The Book of Jonah: A Novel

by Feldman, Joshua Max

She could not avoid the house entirely, though. She had to be there for the assessment, she had to be there to tell the movers what to put into storage and what to leave for the estate sale, she had to search for papers in the filing cabinet in her father’s office. The details to be attended to seemed only to accumulate, to multiply grotesquely. Her aunt Naomi might have helped with some of this, but immediately after the funeral she had absented herself to California. Margaretha, her only cousin, hadn’t been able to attend at all. She sent her condolences, her aunt informed her, from Amsterdam.

  One Sunday, Judith came to the house to see that three copies of the Sunday New York Times waited in their blue plastic bags on the stoop. It was the remnant of their little eccentricity: one copy of the Sunday crossword puzzle for each of them. Looking at the three untouched newspapers, Judith realized that the Bulbrooks had been more peculiar—rarer—than she had ever given them credit for. And now she was the last one. Walking through the house that day—great cardboard boxes everywhere with their tops gaping open, the china in the dining room encased in bubble wrap, the mattress on her parents’ bed already thrown away, leaving only the wooden frame, the silence in all the rooms making the lack of occupants of the house somehow palpable—she felt as if she were making her way among the remains of some lost civilization.

  Gabe reappeared around this time. He was not at the funeral, and later she wouldn’t be able to remember if he’d arrived before the ceremony and hadn’t been able to stay, or if he hadn’t been able to make it out in time to attend. The days of her forced residence in her hometown blended together in her memory—were to her all equally funereal. And, in general after her parents’ death, events would become progressively harder for her to sequence, to partition into discrete days, months, years.

  She remembered, though, that she was at the house to pack up her mother’s jewelry when they met. It was nighttime, and they spoke on the porch in the front of the house. The FOR SALE sign was already in the front yard; flies and moths circled the single porch light above their heads. Neither made a move to hug the other when they said hello.

  “They really were wonderful people,” Gabe told her.

  “I know,” she said. Out of respect for what they had once shared, she spared him the facile smile she’d mastered, which the people who said such things to her seemed so much to appreciate seeing. She figured if they were old friends, old lovers, she might as well do him the courtesy of showing him on her face all the comfort such words gave her. The calls she’d received from the president of Yale, from the president of the college where David and Hannah had taught, from the governor of the state and both its senators; the letter she got, signed in actual ink, from George W. Bush; the memorial service at which dozens of former students of the Professors Bulbrook came to pay their respects; the compliments everyone piled on her parents whenever they saw her, the carefully worded offers of sympathy: none of it was any more or less consoling. It was all, equally and unequivocally: Not Consoling. Her grief appeared incontrovertible to her in those days—she was even a little awed by its magnitude.

  “I know they—well, I know they loved you.” She nodded. “You know, you still…” he began, but trailed off. She had come to expect people to trail off when they spoke to her. It made her feel sorry for them—which she found another sad, dull irony.

  “How’s California?” she asked him. “Are you still writing?”

  He nodded, but said, “No, not as much as I used to … I’m actually thinking about going to law school.” She thought he was searching for her reaction to this idea—maybe even hoping for her approval—but the truth was she couldn’t locate much of an opinion either way. Finally he said, “And you chose Yale, I heard.”

  “It seemed like a good fit,” she answered—another rote response, which happened to be true.

  A silence followed. He looked at her regretfully. “What have you been reading?” he asked with a sudden earnestness of caring, the same she sometimes heard when people asked her if she was eating. He looked older, she thought—a little heavier, a little balder. But, all things considered, if he’d walked into her English class that day and read a Whitman poem, and she’d still been a fifteen-year-old girl at Gustav’s, she would have probably fallen in love with him all over again. But she was not a fifteen-year-old girl, and he was invoking a world—the world of the creek—that no longer existed for her, if she could believe it had ever existed at all.

  “It was all pretty cliché, wasn’t it?” she said to him. “You and me. A prep school girl and her English teacher. It felt so … important at the time. But we really weren’t doing anything a thousand other people weren’t doing, too.”

  “Judith…” he said.

  “Anyway, thanks for coming by,” she said to him.

  He put his hand on her shoulder. “You’re still going to have a wonderful life in the end,” he told her.

  Such sentiments, too, she believed served mostly as comfort for the comforters. It seemed as if people needed to think that she would be okay in the end. But what did okay mean? And, as she now asked him, “The end of what?”

  They stood there for a moment, his hand on her shoulder—something that would have meant so much to her once, but was now so mutely, so sorrowfully unimportant. Then she thought of something else—went into her room for a minute, returned with the leather case from under her bed. “These are the letters you wrote me. I need to clean out the house, I wasn’t sure what to do with them.” He took the case, looked at it uncertainly. “Thanks for coming by,” she repeated, and they said goodbye—again without hugging—and that was the last time she saw him.

  * * *

  As quickly as possible, she put whatever she deemed worth storing into storage, mostly photos and mementos she could neither look at nor bear to see thrown away. The rest she liquidated, sold. Then she returned to Yale.

  Being a few weeks behind in her classes was actually a challenge she welcomed, though her professors fell all over themselves offering to make accommodations. She declined all these offers—just as she declined to be interviewed by Yale Daily News, or by USA Today, or to appear with other 9/11 orphans on Good Morning America, or on the Today show, or on Oprah; declined to sit in a luxury box at Yankee Stadium, declined to attend as an honored guest televised memorial services in New York or D.C. She had no intention of embodying for the public The Girl Whose Parents Died on 9/11: dressed in black, laying a wreath, brave in the face of tragedy. Even if she’d thought such gestures possible for her, her instinctive abhorrence of cliché—stronger than ever, as she’d found with Gabe—would not allow it.

  She resumed her Philosophies of Religion class with the brilliant professor, went back to reading À la recherche du temps perdu. But there was none of the ecstasy she’d formerly felt in any of it; only a somewhat comforting familiarity in diligence, the minor satisfaction that she could get A’s at Yale, too. Milim Oh, her roommate, seemed afraid of her at first, as did most of the others she’d met prior. Milim at least got over it enough to act like her friend, though in Judith’s estimation their relationship would always have more of the outward gestures of friendship than genuine affection. Judith understood that Milim had judged it very important that they remain friends, and it was just this judgment that made authentic friendship impossible. The rabbi at the campus Hillel reached out to her—but her belief in God had blinkered out along with her parents. “Any God worth believing in wouldn’t have let my parents be murdered,” she told the rabbi. She knew this opinion was as much a cliché as anything—but she forgave herself for it, because it felt so manifestly true.

  She’d expected when she’d started college to major in English. But reading literature, writing about literature, required something of her she was no longer capable of offering. All it took was one B on a paper on The Canterbury Tales—her professor explaining the grade by saying she had “failed to engage honestly with Chaucer’s work”—to convince her she needed another subject in which to specialize
.

  It was a class she took called American Art and the Postmodern World that made her settle on art history. The other students struggled with the features of postmodernism: the piled layers of abstraction, the slipperiness of context. But Judith discovered she had an instinct for it, was not put off by the sterility, the abstruseness her classmates sensed. And she found that staring at art—staring at it until she could see it as merely an amalgamation of influences, intentions, trends and counter-ends—was somehow aligned with her present state of mind: something she could do honestly.

  If anything, she worked harder than she had before. She did all the assignments for her courses, did all the suggested readings on the syllabus, even did a few readings she figured could have been suggested. Sometimes she would go directly to the library from an afternoon class, take a seat in some windowless corner of the stacks, and break off her study only when a librarian told her the building was closing, and would emerge into a chilly, thinly starred New Haven night. Again, she lacked the passion for academics she’d once had—but her resolve had taken on bleak new strength.

  And, soon after she arrived back on campus, Judith started to have a lot of sex. In the crudest terms: Grief made her horny. She observed to herself that, from a Darwinian perspective, it was a fairly useful adaptation. If she allowed a slightly less reductive view of the matter, though, she could admit that she was profoundly lonely; she could admit she didn’t know how to feel good. Sex solved both these problems, if only briefly. When the boys knew who she was—or, more precisely, knew how her parents had died—they generally seemed afraid of her, too. But a lot of them didn’t know, and there were a lot of boys. She found all she had to do was remain at a bar or a frat party long enough, and eventually one of them would present himself. She became like one of those fabled people who actually doesn’t care where the group goes to dinner: Judith was up for anything. She had no inhibitions regarding positions or parts of her body; she got into bed with guys and their girlfriends; she had sex with two members of the lacrosse team at once; she was content tying or being tied up. She found the variety in bodies and in preferences that she discovered surprising, even intriguing. You could never predict quite how people would look without their clothes on: where the hair would cluster, where their stomachs would fold as they turned or sat up, the way a penis would look relative to the rest of a male body—how people would conduct themselves when there was another naked human being beside them, willing to engage with them in whatever. There was, she sometimes thought, an essential truth to all this—as though bodies provided the full and final revelation of a person.

  For a semester she took up with the graduate teaching assistant in her Art of the Etruscans course; he introduced her to BDSM. She would come home from his apartment and gaze at herself in the full-length mirror on her door—would look at her pale white skin here bruised, there welted with bite marks, belt lashes—and would see herself as if from very far away, as though studying her naked body from the end of a tunnel. What, she would ask herself, was the truth that her own body revealed to her? And as she would maybe trace the circumference of an egg-sized contusion on her thigh, she would conclude that her body told her only what any body could tell anyone: that this was what she wanted.

  There were some boys who, when they learned what had happened to her parents (she was never quick to volunteer the information, but neither did she hide it), would try to console her, heal her—save her. They would substitute for caresses a sort of ostensibly reassuring petting, they would offer to “talk about it”—ask her questions about her parents, her feelings—would urge her to see a psychologist. While she knew this was well intentioned, she always felt embarrassed for them, at the thinness of their words of comfort—and more, annoyed that they would not simply give her what she wanted from them. “That sounds so awful,” they would say. “I can’t imagine it. Do you think you should talk to someone?”

  And she would say what she always did when she was urged into the arms of psychotherapy: “What could they tell me about myself that I don’t already know?” She knew she was drowning herself in self-degradation, in self-pity, in despair. But she believed she had finally found a state of mind equal to her voracious mental appetites.

  * * *

  She graduated Yale summa cum laude, with distinction in art history, and in three years, in fulfillment of the ancient plan. Milim, her parents, even Milim’s teenage sister, attended Judith’s commencement, insisted on taking her out to dinner that night—a kindness she finally decided not worth refusing. She would always remember the toast Milim’s father—stooped, in his seventies—gave at this dinner. He spoke in Korean, Milim’s mother whispering her translation in Judith’s ear. “He is proud of you.…” she whispered. “He hopes you and Milim will always be great friends.… He knows your parents are proud of you, too.…”

  After the meal, Milim’s mother took a picture of the three young women, sitting side by side at the table. Judith was headed that fall to a PhD program at Princeton; Milim already had plans to attend medical school at Cornell after she graduated the next year. So the freshman roommates were ending up in something of the equivalent place—though it seemed to Judith you could tell just from looking at the photograph on the screen of Milim’s mother’s digital camera that their paths had been very different. Judith had wondered sometimes, in college, what others made of her—what they guessed about the girl going to and from the library at odd hours, or sitting mutely with her legs crossed on their roommate’s bed the morning after; what they could tell of thoughts that tended to run far away from whomever she happened to be talking to, or fucking. This photograph, she believed, made it clear. While the smiles of Milim and her sister were bright, sincere, Judith’s was distant, thin; she still wore the burgundy dress she’d had on under her graduation gown, its rich color accentuating the whiteness of her skin; her black hair was a dense mass above her forehead, her chin turned a bit away from Milim, making the mole by her left eye more prominent. It looked to Judith as if grief was written all over this strange, spectral face—as if it were the blackness itself of her hair and mole. Judith felt that anyone could see, just from the remoteness of her smile, that she had spent the ten minutes following the toast hiding in a bathroom stall and weeping, somehow gratefully. It had been two and a half years, and she could still feel the pain—could still see it in the picture—as though it were brand new: sharp, and undiminished.

  Within three weeks of graduating Yale, she had moved to Princeton, started a summer research project for one of her professors. She’d chosen Princeton because of the reputation of its art history program, and because of the keenness with which the department had courted her. “Unlike many of your peers, you have an unusual capacity to critique art not in terms of what it aspires to be but rather in terms of what it is,” the chair of the department had written in her acceptance letter. Judith regarded this as an insightful and greatly flattering compliment. Princeton also appealed to her because at no time during the admissions process had anyone suggested she would be an especially welcome addition to the school on account of her connection to 9/11. (Harvard and Columbia and UChicago had not been similarly restrained.)

  Her life at Princeton quickly became so similar to her life at Yale—her weeks filled with thick, unmarked stretches of classes, professors, slides, reading, research, frantic but numbed sex—that she would sometimes forget to notice the difference. She would be walking beneath an archway of pale stone into a courtyard, she would be scanning a line of books on a library shelf, searching for a title, she would be making her way across a messy living room toward a narrow bedroom or a futon—and find herself surprised when she recalled that she no longer lived in New Haven. It occurred to her that all that had changed for her in these three years were the names on the doorplates, the numbers before the course titles on her schedule, the shapes and contortions of the bodies.

  She knew she ought to give some attention to building a life for herself ou
tside a university. But nothing that life might include held any particular attraction. She was at graduate school because she had to be somewhere. And at least graduate school allowed her to still be considered brilliant and hardworking, as she was by all her new professors, just as she had been at Yale, and at Gustav’s—as she knew she would be for as long as she remained in school.

  She began research for a thesis on Gothic architectural motifs in contemporary art, and won a fellowship to spend the summer after her first year studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. She had first visited the city with her mother when she was nine, and in order to confront any painful associations with this—pull the Band-Aid off in one rip, as it were—she spent her first day in Paris retracing the route she and her mother had taken among the tourist attractions of the city: the Arc de Triomphe and the Pantheon; Sacré-Cœur and Sainte-Chapelle; the Louvre, the Pompidou, the Musée d’Orsay; the Eiffel Tower and the Jardin des Tuileries. She wept as she went—moved to tears at every turn, at every memory, just as she’d anticipated. But she found something hollow in the force of this crying: It surprised her that the tears were not more violent, the sorrow not more intense. She realized that for her there would be no ghosts, no visions; the absence of Hannah and David Bulbrook was uniform across the world. This thought was the one that made her cry the hardest—with the force she seemed to have been seeking.

  Classes at the Sorbonne were conducted in French, the faculty were of a more demanding frame of mind than those in the United States—but if any of this added another degree of difficulty to the work, it was not a challenge Judith had much trouble meeting. She was fluent by now: fluent in French, fluent in academia. As an ancient professor who had been a personal acquaintance of Braque praised her before the entire class for a paper she’d written, she suddenly had an image of herself as a sort of roaming academic game hunter: going from continent to continent, crossing names off a collectively understood list. Perhaps she would get a postdoc at Oxford.