somehow humiliated and tearful. When he joined up with Derrick, he was furious at him.
“Okay,” he said, shrugging into his coat and heading for the door. “Let’s go.”
Derrick grabbed his coat and rushed after him. “That didn’t take very long.”
Daniel was silent as Derrick fell into step beside him and they headed out into the cold darkness toward the parking lot.
“Are you okay?” Derrick asked.
Daniel stopped abruptly. “What do you want from me, Derrick?” he demanded.
“What do you mean?”
“We didn’t have a deep, meaningful conversation, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
“Okay,” Derrick said. “That’s cool.”
He held Daniel’s gaze as Daniel stared him down.
They walked quickly to Derrick’s car, and Derrick let it idle for a few minutes to warm up. Their breath puffed around them. “I just—I just didn’t want to be another sanctimonious Jewish jerk talking about his own pain,” Daniel said.
“Man, are you crazy? You’re nothing like that.”
“Jesus, I hate those guys!” Daniel burst out. “They’re so sorry they don’t believe in peace, they’re agonized”—he made scare quotes with a scathing gesture, his mouth twisted—“about the necessary civilian Palestinian losses in any given conflict. Bullshit! It’s all a performance of Jewish moral superiority, and I’m sorry, it’s bullshit.”
“Okay,” Derrick said with comic care, as though trying to humor a lunatic. “But you realize that . . . that there’s no connection between talking to someone about your own losses and what you’re talking about. Right?”
“Whatever,” Daniel said.
Derrick shifted into reverse and stretched his arm across Daniel’s seat as he backed up. They were quiet during the short ride home, and when they got there, Daniel thanked him for the ride. “You’re welcome,” Derrick said, adding, as Daniel got out of the car, “And honey, give yourself a break.”
Matt was in the bright kitchen, which was warm and steamy from boiling pasta water, sitting at the table with Gal, who had a bowl of pasta and a little container of organic applesauce in front of her. His elbow was on the table and his head rested in his hand as he watched her eat, his own plate cleaned. Noam was in his ExerSaucer, spinning wheels, making beads clatter and little bells ring. He had outgrown it several months ago, but it was enjoying a resurgence of his favor, after he had played in one belonging to the six-month-old twins of a lesbian couple from the shul.
“Hey,” Matt said.
“Hey. Did he eat?” Daniel asked, coming into the kitchen in his socks but with his coat still on.
“Yes,” Matt said. “How was it?”
“Fine,” Daniel said. He went into the hall to hang up his coat, and when he came back, Matt said, “I made pasta with chicken and broccoli and lemons.”
Daniel went over to the warm bowl sitting on the counter and helped himself to some pasta, put it in the microwave for a minute, and leaned against the counter.
“Remember all those sitcoms,” Matt said, “where the wife is furious because the husband came home late from work and his dinner’s cold?”
“Not just sitcoms,” Daniel said, loosening his tie and his collar. “Ordinary People.”
“No, that was pancakes for the son’s breakfast. I think you’re confusing that Mary Tyler Moore character with Laura Petrie.”
“Oh yeah.”
“Well, anyhoo, I think the microwave has made that situation obsolete.”
“So it has,” Daniel said.
“Lucky for us, huh?”
“Are you saying you’re mad at me?” Daniel asked, bringing his plate to the table.
Gal looked up with interest.
“Nope. Just making conversation,” Matt said. He watched Daniel hunch over his plate and eat. There was a click and then “Pop Goes the Weasel” played, manically cheerful. “I haven’t managed to accidentally break the music on that thing yet,” Matt said.
Daniel smiled dutifully. Matt looked at him, at the sharp dusty planes of his face, and wondered, again, if he was still in love with him, and if he wasn’t, whether he ever had been—because surely a good, real love could get them through tragedy together. The thought didn’t pain him, because he put it in a place in his mind marked On Hold—things, like his own death, that he would someday have to make it his business to think about, but that he didn’t have to think about right now.
“Are you fighting?” Gal asked.
“No,” Daniel said, while Matt brushed her hair out of her eyes and said, “Why do you ask that?”
She shrugged. “It looked like you were fighting. Even though you weren’t saying anything like ‘I’m mad at you’ or ‘You hurt my feelings.’ ”
“How can you tell, then?” Matt asked.
She shrugged again, smiling faintly this time. “I just can,” she said complacently.
“You can, can you?” He reached over and gave her a squeeze in the ribs, and she slapped his hand away with an aggravated “Stop it!”
“Oh, are we fighting now?” he asked.
“Yes!” she shouted.
“Everybody stop fighting,” Daniel said.
A song—“London Bridge Is Falling Down”—began to tinkle, loudly and spontaneously, from a toy in the corner of the kitchen. The three of them looked at one another and laughed. “I swear I switched that thing off!” Matt leapt up and grabbed it. “Ha!” he cried, and thrust the toy under each of their noses so they could see the switch on “off.” The thing played again in his hands, and he tossed it in the air as if it had burst into flames, which startled Noam. “Oh, sorry, honey,” Matt said, running to the small useful-things drawer and pawing through it in search of the tiny Phillips head screwdriver. He unscrewed furiously—the screwdriver tiny and spinning in his hands—one, two, three, four screws; they each hit the table with a tiny click. Then he dug out the D batteries, set the toy on the table. “I’m taking bets that it’s like a smoke detector, and will still play,” Matt said. “Anyone care to make it interesting?” They waited in suspense. The toy was silent.
“Dang,” Matt said.
THAT NIGHT MATT AND Noam read the color book in Matt and Daniel’s bed, and then Matt carried him—marveling that they really did get heavier when they started falling asleep—into his own room, and laid him down on his bed. He turned on the humidifier and Noam’s Norah Jones CD, his lullaby music. “Good night, monkey,” he whispered, running his hand over Noam’s hair and putting his little fleece with the puppet head near his hand, so if he awoke in the night he’d know he was in his own bed.
He was drowsy when he went into the bedroom, where Daniel had spilled the basket of clean laundry onto Matt’s side of the bed for folding. The water was running in the bathroom down the hall—Gal running herself a bubble bath, about which she’d become a fanatic; every trip to the drugstore now involved the purchase of a fancy potion for her.
Daniel was pulling out all of the kid pajamas from the pile. “Did you turn on the humidifier?” he asked.
“I did,” Matt said. He pulled out all the sheets and towels, the things he liked to fold first, to make the laund
ry pile quickly smaller. He folded the towels, then turned to put them in the linen closet and to go check on Gal.
“Could you check on her?” Daniel asked.
Matt sighed and flashed him a look. “I’m just going to check on her.”
“What? Why do you have to be a prick about it?”
“Because ten times a day I’m in the very process of picking up a blanket when you tell me to cover the baby with a blanket,” Matt said, “or opening a dresser drawer to get a sweater for Gal as you tell me that it’s cold and I should put a sweater on her. It’s maddening! I know you’re the Boss Man, but I’m an adult, too! Jesus.”
Daniel stared at him. “Can’t you cut me some slack?” he asked. “Think of it as a great-minds-think-alike moment? It’s not about you.”
Matt took in the semi-hostile apology, unplacated. He sighed. “You didn’t used to treat me this way. Now . . .” He shook his head.
“ ‘Now’ what? Do you really want to start a fight right now?”
“Remember yesterday when I came back from the supermarket and was stacking apples in the bowl, and the top one rolled off and hit the floor? What’s your response? You laughed! You said, ‘I knew it! I could see that one coming.’ ”
“So what?”
“That’s so mean! And you do it all the time.”
“You’re mad at me because I could see that one coming?”
“I’m mad at you because you treat me like a fuckup.” Matt pulled out a pair of jeans and gave them a shake and a snap before laying them on the bed to fold. He knew he was the clown in their family dynamic, the tackler, the tickler, the one who pretended he couldn’t find his hat when it was sitting on his head. Most of the time he relished that, and thought it was important to be that way, especially since Daniel was so—what? Deadened. But maybe, he was thinking, it was a mistake, too. One day, he’d reached up to pull the light cord on the kitchen ceiling fan and it had come clear out in his hand. Daniel had gone out and bought a new fan and installed it himself, and for days, Gal had walked around informing people, “Matt broke the ceiling fan, but Dani fixed it.”
“Matt made a big steaming pile of doody,” he’d said irritably to Brent, “but Daniel cleaned it up. That’s what she’s saying.”
“But just look what a perfect couple that makes you!” Brent offered optimistically. “What if you were both ceiling fan breakers, and neither of you could fix it? Or if you both could fix ceiling fans, but there was no one to break one?”
“Oh please,” Daniel said now. “Admit it. This is about sex.”
“It is not!” Matt cried. “And what if it is? Is it so terrible for me to want to have sex with you?”
“I knew it,” Daniel said with bitter satisfaction.
“Jesus,” Matt said, feeling as though he’d just lost a major point. “You make it seem as if I’m an insensitive, shallow jerk for wanting it, so I have to pretend I don’t. But I’m tired of pretending, and I’m not shallow and I’m not insensitive. Okay,” he said, with an impulse to joke self-deprecatingly to increase his own credibility, “I’m a little shallow and insensitive. But not because I want to have sex with my boyfriend.”
Daniel whirled on him. “Don’t you think I would if I could? Don’t you?”
Matt looked at him with interest, a pair of sweatpants dangling from his hands. “Why can’t you?”
“I . . . I just can’t. I feel very strongly that I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Maybe because my twin brother was blown to smithereens?” Daniel’s tone was ugly with suppressed tears.
He was dropping a bomb on the conversation, Matt thought, to make it stop. But Matt pursued it: “So if that happened to his body, then your body can’t get any pleasure?”
Daniel shot him a withering look. “Oh, aren’t you clever.”
The phone rang, and he reached for it, Matt saying with a warning tone, “Don’t!” He knew he’d scored, and he didn’t want to give up his advantage.
“Hi,” Daniel said into the phone.
“That’s not cool,” Matt said.
Daniel was casting his eyes up, defeated. “It was fine, Val. Thanks for asking. No, I’m not mad, it’s just that a lot of people seem to be very interested in how it went, and I feel— No, of course, there’s nothing wrong with that.”
Matt watched for a minute as Daniel listened impatiently. “Listen,” Daniel said, “I’m in the middle of something, can we talk about it tomorrow? Thanks. Thanks.” A pause; he was lowering his head toward the telephone base with the receiver against his ear. “Thanks, Val. Okay.”
“See?” he said, turning to Matt. “This is what I mean. You, Derrick, Val—everybody knows about the Families Project event, and everyone’s on my case about it. ‘How was it, Daniel? Did you talk to them, Daniel? Did they show you the right way to grieve?’ She keeps trying to give me the name of this therapist she knows.”
“Whoa!” Matt said. “You think people think you’re grieving wrong?”
“Peggy Sheridan sure does! Don’t you?”
Matt sat on the bed, making the pile of little washcloths Daniel had folded cave onto his thigh. “I don’t know what that means.” He said that even though he sort of knew what it meant. He’d been thinking about it. It was amazing that Daniel didn’t feel rage at the terrorist, at the Palestinians. Mostly he thought that was because Daniel was simply an amazing and compassionate person, wise enough to see the big picture. Because he was. But sometimes Matt wondered—he couldn’t help it—if that response was entirely real, entirely human. If Daniel could let himself be angry, would things be different?
“It hasn’t even been a year!” Daniel said. “But clearly I haven’t learned to do it right yet.”
“No,” Matt said.
“You’re messing up my pile! So why is everyone pressuring me?”
“Then fold the laundry on your own freaking side of the bed!” Matt stood and picked up the empty basket to take into the bathroom. “They’re not pressuring you.”
“Oh, come off it! Sitting next to Derrick at that event was excruciating. He kept turning and gazing into my eyes with this, this soulful expectancy.”
Matt laughed. “He always does that, Dan. He does it when he asks if you like his new recipe for tofu stir-fry with shiitake mushrooms, or whatever the fuck.”
“He was just dying for me to have a huge catharsis, right there at Smith College.”
Matt put the basket into the linen closet in their bathroom. When he came out, he asked carefully, “Do you think therapy’s a terrible idea?”
Daniel was hanging a clean shirt in his closet, shaking and smoothing it, buttoning the second button around the hanger. He threw his head back, his eyes closed, his Adam’s apple a shard against his throat. “I’m not going into therapy.”
“Why not? It’s not like you haven’t done it before.” Matt felt carefully for the words. “I think . . . It’s not that you’re grieving. It’s that you’re . . . frozen. You’re different.”
“What do you think grieving is?” Daniel cried. “Do you think you can really grieve—and I mean grieve so hard it takes your breath away, day after day after day—and not be changed?”
Matt was quiet. Was that true?
“Christ!” Daniel said, his face red and his nostrils flared. “It’s not—it’s not pretty, or ennobling. And if you think therapy can touch it, well—”
Matt stood gazing at him, leaning against his dresser with his arms crossed. Daniel was acting as though Matt had never grieved himself, but as Matt thought resentfully about that he also felt embarrassed, because he had felt his grief for Jay to be a little bit ennobling.
“So excuse me if I’m not exactly lusting after you,” Daniel said, sensing an advantage from Matt’s pensiveness.
“Stop it,” Matt snapped. “You’re like straight people, acting like sex is trivial. I can’t stand that! And I’ll tell you something, we’re setting a crappy example of a healthy couple for these kids.
They’re going to think we hate each other!”
“I don’t hate you,” Daniel said, his eyes glistening. “I really don’t. You’ve been a total saint, and I don’t know what I’d be doing without you.”
“Well, thanks,” Matt said, thinking, A total saint: just kill me.
They sat down on the bed and slumped against each other. “What now?” Matt asked.
“Let me go make sure Gal hasn’t flooded the house,” Daniel said.
That night, curled against a sleeping Matt, Daniel’s mind continued to churn. Therapy! What were they thinking? Sure, he believed in it—back in college, it had been a lifeline as he struggled to become comfortable with his sexuality. But to make him all better from terrorism, from one of the biggest and most violent losses a person could sustain? It felt so galling, so puny and trivial, in the face of what he was going through, so massively deluded as an enterprise. He couldn’t get past that. You might as well tell that guy Ibrahim, or the woman whose cousin was killed in Jenin, to go to therapy.
Thinking of them let in a fresh wave of confusion and self-reproach. He’d felt so victimized, as a gay man, in the face of the Israeli legal system. What a joke that was! It mortified him now to even think about it. What an obscene luxury to have all his friends worrying and whispering about his mental health, while the children the Israeli courts had handed to him slept in a safe house that would never get bulldozed, when he would never be stuffed into a tiny strip of land he couldn’t get out of and then bombed, or have one of his kids shot and then, on top of that, have the very people who had committed the murder blame him for being a negligent parent.
He didn’t know what to do with all that, except to scorn his friends for their naïveté and privilege. His mind stalled there for a while, clotted and pulsing. Who was this man whom his friends said they missed? It was so hard to remember him! He knew, somewhere in the shadows of his mind, that he was a good and loving person, even a charismatic one—or that he had been anyway. In their early days together, Matt had prodded him: “You know that that whole shy and sweet thing you’ve got going on is irresistible, right? Remember fifth grade—‘He’s cute but he doesn’t know it’? That’s you.” It had been hard to fully believe that Matt was in love with him. Sometimes he still had trouble believing that he could command the attention of such a smart and beautiful man.