Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(16)
She never knew what to do with the feeling of wanting more for herself: time, space, quiet. Maybe girls would have been different, but she had boys. For a year she held them against her, but after that sleepless holiday she was at the mercy of their physicality: their screaming, wrestling, table drumming, competitive farting, and endless explorations of their scrotums. She loved it, all of it, but needed time, space, and quiet. Maybe if she’d had girls, maybe they’d have been more contemplative, less brutish, more constructive, less animalistic. Even approaching such thoughts made her feel unmotherly, although she always knew she was a good mother. So why was it so complicated? There were women who would spend their last pennies to do the things she resented. Every blessing that was promised the barren heroines of the Bible had fallen into her open hands like rain. And through them.
i want to lick the cum out of your *
She met Mark at the hardware gallery. It was elegant, and it was obnoxious, and in a world where the bodies of Syrian children washed up on beaches, it was unethical, or at least vulgar. But her commissions added up.
Mark was already handling samples when she arrived. He looked good: a tightly cropped, gray-dusted beard; clothes that were intentionally snug and not bought in sets of three. He had the physical confidence of someone who doesn’t know within one hundred thousand dollars the contents of his bank account at any given moment. It wasn’t attractive, but it wasn’t ignorable.
“Julia.”
“Mark.”
“We seem not to have Alzheimer’s.”
“What’s Alzheimer’s?”
Innocent flirtation was so revitalizing—the gentle tickling of language that gently tickled one’s ego. She was good at it, and loved it, always had, but grew to feel guilty about it in the course of her marriage. She knew there was nothing wrong with such playfulness; she wanted Jacob to have it in his life. But she also knew of his irrational, uncontainable jealousy. And frustrating as it could be—she never dared to mention a romantic or sexual experience from her past, and needed to overclarify any remotely misinterpretable experience in the present—it was part of him, and so something she wanted to care for.
And it was a part of him that drew her in. His sexual insecurity was so profound, it could only have sprung from a profound source. And even when she felt that she knew everything about him, she never knew what created his insatiable need for reassurance. Sometimes, after deliberately omitting something innocent that she knew would upset his brittle peace, she would look at her husband with love and think, What happened to you?
“Sorry I’m late,” she said, adjusting her collar. “Sam got in some trouble at Hebrew school.”
“Oy vey.”
“Indeed. Anyway, I’m here. Physically and mentally.”
“Maybe we should go get that coffee first?”
“I’m trying to quit.”
“Why?”
“Too dependent on it.”
“That’s only a problem if there isn’t coffee around.”
“And Jacob says—”
“That’s only a problem if Jacob’s around.”
Julia giggled at that, unsure if she was giggling at his joke or her girlish inability to resist his boyish charm.
“Let’s earn the caffeine,” she said, taking a too-distressed bronze knob from his hand.
“So I have some news,” Mark said.
“Me, too. Should we wait for Jennifer?”
“We shouldn’t. And that’s my news.”
“What do you mean?”
“Jennifer and I are getting divorced.”
“What?”
“We’ve been separated since May.”
“You said divorced.”
“We’ve been separated. We’re getting divorced.”
“No,” she said, squeezing the knob, further distressing it, “you haven’t.”
“Haven’t what?”
“Been separated.”
“I would know.”
“But we’ve been together. We went to the Kennedy Center.”
“Yes, we were at a play.”
“You laughed, and touched. I saw.”
“We’re friends. Friends laugh.”
“They don’t touch.”
Mark extended his hand and touched Julia’s shoulder. She reflexively recoiled, eliciting a laugh from each of them.
“We’re friends who were married,” he said.
Julia organized her hair behind her ear and said, “Who still are married.”
“Who are about not to be.”
“I don’t think this is right.”
“Right?”
“Happening.”
He held up his ringless hand: “It’s been happening for at least long enough to erase a tan line.”
A skinny woman approached.
“Anything I can help with today?”
“Maybe tomorrow,” Julia said.
“I think we’re OK for now,” Mark said, with a smile that appeared, to Julia, as flirtatious as the one he’d given her.
“I’ll just be over there,” the woman said.
Julia put down the knob with a bit too much force and picked up another, a stainless octagon—ridiculously effortful, repulsively masculine.