by Judith Frank
“What’s next for you?” Alex asked, his eyes traveling in a friendly manner over Matt’s face and body.
“Not sure,” Matt said. “I’m thinking about returning to New York.”
Through a friend of Val’s, he put down a deposit for a three-month-long sublet in the West Village, thinking he would go back and give living there a trial run before actually moving there. But the closer the time got to the beginning of the sublet, the less New York seemed to shimmer with promise, and he began to wonder whether, at this point, its wonder and excitement were just the mechanical fantasy of a queer living in the boondocks. He found himself getting lethargic each time he was supposed to be packing, and even if it was a total long shot, he felt he had to stick around in case he got to see Gal and Noam. Then his Jetta broke down and needed a new transmission, and for three days he obsessed over whether to continue investing in it—it had ninety-four thousand miles on it—or buy a new car. Either way, it was going to cost a fortune—and if he gave up his sublet, he’d lose his $1,700 security deposit as well.
What was wrong with him? He felt lazy and boring; it felt like an unconscious unwillingness to truly part from Daniel, and he dreaded being the pathetic ex-without-a-clue. He worried that the kids were just an excuse. He’d left New York four years ago because he couldn’t take the scene anymore, because he was afraid of the drugs and the self-destruction, because he knew the answer to the game of Who’s the Hottest Man in the Room?, and it didn’t gratify him anymore. Did he fear that, at thirty-two, with just that infinitesimal thickening, he might not be in the game anymore? And even if he was, he didn’t know yet whether he had HIV, and would have to conduct a sex life full of honest confessions and intense precautions with men he didn’t even yet know, which wearied him just thinking about it. He had clumsily extricated himself from Alex Connor’s muscular arms after their drink for that very reason.
He decided, finally, to stay in Northampton through the summer and consider going back to New York in the fall. It was money down the drain, but you couldn’t push this kind of thing. And the truth was, he kind of loved Northampton. Unwillingly, and with a tremendous sense of self-irony, but he did: He’d turned into a nature-loving, dog-loving, hiking New Englander who knows the best local ponds and lakes to swim in, who gorges on farm-stand corn and berries in the summer, and gets his woodpile ready for winter so he can sit in the woodstove’s warmth and watch the flames flicker behind the door. Not to mention his love of the cafés crowded with academics writing on their laptops or grading papers, the fantastic bookstores, the organic this and fair-trade that, the fiery debates in local newspapers about the Fourth of July or the Pride parade, or the whole development versus conservation problem. And the lesbians! Could he live without the lesbians now? His tenderness for them was no less deep for its comical condescension. How could you not love the jocks who returned from summer vacations at P-town and the Hamptons and Ogunquit with deep tans and new girlfriends; the buzz-cut butches with their husky laughs; the lesbian moms who were gamely supportive of their daughters who insisted on wearing nothing but tutus and tiaras and pink pink pink?
He didn’t see Gal and Noam anywhere around town; it figured that in a small town where you saw everybody all the time, he wouldn’t see the people he was actually dying to see. He kept himself from driving past Gal’s school and Noam’s day care, and past Daniel’s house, and he didn’t ask their mutual friends about them either because asking would have made him feel too pathetic. But he heard this and that from Val and Adam, Brent and Derrick, and Cam. That the kids missed him. That Daniel was still making plans to take them to Israel for the year anniversary. That he wouldn’t keep Matt from seeing them forever. He couldn’t, Matt thought. Surely he couldn’t.
CHAPTER 18
WHERE AM I going to sleep?” Gal asked.
It was early March, and they were in the car on the way to the Newark airport, a four-hour drive to begin their trip to Israel. Noam, strapped into his car seat next to Gal, was sucking his pacifier and clutching his doggie and two wool hats. Over the past few weeks he’d begun saying a few words other than yeah and no. His newest word was doggie. “What’s your doggie’s name?” people would ask, and he would reply, “Doggie.” His second word was more, which he uttered with a huge astonished veer upward, in imitation of the few times they’d teased him about wanting even more of something.
“In your old bed, I guess,” Daniel said to Gal. “And I could put Noam’s crib into the little guest room if you want, so you can have your own room.”
“Uh-huh,” Gal murmured, thinking about that. “I think maybe he should sleep in the same room as me, because it’s a new place for him.”
“Okay,” Daniel said. Lately, since Noam’s cheek injury, she’d been solicitous to him, running to get his passy when he cried and wedging it into his mouth till he sucked; the other day Daniel had come into their bedroom to read a story and found them sitting on Gal’s bed, holding hands.
“Where are you going to sleep?” Gal asked.
Daniel paused. “I thought I’d sleep in your parents’ old room.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
She said it in her most carefully reasoning tone.
“Really?” he asked.
“Because what if I have a bad dream and I get up and go into their room? I’ll think I’m going to Ema and Abba but then they won’t be there, and then I’ll feel even worse.”
Daniel was quiet. Over the past few weeks she’d been full of anxious questions about their visit. Were they staying with her grandparents? Would she sleep over at Leora’s house all by herself ? Would they lock the doors when they were in the house? Suddenly she couldn’t remember the Hebrew word for Popsicle, or for sidewalk, and her face flooded with relief when he reminded her.
“Why don’t we play it by ear,” he said.
His mind had been going over the vital things he’d packed or zipped into his inside winter coat pocket: wallet, passports, tickets, the kids’ legal papers, the keys to the apartment in Jerusalem. His stomach and throat were tight, and for a few days, it had been hard to get food down. When he thought about opening the door to Joel and Ilana’s apartment, he wondered what on earth he’d been thinking when he’d agreed with his father to keep it for a while. He imagined how stale and dusty the apartment would be, how half-vacated, how they’d keep coming across pieces of baby gear or freezer-burned food, every object haunted. He couldn’t, for the life of him, remember whether they’d gotten rid of Joel and Ilana’s clothes.
Gal gazed out the window at bare trees and dirty snow. Her brother’s eyes were falling shut and then opening again. She’d wanted to go back so badly, to see Leora and her classmates and her grandparents, to be home. But as the time had approached, she’d had trouble falling asleep at night, as her mind spun with anxious conjecture. What if she got killed by terrorists? Or didn’t remember how to say things? Or missed her parents even more? And Noam, too. The scar under his eye, which no longer needed a bandage, was healing slowly—you couldn’t see the stitch marks anymore, but it hadn’t yet turned white, either. It made him look fragile and damaged, and Gal dreaded everybody asking what had happened to his cheek, and finding out that she had been the one who hurt him.
She’d wanted to tell Daniel she wasn’t going to go, but the thought of being separated from him frightened her. And what about her grandparents? She knew that their looking forward to her visits was what kept them alive, her grandfather had told her that. Daniel had tried to talk to her about the trip, asking her how she felt about going back, and she’d looked at him with door stoppers in her throat, words bumping against hard rubber. He sat next to her, wearing a T-shirt fraying around the collar, his hand warm on her leg. He told her that it was going to be hard, and sad, but also fun to see Leora and Shai and Ruti and her other friends.
“You know what the important thing is?” he asked Gal.
She looked in his face, which was se
rious and sweet. She knew the right answer was something like “That we all love each other.”
“The important thing is that we’ll all be together,” he said.
“Is Matt coming, too?” she asked.
He sighed. “No, Gal. You know he’s not.”
She stirred and tried, with a deep breath, to disperse the bad feeling sifting through her like dust motes turning in a shaft of sun; she hadn’t asked the question to be fresh or mean.
“But Yossi and Rafi are,” Daniel reminded her. Yossi had been talking for a while about taking the family to Israel to visit his aging parents in Petach Tikva, and a few weeks ago, he had decided to go alone with Rafi. He planned it so they and Daniel and the kids could fly back and forth together, and so he and Rafi could come to the memorial. The news had flooded Gal with relief; she had the vague and scary sense of the family dwindling, failing, like the feeble trickle from a faucet after the water runs out.
“Is Rafi going to sleep over?” she asked now, her voice rising over the din of the car. “Where will he sleep?”
“I don’t know yet, Gal-Gal. If he does, it’ll just be for one night, and we’ll figure it out.”
“Why isn’t Anat coming?”
“She’s staying home with Ezra and Udi, remember? Because they have school and practices they didn’t want to miss.”
“Does she have to go to the lab?” Rafi’s mother, Anat, who was doing a postdoc in physics, was famous for spending ungodly hours in the lab; Gal knew the Israeli Sign Language sign for lab.
“Yes,” Daniel said.
When they arrived at the gate three hours later, flushed and hassled from parking and the shuttle bus and the long security line, Yossi and Rafi were already there. The lounge area wasn’t even open yet; it was barricaded off till the security officers could arrive. They wandered around looking for a place nearby to settle and dump their stuff, Noam slumped in his stroller with his passy listless in his mouth; he’d been up three times in the night, and both he and Daniel were haggard. Gal and Rafi examined electronics and iPod accessories and sunglasses and inflatable neck pillows, prodded repeatedly by Yossi and Daniel to move along and keep within eyeshot. In the newspaper store, as the men bought magazines and chewing gum, they fingered the travel-sized items—toothpaste and collapsible toothbrushes, tiny bottles of shampoo and ibuprofen and moisturizer and hand sanitizer, miniature sets of Scrabble and chess. Each time Rafi went with his parents to the supermarket, he begged them for one trial-sized item, and in his room he had a bin of products in deliciously tiny containers that he and Gal loved to plunge their hands into, removing individual items to examine and caress.
On the flight, Gal and Yossi switched seats so she could sit next to Rafi, and she watched movies with a headset while Rafi worked tiny travel puzzles and a Game Boy with his thumbs. He sat slumped with his heels on the seat, tucked under his butt, and sometimes he’d gaze at the screen on the seat back in front of her, blinking with sleepy absorption, and she wondered, as she often did when they watched TV together—the sound turned up and the English subtitles making her eyes scramble all over the screen—how much he could understand. She took off her own headset and just watched the pictures, to see if she could follow the story, and he looked sideways at her, his lips curling up in a smile, then fished out his own headset from the seat pocket. He mimed putting them on and turning up the volume, and arranged his face into an expression of sage contemplation, and she laughed; he was showing her that he could hear if he put those on. He’d gotten a haircut for Israel, which made him look older, less elfin.
It was thrilling to choose and examine and eat their own dinner without the help of a parent. Yossi came by and poked his head in, but they yelled at him to go away till he slunk off, hands raised in surrender. They found the little packets of salt and pepper, the tiny tubs of margarine for their rolls—and they agreed with great pleasure that the meal was disgusting except for the carrot cake.
THEY PARTED FROM YOSSI and Rafi at the Pelephone booth outside of customs, where Daniel needed to stop and rent a cell phone. When Yossi lifted Gal and hugged her, she wrapped her legs around his back and laid her head on his shoulder. She felt his back vibrate as he murmured in her ear, and then he looked in her face and rubbed his beard stubble on her cheek, making her swat at him. “We’ll see you next week at the memorial,” he said. He put her down and bent to kiss Noam’s head. Rafi waggled his fingers good-bye and slipped something into her coat pocket; when she took it out, she found it was a trial-sized tube of Jergens Ultra Healing moisturizer. She watched them walk off with a throb of unease.
The sound of native Hebrew jingled in her ears, and her brain rearranged itself with a smart click, like a metal washer onto a magnet. After he’d signed for the phone, Daniel put his wallet back in his pocket and ushered them away from the line, gesturing for Gal to wheel Noam in the little folding stroller while he wheeled the cart with the suitcases. He stopped, peered at the phone in his palm, and dialed Yaakov’s cell phone. “Yaakov?” he said loudly. “It’s Daniel!” He listened for a while, and Gal heard a torrent of noisy, distorted male speech come from the phone on his ear. Sabba, she realized with alarm, wasn’t at the airport. Daniel kept trying to cut in and tell him it was no problem, they’d take a sherut. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Yaakov. Yaakov. Don’t worry. Okay, le’hitraot. See you soon.”
“Okay, guys,” he told the kids. “Sabba isn’t going to make it—he got a flat tire. So we’re taking a sherut. C’mon. Gal, you push your brother, okay?”
“Did he get into an accident?” Gal asked as he herded her out the doors and into the crowd. Would Daniel know how to get them to Jerusalem, and remember that he had to pay with shekels, not dollars?
“No, no,” he said. “He got a flat tire when the car was parked in front of the house.”
“Are we still going to see him?” She was hurrying with the stroller to keep up with him.
“What?”
“Are we still going to see him? Wait for me!”
“Of course!”
The air smelled of exhaust and cigarette smoke, the high whine of idling planes punctuated by quick blasts of car horns and brake squeals. People were holding up signs, exclaiming, hugging. Taxi drivers approached and solicited his business in English, and Daniel waved them off till he saw a Shemesh van. “Yerushalayim?” he asked the driver, and when he nodded, Daniel wheeled the bags to the back, supervised their getting lifted into the trunk, and lifted Gal’s backpack off her back so she could get in. He tossed it in after her, lifted Noam out of his stroller and struggled to collapse it with one hand, sweating in his winter coat, remembering the woman in the security line who’d said, “I’d help you with that, but I don’t have a degree in advanced engineering.”
He handed the folded stroller to the driver to stow away, lifted Noam into the van, and sat him next to Gal in the middle row, then climbed in beside him. The van vibrated loudly. In the back sat a religious couple with two little girls wearing sweatshirts over dresses. Daniel unzipped his coat and squirmed it off, feeling his shirt stick to his back and a trickle of sweat on his temple. “Whoosh,” he sighed. “One more little drive and we’re there.”
They were the last ones in the van; the driver got in and pulled away. Now that Daniel was settled and had caught his breath, he remembered sitting in a van with his parents and Matt a year ago, the one that had taken them to the morgue, and for a moment something of the old shock came over him. When he could breathe again, he was glad to be alone, without his parents to manage and ward off, without reporters in his face. He put his arm around Noam and scooted him in closer.
He dozed, and was awoken when the van lurched into low gear as they began to ascend. It was warm in the van, and one of the little girls behind him was kicking at his seat; just when he was about to turn around, she’d stop, and then when he settled down, she’d kick again. He looked down at Gal, who was nodding and dozing with her head resting on the window. A scent memory
of the morgue floated past him, and he concentrated on it for a second, trying to make it comprehensible, before letting it go in revulsion. The swing of the van through curves and the slash of sunlight in and out of his field of vision began to nauseate him. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, it was dark, the sun blocked by the massive wall of the cemetery where his brother was buried. Tears sprang to his eyes. His brother—brother—never had a word pierced his heart so sharply. A silent cry rushed through his chest and head.
Matt!
The slip was startling—although, he quickly reminded himself, it certainly wasn’t the first time he’d called Joel “Matt,” or vice versa. After all, hadn’t Joel been his first beloved, the model for all future beloveds? He rubbed his eyes before the tears could fall, and shrugged off the soreness and longing in his heart.
THE APARTMENT WAS CHILLY and dark, the blinds on the porch making a hollow shuddering sound in the wind. They entered, sniffing and twitching. There was a faint smell of cleaning chemicals; Malka had had her housekeeper clean it.
Daniel dumped his bags in the hall and helped Gal off with her backpack. He turned on all the lights within reach, and flipped on the boiler switch next to the bathroom. He wheeled Noam into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, peering in as if it would offer him the key to an important mystery. It was empty except for some condiments in the door—mustard, mayonnaise, capers—and had been wiped out by someone who’d done a half-assed job; tiny crumbs lined the edges of the vegetable drawers, and there was an intractable juice syrup spot with tiny shreds of paper towel fuzzed around its edges.
Gal went automatically to her after-school destination, the snack drawer, sliding it open and finding a few loose Bamba and pretzel pieces and crumbs in the corners. She put a piece of Bamba in her mouth but when she bit down on it, it felt like biting into a sponge and she spat it into her hand. She looked around for the garbage, or a paper towel, then held her hand with the tooth-marked yellow paste out to Daniel, and he wrinkled his nose and brought her by the wrist to the sink. The faucet coughed loudly twice before water came out and washed it off.