Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

“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 bequeathed 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.