Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(34)

“That’s a funny way of saying no.”

“What was the question?”

“Is there something you need to tell me?”

“There’s always a lot of things I want to tell you.”

“I said need.”

Argus moaned.

“I don’t understand this conversation,” Jacob said. “And what the hell is that smell?”

So many days in their shared life. So many experiences. How had they managed to spend the previous sixteen years unlearning each other? How had all the presence summed to disappearance?

And now, their first baby on the brink of manhood, and their last asking questions about death, they found themselves in the kitchen with things finally worth not talking about.

Julia noticed a small stain on her shirt and starting rubbing at it, despite knowing it was old and permanent.

“I’m guessing you didn’t bring home the dry cleaning.”

The only thing she hated more than feeling like she was feeling was sounding like she was sounding. As Irv had told her Golda Meir had told Anwar Sadat: “We can forgive you for killing our children, but we will never forgive you for making us kill yours.” She hated the person Jacob forced her to sound like: pissy and aggrieved, unfun, the nagging wife she would have killed herself to avoid becoming.

“I have a bad memory,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“I have a bad memory, too, but I don’t forget things.”

“I’m sorry, OK?”

“That would be easier to accept without the OK.”

“You act as if I only ever make mistakes.”

“Help me out,” she said. “What, in this house, do you do well?”

“You’re serious?”

Argus let out a long moan.

Jacob turned to him and gave a bit of what he wasn’t capable of giving to Julia: “Chill the f*ck out!” And then, not appreciating the joke he was making at his own expense: “I never raise my voice.”

She appreciated it: “Isn’t that right, Argus?”

“Not at you or the kids.”

“Not raising your voice—or not beating me or molesting the children, for that matter—doesn’t qualify as something you do well. It qualifies as basic decency. And anyway, you don’t raise your voice, because you’re repressed.”

“No I’m not.”

“If you don’t say so.”

“Even if that’s why I don’t raise my voice, and I don’t think it is, it’s still a good thing. A lot of men scream.”

“I’m jealous of their wives.”

“You want me to be an *?”

“I want you to be a person.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Are you sure there isn’t something you need to tell me?”

“I don’t understand why you keep asking me that.”

“I’ll rephrase the question: What’s the password?”

“To what?”

“To the phone you’re clenching.”

“It’s my new phone. What’s the big deal?”

“I’m your wife. I’m the big deal.”

“You’re not making sense.”

“I don’t have to.”

“What do you want, Julia?”

“Your password.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to know what it is you can’t tell me.”

“Julia.”

“Once again, you have correctly identified me.”

Jacob had spent more waking hours in his kitchen than in any other room. No baby knows when the nipple is pulled from his mouth for the last time. No child knows when he last calls his mother “Mama.” No small boy knows when the book has closed on the last bedtime story that will ever be read to him. No boy knows when the water drains from the last bath he will ever take with his brother. No young man knows, as he first feels his greatest pleasure, that he will never again not be sexual. No brinking woman knows, as she sleeps, that it will be four decades before she will again awake infertile. No mother knows she is hearing the word Mama for the last time. No father knows when the book has closed on the last bedtime story he will ever read: From that day on, and for many years to come, peace reigned on the island of Ithaca, and the gods looked favorably upon Odysseus, his wife, and his son. Jacob knew that whatever happened, he would see the kitchen again. And yet his eyes became sponges for the details—the burnished handle of the snack drawer; the seam where the slabs of soapstone met; the Special Award for Bravery sticker on the underside of the island’s overhang, given to Max for what no one knew was his last pulled tooth, a sticker Argus saw many times every day, and only Argus ever saw—because Jacob knew he would one day wring them out for the last drops of these last moments; they would come as tears.

“Fine,” Jacob said.

“Fine what?”

“Fine, I’ll tell you the password.”

He put the phone on the counter with a righteous force that might, just might, have jarred loose the workings, and said, “But know that this lack of trust will always be between us.”

“I can live with that.”

He looked at the phone.