Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(147)

“I don’t know how I could be any more sorry for what I did,” he said.

“You could start by telling me you’re sorry.”

“I’ve apologized many times.”

“No, many times you’ve told me that you’ve apologized. But you’ve never once apologized to me.”

“I did that night in the kitchen.”

“You didn’t.”

“In bed.”

“No.”

“On the phone in the car, when you were at Model UN.”

“You told me you’d apologized, but you didn’t apologize. I pay attention, Jacob. I remember. Exactly once, since I found the phone, did you say, ‘I’m sorry.’ When I told you your grandfather died. And you weren’t saying it to me. Or to anyone.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter if that’s the case—”

“It is the case, and it does matter.”

“It doesn’t matter if that’s the case, because if you don’t remember an apology, I obviously didn’t apologize fully enough. So hear me now: I’m so sorry, Julia. I’m ashamed, and I’m sorry.”

“It’s not the texts.”

The night Julia found the phone, she told Jacob, “You seem happy, but you aren’t.” And more: “You find unhappiness so threatening that you would rather go down with the ship than acknowledge a leak.” What if she wouldn’t go down with the ship? Because if it wasn’t the texts, then it was everything. What if, when Jacob closed himself in the unoccupied room, he closed Julia in the unoccupied house? What if the thing he needed to apologize for was everything?

“Tell me,” he said, “just tell me, why are you going to destroy this family?”

“Don’t you dare say that.”

“But it’s true. You’re destroying our family.”

“I’m not. I’m ending our marriage.”

He couldn’t believe what she had just dared to say.

“Ending our marriage will destroy our family.”

“No. It won’t.”

“Why? Why are you ending our marriage?”

“Who have I been having all of those conversations with for the last three weeks?”

“We were talking.”

She let that reverberate for a moment, then said, “That’s why.”

“Because we were talking?”

“Because you’re always talking, and your words never mean anything. You hid your greatest secret behind a wall, remember that?”

“No.”

“Our wedding. I walked seven circles around you, and I surrounded you with love, for years I did, and the wall toppled. I toppled it. But you know what I discovered? Your greatest secret is that you’re wall all the way to the centermost stone. There is nothing there.”

And now he had no choice: “I’m going to Israel, Julia.”

And either because of the addition of her name, or a shift in his tone, or more likely because the conversation had reached the point of breakage, the sentence took on a new meaning—one that Julia believed.

“I can’t believe this,” she said.

“I have to.”

“For whom?”

“Our kids. And their kids.”

“Our kids don’t have kids.”

“But they will.”

“So that’s the trade: lose a father, gain a kid?”

“You said it yourself, Julia: they’re going to put me behind a computer.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You said they wouldn’t be dumb enough to give me a gun.”

“No, I didn’t say that, either.”

Jacob could hear the click of a lamp. A hotel? Mark’s apartment? How could he ask her where she was in a way that didn’t convey judgment or jealousy or imply that he was going to Israel to punish her for having gone to Mark’s?

More than a thousand “constructed languages” have been invented—by linguists, novelists, hobbyists—each with the dream of correcting the imprecision, inefficiency, and irregularity of natural language. Some constructed languages are based on the musical scale and sung. Some are color-based and silent. The most admired constructed languages were designed to reveal what communication could be, and none of them is in use.

“If you’re going to do this,” Julia said, “if you’re really going to do this, I need two things from you.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you’re going to go to Israel—”

“I am.”

“—you need to do two things for me.”

“OK.”

“Sam needs to have a bar mitzvah. You can’t leave without helping to see that through.”

“OK. Let’s do it tomorrow.”

“As in, today?”

“Wednesday. And we’ll do it here.”

“Does he even know his whole haftorah yet?”

“He knows enough. We can invite whatever family can make it, whatever friends Sam wants. The Israelis are here. I can get ninety percent of what we need at Whole Foods. We’ll skip the accoutrements, obviously.”

“My parents wouldn’t be able to be there.”