* * *
I find there is a hangover to this, however. How lonely I feel, ashamed, even, reading this over. My reverie over a dead man’s book. All I can do not to rip the page out.
9/9
Finished packing. Obvious I was drawing the task out, to fill the time. Now it is done and tomorrow I leave. Still lack a destination. In sudden burst of anxiety over this, sent emails to former professors, former classmates, inquiring about work opportunities. Attempted neutral phrasing. Tried not to announce myself as one with no place to be tomorrow. From a financial perspective, I do not need a job. No more tuition payments to make and, as a percentage, have spent almost none of the money Mom and Dad left me. But I understand that a job is what you hang your life on, outside of a school. It is the something that tells you where to go each day, what to do. Three hours since and no replies. Hitting refresh like one of those rats to whom they give cocaine.
* * *
Three hours further, still nothing. What did I expect? People I haven’t deigned to speak to in years. Why should I assume they even remember who I am?
9/10
Picked up the van promptly at 8. Then spent hours going up and down stairs, carrying one box at a time. Didn’t think to hire movers, bien sûr. Eventually two neighbors I had never met volunteered to help. Grad students, poli sci and comp lit (Spanish), respectively. Introduced themselves as lovers. Former chatty enough my intractable reticence mattered less, latter described himself as “obsessed” with contrast of my hair, skin tone. They asserted genuine disappointment to be only meeting me on the day of my departure. I refrained from revealing I was almost tearful over it. Over the dumb, antagonistic irony of it. Hid also the impulse to discard all my plans and stay because I had met them. But I am, finally, not that stupid. My near breakdown on Nassau Street was proof enough that my presence here is not only pointless and unwelcome but also unhealthy. Their descriptions of their thesis work sounded juvenile, silly. Had to bite my inner cheek at times to stop myself from smiling (though in retrospect it would have been a smile I’d have been curious to see). The ash-colored stone buildings on campus put me in mind of mausoleums. When I see professors, or anyone in my former department, I experience an indecipherable shame. Turn my back and walk the opposite direction rather than have to make an accounting of myself. Have nowhere to go but at minimum understand I can’t be here any longer. Will be forced to navigate by dislocation. It is time for Judith to stand up from the closet floor and depart.
* * *
8:02 PM by the digital clock on the bedside table. Glowing red numbers composed of elongated trapezoids meeting at right angles. In a Hyatt, I believe in southern New Jersey. Though possibly Delaware? Maryland? Curtains and bedspread an eggplant shade, at once both overdark and washed out. Ceiling fan over queen-sized bed. Window overlooking a parking lot. Little desk and a chair. A bathroom that illuminates brightly. Not much else. Chose this hotel because its name evokes safety, cleanliness to me. Credit to those whose job it is to establish such connotations in my head. Realize I ought to have brought in at least some of the things from the van, but find I lack the energy. Not sleepy, though. Drove south from Princeton for hours with a feeling of … Sorry, not able to describe it. My mother was the poet of the family. My father was an essayist, critic, but had a gift for prose (vivid, nimble, funny) that has not proven hereditary. My own writing often praised for clarity, precision, but I have long understood it lacks artfulness. Never quite felt this deficiency as I do now, though. Trying to describe how it felt to drive out of Princeton with all my earthly possessions, or all the possessions I had elected to keep, with no idea where I ought to go. Must I say it felt frightening? Lonely? Must I specify it lacked anything like a sense of liberation? Of a new beginning? And whatever I say, how can it be taken seriously, given how farcical it all is? The incompetent postgrad driving off into a foreign, forbidding “real world.” Reader, it felt like failure. Feels like failure.
* * *
And only now do I receive the final knife twist: reading this over, take note of what tomorrow is. But isn’t this a sign of persistent narcissism, too, to take this as assault? The universe’s cruelty. It is not a knife twist at all, simply another fluctuation of randomness. What the date happens to be tomorrow.
* * *
11:14 PM. No sleep. Ceiling fan spinning above my head, silence from the other rooms. Patch of parking lot behind the window not producing any sound, either. Oblique sense it would be easier to sleep if it were louder.
* * *
12:07 AM. Glad I stayed awake. Would have been worse to wake up and have to realize it again. As though entering the day twice. Four years. Won’t waste paper & ink trying to offer insight into what the day “means.” For me, it will always be a personal tragedy. I don’t pretend to know the contours of anyone else’s grief, much less a city’s, a nation’s. Have my doubts such things can be felt collectively. Do find myself wondering, Is this what they intended? They, the terrorists. Four years later, an emotional cripple trapped in a hotel room.
* * *
7:58 AM. Shallow, intermittent sleep. Gave up hope for better at five. Checked email. Inbox unchanged as a stone. Showered, went for a run. Woods behind the parking lot. No trail, sore when I began, ran for hours anyway. Scenery never appeared to vary. Black pine trees, fallen needles, broken branches. Knees, feet, nose aching by the time I got back. Hobbled across the lobby. Checked email again. Showered again. Lying in a towel on the bed.
* * *
12:18 PM. Fell asleep for a little while. Woke up, and none of it had budged an inch. The fan overhead. The shit purple curtains. The digital clock with the square red numbers on its face. Can you believe it? I used to believe in miraculous things. I miss that, too.
* * *
4:27 PM. Called down to the front desk, inquired about a local bar, a taxi to take me there. Lonesome enough to be glad for merest bodily companionship. Bodily accompaniment. Hopeful I can achieve at least that. Would have left immediately, but, in jolt of shame, told the desk clerk I wanted the taxi for 7. Still light outside in the parking lot. Evidently the desk clerk is the only person I have left to impress. Will spend the intervening time in meticulous preparation. Slowly drawing the pencil across my eyebrows, counting the strokes as I yank the comb through my hair.
* * *
8:32 PM. Bar was called the Skybox. Squat, brick, freestanding building, sharing its parking lot with a laundromat. Inside, broadcast of a sporting event played over the speakers. Not sure what sport. Sat down at the bar. Even I knew better than to ask for a glass of red wine from the bartender (female, middle-aged, frowning with hostility). Ordered a gin and tonic, waited. Made an honest effort to follow the sporting event, but difficult when one can’t identify sport, rules, teams, players. Finally (and that is just the word, though it could not have been more than ten or twenty minutes), a man took the stool nearest me. My age or just older. Red baseball hat turned backward, earrings in both ears. Stocky. Waggish grin as he sat down. Inquired about my rooting interest in the sporting event. Confessed my total ignorance of professional sports. He laughed as though I’d told a joke, offered to buy me a drink. Recognizing this as the first step in these mating rituals, I agreed. Thought, Isn’t this what I came for? Bartender placed two shot glasses before us on the bar, filled with a yellow liquid. Flavor lemon, syrupy. He suggested I imbibe more quickly, I obliged. More glasses of lemon syrup were brought. Next asked if I had “walked into a wall” and laughed again. Then expressed smiling contrition, assured me that he was “just fucking with” me. Pointed to my nose. Reader, I never knew. It is so crooked other people notice. He asked, with superficial sympathy, “Did you get into an accident or something when you were a kid?” Considered abandoning the whole endeavor then, but thought of the clock. The fan. Even this, describing my failure to make even the most ephemeral connection with another human being. Again in my head, like a rote response, Isn’t this what I came for? Continuing mating rituals as
they were practiced in early 21st-century New Haven, Connecticut, I stated I was bored. I stated I wanted to get out of there. He smiled as though this confirmed some assumption he had made about me. (But what had he guessed? And how?) Followed him out of the bar, through the parking lot. Kept expecting him to stop at one of the cars, take out keys. Instead, he stopped behind the building. Simultaneous visual, olfactory, tactile sensations: dumpsters, urine, tongue in my mouth. Again, though, Isn’t this what I came for? Back up against the dumpster. Wordless, pleasureless. Violent but in an unaccustomed way. Indifferently violent. Realized I had been stupid enough to think every bar was an Ivy bar, the boys so respectful you have to ask them not to be. Earful of seething breath when he finished. Turned away as he pulled his pants up. While I put my underwear back on, he said something about needing to watch the ninth inning. “Who did you think I was?” I asked him. He shrugged, disinterested, impatient. As if he were always hearing this question from women by the dumpsters. Reiterated necessity of watching the ninth inning. Walked several steps ahead of me back into the bar. I called a taxi. I waited. And here I am. 8:48 PM, sayeth the clock. And the hardest part, reader: I have to do it all again tomorrow.
* * *
Showered and stood before the mirror. Attempted to give myself an honest look. Thinner than perhaps I have ever been. Elbows jutting out from the middle of my arms. My finger disappearing almost to the second knuckle in the depression between neck and clavicle. Breasts a modest disruption of white skin across chest and stomach. Hair on my head and hair on my pubis differing only in scale. Color the same, texture the same. And nose unmistakably, unmissably crooked. Only somehow I had missed it. Recalled a joke Dad used to tease Mom with. “When they chose Klein, they weren’t talking about the nose!” Smiled for a moment, thinking of it. Then watched the points of the smile slacken, my lips bend, my chin push itself up a little. I watched the whole affair contort and contract into weeping. All my features crowding together spastically, like for warmth. Sheen of water down my cheeks. I cried and I cried because … Because I don’t have a nose like my mom’s anymore, because I had humiliating sex, because I’m living in a hotel with no reason to stay or to leave, because it all got so fucked up four years ago. Because, because, because. My eyes fell on the razor I’d used to shave my legs, on the raised lip of the shower where I’d left it. Plastic, red and green and blue. I could envision it, so easily. A flick down each wrist. Crouching to the bathroom floor, watching the cascade of blood. And, soon enough, nothing more. It was as though the moment lengthened, broke apart into its constituent elements. The mirror. The sink. The tile. The glow of the fluorescent light from above the mirror. The weight of my body distributed between the soles of my feet. My two eyes blinking. My two lungs swelling. Heart beating. Neurons firing. All these facts, these arrangements of the physical world. It is only the neurons that name them, organize them into a moment. I thought how easily I could become merely another aspect of the room: a corpse crumpled on the floor for the maid to find. I thought how smoothly the world would continue to spin in the seconds, in the eons after my death. Then I came out here to sit beneath the fan and record the chattering noise the firing neurons make. Maybe the cliché was simply too abhorrent: some Plathian surrender to despair, and on the anniversary, no less. Reader, I do not know. I can’t say if it is bravery or cowardice that makes me cling to something I have no earthly idea how to do. If it is bravery, it is no more than the same bravery that keeps the eyes blinking, or the fan spinning. Call it a preference. Some small but irreducible preference for life over death. Perhaps there, my true heritage as a Jew. That enduring preference, the six thousand years of clinging dumbly to existence, despite all reason.
* * *
And now an email. A girl who had been in my residence college at Yale. She works at a gallery in Los Angeles, she informs me, is now going on to graduate school herself. Was just beginning to search for her own replacement when my email arrived. “What a lucky coincidence!” she writes. I knew her only tangentially, I have no graduate degree, I have no experience with or interest in commercial art. So I doubt very much her enthusiasm has much to do with my merits as a job candidate. Or anything like luck. It has to do with what she thinks the date means. But I find I am in no position to refuse. Maybe there is a person the world expects you to be, and all your struggles not to be that person are in vain. In any case, I find there is something I can’t escape. I have turned the lights off in the room. Writing by the glow of lights in the parking lot outside. Next I’ll close the curtains. Make of the room something dark and narrow. Then I will go to sleep. And in the morning, I will leave as much of this behind as I can. All the people I would have been, should have been. I will leave them here, like a gathering of ghosts. And you, too, reader. I will stop staring at my life and weeping over it. I will accept it as what it will be, I will make a virtue of what it lacks. And nothing more.
III. AMSTERDAM, OR THE BELLY OF THE WHALE
While he lived in Amsterdam, Jonah was plagued by a recurring dream. The dream took place in a banquet hall of fantastic luxury: chandeliers spreading octopus arms dripping with sparkling diadems above a room lined in molded walnut paneling; tables arrayed with gold flatware, china plates, crystal vases capped with roses of pink and red—all of it of a class he would have thought had sunk with the Titanic, as it were; waiters in black tie circling with green-glass bottles of champagne or with trays of caviar and lobster tail poised on the pads of five white-gloved fingers. The guests at this banquet were dressed immaculately in tuxedos and evening gowns, and Jonah found himself seated at a table with Doug Chen, and Aja Puvvada, and other Cunningham Wolf partners. Sylvia was sitting beside him, resplendent in a shimmering dress of pale green, smiling with warmth and satisfaction.
At the front of the hall was a stage and dais, and after a time Lloyd Davis Cooper himself appeared: managing partner of Cunningham Wolf for the last two decades, dressed in a white tuxedo and carrying a large and propitiously ribboned envelope. “The time has come to announce our newest partner,” he declared, speaking in the absurdly dignified Boston-gentleman’s-club accent familiar to Jonah from the speeches he gave at the firm’s annual holiday parties. At his words, the lights dimmed, and spotlights began to wheel across the hall, as though searching for the anointed associate.
At this point, it would occur to Jonah that this was a very unusual way to announce partnership at a law firm. But this thought only sent ripples across the surface of the dream—didn’t shatter it—nor did it stop him from feeling a breathless, heart-gripping elation when Lloyd Davis Cooper tore open the envelope and read, “Jonah Jacobstein!” As the spotlights surrounded him and applause filled the hall, tears of happiness would spring to Jonah’s eyes—in the dream, and where he slept on the couch in the back of the houseboat.
The partners rose in a standing ovation, Doug Chen nodded in approval. Sylvia beamed, and Jonah kissed her on the lips. Then he stood and walked onto the stage. Lloyd Davis Cooper produced a green jacket and slipped this over Jonah’s shoulders. (This latter detail, apparently drawn from watching golf highlights on SportsCenter, was especially baffling to Jonah in his waking life.) He took his place at the dais—triumphant, grateful, ready to thank everyone: his parents, his colleagues, his law school professors, his elementary school teachers, friends, Sylvia, everyone—thank them all so earnestly.
And then he noticed, at the back of the room, a Hasidic Jew, smiling devilishly at him. This man resembled not so much one particular Hasid as he did the idea of any Hasid: He had a Hasid’s distinguishing characteristics but in exaggerated, almost caricatured form—like the costume Jonah had worn in eighth grade to play Avram the Bookseller in his junior high school’s production of Fiddler on the Roof. He was dressed all in black—black overcoat, black hat, oversize black boots—his beard had a sort of gaudy charcoal blueness to it, his payos dangled in wild curls. As Jonah met his eyes, the Hasid wagged a finger at him, tapped his nose, wagged his finger aga
in, sharpened his devilish grin. Jonah cleared his throat, returned his attention to the other guests. The spotlights seemed to have brightened; he felt himself getting hot.
“I just want to say…” he began. His eyes darted nervously to the back of the hall—but the Hasid had vanished. Relieved, Jonah continued. “I just want to say, that I’ve learned if you work hard, if you dedicate yourself to a goal and—”
Plunk! Something had struck him on the cheek—soft, round, somewhat slimy. He looked around, but saw only the expectant faces of partners. “If you dedicate yourself to a goal and commit yourself to—”
Plunk! He was struck again! And this time the off-white, grease-dripping sphere bounced from his forehead and onto the dais—and Jonah saw: He had been hit with a matzo ball.
He quickly wiped the grease from his face, glanced anxiously in the direction of his table. Sylvia was frowning; Doug Chen lifted and lowered his hand in disappointment. “What I mean is, becoming a partner was an ambition of mine for a long time, and if you believe you can accomplish—”
Plunk!
This one struck him right on the nose.
He spotted the Hasid ducking behind a table to the right, tittering fiendishly. “Security!” Jonah yelled. “That man is attacking me!”
The crowd started muttering—and Jonah could tell these were the uncomfortable mutters of an audience losing faith in the speaker. Had no one else noticed the Hasid? Had no one else seen the matzo balls? He plunged ahead. “I worked very hard for this!” he declared.
Plunk!
Jonah looked frantically around the room—the Hasid was nowhere to be seen. “Because I…” he resumed, hurriedly wiping his face. He spotted the Hasid doing a leg-kicking Russian folk dance, a bottle balanced on his head. “That man!” Jonah shouted, pointing.
The Book of Jonah: A Novel Page 25