Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(17)

“Well, Mark…I don’t know what to say.”

“Congratulations?”

“Congratulations?”

“Sure.”

“That doesn’t feel right at all.”

“But it’s my feelings we’re talking about here.”

“Congratulations? Really?”

“I’m young. Just barely, but still.”

“Not just barely.”

“You’re right. We’re resolutely young. If we were seventy it would be different. Maybe even if we were sixty or fifty. Maybe then I’d say, This is who I am. This is my lot. But I’m forty-four. A huge portion of my life hasn’t happened. And the same is true for Jennifer. We realized we would be happier living other lives. That’s a good thing. Certainly better than pretending, or repressing, or just being so consumed with the responsibility of playing a part that you never question if it’s the part you would choose. I’m still young, Julia, and I want to choose happiness.”

“Happiness?”

“Happiness.”

“Whose happiness?”

“My happiness. Jennifer’s, too. Our happiness, but separately.”

“While we pursue happiness, we flee from contentment.”

“Well, neither my happiness nor contentment is with her. And her happiness definitely isn’t with me.”

“Where is it? Under a sofa cushion?”

“In fact, under her French tutor.”

“Holy shit,” Julia said, bringing the knob to her forehead harder than she’d intended.

“I don’t know why you’re having this reaction to good news.”

“She doesn’t even speak French.”

“And now we know why.”

Julia looked for the anorexic clerk. Anything to look away from Mark.

“And your happiness?” she asked. “What language are you not learning?”

He laughed. “For now, I’m happy to be alone. I’ve spent my whole life with others—my parents, girlfriends, Jennifer. Maybe I want something different.”

“Loneliness?”

“Aloneness isn’t loneliness.”

“This doorknob is very ugly.”

“Are you upset?”

“Too little distress, too much distress, it isn’t rocket science.”

“That’s why they save rocket scientists for rocket science.”

“I can’t believe you haven’t even mentioned the kids.”

“It’s painful.”

“What this is going to do to them. What seeing them half the time is going to do to you.”

She pressed into the display case, angled herself a few degrees. No amount of adjusting could make this conversation comfortable, but it would at least deflect the blow. She put down the knob and picked up one whose only honest comparison would be the dildo she was given at her bachelorette party, sixteen years before. It had resembled a penis as little as this knob resembled a knob. Her girlfriends laughed, and she laughed, and four months later she came upon it while searching her closet with the hopes of regifting an unopened matcha whisk, and she found herself bored or hormonal enough to give it a shot. It accomplished nothing. Too dry. Too unwillful. But holding the ridiculous doorknob, then, she could think of nothing else.

“I lost my interior monologue,” Mark said.

“Your interior monologue?” Julia asked with a dismissive grin.

“That’s right.”

She handed him the knob: “Mark, it’s your interior monologue calling. He was mugged by your id in Nigeria and needs you to wire it two hundred fifty thousand dollars by the end of the day.”

“Maybe it sounds silly. Maybe I sound selfish—”

“Yes and yes.”

“—but I lost what made me me.”

“You’re an adult, Mark, not a Shel Silverstein character contemplating emotional boo-boos on the stump of a tree whose trunk he used for a dacha, or whatever.”

“The harder you push back,” he said, “the more sure I am that you agree.”

“Agree? Agree with what? We’re talking about your life.”

“We’re talking about the endless clenched-jaw worrying about the kids all day, and the endless replaying of unhad fights with your spouse all night. You wouldn’t be a happier, more ambitious and productive architect if you were alone? You wouldn’t be less weary?”

“What, me weary?”

“The more you joke, the more sure—”

“Of course I would.”

“And vacations? You wouldn’t enjoy them more alone?”

“Not so loud.”

“Or someone would hear that you’re human?”

She ran her thumb over the head of the knob.

“Of course I’d miss my kids,” she said. “You wouldn’t?”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“Yes, I’d prefer to have them with me and them on vacation.”

“Tough sentence to assemble?”

“I would choose their presence. If it were a choice.”

“Is it the never sleeping in, the never enjoying a meal, or the hypervigilance at the edge of a beach chair that your back will never touch?”