Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(78)
Pornography was only one example of the chasm between their life experiences. Tamir walked himself to school before Jacob’s parents would leave him at a drop-off birthday party. Tamir cooked his own dinner, while an airplane full of dark green vegetables searched for a landing strip in Jacob’s mouth. Tamir drank beer before Jacob, smoked pot before Jacob, got a blowjob before Jacob, got arrested before Jacob (who would never be arrested), traveled abroad before Jacob, had his heart created by having his heart broken before Jacob. When Tamir was given an M16, Jacob was given a Eurail pass. Tamir tried without success to stay out of risky situations; Jacob tried without success to find his way into them. At nineteen, Tamir was in a half-buried outpost in south Lebanon, behind four feet of concrete. Jacob was in a dorm in New Haven whose bricks had been buried for two years before construction so that they would look older than they were. Tamir didn’t resent Jacob—he would have been Jacob, given the choice—but he had lost some of the lightness necessary to appreciate someone as light as his cousin. He’d fought for his homeland, while Jacob spent entire nights debating whether that stupid New Yorker poster where New York is bigger than everything else would look better on this wall or that one. Tamir tried not to get killed, while Jacob tried not to die of boredom.
After his service, Tamir was finally free to live on his own terms. He became hugely ambitious, in the sense of wanting to make shitloads of money and buy loads of shit. He dropped out of Technion after a year and founded the first of a series of high-tech start-ups. Almost all of them were flops, but it doesn’t take many nonflops to make your first five million. Jacob was too jealous to give Tamir the pleasure of explaining what his companies did, but it wasn’t hard to surmise that, like most Israeli high tech, they applied military technologies to civilian life.
Tamir’s homes and cars and ego and girlfriends’ breasts got bigger every visit. Jacob put on a respectful face that revealed just the right amount of disapproval, but in the end, all his emotional dog whistles were rendered pointless by Tamir’s emotional tone-deafness. Why couldn’t Jacob just be happy for his cousin’s happiness? Tamir was as good a person as just about anyone, whose great success made his good-enough values increasingly difficult to act on. It’s confusing to have more than you need. Who could blame him?
Jacob could. Jacob could because he had less than he needed—he was an honorable, ambitious, near-broke novelist who barely ever wrote—and that wasn’t in any way confusing. Nothing was getting bigger in his life—it was a constant struggle to maintain the sizes he’d established—and people without fancy material possessions have their fancy values to flaunt.
Isaac always favored Tamir. Jacob could never figure out why. His grandfather seemed to have serious problems with all his post–bar mitzvah relatives, very much including those who forced their children to skype with him once a week, and took him to doctors, and drove him to distant supermarkets where one could buy six tins of baking powder for the price of five. Everyone ignored Isaac, but no one less than Jacob, and no one more than Tamir. Yet Isaac would have traded six Jacobs for five Tamirs.
Tamir. Now, he’s a good grandson.
Even if he wasn’t all that good, or in any way his grandson.
Maybe it was the distance Isaac loved. Maybe the absence allowed for a mythology, while Jacob was cursed to be judged by the increments he fell short of perfect menschiness.
Jacob tried to persuade Tamir to come see Isaac before the move to the Jewish Home. There were eighteen months of purgatory as they waited for someone to die and free up a room. But Tamir denied the significance of the event.
“I’ve moved six times in the last ten years,” he e-mailed, although like this: “iv mvd 6 tms n lst 10 yrs,” as if English were as vowelless as Hebrew. Or as if there were no possible way for him to give less of a shit about the message.
“Sure,” Jacob wrote back, “but never to an assisted-living facility.”
“I’ll come when he dies, OK?”
“I’m not sure that visit will mean as much to him.”
“And we’ll be there for Sam’s bar mitzvah,” Tamir responded, although at that point it was still a year away and definitively happening.
“I hope he makes it that long,” Jacob wrote.
“You sound like him.”
The year passed, Isaac survived, as was his way, and so did the insolent Jews squatting in the various rooms that were his birthright. But then, finally, the exasperating wait was over: someone shattered his hip and died, bringing Isaac to the top of the list. Sam’s bar mitzvah was finally upon him. And according to Jacob’s phone, the Israelis were in their final descent.
“Listen,” Jacob told Max as Irv pulled into a parking spot, “our Israeli cousins—”
“Your Israeli cousins.”
“Our Israeli cousins are not the easiest people in the world—”
“We’re the easiest people in the world?”
“I’ll tell you the one thing the Arabs get right,” Irv said, annoyed by the angle at which a car was parked. “They don’t give women licenses.”
“We’re the second-most-difficult people in the world,” Jacob told Max. “After your Israeli cousins. But the point I’m trying to make is don’t judge the State of Israel by the stubbornness, arrogance, and materialism of our cousins.”