The Book of Jonah

by Joshua Max Feldman

  Indeed, nothing that bothered her so much about herself bothered him at all; he even found the persistence of all the (to him baseless) anxieties charming. And as he watched her frowning at whatever she was hearing on the phone, still chewing her thumbnail (a habit she had been trying to break for as long as he’d known her), it became difficult for him to distinguish between his reluctance over the breakup and his affection for her, because there really was so much about her that he found charming: the inchoate worries; her candor, her wit; her idiosyncratic habit of swearing only in languages other than English; the drama of her facial expressions—she being a woman whose brow furrowed, whose laughter was loud and openmouthed, whose nervousness brought tautness from her forehead to her chin, whose almond-shaped brown eyes narrowed and darted, and whose head tilted just so when she was flirting.

  “Five hundred words? Two fifty?” she continued. “Sure … And then you saw the emails? Okay. Call me on my cell when you hear from Anika, all right? Okay, thanks, ciao.” She hung up, dropped her phone into her voluminous purse, and, with the same hand, immediately began digging around in it. “You have no idea, Yonsi”—this being her nickname for him—“I have been on the phone nonstop since I walked in this morning. I haven’t even had the chance to do something terrible for my body.” She pulled out a lighter and a pack of cigarettes, by smooth rote motions put one in her mouth and lit it. As she took a deep drag, she looked at him from feet to moist forehead. “Remember, it’s good for your pores,” she said consolingly. “Do you want a tissue?”

  “No, it’s okay…” he said, wiping his face again, guilt now taking a place among the doubts. She was so complicated and contradictory in so many ways that he was often caught off guard by how plainly nice she was to him. She was the closest thing to a Jewish mother he had ever had.

  She took another tug on her cigarette. “The star of one show you never watch is writing a memoir about his gay escapades with the star of another show you never watch. And Darla’s old roommate is an assistant to some agent in L.A., and she sent us the proposal. It’s mass hysteria up there, Yonsi, really, B-girls gone wild. I had zero time to answer your calls. The details are absolute pornography, and guess who has to write about it? That’s what I get for graduating magna from NYU. Tell me I have the most soulless job of anyone you know.”

  He glanced at his phone—he had only about five minutes left. Again he pondered reversing course. But he knew himself, knew that if he failed to do it now, it would be weeks before he put himself in a position to do it again. It was still the right thing to do, he reminded himself. So he took a decidedly calm breath and said, “Look, Zoey…”

  Her eyes immediately narrowed, she scrutinized his face suspiciously. Then she let out a disgusted sigh. “Scheisse, Yonsi…”

  “Zoey…”

  “Please stop saying my name like you heard my cat died.”

  “I just think that we—”

  “You’re doing this to me again?”

  “How often has it been you doing it to me?”

  “Yeah, but I always had good reasons.”

  “Sylvia and I…”

  She rolled her eyes preemptively. “She does not qualify as a good reason.”

  “We’re moving in together.”

  He had meant to deliver this piece of news more gently, but had found himself feeling immediately on the defensive, and so the most compelling rationale had come tumbling out. There had, of course, been many such revelations over the last ten years: new significant others, new seriousness with those others, new intentions of exclusivity. Only three months previously, Zoey had mentioned—with a certain grimness—that Evan had started making veiled references to possibly getting engaged at some point. But actually living with another person was something new to them—and maybe because it was new, Zoey looked puzzled when she first heard it, and her first response was, “But you said she didn’t even vote for Obama.”

  “I said I didn’t think she voted for Obama,” he answered, though the only reason he wasn’t certain was that he hadn’t wanted to ask and know for sure.

  She asked skeptically, “You really want to live with Schlampe?”—this her nickname for Sylvia.

  “I don’t know,” he answered—more honestly, he realized, than he probably should have. “I can really see a future with her,” he added quickly. “And with us,” he went on, “it just isn’t meant to be.”

  This point seemed fairly obvious to him—self-evident, really. But as he watched, tiny tremors began in her lips and her forehead, a reliable harbinger of tears. Though her cigarette was only half smoked, she dropped it to the pavement, stamped it out with her toe as her hands began digging into her vast purse for another. “You have such a talent for saying the most hurtful things.”

  “Zoey…” he began.

  “There’s that word again,” she said into her purse.

  “You know I never wanted to hurt you,” he mumbled.

  “That must make you feel much better about all of this.” She didn’t look up until she had another cigarette between her lips. As she clicked her lighter before it, she said, “Would it never work out because of my A cups? Or because I didn’t go Hah-vahd like Schlampe?”

  “C’mon, Zoey, we aren’t even dating,” he said, guilt giving way a little to irritation.

  “Therefore I shouldn’t mind that you’re dumping me to live with another woman?”

  “I’m not dumping you—we aren’t dating!”

  “I guess I’m not aware of the legal definition of getting dumped. But then again, we didn’t all go to Columbia Law School—”

  “You have a boyfriend! You’re talking about getting married!”

  She lifted the hand holding the cigarette, flapped her bare ring finger. “You were the one who said it didn’t mean anything until he got me a ring.”

  “I never said that,” though he knew he had.

  “No really, it’s fine,” she said, with mock breeziness. “I was looking forward to a joyless marriage with a man who can’t support me. Maybe I’ll see Schlampe pushing one of your blond babies around Prospect Park someday.”

  She turned away, stared off toward the traffic on Seventh Avenue, her forehead still trembling a little, but her mouth now set in a hard, tight frown. Jonah glanced at his phone—a bead of sweat dropped from his forehead onto its face. If he didn’t get in a cab in the next three minutes, he would be late. And there was, he told himself, no point to this conversation anymore. He’d learned from his past breakups—with her, with anyone—that everything beyond the delivery of the hard, essential message was only a sort of ritualistic airing of grievances: kabuki theater in which the aggrieved party tried to elicit as much guilt as possible, while the person doing the aggrieving made parrying attempts to end the conversation without giving any new cause for being thought an asshole, or at minimum, to escape before the crying started.

  “Zoey, you were late, I’ve got to go.…”

  “My therapist says I have a problem with patterns,” she responded, taking another drag on her cigarette and exhaling smoke from the corner of her mouth. “Dr. Popper explains that my anxiety makes me do what’s familiar, even when it’s bad for me. Your name came up. Shocking, I know. Thanks for making her look so smart.” She punched him—hard—on the arm.

  “Jesus,” he said. But he knew the punch was, if not exactly affectionate, then at least not entirely hostile, either. If nothing else, it was an acknowledgment of something. “Look, I feel really shitty about this,” he told her.

  “That’s nice of you to say.” She was standing perpendicular to him now, and this lessened the translucence of her dress—which was a relief—but allowed him the full profile of her nose—which was not. It was not that Zoey was prettier than Sylvia; by conventional reckoning she wasn’t. There was simply a lot more going on in Zoey’s face than in Sylvia’s neat, all-American-by-way-of-Ireland features. Zoey glanced over at him, her brown iris filling the corner of her right eye. “Tell me the
truth. Does it mean anything if there’s no ring?”

  Jonah rubbed some sweat from the back of his neck. “I was being a dick. Of course it means something.”

  Whether she was comforted by this or further distressed, he couldn’t tell. She couldn’t tell, either, was his guess. Profound ambivalence had always been a hallmark of her feelings toward Evan. “But she’ll see a ring from you, is that the idea?” Zoey asked. “It’ll be you and Schlampe?”

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t know the answer—and he wouldn’t have known how to phrase any answer, given who was asking. But his best guess was yes—him and Schlampe. Wasn’t that the whole point of doing this?

  “I got a BBEC case,” he told her. “I’ll be working with Doug Chen—y’know, the one with the strippers. It puts me in good shape for partner.” He realized it was unfair to tell her—to dump her and in the same breath mention how great his life was going. But it was important to him that she know, for some reason.

  She turned to him, and smiled in a way that was not entirely convincing, but strived for sincerity. “I’m happy for you, Yonsi. You’ve worked really hard for that.” She moved the cigarette toward her mouth, then stopped. “The thing is,” she said, “I get it. She does seem like the kind of girl a partner in a law firm would want to marry. And no, that is not entirely a compliment, but it’s a much nicer thing than you’ve ever said about Evan. And yes, he is kind of my boyfriend, and I suppose there’s even a chance he’ll ask to marry me. It’s just that…” She returned the cigarette to her mouth, expelled its smoke in a sigh. Her expression was tired now—forlorn. “I thought things were going really good this time.”

  “They were, they were, it’s…”

  “How come you never wanted to live with me?”

  He was grappled with a powerful tenderness toward her—an urge to take her in his arms, tell her he hadn’t meant any of it. And whether it was fueled by guilt or nostalgia or pain avoidance or genuine affection: It was still tenderness. “It’s not that, y’know, I at any point rejected the idea of us living together.”

  “You sound so lawyerly these days,” she muttered.

  Luckily, or so he would think later, at this moment his phone chimed with a reminder for his meeting. “I’m sorry, Zoey. I have to go.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she said. “Don’t think I don’t have five hundred words to write about two closeted TV stars groping each other. Meanwhile you and Schlampe ride off into the sunset.” She flicked her cigarette in the general direction of his shoes. “In the past when you’ve done this to me, my phone rings at one in the morning, you’re a little slurry, and Schlampe or whoever it is isn’t around, and you’re wondering if I maybe want to re-create that time at the W.”

  “That won’t happen this time.” She pursed her lips dubiously, as though she’d heard it all before—which she probably had. In an effort to convince her of his seriousness, he added, “It was really wrong what we were doing, Zoey.”

  She studied his face very carefully for a moment. “Vai all’inferno e restaci, Yonsi,” she said.

  “I’m assuming that wasn’t very nice.”

  “What do you care? I’m just the girl you were cheating with, right?” She pulled her purse up onto her shoulder. “I look forward to not hearing from you.” And she walked away and into the building.

  He watched her as she crossed the lobby, disappeared into an elevator. For another moment he stood in the heat—wishing he’d somehow been able to communicate that, while he did in fact intend to never see her again, he nevertheless cared about her very much. The longer he thought about this, though, the more frustrated it made him—and he finally concluded that any attempt to communicate such a plainly self-contradictory idea was doomed from the start. He wiped the sweat from his face once more, annoyed at the heat, at how the conversation had gone, and most of all annoyed that he’d run into her six months earlier on St. Mark’s Place outside a theater where Evan was performing, which was the only reason they’d started talking again and having sex again and any of this had ever happened again—and he mumbled a “damn it” in the direction of this unlucky happenstance. But then he was on the move, mercifully departing the plaza, heading toward the street, where several open cabs were stopped at a light. It had been shitty, but not as shitty as it could have been. And, more important, it was done.

  * * *

  To become a partner at Cunningham Wolf—and that had been Jonah’s goal from his first day as a summer associate at the firm—you had to bill an average of 3,000 hours a year. The rule wasn’t written down anywhere, and for that was all the more reliable. Billing 3,000 hours a year generally meant working at least 3,500. That was an average of 9.5 hours a day, 365 days a year. Practically speaking, though—because even ambitious associates took off the occasional holiday, birthday, hungover Monday—that meant most days were twelve or fourteen hours long, not excepting Saturdays, plus a half day most Sundays. All told, Jonah figured he had worked at least 17,500 hours since graduating from law school five years before. That was more than two continuous years of briefs, memos, depositions, filings, emails, meetings, takeout, two-faced colleagues, abusive partners, hysterical clients, incompetent assistants, flame-out first-years, senile judges, gossip, rumors, motions, dismissals, settlements, conference calls, and four (or more) cups of coffee a day. And now partnership was just one more case away.

  So, back in his apartment, Jonah had opened a three-hundred-dollar bottle of Scotch he’d bought on a trip with some law school friends to the Scottish Highlands. The man who’d sold it to him—rich-brogued, bronze-sideburned, stereotypically Scottish in every way but for lack of a kilt—had put three bottles on the table before him and his friends and, passing his hand over each one, said, “This is what y’drink with the father of your wife on your wedding day. This is what y’drink when your first child is born. And lads, this is what y’drink when your first son is born.” It was a good line, got a good laugh from the group of American law school students on what would likely be the last summer vacation of their lives. Of course, they all bought.

  He poured the golden-amber liquid into a glass from the dishwasher. He’d never intended to wait for the birth of a son; fatherhood wasn’t something he thought much about. He figured he’d eventually open the bottle in celebration of something in his career, and over the years that something had naturally become fixed as Cunningham Wolf partnership. True, he was not a partner yet, it could still all go wrong. He could fuck up his work with BBEC, an asteroid could strike 813 Lexington. But neither event was very likely. Indeed, the asteroid seemed the more probable. He’d learned what it took to succeed as a lawyer: It took intelligence, which he’d been born with; it took diligence, which, ultimately, was really just a question of deciding to be diligent; it took a modicum of interpersonal skills, a high tolerance for bullshit, a passion for being proven right—he had it, he’d acquired it, he seemed to find more of it every day. So leaving aside the possibility that BBEC operated differently from any other Fortune 100 company with turf to protect (and he knew it didn’t), and barring the asteroid or whatever—he would within a few years be a partner at one of the oldest, most prestigious law firms in the city.

  He carried the glass from his kitchenette into his living room. He had lived in this apartment for three years and somehow had managed not to have completely unpacked yet; bulging cardboard boxes were still stacked behind the couch. Pre-Sylvia, it had been even worse: Boxes had functioned as the dresser in his bedroom, as an impromptu entryway table by his door. She’d imposed some order, as was her way, and as for these last few behind the couch, they both felt there was no point bothering. He would soon be moving again.

  Outside the living room windows, a purplish dusk was descending over the city—windows on the faces of buildings brightening into little squares of gold. It looked as if the city were putting on its showier, colorful clothing, too, for the Friday night ahead. The bars would be filling up, the lines at restaurants forming,
opening acts starting their sets. Ordinarily he didn’t mind spending Friday nights at home, alone. He was usually more than content to order in and get drunk on his couch, watching whatever on TV—unwinding. But tonight he could sense on the other side of his windows the great inhalation of breath before the city dove into the night ahead. He took his first sip of the three-hundred-dollar Scotch. During the Highlands trip, he’d become adept at the jargon of Scotch: malty, peaty, finish, nose. He’d forgotten all that by now; the best he could come up with by way of description was that this Scotch tasted really fucking great.

  He took out his phone and called Sylvia. She was a senior analyst for Ellis–Michaels, and for the last two months had spent her weeks and the majority of her weekends in Chicago working on a deal, the details of which she couldn’t divulge. It was only 7:00 there, she would almost certainly still be working, but he hadn’t talked to her all day—hadn’t told her the good news.

  After several rings she answered. “Hey, we’re still at it. Can I call you back in three hours?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “I think I might go out.”

  “I’ll call you while you’re out,” she replied.

  “It won’t be late, though. I might go in before we meet the broker tomorrow.”

  “This could take until midnight.”

  They both agreed her frequent travel to Chicago had put stress on their relationship. Already he could sense the implicit competition in their words: Who worked more? Who had less time for whom? Who put unfair demands on the other? Tonight he wasn’t in a position to ask for much: She was flying back the next morning to look at apartments with him; they would have dinner, and then she would fly back to Chicago that night to be in the office Sunday morning. Of course, he hadn’t asked her to, but she had made no secret of the inconvenience of it all, of the effort she was putting in, for their sake.