Here I Am

by Jonathan Safran Foer

  Their inner lives were overwhelmed by all the living—not only in terms of the time and energy required by a family of five, but of which muscles were forced to strengthen and which withered. Julia’s unwavering composure with the children had grown to resemble omnipatience, while her capacity to express urgency to her husband had shrunk to texted Poems of the Day. Jacob’s magic trick of removing Julia’s bra without his hands was replaced by the depressingly impressive ability to assemble a Pack ’n Play as he carried it up the stairs. Julia could clip newborn fingernails with her teeth, and breast-feed while making a lasagna, and remove splinters without tweezers or pain, and have the kids begging for the lice comb, and compel sleep with a third-eye massage—but she had forgotten how to touch her husband. Jacob taught the kids the difference between farther and further, but no longer knew how to talk to his wife.

  Their inner lives were nurtured in private—Julia designed houses for herself; Jacob worked on his bible, and bought a second phone—and a destructive cycle developed between them: with Julia’s inability to express urgency, Jacob became even less sure that he was wanted, and more afraid of risking foolishness, which furthered the distance between Julia’s hand and Jacob’s body, which Jacob had no language to address. Desire became a threat—an enemy—to their domesticity.

  When Max was in kindergarten, he used to give everything away. Any friend who would come over for a playdate would inevitably leave with a plastic car or stuffed animal. Any money that he somehow acquired—change found on the sidewalk, a five-dollar bill from his grandfather for having made a persuasive argument—would be offered to Julia in a checkout line, or to Jacob at a parking meter. He invited Sam to take as much of his dessert as he liked. “Go on,” he would say when Sam demurred. “Take, take.”

  Max wasn’t responding to the needs of others, which he seemed as capable of ignoring as any child. And he wasn’t being generous—that would require the knowledge of giving, which was precisely what he lacked. Everyone has a pipeline through which he pushes what he is willing and able to share of himself out into the world, and through which he takes in all of the world that he is willing and able to bear. Max’s conduit wasn’t bigger than anyone else’s, it was simply unclogged.

  What had been a source of pride for Jacob and Julia became a source of concern: Max will be left with nothing. Careful not to suggest that there was anything wrong with the way he lived, they gently introduced notions of worth, and the finitude of resources. At first he resisted—“There’s always more”—but as children do, he came to understand that there was something wrong with the way he lived.

  He became obsessed with comparative value. “Could you get one house for forty cars?” (“It depends on the house and the cars.”) Or, “Would you rather have a handful of diamonds or a houseful of silver? A hand the size of yours, a house the size of this one.” He started trading compulsively: toys with friends, belongings with Sam, deeds with his parents. (“If I eat half of this kale, will you let me go to bed twenty minutes later?”) He wanted to know if it was better to be a FedEx driver or a music teacher, and became frustrated when his parents challenged his use of better. He wanted to know if it was OK that his dad had to pay for an extra ticket when they took his friend Clive to the zoo. “I’m wasting my life!” he would often exclaim when not engaged in an activity. He crawled into bed with them, too early one morning, wanting to know if that’s what being dead is.

  “What’s that, baby?”

  “Having nothing.”

  The withholding of sexual needs between Jacob and Julia was the most primitive and frustrating kind of withdrawal, but hardly the most damaging. The movement toward estrangement—from each other, and from themselves—took place in far smaller, subtler steps. They were always becoming closer in the realm of doing—coordinating the ever-expanding routines, talking and texting more (and more efficiently), cleaning together the mess made by the children they made—and farther in feeling.

  Once, Julia bought some lingerie. She’d placed her palm atop the soft stack, not because she had any interest, but because, like her mother, she couldn’t control the impulse to touch merchandise in stores. She took five hundred dollars out of an ATM so it wouldn’t show up on the credit card bill. She wanted to share it with Jacob, and tried her best to find or create the right occasion. One night, after the kids were asleep, she put on the panties. She wanted to descend the stairs, cap Jacob’s pen, not say a word, but communicate: Look how I can look. But she couldn’t. Just as she couldn’t bring herself to put them on before bed, fearing his not noticing. Just as she couldn’t even lay them on the bed for him to come upon and ask about. Just as she couldn’t return them.

  Once, Jacob wrote a line he thought was the best he’d ever written. He wanted to share it with Julia—not because he was proud of himself, but because he wanted to see if it was still possible to reach her as he used to, to inspire her to say something like “You’re my writer.” He took the pages into the kitchen, laid them facedown on the counter.

  “How’s it going?” she asked.

  “It’s going,” he said, in precisely the way he most hated.

  “Progress?”

  “Yes, just not clear it’s in the right direction.”

  “Is there a right direction?”

  He wanted to say, “Just say, ‘You’re my writer.’ ”

  But he couldn’t cross the distance that didn’t exist. The vastness of their shared life made sharing their singularity impossible. They needed a distance that wasn’t a withdrawal, but a beckoning. And when Jacob returned to the line the next morning, he was surprised and saddened to see that it was still great.

  Once, Julia was washing her hands at the bathroom sink, after having cleaned up yet another Argus shit, and as she observed the soap forming webs between her fingers, the sconce flickered but persisted, and she was unexpectedly overwhelmed by a kind of sadness that didn’t refer to or mean anything, but whose weight was punishing. She wanted to bring that sadness to Jacob—not with the hope of his understanding something that she couldn’t understand, but with the hope that he might help carry something that she couldn’t carry. But the distance that didn’t exist was too great. Argus had shit on his bed, and either didn’t realize it or couldn’t be bothered to move; it got all over his side and tail. While Julia scrubbed it off with human shampoo and a damp T-shirt from some forgotten soccer team that once broke hearts, she told him, “Here we go. It’s OK. Almost finished.”

  Once, Jacob considered buying a brooch for Julia. He had wandered into a store on Connecticut Avenue—the kind of place that sells salad bowls turned from reclaimed wood, and salad tongs with horn handles. He wasn’t looking to buy anything, and there was no upcoming occasion for which a gift would have been appropriate. His lunch date had texted that she was stuck behind a garbage truck, he hadn’t thought to bring along a book or newspaper, and every chair in Starbucks was occupied by someone who would finish his thinning life before finishing his thinly veiled memoir, leaving Jacob no place to go deep into his very thin phone.

  “Is that one nice?” he asked the woman on the other side of the case. “Dumb question.”

  “I love it,” she said.

  “Right, of course you do.”

  “I don’t like that,” she said, pointing at a bracelet in the case.

  “It’s a brooch, right?”

  “It is. A silver cast of an actual twig. One-of-a-kind.”

  “And those are opals?”

  “They are.”

  He walked to another section, pretended to examine an inlaid cutting board, then returned to the brooch. “It’s nice, though, right? I can’t tell if it looks costumey.”

  “Not at all,” she said, taking it from the case and putting it on a velvet-lined tray.

  “Maybe,” Jacob said, not picking it up.

  Was it nice? It was risky. Did people wear brooches? Was it cornily figurative? Would it end up in a jewelry box, never to be seen again until it was b
equeathed as an heirloom to one of the boys’ brides so that she could put it in a jewelry box until it was one day passed down again? Was seven hundred fifty dollars an appropriate price for such a thing? It wasn’t the money that concerned him, it was the risk of getting it wrong, the embarrassment of trying and failing—an extended limb is far easier to break than a bent one. After lunch, Jacob went back to the store.

  “Sorry if I’m being ridiculous,” he said, returning to the woman who had been helping him, “but would you mind putting it on?”

  She took it back out of the case and pinned it to her sweater.

  “And it’s not heavy? It doesn’t pull on the fabric?”

  “It’s quite light.”

  “Is it fancy?”

  “You could wear it with a dress, or on a jacket, or sweater.”

  “And you would be happy if someone gave it to you?”

  Distance begets distance, but if the distance is nothing, what is its origin? There was no transgression, no cruelty, not even indifference. The original distance was closeness: the inability to overcome the shame of subterranean needs that no longer had a home aboveground.

  give me your cum

  then you can have my cock

  Only in the privacy of her own mind could Julia wonder what her own home would look like. What she would gain, and what she would lose. Could she live without seeing the kids every morning and evening? And what if she were to admit that she could? In six and a half million minutes, she would have to. No one judges a mother for letting her children go to college. Letting go wasn’t the crime. The crime was choosing to let go.

  you don’t deserve to get fucked in the ass

  If she built a new life for herself, so would Jacob. He would remarry. Men do. They get over it, and get on with it. Every time. It was easy to imagine him marrying the first person he dated. He deserved someone who didn’t build imaginary homes for one. He didn’t deserve Julia, but he deserved better than Julia. He deserved someone who stretched upon waking, rather than recoiled. Someone who didn’t sniff food before eating it. Someone who didn’t see pets as burdens, who had a pet name for him, and made jokes in front of friends about how much she liked being fucked by him. Some new, unclogged pipeline to a new person, and even if it were doomed to ultimately fail, at least the failure would be preceded by happiness.

  now you deserve to get fucked in the ass

  She needed a day off. She would have loved the feeling of not knowing how to fill the time, of wandering without a destination in Rock Creek Park, of actually savoring a meal of the kind of food that her kids would never tolerate, and reading something longer and of more substance than a sidebar about how better to organize emotions or spices. But one of her clients needed help selecting door hardware. Of course it had to be a Saturday, because when else could someone who was able to afford bespoke hardware have time to sample it? And of course no one needs help to look at door hardware, but Mark and Jennifer were unusually helpless when it came to negotiating their incompatible lacks of taste, and a doorknob was exactly unimportant and symbolic enough to require mediation.

  Compounding Julia’s irritation was the fact that Mark and Jennifer were the parents of one of Sam’s friends, and thought of Jacob and Julia as their friends, and wanted to have a coffee after to “catch up.” Julia liked them and, insofar as she could muster enthusiasm for extrafamilial relations, considered them friends. But she couldn’t muster much. At least not until she could catch up with herself.

  Someone needed to invent a way to be close to people without having to see them, or talk to them on the phone, or write (or read) letters, or e-mails, or texts. Was it only mothers who understood the preciousness of time? That there was none of it, ever? And you can’t just have coffee, even and especially not with people you rarely see, because it takes half an hour to reach the café (if you’re lucky), and half an hour to return home (if you’re lucky again), not to mention the twenty-minute tax you pay just to get out the door, and a quick coffee ends up being forty-five minutes in the Olympic scenario. And there was the horrible rigmarole at Hebrew school that morning, and the Israelis were coming in less than two weeks, and the bar mitzvah was saying its goodbyes in the ICU, and while it’s entirely possible to get help, help feels bad, help shames. One can order groceries online and have them delivered, but that feels like a failure, an abdication of motherly duty—motherly privilege. Driving farther to the store with good produce, selecting the avocado that will be perfectly ripe at its moment of use, making sure it doesn’t get crushed in the grocery bag and that the grocery bag doesn’t get crushed in the cart…it’s a mother’s job. Not job, but joy. What if she could accomplish the job but not the joy?

  She never knew what to do with the feeling of wanting more for herself: time, space, quiet. Maybe girls would have been different, but she had boys. For a year she held them against her, but after that sleepless holiday she was at the mercy of their physicality: their screaming, wrestling, table drumming, competitive farting, and endless explorations of their scrotums. She loved it, all of it, but needed time, space, and quiet. Maybe if she’d had girls, maybe they’d have been more contemplative, less brutish, more constructive, less animalistic. Even approaching such thoughts made her feel unmotherly, although she always knew she was a good mother. So why was it so complicated? There were women who would spend their last pennies to do the things she resented. Every blessing that was promised the barren heroines of the Bible had fallen into her open hands like rain. And through them.

  i want to lick the cum out of your asshole

  She met Mark at the hardware gallery. It was elegant, and it was obnoxious, and in a world where the bodies of Syrian children washed up on beaches, it was unethical, or at least vulgar. But her commissions added up.

  Mark was already handling samples when she arrived. He looked good: a tightly cropped, gray-dusted beard; clothes that were intentionally snug and not bought in sets of three. He had the physical confidence of someone who doesn’t know within one hundred thousand dollars the contents of his bank account at any given moment. It wasn’t attractive, but it wasn’t ignorable.

  “Julia.”

  “Mark.”

  “We seem not to have Alzheimer’s.”

  “What’s Alzheimer’s?”

  Innocent flirtation was so revitalizing—the gentle tickling of language that gently tickled one’s ego. She was good at it, and loved it, always had, but grew to feel guilty about it in the course of her marriage. She knew there was nothing wrong with such playfulness; she wanted Jacob to have it in his life. But she also knew of his irrational, uncontainable jealousy. And frustrating as it could be—she never dared to mention a romantic or sexual experience from her past, and needed to overclarify any remotely misinterpretable experience in the present—it was part of him, and so something she wanted to care for.

  And it was a part of him that drew her in. His sexual insecurity was so profound, it could only have sprung from a profound source. And even when she felt that she knew everything about him, she never knew what created his insatiable need for reassurance. Sometimes, after deliberately omitting something innocent that she knew would upset his brittle peace, she would look at her husband with love and think, What happened to you?

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said, adjusting her collar. “Sam got in some trouble at Hebrew school.”

  “Oy vey.”

  “Indeed. Anyway, I’m here. Physically and mentally.”

  “Maybe we should go get that coffee first?”

  “I’m trying to quit.”

  “Why?”

  “Too dependent on it.”

  “That’s only a problem if there isn’t coffee around.”

  “And Jacob says—”

  “That’s only a problem if Jacob’s around.”

  Julia giggled at that, unsure if she was giggling at his joke or her girlish inability to resist his boyish charm.

  “Let’s earn the caffeine,” she said, taking a to
o-distressed bronze knob from his hand.

  “So I have some news,” Mark said.

  “Me, too. Should we wait for Jennifer?”

  “We shouldn’t. And that’s my news.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Jennifer and I are getting divorced.”

  “What?”

  “We’ve been separated since May.”

  “You said divorced.”

  “We’ve been separated. We’re getting divorced.”

  “No,” she said, squeezing the knob, further distressing it, “you haven’t.”

  “Haven’t what?”

  “Been separated.”

  “I would know.”

  “But we’ve been together. We went to the Kennedy Center.”

  “Yes, we were at a play.”

  “You laughed, and touched. I saw.”

  “We’re friends. Friends laugh.”

  “They don’t touch.”

  Mark extended his hand and touched Julia’s shoulder. She reflexively recoiled, eliciting a laugh from each of them.

  “We’re friends who were married,” he said.

  Julia organized her hair behind her ear and said, “Who still are married.”

  “Who are about not to be.”

  “I don’t think this is right.”

  “Right?”

  “Happening.”

  He held up his ringless hand: “It’s been happening for at least long enough to erase a tan line.”

  A skinny woman approached.

  “Anything I can help with today?”

  “Maybe tomorrow,” Julia said.

  “I think we’re OK for now,” Mark said, with a smile that appeared, to Julia, as flirtatious as the one he’d given her.

  “I’ll just be over there,” the woman said.