The Book of Jonah

by Joshua Max Feldman

  “There are worse things than being hit on by a food blogger,” he answered. “Should I actually read it?”

  “I dunno,” Becky said. “How interested are you in desserts made with vegetables?” And they both laughed. Jonah was an only child, wasn’t used to the easy rapport possible among family members of the same age. It surprised him how similar they were, having seen each other only for a few hours here and there over the years—similar not even in personality, but in outlook. “Anyway, you remember my boyfriend, Danny, right?” she said, now gesturing to the man standing beside her.

  “Good to see you, Jonah,” Danny said, shaking Jonah’s hand firmly. Jonah did remember meeting him now, and remembered, too, that he was an accountant—reminded of this because, with his neat, 1950s-vintage crew cut, his starched blue button-down shirt, his wrinkleless khakis, Danny made such a strong impression of accountancy, of being an accountant-in-full. There was even something accountant-like in the robotic way he slung his arm around Becky’s shoulder: as if he had this arm around his girlfriend only because that was where he knew his arm was supposed to go, in the same way he might put another depreciated asset in the debits column of a spreadsheet. “We were so glad you could come,” he said to Jonah.

  “I was so surprised,” said Becky. “I mean, in a good way. I didn’t even know if you got the Evite.”

  “Well, y’know, family first,” Jonah said. From the many expressions of unexpected pleasure at his being there, it had become clear to him that his presence tonight was a very large surprise; not that anyone was wrong to be surprised, of course, as his attendance was basically accidental. He decided to change the subject, taking the only course that presented itself: “Danny, you’re an accountant, right? How’s work been for you?”

  “Terrific, as a matter of fact,” Danny answered. “Everybody wants an expert handling their money in this economy. Fear is the best salesman for CPAs,” he said pleasantly. It was such an oddly tin-eared comment that Jonah could only think to nod, as if in agreement. “Are you invested?” Danny asked him.

  He wasn’t, not in any meaningful way, but Sylvia had hinted that, in the not too distant future, she would be handling all of that. “I play some online poker,” he said.

  “Jonah, I actually wanted to ask you about your job,” Becky said. “I’m thinking about taking an LSAT class this fall.”

  “Really?” he said. “I thought you wanted to be in the music industry.”

  “Yeah, well,” she said with a shrug. “The music business isn’t quite what I thought it would be. You like being a lawyer?”

  He looked at Becky, with her tiara; he looked at Danny, with his strangely wooden grin. He really didn’t know what to say—felt as if he’d been asked whether he liked being named Jonah. But then he decided—yes, he did like being named Jonah. He did like being a lawyer. “It’s a lot of fun,” he laughed. “It’s a lot of fun.”

  “Oh God, you’re totally drunk,” Becky moaned.

  “Not totally.” Then, with a long swig, he finished off the drink Aimee had made him. “I’m working on it, though,” he said, feeling that this was all he had been trying to do for the last twenty-four hours: have some fun.

  The project of intoxication was accelerated considerably when, a few minutes later, it was decided to move the party to the roof. The keg was lugged to the elevator; everyone grabbed bottles of liquor and beers from the refrigerator. The elevator let out in a glass vestibule, beyond which was a roof deck that traced the edge of the building. The heat of the day had faded now. Three hundred feet up, the night air was mild, comfortable, conducive to partying all night. Jonah shared a joint with a coworker of Becky’s, a hipster in full regalia: sub-30-waist jeans, elaborately manicured facial hair, ironic watch fob. They talked about music, a topic Jonah had once flattered himself to think he knew a lot about—once upon a time he’d attended dozens of Phish shows—but he found that after several years away from the scene, he didn’t recognize most of the bands his smoking companion named. They agreed to exchange mixes through Becky. Now both drunk and high, Jonah played some beer pong, then assisted in some keg stands, then did one himself. He flirted a little more shamelessly with Aimee, even went so far as to dance with her, which was a sign of just how wasted he was, because as a rule he had to be very wasted indeed to do any dancing at all. But he was proud of himself for not letting either their joking or the her-back-to-his-front dancing get out of hand.

  It got to be past one. He’d intended to be home an hour earlier—but you can’t always do what you intend, he reminded himself happily, nor did you have to. He went to the edge of the roof deck and took out his phone and wrote a text to Sylvia that he knew she wouldn’t receive until the morning: “Thnking about how much I love you.” He hit send and then leaned his elbows on the railing. Becky’s building was about thirty stories—nothing so soaring by Manhattan standards, but to the human eye it was still enough to create of the city a great, spangled sea of bright windows on heaves of buildings, densely illuminated rivulets of headlights, taillights, flowing through the streets below. A little farther down the railing, Becky was writing a text message of her own, frowning into her phone. Jonah went over and gave her an affectionate squeeze.

  “It’s really great to see you,” he said to her.

  “It’s great to see you, too,” she answered. “You think it’s okay if my friend brings a few other friends, right? We’re not too loud?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Jonah assured her.

  “Hey, did you tell Aimee you’d take her to Nobu?”

  Maybe he hadn’t cleaved as closely to the innocent as he’d imagined. “Mmm, yeah, well—I’m not actually going to do it.”

  “How nice for her,” Becky laughed. “Y’know, I’ve been wanting to tell you something.” She leaned a little closer toward him, spoke a little more quietly. “Danny and I are talking about…” And her smile seemed to broaden and brighten past the point where she could continue. “Engaged,” she mouthed.

  “No shit?” said Jonah. “Didn’t you guys just get together?”

  “Two years ago, Jonah.”

  “Fuck. Time moves pretty fast when you live inside a law firm,” he muttered.

  “You think he’s a good guy, though, right?”

  He recognized he hadn’t been appropriately enthused in his initial reaction. “Of course he’s a good guy,” he told her. And, as he thought about it, he decided he had been too hard on Danny—that he was definitely a good guy. After all, wasn’t it better to have your cousin marrying a guy who was a little too much an accountant as opposed to, say, a little too much a pot dealer? Plus, anyone could tell from the way she beamed just talking about marrying him that she was in love—that she was happy. And in that moment his cousin’s happiness was very important to him. “He’s a really good guy,” Jonah told her.

  “We walked by Harry Winston the other day and he randomly wanted to go in,” she said. “That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”

  He thought about Zoey, about Evan and the ring he hadn’t offered. “Yes,” he told Becky. “That is a very good sign.”

  “Don’t tell your dad, though, okay? I want to surprise my parents.”

  “Lips are sealed.”

  “I am ninety percent certain he was ring shopping the other day. He was gone the whole afternoon and wouldn’t say where. So, I don’t know, maybe it’ll happen soon.”

  As he looked into her earnest and hopeful face, Jonah saw that she was changing. He remembered her, as a teenager and even in college, having a decided hippie streak: wearing her hair long and unwashed, playing acoustic guitar at open mics, bringing an olive branch to Passover one year “in honor of Palestine bondage.” Now she was going to get engaged to a CPA and wear a Harry Winston diamond and probably take the LSAT. But then, relationships changed people. Thanks to Sylvia, he had belts in three different colors and no longer drank soda. Maybe a progression away from hippie values was simply a natural consequence of maturity—o
r anyway, of a further entrance into adult life. Besides, he was the one who, after all those Phish shows, didn’t know if that band was even together anymore. “I’m really happy for you, Becky,” he said with sincerity. “It’s going to work out, I can tell.”

  She rubbed his shoulder. “Thanks, Jonah. Anyway, come over to the other side with me, ’cause I want to start flip cup.”

  “I have to piss first. Is it okay if I go over the edge?”

  “You’re forgetting I didn’t have brothers,” she said. “There’s a bathroom by the elevators. Come soon!” And she hurried away.

  It was going to work out, he thought, as he walked around the deck—a little stumblingly—pushed open the door to the vestibule, where there were the elevators, a door to the stairwell, and, yes, a door to a small bathroom off to the left. Everything was going to work out, he thought, as he went inside, flicked on the light, latched the door behind him. He liked bathrooms—or rather, he liked taking refuge in bathrooms—bathrooms with one toilet, one sink and a mirror, where you could lock the door and be by yourself and—take stock of things. Sometimes even during dinners with clients or colleagues he would do this—feign the need for the toilet, go inside and lean against the door, check his phone and just enjoy the respite from needing to be yourself. Often, as he did now, he looked in the mirror—and thought again how all, everything, was going to work out—because Danny was a good guy—reliable and dependable and kind, and what else would he want in a husband for a family member? Because Sylvia in her relentless way was absolutely in love with him, and he was in love with her, too—maybe not with the fervor of his first months with Zoey, but that had been an aberration, fleeting; his love with Sylvia was tougher, more mature—they would make it work. All of them—he and Sylvia and Philip and Doug Chen, and the Aaron Seylers of the world, his parents, Zoey and Evan—they’d all make it work, it was all moving toward a common good end, a final good end. Maybe, just maybe, the whole world was entirely perfectible—and it was around then that he noticed something very bright and glowing on the very tip of his nose.

  He thought maybe it was a pimple but immediately understood something very strange and probably very unfortunate was happening to him—a seizure at best—because the light on the tip of his nose expanded, rapidly whiting out his entire field of vision and revealed itself as the all-encompassing white to which all colors combine in negation—a blankness oceanic in depth—encompassing all things seeable and not in a single uniform absence the way inky darkness did—and the first thing he saw looking through this whiteness into the mirror behind was his own aged, ragged face—its wrinkles and weakness and discoloration apprehended as the common end of all things—because it was only a matter of time—and in the lines of this face he could see the avenues of the city he flattered himself to think of as permanent but had no more permanence than any single resident of it or day on its calendar—the Empire State Building collapsed and Grand Central Station collapsed and the subway tunnels flooded with water and then water rising to the streets through the concrete so that what had been the city, this city, became an island again interlaced with rivers and buried in the rubble of things collapsed or burned or bombed or pulled apart like the shining marble pulled from the pyramids and the city that had surrounded them because really—it was only a matter of time—before all, everything—every name, street, partner, marquee, gigabyte of memory, scrap of paper, cupcake, T-shirt, actress, taxicab, chai, beer bottle, mouse, MetroCard, friend, colleague, book, bill, exhibit, bench—every person loved and unknown—and Jonah Daniel Jacobstein—would vanish like a closed eye—and against this empty white he saw now as if inscribed in fire upon it, small and still and unmistakable:

  And then it was just a five-by-five bathroom, with the distinct odor of natural mildew comingling with synthetic evergreen. And it was just his face—though he saw it as he had never seen it before: inseparable from its mortality—as Judith’s had been. His heart was pounding, his clothes were soaked in cold sweat. He gripped the sides of the sink, worried he might pass out, and was immediately relieved to feel its solidity—the cold, dull, porcelain banality—but the relief was temporary because, as he leaned forward, he cracked the sink from out of the wall and was hit with a jagged stream of water from the pipes behind.

  He fled. He rushed from the bathroom, punched the down button on the elevator with the palm of his hand, waited about three seconds, then shoved open the door to the stairs and started bounding down them, two at a time. At the first landing, he came upon another vision: two men wrestling. Then he realized the two men were not in fact wrestling but rather were involved in a passionate make-out session—arms wrapped around each other, mouths pressed tightly together. Jonah hurried past them, saw that one of the men was the hipster he’d smoked with—and then, as he brushed by, that the other was Danny. At just that moment Danny opened his eyes—their eyes met, and Jonah continued his run down the stairs.

  For several floors he thought he was caught in an endless Escher staircase, that the vision had exploded the physics of reality altogether—but then some less hysterical part of him noted that this was how it felt to try to run down thirty flights of stairs. His heart was still thumping wildly; to stop himself, he grabbed at the railing, spun to the floor, and crashed onto his knees. He was so covered in sweat, both cold and warm, with water from the broken sink, that he felt as if he had been plunged into the ocean. He heard a painful heaving sound. It took him a full minute to understand this was his own labored breath. He wondered if he was indeed having a heart attack—but after several minutes the panting had ebbed a little, and he was still alive. He pulled himself to his feet. He forced himself to walk slowly down to the next landing, where he exited the stairwell and pushed the down button on the elevator. When it came, it was empty: There were no shining angels or horrifying demons. He rode down to the lobby—and then, eyes on the black polished floor, he walked to and through the revolving door and out of the building. Eyes now on the sidewalk, he raised his arm for a cab, and when it pulled up he got in and told the driver where he lived. He squeezed his eyes shut for the ride home—and it was only as the cab jerked forward that he realized he’d pissed his pants on top of everything else.

  2. JUDITH, OR THE GOOD STUDENT

  Judith had one of those happy, complete-unto-itself childhoods that seem to exist as a sort of aspirational fairy tale in the American mind.

  Her parents were upper middle class, steadily employed, stable people, in love with each other and in love with their only daughter, committed to giving Judith as perfect a girlhood as possible. The family took ski trips to Colorado, beach trips to Hawaii, culturally edifying trips to Paris and London and Athens and Israel; they went on safari in South Africa when Judith graduated junior high. Her birthdays were always resoundingly celebrated, she received a present on each of the eight nights of Hanukkah. As far back as she could remember, she was encouraged, she was supported, she was continually reassured as to how special and brilliant and beautiful she was.

  And somehow in response to all this, Judith worked nonstop. She was one of those kindergartners who was thrilled the day she got her first piece of homework: happy to get it, proud to do it. On the bulletin board in the classroom recording the number of books each student had read, the line of cutout stars tacked beside Judith’s name was always several inches longer than any other child’s. She would put herself to sleep reciting the multiplication tables, one through twelve; she prepared for science or history tests by creating fat stacks of note cards that she would study one by one, over and over, with monkish concentration. Her greatest disciplinary problem as a child was reading ahead in her books against her teachers’ instructions.

  She was the one who, at twelve, had requested an SAT tutor, knowing full well it was a test she would not have to take for more than four years. But she was hardly the sort of girl who shied away from the extremes of preparation. Once, when she and her parents had gone over to a neighbor’s for Passover, s
he spent the pre-Seder mingling time sitting on the rug and working on her Latin homework on the coffee table. Observing this, the mother of the hostess—a compact old woman with brilliantly silver hair and the weathered skin of someone who had spent the greater part of her adult life either over a stove or on the beach in Florida—said of her, “She’s like a dog with a bone, that one.” Os, ossis, thought Judith.

  Her labors were not limited to schoolwork, either. There were also the many activities—in theory recreational but, as she got older, intended more and more to enhance what her father called “the old college application.” In elementary school she took piano and private French lessons and pottery. By high school, to these had been added model UN, debate, various honor societies, B’nai B’rith Girls (local and regional), monthly volunteering at the local soup kitchen, and running cross-country.

  This last area was the one in which Judith distinguished herself least. Though she was theoretically built like a distance runner—unusually long-limbed and tall since girlhood—she was not athletic, and the rituals of team sports (the whooping after victories, the sobbing after losses) did not come naturally to her. The dynamics of the sport were intuitive enough, familiar enough, though: Just go. And the greater purpose, as her father only occasionally had to remind her, was to demonstrate that she was a well-rounded young woman.

  By the end of her sophomore year, it was clear Judith would have enough credits to graduate from high school a year early. This situation was deemed worthy of an official family meeting, so Judith and her parents gathered in the living room, sat on the couch underneath the portrait of Judith’s father’s grandfather—ancient, white-bearded, dour in black coat and black skullcap—looking, Judith always thought, as though he’d stepped into the painting directly from some authentic Jewish shtetl past.