Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(11)
“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.
do you like my tongue pushing its way between your tight lips?
show me
cum on my mouth
There was a night, early in their marriage, at a Pennsylvania inn. She and Jacob shared a joint—the first time either had smoked since college—and lay in bed naked, and promised to share everything, everything without exception, regardless of the shame or discomfort or potential for hurt. It felt like the most ambitious promise two people could make to each other. Basic truth telling felt like a revelation.
“No exceptions,” Jacob said.
“Even one would undermine everything.”
“Bed-wetting. That kind of thing.”
Julia took Jacob’s hand and said, “Do you know how much I’d love you for sharing something like that?”
“I don’t happen to bed-wet, by the way. I’m just establishing boundaries.”
“No boundaries. That’s the point.”
“Past sexual encounters?” Jacob asked, because he knew it was the address of his greatest vulnerability, and so the place such sharing would have to go. Always, even after he’d lost the desire to touch or be touched by her, he abhorred the thought of her touching or being touched by another man. People she’d been with, pleasure she’d given and received, things she’d moaned. He was not an insecure person in other contexts, but his brain was compelled, with the magnetism of someone unable to escape the perpetual reliving of a trauma, to imagine her being sexually intimate with others. What did she say to them that she also said to him? Why would such repetitions feel like the ultimate betrayal?
“Of course they would be painful,” she said. “But the point isn’t that I want to know everything about you. It’s that I don’t want anything about you withheld.”
“So I won’t.”
“And I won’t.”
They passed the joint back and forth a few times, feeling so brave, so still-young.
“What are you withholding right now?” she asked, almost giddily.
“Right now, nothing.”
“But you have withheld?”
“Therefore I am.”
She laughed. She loved his quickness, the oddly comforting warmth of his mind’s connections.
“What’s the last thing you withheld from me?”
He thought about it. Being stoned made it harder to think, but easier to share thoughts.
“OK,” he said. “It’s a little one.”
“I want all of them.”
“OK. We were in the apartment the other day. It was Wednesday, maybe? And I made breakfast for you. Remember? The goat cheese frittata.”
“Yeah,” she said, resting her hand on his thigh, “that was nice.”