Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(151)
Without intending to, Julia picked up where she’d left off earlier: “When they were tiny, I wouldn’t take my eyes off them for two seconds. But there’s going to come a time when we won’t speak for days on end.”
“There won’t.”
“There will. Every parent thinks it will never happen to them, but it happens to everyone.”
“We won’t let it happen.”
“And at the same time we’ll force it to happen.”
Then they were upstairs. She searched her toiletries until she couldn’t remember what she was searching for. He switched the placement of his sweaters and T-shirts—a little early this year. The windows were black, but she lowered the shades for the morning. He stood on an ottoman to reach a bulb. And then they were at the side-by-side sinks, brushing.
“There’s an interesting house for sale,” Jacob said, “in Rock Creek Park.”
“On Davenport?”
“What?”
She spat, and said, “The house on Davenport?”
“Yeah.”
“I saw it.”
“You went to it?”
“The listing.”
“Kind of interesting, no?”
“This house is better,” she said.
“This is the best house.”
“It’s a very good house.”
He spat, then alternated between rinsing the brush and brushing his tongue. “I should sleep on the sofa,” he said.
“Or I can.”
“No, I’ll go. I should get used to sleeping in uncomfortable places, toughen myself up a bit.” His joke applied pressure to something serious.
“The shabby-chic sofa isn’t such a deprivation.” Her joke pushed back.
“Maybe it would be a good thing if I set an alarm for quite early, and came back up to the bedroom so the boys could find us there together in the morning?”
“They’re going to have to know at some point. And they probably already know.”
“After the bar mitzvah. Let’s give them this last bit. Even if everyone is in on the make-believe.”
“Are we really not going to say any more about your going to Israel?”
“What else is there to say?”
“That it’s insane.”
“That’s already been said.”
“That it’s unfair to me, and to the kids.”
“That’s already been said.”
What hadn’t been said, and what he wanted to hear, and what might even have made him choose differently, was “That I don’t want you to go.” But instead she’d given: “You’re not my spouse.”
The sofa was perfectly comfortable—more comfortable than the seven-thousand-dollar organic kelp and pony hair mattress Julia had insisted on buying—but Jacob couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t even make it to tossing and turning. He wasn’t sure what he felt—it could have been guilt, it could have been humiliation, or just sadness—and as always, when he couldn’t place a feeling, it became anger.
He went to the basement and turned on the TV. CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ABC: it was all coverage of the Middle East, all interchangeable. Why could he never admit that he was just looking for his show, which wasn’t even his show? It wasn’t ego, it was self-flagellation. Which was ego.
There it was, syndicated on TBS. Sometimes Jacob convinced himself it was better with the swearing and brief flashes of nudity removed, that they were there only because the freedom to do such things had to be justified by exercising it. Jacob wondered what the executive producers were making for the airing, and switched the station.
He flipped past some sort of cooking reality show, some sort of X Games something or other, past one of the despicable Despicable Me iterations. Everything was another version of something that was never good to begin with. He made a full journey around the planet of television, ending at his point of departure: CNN.
Wolf Blitzer had once again relieved the horrible tension of his purgatorial beard—neither a beard nor not a beard—with yet another new pair of glasses. He was a man on TV standing in front of a TV, using this TV-in-a-TV to explain the geopolitics of the Middle East. Jacob zoned out. Normally, he would have taken this moment of mental meandering to contemplate masturbating, or whether whatever Pirate Booty rubble could be found at the bottom of the bag would justify the trip upstairs. But instead, inspired by the next day’s bar mitzvah, he thought about his own, almost thirty years before. His portion was Ki Tissa, which, his bad luck, happened to be the longest portion in Exodus, and among the longest in the Torah. He remembered that much. Ki Tissa means “when you take,” the first distinctive words in the portion, referring to the first census of the Jews. He had some vague memory of the melodies, but they could just as well have been generic Jewish-sounding musical phrases, the kind people fall back on when faking a prayer they are embarrassed not to know.
There was a lot of drama in the portion: the first census, Moses ascending Mount Sinai, the golden calf, Moses destroying the tablets, Moses ascending Mount Sinai a second time and returning with what would be the Ten Commandments. But what he remembered most clearly wasn’t even in the parsha itself, but a related text, a passage of the Talmud, given to him by his rabbi, which addressed the question of what was done with the broken tablets. Even as an uninterested thirteen-year-old, it struck Jacob as a beautiful question. According to the Talmud, God instructed Moses to put both the intact tablets and the broken tablets in the ark. The Jews carried them—the broken and the whole—for their forty years of wandering, and placed them both in the Temple in Jerusalem.