Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(138)

“Hello?”

She stood motionless and silent. Could the microphone detect her breathing? Was Mark listening to her exhalations, four floors above?

“I can see you, Julia. There’s a little camera just above the buzzers.”

“It’s Julia,” Julia said, as if she could snip out those last couple of seconds and respond to “Hello?” like a normal human being.

“Yes, I’m looking at you.”

“This is an unpleasant feeling.”

“So get out of the frame and come on up.”

The door opened itself.

And then the elevator doors opened for her, and then opened for her again.

“I wasn’t expecting you,” Mark said, ushering her in.

“I wasn’t expecting me, either.”

Reflexively, she scanned the apartment. Everything was new and new-looking: phony moldings, floors glossy enough for bowling, fat plastic dimmer slides.

“As you can see,” Mark said, “it’s a work in progress.”

“What isn’t?”

“A lot of furniture is arriving tomorrow. Tomorrow it will look completely different.”

“Well, then I’m glad I got to see the before.”

“And it’s temporary. I needed a place, and this…was a place.”

“Do you think I’m judging you?”

“No, but I think you’re judging my apartment.”

She looked at Mark, the efforts he made: he worked out, used hair product, bought clothes that someone—in a magazine or store—told him were cool. She looked around the apartment: how high were the ceilings, how tall the windows, how glossy the appliances.

“Where do you eat?”

“Out, usually. Always.”

“Where do you open mail?”

“That sofa is where I do everything.”

“You sleep on it?”

“Everything but sleep.”

Everything but sleep: it was unbearably suggestive. Or so Julia felt. But everything felt unbearably suggestive to her right then, because she was unbearably exposed. Before the skin regrew and healed, some of the inside of Sam’s hand was on the outside, and infection was a constant concern. Childishly, Julia didn’t want to blame her child’s hand for its vulnerability, and so saw him as having stayed the same and the world as having become more threatening. They went straight from the hospital to ice cream. “Every topping?” the server asked. As her hand pressed on the door—the first door she’d opened since the heavy one shut—Julia noticed the back of the OPEN sign. “Look,” she said, finding, in the joke, another reason to hate herself, “the world is closed.”

“No,” Sam said. “Close. Like near.”

Another reason to hate herself.

There were so many things she could have said to Mark. There was so much available small talk. It was at sleepaway camp that she learned how to make a bed with hospital corners. It was at the hospital that she learned how to press tightly folded words between massive seconds. But she didn’t want things to be tidy or concealed right then. But she didn’t want things to be as disheveled and exposed as they felt.

What did she want?

“What do I want?” she asked, quiet as a spacewalk.

She wanted some of her insides on the outside, but which insides and how much?

“What?” Mark asked.

“I don’t know why I’m asking you.”

“I didn’t hear what you asked,” he said, closing the distance between them, perhaps to hear better.

She’d tried everything: juice cleanses, poetry binges, knitting, writing letters by hand to people she’d let go of, moments of the unmediated honesty they’d promised each other in Pennsylvania sixteen years before. She’d tried meditating half a dozen times, but always felt lost when guided to “remember” her body. She knew what was meant, but was incapable, or unwilling.

She took a step toward Mark, closing the distance, perhaps so that all she couldn’t say could be better heard.

But now, and without trying, she remembered her body. She remembered her breasts, which hadn’t been seen by another man, not sexually, since she was young. She remembered their heaviness, that they were the slowly descending weights powering her biological clock. They had appeared too early, but grew too slowly, and were referred to by the only college boyfriend whose birthday she still remembered as “Platonic.” They became so sensitive when she had her period that she held them as she walked around the house. Years after it was turned off for the last time, she still occasionally heard the asthmatic Medela breast pump struggling not to die. She had grown to know her breasts more intimately as there was more to fear, but she looked away when, each of the last three years, they were pressed between mammogram plates—each time the tech made the unsolicited promise that the machine delivered less radiation than she would be exposed to on a transatlantic flight. When Jacob took her to Paris for her forty-first birthday, she imagined the kids searching the sky for her plane, her breasts glowing like poisoned beacons for them.

What did she want?

She wanted everything on the outside.

She wanted something impossible, whose fulfillment would destroy her.

And then she understood Jacob. She had believed him when he said his words were only words, but she never understood him. Now she understood: he needed to stick his hand in the hinge. But he didn’t want to close the door on himself.