Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(35)
“I’m just trying to remember what the password even is. I lost it right after I got it. I don’t even think I’ve used it yet.”
He picked up the phone and stared at it.
“Maybe the password the Blochs use for everything?” she suggested.
“Right,” he said. “That’s definitely what I would have used: t-h-i-s-2-s-h-a-l-l-p-a-s-s. And…nope.”
“Hm. I guess not.”
“I can probably have the store unlock it.”
“Maybe, and this is just a stab in the dark, you could capitalize the first letter, and type t-w-o instead of the numeral?”
“I wouldn’t do it like that,” he said.
“No?”
“No. We always do it the same way.”
“Give it a try.”
He wanted to escape this childish terror, but he wanted to be a child.
“But I wouldn’t do it like that.”
“Who really knows what one would do? Just try it.”
He examined the phone, and his fingers around it, and the house around them, and with an unmediated impulse—as reflexive as the kicked leg of a hammered knee—he hurled it through the window, shattering the glass.
“I thought it was open.”
And then a silence that struck bedrock.
Julia said, “You think I don’t know how to get to our lawn?”
“I—”
“And why wouldn’t you just create a sophisticated password? One Sam wouldn’t be able to guess?”
“Sam looked at the phone?”
“No. But only because you’re incredibly lucky.”
“You’re sure?”
“How could you have written those things?”
“What things?”
“It’s way too late in this conversation for that.”
Jacob knew it was too late, and absorbed the gouges in the cutting board, the succulents between the sink and window, the kids’ drawings blue-taped to the backsplash.
“They didn’t mean anything,” he said.
“I feel sorry for someone who is capable of saying so much and meaning nothing.”
“Julia, give me a chance to explain.”
“Why can’t you mean nothing to me?”
“What?”
“You tell someone who isn’t the mother of your children that you want to lick your cum out of her *, and the only person who makes me feel beautiful is the f*cking Korean florist at the back of the deli, who isn’t even a florist.”
“I’m disgusting.”
“Don’t you dare do that.”
“Julia, this might be hard to believe, but they were only texts. That’s all that ever happened.”
“First of all, that’s easy to believe. No one knows better than I do that you’re incapable of an actually brave transgression. I know that you’re too big a * to actually lick anyone’s *, cum-filled or not.”
“Julia.”
“But more important, how much needs to happen? You think you can go around saying and writing whatever you want without consequence? Maybe your father can. Maybe your mother is weak enough to tolerate that kind of piggishness. But I’m not. There’s decency and indecency, and they’re different. Good and bad are different. Do you not know this?”
“Of course I—”
“No, of course you don’t. You wrote to a woman who isn’t your wife that her tight * doesn’t deserve you?”
“That’s not really what I wrote. And it was in the context of—”
“And you’re not really a good person, and there is no context that could make such a thing OK to say.”
“It was a moment of weakness, Julia.”
“Are you forgetting that you never deleted any of them? That there is a history to refer to? It wasn’t a moment of weakness, it was a person of weakness. And will you please stop saying my name.”
“It’s over.”
“Do you want to know the worst part? I don’t even care. The saddest thing about this has been confronting my own lack of sadness.”
Jacob didn’t believe that, but neither could he believe that she would say it. The pretense of a loving relationship had made the absence of a loving relationship bearable. But now she was letting go of appearances.
“Listen, I think—”
“Lick the cum out of her *?” She laughed. “You? You’re a coward and a germ freak. You just wanted to write it. Which is fine. Which is even great. But acknowledge the make-believe. You want to want some kind of sexually supercharged life, but you actually want the gate-checked stroller, and the Aquaphor, and even your desiccated, blowjobless existence, because it spares you worrying about erections. Jesus, Jacob, you carry a packet of wipes so you’ll never have to use toilet paper. That’s not the behavior of a man who wants to lick cum from anyone’s *.”
“Julia, stop.”
“And by the way, even if you found yourself in that situation, with an actual woman’s actual * filled with your actual cum and beckoning your tongue? You know what you’d do? You’d get your ridiculous hand tremors, sweat through your shirt, lose the one-quarter, Jell-O mold erection you would have been lucky to achieve in the first place, and probably shuffle off to the bathroom to check the Huffington Post for puerile, unfunny videos or relisten to the Radiolab in praise of tortoises. That’s what would happen. And she’d know you were the joke that you are.”