Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

“I’m sorry.”

“And I don’t need comforting.”

“I thought it would be welcomed. And everyone needs comforting.”

“You thought touching my face would be welcomed?”

“I did. The way you angled your body to suggest I enter the room. How you looked at me. When you said, ‘I’m good,’ and took a step closer.”

Had she done that? She remembered the moment, but felt certain that he had stepped toward her .

“Boy, was I asking for it.”

Was it possible she’d been too hard on Jacob, simply because he’d been first to express what she knew she’d been first to feel? There was no balance to be found in cruelty — only in cheating on him, which she wasn’t going to do.

“I’m not full of shit, Julia. You think I am—”

“I do.”

“—but I’m not. I’m sorry if I put you in an uncomfortable position. That’s not at all what I had in mind.”

“You’re lonely, and I look like a Band-Aid.”

“I’m not lonely, and you don’t—”

“ You’re the one who needed comforting.”

“We both did. We both do.”

“You need to leave.”

“OK.”

“So why aren’t you going?”

“Because I believe you don’t want me to go.”

“How could I prove it?”

“You could push me.”

“I’m not going to push you, Mark.”

“Why do you think you just used my name?”

“Because it’s yours.”

“What were you emphasizing? You didn’t use my name when telling me to go. Only when telling me what you weren’t going to do.”

“Jesus. Just go, Mark.”

“OK,” he said, and turned for the door.

She didn’t know what the emergency was, only that the trauma center of her brain was consuming everything. At the margin, still safe, remained the strange joy of finding and removing ticks in Connecticut. But the trauma smelled the pleasure, and attacked it. At the end of every night, she sat in a dry bathtub and checked herself, because if she didn’t, no one would.

“No, wait,” Julia said. Mark turned back to face her. “I did need comforting.”

“Still, I—”

“I’m not finished. I did need comforting, and I’m sure I communicated as much, even if I didn’t intend to, or realize it.”

“Thank you for telling me that. And while we’re in the business of full disclosure: I stepped toward you.”

“You lied to me.”

“No, I just couldn’t find a way to—”

“You lied to me, and made me question myself.”

“I couldn’t find a way—”

“I knew I was right.” She paused. A small memory displaced a small laugh: “Kisses. I just remembered what Sam used to call kisses.”

“What?”

“He had a few different names for them, depending on the situation. A ‘make-it-better’ was a kiss given in response to an injury. A ‘sheyna boychick’ was a kiss from his great-grandfather. A ‘that-face’ was from his grandmother. A ‘you’ was one of those spontaneous, I-need-to-kiss-you-right-now kisses. I guess we’d always say ‘You’ when going in for one of those.”

“Kids are wonderful.”

“Before they know anything, they really are.”

Mark folded his arms and said, “So, here’s the thing, Julia—”

“Uh-oh, emphasis.”

“I was trying to kiss you.”

“You were?” She felt not only relieved of the earlier embarrassment, but, for the first time in her selectively edited memory, wanted.

“Truth be told.”

“Why were you trying to kiss me?”

“Why?”

“To make-it-better me?”

“To you you.”

“I see.”

“So you’ve chosen not to close your eyes?”

“What?”

“You see.”

She stepped toward him, open-eyed, and asked, “Are things about to become bad?”

“No.”

She took another half step toward him, and asked, “You promise?”

“No.”

There was no more distance to cross.

She asked: “What can you promise?”

He promised: “Things are about to be different.”

“This is a joke ?” Irv asked as they drove to Washington National — the Blochs would sooner renounce air travel than refer to it as Reagan National. NPR was on, because Irv sought confrontations with what he loathed, and to his extreme revulsion there had been a balanced segment on new settlement construction in the West Bank. Irv loathed NPR. It was not only the wretched politics, but the flamboyantly precious, out-of-no-closet sissiness, the wide-eyed wonder coming from the you-wouldn’t-hit-a-guy-with-glasses voices. (And all of them — men, women, young and old — seem to share the same voice, passing it from one throat to another as necessary.) The virtues of “listener-supported radio” don’t alter the fact that no one with self-respect uses the word satchel , much less an actual satchel, and anyway, how many subscriptions to The New Yorker does a person need?

“Well, now I’ll have an answer,” Irv said, with a self-satisfied nod that resembled davening or Parkinson’s.

“To what?” Jacob asked, unable to swim past the bait.

“When someone asks me what was the most factually erroneous, morally repugnant, and also just boring radio segment I’ve ever heard.”

Irv’s knee-jerk response triggered a reflex in Jacob’s brain’s knee, and within a few exchanges they were rhetorical Russian wedding dancers — arms crossed, kicking at everything but anything.

“And anyway,” Jacob said, feeling that they’d taken things far enough, “it was a self-described opinion piece .”

“Well, that stupid idiot’s opinion is wrong —”

Without looking up from his iPad, Max defended National Public Radio — or semantics, in any case — from the backseat: “Opinions can’t be wrong.”

“So here’s why that idiot’s opinion is idiotic…” Irv ticked off each “because” on the fingers of his left hand: “Because only an anti-Semite can be provoked to anti-Semitism —a hideous phrase; because the mere suggestion of a willingness to talk to these freaks would just be throwing Manischewitz on an oil fire; because — not for nothing— their hospitals are filled with rockets aimed at our hospitals, which are filled with them ; because at the end of the day, we love kung pao chicken and they love death; because — and this really should have been my first point — the simple and undeniable fact is … we’re right !”

“Jesus, watch your lane!”

Irv removed his other hand — balancing the wheel on his knees — to acquire another rhetorical finger: “And because anyway, why should our yarmulkes bunch over a troop of Goy Scouts earning protest patches in front of the Berkeley Co-op, or simians in keffiyehs doing a little urban stone-skipping in Gaza so-called City?”

“At least one hand on the wheel, Dad.”

“I’m getting in an accident?”

“And find a better word than simians .”

Irv turned to face his grandson while continuing to drive with his knees: “You gotta hear this. You put a million monkeys in front of a million typewriters and you get Hamlet . Two billion in front of two billion and you get—”

“Watch the road !”

“The Koran. Funny, right?”

“Racist,” Max muttered.

“Arabs aren’t a race , bubeleh. They’re an ethnicity .”

“What’s a typewriter?”

“Let me also say this,” Irv said, turning to Jacob and pointing his spare index finger while continuing to hold up the other six fingers. “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, but people with no homeland really shouldn’t. Because when those stones of theirs start breaking Chagall windows, don’t expect to see us on our knees with a dustpan. Just because we’re smarter than those lunatics doesn’t mean they have a monopoly on insanity. The Arabs have to understand that we’ve got some stones, too, but our slingshot’s in Dimona, and the finger on the button is connected to an arm with a string of numbers tattooed on it!”