Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

“What your mother said before, about you and Julia needing to approach this together? That was wrong. You need to defend Sam. Let everyone else worry about what actually happened.”

“I believe him.”

And then, as if noticing her absence for the first time: “Where is Julia, anyway?”

“Taking the day off.”

“Off from what?”

“Off.”

“Thank you, Anne Sullivan, but in fact I heard you. Off from what ?”

“From on . Can you just let it be?”

“Sure,” Irv said, nodding. “That’s an option. But let me speak some words of wisdom that not even Mother Mary knows.”

“Can’t wait.”

“Nothing goes away. Not on its own. You deal with it, or it deals with you.”

“This too shall—?”

“Solomon wasn’t perfect. In all of human history, nothing has ever gone away on its own.”

“Farts do,” Jacob said, as if to honor Sam’s absence.

“Your house stinks, Jacob. You just can’t smell it, because it’s yours.”

Jacob could have pointed out that there was Argus shit somewhere within a three-room radius. He’d known it as soon as he opened the front door.

Benjy came back into the room. “I remembered my question,” he said, despite having given no indication of trying to remember anything.

“Yes?”

“The sound of time. What happened to it?”

Julia liked the eye being led where the body can’t go. She liked irregular brickwork, when one can’t tell if the craftsmanship is careless or masterly. She liked the feeling of enclosure, with the suggestion of expansiveness. She liked it when the view wasn’t centered in the window, but also liked remembering that views are, by nature’s nature, centered. She liked doorknobs that one wants to keep holding. She liked steps up, and steps down. She liked shadows laid upon other shadows. She liked breakfast banquettes. She liked light woods (beech, maple), and didn’t like “masculine” woods (walnut, mahogany), and didn’t care for steel, and hated stainless steel (until it was thoroughly scratched), and imitations of natural materials were intolerable, unless their fakeness was declared, was the point, in which case they could be quite beautiful. She liked textures that the fingers and feet know, even if the eye doesn’t. She liked fireplaces centered in kitchens centered on the main living floor. She liked more bookshelves than are necessary. She liked skylights over showers, but nowhere else. She liked intentional imperfections, but she couldn’t bear nonchalance, but she also liked to remember that there could be no such thing as an intentional imperfection. People are always mistaking something that looks good for something that feels good.

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She didn’t like uniform textures — they aren’t how things are . She didn’t like rugs centered in rooms. Good architecture should make one feel as if one is in a cave with a view of the horizon. She didn’t like double-height ceilings. She didn’t like too much glass. The function of a window is to bring in light, not to frame a view. A ceiling should be just out of reach of the extended fingers of a raised hand of the tallest occupant standing on tiptoes. She didn’t like carefully placed trinkets — things belong where they don’t. An eleven-foot ceiling is too high. It makes one feel lost, forsaken. A ten-foot ceiling is too high. She felt that everything was out of reach. Nine feet is too high. Something that feels good — safe, comfortable, designed for living — can always be made to look good. She didn’t like recessed lighting, or lamps controlled by wall switches — so sconces, chandeliers, and effort. She didn’t like concealed functions — refrigerators behind panels, toiletries behind mirrors, TVs that descend into cabinets.

you don’t need it enough yet

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Every architect has fantasies of building her own home, and so does every woman. For as long as she could remember, Julia had felt a secret thrill whenever she passed a small parking lot or an undeveloped slice of land: potential . For what? To build something beautiful? Intelligent? New? Or simply for a home that might feel like home? Her joys were shared, not fully hers, but her thrills were private.

She had never wanted to become an architect, but she always wanted to make a home for herself. She disposed of the dolls to free the boxes they came in. She spent a summer furnishing the space under her bed. Her clothes covered every surface in her room, because closets shouldn’t be wasted with utility. It wasn’t until she started designing homes for herself — all on paper, each a source of pride and shame — that she came to understand what was meant by “herself.”

“This is so great,” Jacob said while being led through a floor plan. Julia never shared her personal work with him unless he explicitly asked. It wasn’t a secret, but the experience of sharing always seemed to leave her feeling humiliated. He was never enthusiastic enough, or not in the right ways. And when his enthusiasm came, it felt like a gift with too precious a bow. (The so ruined everything.) He was filing away his enthusiasm for future retrieval the next time she said he was never enthusiastic about her work. And it humiliated her, also, to need his enthusiasm, even to want it.

What’s wrong with such wanting and needing? Nothing. And the yawning distance from where you are to what you’d always imagined does not have to suggest failure. Disappointment need not be disappointing. The wanting, the needing, the distance, the disappointment: growing, knowing, committing, aging beside another. Alone, one can live perfectly. But not a life.

“It’s great,” he said, so close his nose almost touched the two-dimensional rendering of her fantasy. “Amazing, actually. How do you think of these things?”

“I’m not sure I do think of them.”

“This is what, an interior garden?”

“Yeah, the stairs will rise around a light shaft.”

“Sam would say, ‘ Shaft…’ ”

“And you would laugh, and I would ignore it.”

“Or we’d both ignore it. Anyway, this is really, really nice.”

“Thank you.”

Jacob touched his finger to the floor plan, moved it through a series of rooms, always through the doors. “I know I’m no good at reading these things, but where would the kids sleep?”

“What do you mean?”

“Unless I’m misunderstanding something here, which is probably the case, there’s only one bedroom.”

Julia tilted her head, squinted.

Jacob said, “You know the one about the couple who get divorced after eighty years of marriage?”

“No.”

“Everyone asks, ‘Why now? Why not decades ago, when there was still life to live? Or why not just see it through to the end?’ And they respond, ‘We were waiting for the grandchildren to die.’”

Julia liked calculators that printed — the Jews of the office store, having stubbornly out-survived so many more-promising business machines — and while the kids assembled school supplies, she would tap out feet of numbers. Once, she calculated the minutes until Benjy went to college. She left it there, as evidence.

Her homes were just stupid little exercises, a hobby. She and Jacob would never have the money, nor the time and energy, and she’d done enough residential architecture to know that the desire to wring out a few more drips of happiness almost always destroyed the happiness you were so lucky to have, and so foolish never to acknowledge. It happens every time: a forty-thousand-dollar kitchen remodel becomes a seventy-five-thousand-dollar kitchen remodel (because everyone comes to believe that small differences make big differences), becomes a new exit to the garden (to bring more light into the enhanced kitchen), becomes a new bathroom (if you’re already sealing off the floor for work …) , becomes stupidly rewiring the house to be smart (so you can control the music in the kitchen with your phone), becomes passive-aggression over whether the new bookshelves should be on legs (to reveal the inlaid floor borders), becomes aggressive-aggression whose origin can no longer be remembered. One can build a perfect home, but not live in it.