Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

“Julia.”

“But more important, how much needs to happen? You think you can go around saying and writing whatever you want without consequence? Maybe your father can. Maybe your mother is weak enough to tolerate that kind of piggishness. But I’m not. There’s decency and indecency, and they’re different . Good and bad are different . Do you not know this?”

“Of course I—”

“No, of course you don’t . You wrote to a woman who isn’t your wife that her tight pussy doesn’t deserve you?”

“That’s not really what I wrote. And it was in the context of—”

“And you’re not really a good person, and there is no context that could make such a thing OK to say.”

“It was a moment of weakness, Julia.”

“Are you forgetting that you never deleted any of them? That there is a history to refer to? It wasn’t a moment of weakness, it was a person of weakness. And will you please stop saying my name.”

“It’s over.”

“Do you want to know the worst part? I don’t even care . The saddest thing about this has been confronting my own lack of sadness.”

Jacob didn’t believe that, but neither could he believe that she would say it. The pretense of a loving relationship had made the absence of a loving relationship bearable. But now she was letting go of appearances.

“Listen, I think—”

“Lick the cum out of her asshole?” She laughed. “ You? You’re a coward and a germ freak. You just wanted to write it. Which is fine. Which is even great. But acknowledge the make-believe. You want to want some kind of sexually supercharged life, but you actually want the gate-checked stroller, and the Aquaphor, and even your desiccated, blowjobless existence, because it spares you worrying about erections. Jesus, Jacob, you carry a packet of wipes so you’ll never have to use toilet paper. That’s not the behavior of a man who wants to lick cum from anyone’s asshole.”

“Julia, stop.”

“And by the way, even if you found yourself in that situation, with an actual woman’s actual asshole filled with your actual cum and beckoning your tongue? You know what you’d do? You’d get your ridiculous hand tremors, sweat through your shirt, lose the one-quarter, Jell-O mold erection you would have been lucky to achieve in the first place, and probably shuffle off to the bathroom to check the Huffington Post for puerile, unfunny videos or relisten to the Radiolab in praise of tortoises. That’s what would happen. And she’d know you were the joke that you are.”

“I wouldn’t be wearing a shirt.”

“What?”

“I wouldn’t sweat through my shirt, because I wouldn’t be wearing a shirt.”

“That’s a fucking mean thing to say.”

“Stop pushing me.”

“You’re serious? You can’t be. You cannot be serious.” She turned on the sink faucet, for no obvious reason. “And you think you’re the only one who wants to act recklessly?”

“You want to have an affair?”

“I want to let things fall apart.”

“I’m not having an affair, and I’m not letting things fall apart.”

“I saw Mark today. He and Jennifer are getting divorced.”

“Great. Or terrible. What am I supposed to say?”

“And Mark was flirting with me.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’ve protected you so much. Cared for your pathetic, baby-bird insecurity. Spared you innocent things that you would have had no right to be upset by, but would be crushed by. And you think I’ve never had fantasies? You think every time I masturbate I’m imagining you? Do you?”

“This isn’t going anywhere.”

“Did some part of me want to fuck Mark today? Yes. In fact, every part below the brain. But I didn’t, because I wouldn’t, because I’m not like you—”

“I didn’t fuck anybody, Julia.”

“—but I wanted to.”

Jacob raised his voice for the second time in the conversation: “God damn it, what’s that smell?”

“Your dog took another shit in the house.”

“ My dog?”

“Yes, the dog that you brought home, despite our explicit agreement not to get a dog.”

“The kids wanted it.”

“The kids want their arms connected to IV drip bags filled with melted Chunky Monkey and their brains in vats of Steve Jobs’s cum. Good parenting has nothing to do with satisfying your children’s wants.”

“They were sad about something.”

“ Everybody is sad about something. Stop blaming the kids, Jacob. You needed to be a hero, and you needed to make me a villain—”

“That’s not fair.”

“Not even close to fair. You brought home a dog that we agreed it would be a mistake to get, and you were the superhero and I was the supervillain, and now there’s a stale shit-bâtard on our living room floor.”

“And it didn’t occur to you to clean it up?”

“No. Just like it didn’t occur to you to house-train it—”

“ Him . House-train him . And the poor guy can’t help it. He’s—”

“Or walk it, or take it to the vet, or wash its bed, or remember its heartworm pills, or check it for ticks, or buy it food, or feed it. I pick up his shit every single day. Twice a day. Or more. Jesus, Jacob, I hate dogs, and hate this dog, and didn’t and don’t want this dog, but if it weren’t for me, this dog would have been dead years ago.”

“He understands you when you say that.”

“And yet you don’t. Your dog—”

“ Our dog.”

“—is smarter than my husband.”

And then he screamed. It was the first time he’d ever raised his voice at her. It was a scream that had been building in him for sixteen years of marriage, and four decades of life, and five millennia of history — a scream that was directed at her, but also at everyone living and dead, but primarily at himself. For years he’d always been elsewhere, always underground behind a twelve-inch door, always taking refuge in an interior monologue to which no one — including himself — had access, or in dialogue trapped in a locked drawer. But this was him .

He took four steps toward her, bringing the lenses of his glasses as close to her eyes as to his own, and screamed: “You are my enemy!”

A few minutes before, she’d told Jacob that the saddest thing had been confronting her own lack of sadness. It was true then, but it wasn’t true anymore. Through the prism of tears, she saw her kitchen: the cracked rubber gasket of the faucet, the casement windows that still looked good but whose frames would crumble if gripped. She saw her dining room and living room: they still looked good, but were two layers of paint over a layer of primer over a decade and a half of slow decay. Her husband: not her partner.

Sam came home from third grade one day and excitedly told Julia, “If Earth were the size of an apple, the atmosphere would be thinner than the apple’s skin.”

“What?”

“If Earth were the size of an apple, the atmosphere would be thinner than the apple’s skin.”

“I might not be smart enough to understand why that’s interesting. Can you explain?”

“Look up,” he said. “Does it seem thin to you?”

“The ceiling?”

“If we were outside.”

The shell was so thin, but she had always felt safe.

They got a dartboard at a yard sale, dozens of Sundays before, and hung it on the door at the end of the hall. The boys missed the board as often as they hit it, and each dart pulled from the door held the door’s previous color on its tip. Julia took the board down after Max came into the living room, blood dripping from his shoulder, saying, “It was nobody’s fault.” What remained was a circle, defined and surrounded by hundreds of holes.