Joshua Ferris - To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“There’s always been a vigorous debate surrounding Job’s authorship,” he said. “Certain terms and expressions are undoubtedly Aramaic in tone, and the lack of any reference in the book of Job to historical events leads many scholars to argue it had non-Hebraic origins. The writer almost certainly predated Moses. What’s interesting to me is this man Eliphaz. He’s the only one besides Job who appears in the biblical account and… whatever account it is you have here. They’re characterized differently, of course, but the name’s the same.”

“Why is that interesting?”

“Well, you see, Eliphaz came from the city of Teman, which was in Edom. And Amalek was the grandson of Esau, who was the chief of the Edomite tribe. The Edomites and the Amalekites were related.”

I looked at him stupidly. He tried again.

“The account of creation in Genesis, as you may know, is rather like that of the Babylonian myth Enuma Elish . And of course the story of the Flood had its origins in the Epic of Gilgamesh , possibly even Hindu mythology. They are cruder accounts than the ones we know from the Bible. Nevertheless, they came first. They are urtexts, prototexts.”

“Sure,” I said. “This one borrows from that one, that one steals from the other one. It’s all a crock of shit.”

“No, now, listen,” he said, rocking his butt cheeks to scoot the chair closer to the desk. “If the book of Job was originally written in Aramaic, as we suspect, and if it’s an Edomite text, as we have reason to believe, because Eliphaz was born in an Edomite town, and if the two tribes, the Edomites and the Amalekites, were as closely connected as we think they were, both at war with the children of Israel, both harboring at Mount Seir, then what you have here… in the scan of this scroll, this rather poor scan… if it’s an original, the scroll, I mean, and if the translation is indeed faithful, it could very well be…”

He paused.

“What?” I said.

“The first draft of Job,” he said.

Connie wasn’t really all that beautiful. Sure, she had all the trappings of beauty: that hair, those speckled brown eyes. And she had beautiful breasts whose perfection was happily suggested by every variety of blouse and blazer and winter jacket you can imagine, to say nothing of the summertime wonders of T-shirts and bikini tops. To watch Connie cook eggs topless, which she did only once, at my request, while I took pictures I had every intention of deleting, was to live happily ever after for an entire afternoon. She was also extraordinarily well proportioned in a classical way, so she could wear anything just as well as the models and mannequins and not have to forgo that year’s trends because of a bummer body type. She was never just plain shit out of luck for a season because of an awkward waist or hip thing and didn’t have to hate other women on principle and talk about them being bitches and sluts because they wore a size 2. Her skin was as tight and tanned as parfleche, and her belly button went ovoid when she stretched naked. But if you got up close, or studied her closely night after night, year after year, you could see that her nose was too closely placed to her upper lip, the effect being a foreshortened or miniature upper lip and a nose that was slightly elephantine in comparison, which wrecked the perceived harmony and symmetry of her other features. It was a problem. I could ignore it when we were together, because not to ignore it while we were together would have been ungenerous. It would have put the focus on the superficial things and permitted the superficial things to diminish the substantial things, the delicate things that required careful nurturing like respect and friendship, and to fault her for something she essentially had no control over. She just had the misfortune of favoring her father in that one respect. On Howard Plotz there was practically no upper lip there at all.

Whenever I found myself concentrating too much on this particular aspect of her, and her likeness to a male, even one I admired as much as I did Howard, I consciously diverted my thinking. I thought of something else: her breasts, her wit, her tenderness toward me. But after we broke up, her truncated upper lip and flarey-nostril nose were practically all I noticed. They jumped out at me every time I talked to her, and instead of turning my attention away, I deliberately studied them, congratulating myself on escaping the fate of having to suffer them for the rest of my days.

And now on top of the lip, she was a believer in God.

I came back to the shop after my meeting with Sookhart and sat briefly inside my waiting room where I took a long hard look at Connie. Her facial disharmony was totally out of control that day. I almost had to look away. And I used to find it so endearing! It was that one incontestable piece of evidence that she was as human as the rest of us. If I had known that she secretly harbored a belief in God, I wondered, watching her at her various tasks, would I have romanticized that, too? If she had been honest about her theism, and if I had made myself more available, more vulnerable, as I had with Sam and the Santacroces, might I have opened my heart, as they say, to an impassioned plea or two and inquired honestly and without judgment how I might allow God to enter my life and love me? Might I have been the one all swept up and willing to change?

But she had not been honest, I had not made myself vulnerable, and now I felt relief. I had made a fool of myself with the Plotzes, sure, but it could have been a lot worse. I could have converted. I could have auditioned to become a cantor. But what were the Plotzes to me now? What was Judaism? What was Job to its first draft? And who was Connie next to Clara, the girl in the weathered Red Sox cap who had lovingly collected and shared with me the details of my family tree? I recalled Clara only vaguely, through a dreamlike haze. Compared with Connie at the front desk, roughed up by office light, in the humdrum backdrop of medical files, and possessed of a huge proboscis hovering above a withered lip, Clara possessed a spectral, perfectly proportioned beauty. All at once, I knew I was no longer in love with Connie. I was finally over her. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t even remember how I felt in the final minutes of our last breakup, when I was crying and crying and wholly unsure of how to go on.

My thoughts were interrupted when someone took a seat beside me. I looked over… it was Connie! I looked back to the front desk; there was no one there. She had stood, entered the waiting room, and sat down next to me, all while I was intently scrutinizing her. Sometimes I thought myself fully present when in fact I was so coiled up inside my own head that I was blind to whatever was happening before my very eyes.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” I said.

And then she did something unexpected. She reached around my elbow, which was planted on the arm of the chair, and took my hand, then turned it over and placed her other hand on top, holding my hand between hers. Her knees were turned so that her right knee was touching my left knee, while her left knee was jutting out so that she could face me better. She smiled, but the smile had nothing good to say. It required a lot of effort just to briefly raise the one side of her lip. “There’s something I think you should know,” she said. Whenever someone thinks you should know something, it’s usually something you really don’t want to know. “I’m seeing someone,” she said.

A music of everyday magic ceased forever, at once.

His name was Ben. He was a poet. They were kind of serious.

I didn’t say anything, and then I said, “What does ‘kind of serious’ mean?”

And she didn’t say anything, and then she said, “You know. Kind of serious.”