Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(47)
“What?”
“No. Her. The singer.”
“Be nice.”
For the finale, the drama and music teachers teamed up for a sanitized version of the opener from The Book of Mormon—living out their dreams while reconfirming why they were dreams. Lots of applause, a brief thank-you from the principal, and the kids filed out and back to class.
Jacob and Julia walked back to their cars in silence. And the talent show wasn’t mentioned at home that night. Had Max chickened out? Did he consider himself talentless? Was his abstention an act of aggression or a call for help? If they’d brought any of these questions to him, he would have pointed out that he told them not to go.
Three nights later, when Jacob came to bed, after having waited the requisite hour, Julia was still reading, so he said, “Oh, I forgot something,” and headed back down to not read the paper while not watching another episode of Homeland and regretting, as he often did, that Mandy Patinkin wasn’t ten years older—he’d have made a great Irv.
Two days after that, Julia walked into the pantry, where Jacob was checking to see if a few hundred billion atoms had spontaneously organized themselves into an unhealthy snack in the ten minutes since he last checked. She walked back out. (Unlike Jacob, she never gave an ostensible explanation for moving away from him, she never “forgot something.”) The pantry wasn’t among the unofficially claimed spaces—as the TV room was Jacob’s, and the small sitting room was Julia’s—but it was too small to be shared.
On the tenth day, Jacob opened the bathroom door to see Julia drying off after a bath. She covered herself. He had seen her come out of hundreds of baths, seen three children come out of her body. He had watched her dress and undress thousands and thousands of times, and twice at the inn in Pennsylvania. They’d made love in every position, offering every view of every body part. “Sorry,” he said, not knowing what the word referred to, only that his foot had half depressed a mine’s trigger.
Or stumbled upon an artifact of old battle, which might have been safe to examine, explore, even value.
What if, instead of apologizing and turning, he’d asked her if the need to conceal herself was new, or old with a new justification?
When Robert E. Lee’s defensive line at Petersburg had been broken and the evacuation of Richmond was imminent, Jefferson Davis ordered the Confederate treasury be moved. It went by train, and then wagon, under many eyes and between many hands. The Union pressed forward, the Confederacy crumbled, and the whereabouts of the five tons of gold bars remain a mystery, although they are assumed buried.
What if, instead of apologizing and turning, he’d gone to her, touched her, shown her not only that he still wanted to make love to her, but that he was still capable of risking rejection?
On Jacob’s first visit to Israel, his cousin Shlomo took the family to the Dome of the Rock, which at the time could be entered by non-Muslims. Jacob was as deeply moved by the devotion of the men on the prayer rugs as he was by the Jews below. He was more moved, because the devotion was less self-conscious: at the Wailing Wall the men merely bobbed; here they wailed. Shlomo explained that they were standing atop a cave carved into the Foundation Stone. And in the floor of that cave was a slight depression, thought to be above another cave, often referred to as the Well of Souls. It was there that Abraham answered God’s call, and prepared to sacrifice his beloved son; there that Muhammad ascended to heaven; there that the Ark of the Covenant was buried, full of broken and whole tablets. According to the Talmud, the stone marks the center of the world, serving as a cover for the abyss in which the waters from the Flood still rage.
“We are standing atop the greatest archaeological site that will never be,” Shlomo said, “filled with the most valuable objects in the world, the place where history and religion meet. All underground, never to be touched.”
Irv was adamant that Israel should dig, come what may. It was a cultural, historical, and intellectual obligation. But to Jacob, until those things were unearthed—until they could be seen and touched—they would be unreal. So it was better to keep them out of sight.
What if, instead of apologizing and turning, Jacob had gone to Julia and lifted the towel, as he’d lifted her veil before the wedding, confirming that she was still the woman she said she was, the woman he still wanted?
Jacob tried to keep the conversations with Julia underground, but she needed the end of their family to be seen and touched. She expressed her continued respect for Jacob, her desire to be friends, best friends, and good co-parents, the best, and to use a mediator and not get lost in all that was not to be cared about, and to live around the corner from each other and go on vacations together, and to dance at each other’s second weddings—although she swore that she would never marry again. Jacob agreed, without believing that any of what she said was either happening or would happen. They’d experienced so many necessary passages—sleep-training the boys, teething, falls from small bicycles, Sam’s physical therapy. This, too, would probably pass.
They could navigate the house to avoid each other, and they could navigate conversations to maintain the illusion of safety, but there was no underground when a child was in the room or the conversation. Many times, Julia would catch sight of one of the boys—Benjy looking up in thought from a drawing of Odysseus facing the Cyclops, Max examining the hairs on his forearm, Sam carefully applying reinforcements as needed in his binder—and think, I can’t.