Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

“Happiness?”

“Happiness.”

“ Whose happiness?”

“My happiness. Jennifer’s, too. Our happiness, but separately.”

“While we pursue happiness, we flee from contentment.”

“Well, neither my happiness nor contentment is with her. And her happiness definitely isn’t with me.”

“Where is it? Under a sofa cushion?”

“In fact, under her French tutor.”

“Holy shit ,” Julia said, bringing the knob to her forehead harder than she’d intended.

“I don’t know why you’re having this reaction to good news.”

“She doesn’t even speak French.”

“And now we know why.”

Julia looked for the anorexic clerk. Anything to look away from Mark.

“And your happiness?” she asked. “What language are you not learning?”

He laughed. “For now, I’m happy to be alone. I’ve spent my whole life with others — my parents, girlfriends, Jennifer. Maybe I want something different.”

“Loneliness?”

“Aloneness isn’t loneliness.”

“This doorknob is very ugly.”

“Are you upset?”

“Too little distress, too much distress, it isn’t rocket science.”

“That’s why they save rocket scientists for rocket science.”

“I can’t believe you haven’t even mentioned the kids.”

“It’s painful.”

“What this is going to do to them. What seeing them half the time is going to do to you.”

She pressed into the display case, angled herself a few degrees. No amount of adjusting could make this conversation comfortable, but it would at least deflect the blow. She put down the knob and picked up one whose only honest comparison would be the dildo she was given at her bachelorette party, sixteen years before. It had resembled a penis as little as this knob resembled a knob. Her girlfriends laughed, and she laughed, and four months later she came upon it while searching her closet with the hopes of regifting an unopened matcha whisk, and she found herself bored or hormonal enough to give it a shot. It accomplished nothing. Too dry. Too unwillful. But holding the ridiculous doorknob, then, she could think of nothing else.

“I lost my interior monologue,” Mark said.

“Your interior monologue ?” Julia asked with a dismissive grin.

“That’s right.”

She handed him the knob: “Mark, it’s your interior monologue calling. He was mugged by your id in Nigeria and needs you to wire it two hundred fifty thousand dollars by the end of the day.”

“Maybe it sounds silly. Maybe I sound selfish—”

“Yes and yes.”

“—but I lost what made me me .”

“You’re an adult, Mark, not a Shel Silverstein character contemplating emotional boo-boos on the stump of a tree whose trunk he used for a dacha, or whatever.”

“The harder you push back,” he said, “the more sure I am that you agree.”

“Agree? Agree with what? We’re talking about your life.”

“We’re talking about the endless clenched-jaw worrying about the kids all day, and the endless replaying of unhad fights with your spouse all night. You wouldn’t be a happier, more ambitious and productive architect if you were alone? You wouldn’t be less weary ?”

“What, me weary?”

“The more you joke, the more sure—”

“Of course I would.”

“And vacations? You wouldn’t enjoy them more alone?”

“Not so loud.”

“Or someone would hear that you’re human?”

She ran her thumb over the head of the knob.

“Of course I’d miss my kids,” she said. “You wouldn’t?”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“Yes, I’d prefer to have them with me and them on vacation.”

“Tough sentence to assemble?”

“I would choose their presence. If it were a choice.”

“Is it the never sleeping in, the never enjoying a meal, or the hypervigilance at the edge of a beach chair that your back will never touch?”

“It’s the fulfillment that has no other source. The first thought I have every morning, and the last thought every night, is about my kids.”

“That’s my point.”

“It’s my point.”

“When do you think about yourself?”

“When I think that one day, a few decades from now, which will feel like a few hours from now, I’ll be facing death all alone, except that I won’t be all alone, because I’ll be surrounded by my family.”

“Living the wrong life is far worse than dying the wrong death.”

“No shit! I got the same fortune cookie last night!”

Mark leaned closer to Julia.

“Just tell me,” he said, “you wouldn’t like to have your time and mind back? I’m not asking you to speak badly of your husband or kids. Let’s take it for granted that you’ve never cared about anything half as much, and couldn’t care about anything more. I’m not asking for the answer you want to give, or feel you have to. I know this is hard to think about, much less talk about. But honestly: you wouldn’t be happier alone?”

“You’re assuming happiness is the ultimate ambition.”

“I’m not. I’m just asking if you would be happier alone.”

Of course it wasn’t the first time she’d confronted the question, but it was the first time that it had been posed by someone else. It was the first time she didn’t have the ability to evade it. Would she be happier alone? I am a mother , she thought — not an answer to the question being asked, and no more her ultimate ambition than happiness, but her ultimate identity. She had no lives to compare with her life, no parallel aloneness to measure against her aloneness. She was simply doing what she thought was the right thing to do. Living what she thought was the right life.

“No,” she said. “I would not be happier alone.”

He ran his finger around a platonically spherical knob and said, “Then you have it all. Lucky you.”

“Yes. Lucky me. I do feel lucky.”

A long few seconds of touching cold metal in silence, and then Mark asked, “So?” and placed the knob back on the counter.

“What?”

“So what’s your news?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You said you had news.”

“Oh, right,” she said, shaking her head. “No, it isn’t news.”

And it wasn’t. She and Jacob had been talking about thinking about looking for a place in the country. Something dinky that could be reimagined. Not even talking about , really, but allowing the joke to linger for long enough to become unfunny. It wasn’t news. It was process.

The morning after their night in the Pennsylvania inn, a decade and a half before, Julia and Jacob went on a hike through a nature preserve. An unusually chatty welcome sign at the entrance explained that the existing paths weren’t original but were “desire lines,” shortcuts people took that trampled the growth and over time appeared deliberate.

Julia and Jacob’s family life became characterized by process, endless negotiation, tiny adjustments. Maybe we should throw caution to the wind and take off the window screens this year. Maybe fencing is one activity too many for Max, and too conspicuously bourgeois for his parents. Maybe if we replaced the metal spatulas with rubber spatulas, we wouldn’t need to replace all the nonstick pans that are giving us cancer. Maybe we should get a car with a third row of seats. Maybe one of those projection things would be nice. Maybe Sam’s cello teacher was right and he should just be playing songs he loves, even if that means “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae).” Maybe more nature is part of the answer. Maybe having groceries delivered would encourage better cooking, which would relieve the unnecessary but unshakable guilt of having groceries delivered.