To Be a Man

by Nicole Krauss

  So what if it’s absurd? Shlomi finally admits on the phone, two nights after their mother and the Husband take a picnic to the beach near Herzliya. What’s the big deal if it isn’t hurting anyone? There’s nothing to be worried about, he asserts, holding to his unique-in-the-family position. The Husband is harmless, he has no designs on their mother’s money or her apartment. He’s a charming man, their mother is enjoying herself. She’s been alone since their father died. Why should they deny her some company and a bit of fun by being sticklers for the facts?

  Tamar is about to assert that she, too, has been alone since her divorce, and he doesn’t see her taking in random men, does he? If she could reduce all of the words her patients spill in her office to a single, plaintive truth, it is that in the end everyone is alone, and the sooner one comes to terms with it, celebrates it, even, the sooner one can begin to live beyond the long shadow of anguish and anxiety. A woman living on her own is not a condition that required the emergency airlift of a man, she wants to argue, on the contrary—

  But as the words are about to leave her mouth, she realizes that her brother might be right. Maybe she is being defensive. Her mother, who has always been there to answer her calls, is now otherwise engaged, and maybe it’s gotten to her a bit. They’ve shared a condition, haven’t they? Two independent women without husbands, managing just fine on their own, thank you very much. In its way, it’s only strengthened the bond between them. Neither of them suffered overly without a husband. Their situations were different, of course: her parents stayed together for forty-seven years before death put an end to it, whereas Tamar and David chose to break their marriage after only ten. Tamar can claim the position of being not interested in another husband, of being “beyond husbandry,” as she sometimes puts it to her friends, whereas for her mother the subject of another husband is—was, until then—a moot point. But even if her mother chose to keep her husband and Tamar did not, something in them has always seemed to her in tacit agreement about the relative peace and quiet of being without one, its lack of demand after a long period of trying to fulfill a high level of demand. She likes that her mother never goes on, the way the mothers of other divorced women she knows go on, about how she should find someone while she still has her looks. And if Tamar does eventually stumble on a man she wishes to be bound to—in other words, a man other than the thirty-two-year-old electronic musician she slept with until she got tired of doing his laundry or he left for Peru, or the trial lawyer who had an outsize personality but, in the end, a shrunken heart—her mother will no doubt be happy for her. Is she happy for her mother?

  She calls Katie.

  Maybe I feel abandoned? Tamar suggests, as the Metro North train pulls out of University Heights on its way to the city.

  Or just a little jealous, Katie says.

  Jealous? Of a little old Hungarian? He makes mulberry jam. And they play chess together.

  Of your mother finding love again, Katie says.

  Tamar sits holding the phone to her ear, watching the chain-link fences and telephone poles fly by as the train hurtles toward Harlem. Love. It has not yet dawned on her that it might be that. Because what are the odds, really? That somewhere in the annals of Special Services, that little-known agency of the state, there is some Israeli Cupid at work, busily matching widows and widowers with a greater success rate than Tinder?

  Uh-uh, she says, there’s no way. She just met him! It’ll probably be over in a week. Trust me, she assures her, even though Katie doesn’t have a horse in the race.

  But the following Saturday, Tamar comes into the kitchen fresh from the shower and finds Remy, who always FaceTimes with her mother on Saturday mornings, learning a card trick from the Husband. She hears his voice first, a deep tenor with an accent refined and educated, savvy and world-weary, soaked in a broth of middle European languages, an old-world accent that went out of production after 1945. She steps closer, careful to stay out of the camera’s range. She can see his face on the screen, and in the top left corner Remy’s eyes, beaming behind the hand of cards he is clutching. Until then the Husband has not been entirely real. He’s been only an old man in a hat, utterly absurd in his way. But now here he is, talking to her son. Charming him, just as he charmed her mother and Shlomi. She steps into view, casting a shadow over Remy’s bright face.

  I’m Tamar, she says coolly. The daughter.

  The Husband says nothing, but his heavy-lidded eyes, full of intelligence, take her in. He doesn’t look at all the way she imagined, at once wiser and somewhat younger, more alive, with blue eyes and a white beard she hadn’t expected that is neatly trimmed to make visible his full lips, lips that would not have been out of place on a child. They regard each other with raised hackles, and yet only one of them, Tamar thinks with satisfaction, is a scavenger.

  So what are your plans? she demands, while Remy watches both of their faces on the screen.

  Plans for what? the Husband asks, surprised. Behind him she can see the windows of her mother’s living room, and, on the wall just to the right of his head, a framed photograph of her and Shlomi at Iris and Remy’s ages, her with a whale-spout ponytail in a scrunchie, and Shlomi channeling the Karate Kid.

  Your gig in Netanya is up, or what? You can still stay there, or you’re planning to move to Tel Aviv?

  She’d intended to say “planning to move into our mother’s apartment,” but something about his gaze, deerlike, makes her swerve at the last instant.

  Netanya is finished, he says simply, without further explanation.

  Remy, unable to parse the dialogue, glances up at his mother.

  We were in the middle of a trick, he pleads.

  So you were, Tamar says, raising an eyebrow at the Husband so that her point will not be lost. So you were. And, turning on her heel, she stomps off to brew the coffee.

  4

  March, which came in like a lion and went out like a lamb, deposited in its path the lost Husband, and in mid-May Shlomi’s baby is born in Nepal because surrogacy for gay men remains illegal in Israel. Two weeks later, he and Dan fly with the infant back to Tel Aviv, and in the third week of June, the day after Iris and Remy finish school, Tamar packs their suitcases as usual and goes over the plant-watering schedule with the house sitter, a Columbia grad student who was a woman last year, but now is a man. Tamar and the kids have spent July in Tel Aviv every year since she and David divorced, and she often stays on in August while the kids fly to meet him wherever he’s decided to spend his vacation. The Columbia student, who was Jessica for the last three summers, is now Kevin, and because Tamar was not present for the transformation, she has the impression, however wrongheaded and absurd, that it happened simply, without a great deal of fuss, just like everything Jessica has ever done. For the last three summers they kept everything in perfect order; more than perfect, really, because when Tamar returned in late August, it was always to a house more organized and well run than the one she’d left, the minor repairs that had accumulated over the year having been seen to, all the burned-out light bulbs replaced, and while this at first delighted her, in the wake of the delight there was left a feeling that she was slightly superfluous, that she was not really needed by her life in New York, just as she was not really needed by her life, what was left of it, in Tel Aviv. One could argue whether or not this is true—there are her patients, her children, her mother, her friends, in short, many people who need her—but regardless of its validity, it is the thought of someone whose roots are sown in two places and so can never grow deeply enough in either. Always on the plane back to Israel Tamar feels the excitement of finally going home, only to land and remember why she left.

  For Iris and Remy it’s less complicated. They love to visit their grandmother, love the beach, which Tamar takes them to in the evenings, love the food, the late bedtimes, the access to a warm, relaxed updraft of freedom so different from the climate in New York. And they are over the moon about meeting the baby. They’ve already FaceTimed with thei
r newborn cousin, and Remy has insisted on packing his little rollaway with toys and books he’s grown out of, to pass on to the five-week-old, who does not yet have a name because Shlomi and Dan are still “getting to know him.” The kids cannot wait to hold the baby, they say as they are patted down at the special gate for the United flight from Newark to Israel. Iris, who is fifteen, which in communities the world over and through time makes her of acceptable childbearing age, is going to “eat the baby up,” and Remy is going to see if he can be the first to make him smile. Tucked into the pocket of Remy’s rollaway is also the pack of cards that has gone everywhere with him the last weeks, at the ready for the practice or performance of a sleight of hand. But neither Remy nor Iris mention anything about meeting the Husband, having gathered, through looks or tones or curt phrases, a measure of their mother’s opinion. A few days earlier, Tamar overheard Remy in Iris’s room, telling her that the Husband had collaborated with Erdős, and so had an Erdős number of one. If he had collaborated with someone who had collaborated with Erdős, he would have an Erdős number of two, and if he had collaborated with someone who had collaborated with someone who had collaborated with Erdős, it would be a three. Someone who had never collaborated with Erdős would have an Erdős number of infinity. But he had a one! And he was going to take Remy to see a Maccabi game.

  Who’s Erdős? asked Iris.

  A genius who wrote more mathematical papers than anyone, solved some of the hardest problems in the world, and lived out of his suitcase, Remy informed her with a note of pride.

  But the Husband is no longer living out of a suitcase. He has bettered Erdős on that problem, Tamar thinks, having read up on Erdős in Wikipedia. He has refuted Erdős’s theory that women capture men and enslave them into marriage, and has offered himself as a lost husband, and so has won a place for his suitcase in the basement storage unit, having gone and unpacked all of its contents and laid them in what were formerly her father’s drawers.

  Tamar waited, in the week before their departure, for her mother to say something about the living arrangements. They always stayed with her when they visited, Tamar sleeping in her old bedroom, and Iris and Remy sharing Shlomi’s, all of them taking turns for the bathroom with the shower that has next to no pressure. How did her mother imagine it would work if the Husband was there, too? The apartment, which always just managed four people, would be strained by five, especially if one was a stranger. Perhaps her mother was waiting for her to volunteer to stay at Shlomi and Dan’s place in Jaffa, big enough for the sprawling, extended Arab family it was once built for. But Tamar didn’t offer, and her mother didn’t ask, and so now they are headed in a taxi for Tchernichovsky Street.

  Ilana is waiting outside, and as the kids fly into her arms, Tamar has a chance to take in the subtle changes in her mother’s appearance—her hair that is a few shades lighter, the copper dusted with gold, her leopard-print leggings, even further out on the limb on which her mother’s fashion taste has always rested, and on her hip a quilted leather fanny pack with a fake Chanel logo. Feeling around inside it for her keys, her mother gaily informs them that she hasn’t lost a thing since she started using it, she keeps it on from the moment she gets up until the moment she goes to sleep, and it has solved the problem of misplacing things: everything that comes out of it goes right back in. As she says it, affectionately patting the plump pouch like a baby’s bottom, Tamar guesses from the delight in her mother’s voice that it was the Husband’s idea, that her mother’s pleasure in the solution is also her pleasure in his ingenuity, and the fact that he’s devoted his special intelligence to her little problem. Climbing the steps behind the swaying fanny pack with the gilded double C, while Remy rides up in the tiny elevator with the luggage, Tamar steels herself for the encounter that is about to take place. But when her mother unlocks the door and the kids tumble in with the suitcases, there is no one else there. Tamar inhales the familiar smell of home and childhood. And only after the first, strong notes of her mother’s cooking, the old building, and Israeli laundry detergent fade away does she discover underneath it all the musky odor of men’s cologne.

  Where is he? she asks, still sniffing.

  Who? her mother asks, but with a telltale twitch of her eyelid, as if the wizened Husband who once collaborated with Erdős had grabbed his hat and shimmied out through the window just as they came in through the door, Erdős who chose for his gravestone the epitaph “Finally I am growing stupider no more.”

  Grandma! shouts Remy, racing into the kitchen with the pack of cards just in time to get her mother off the hook. Can I show you a trick?

  But even if the Husband came out of nowhere and nothing, it does not mean her mother can send him back to nowhere and nothing whenever it’s convenient: in the bathroom, Tamar discovers a toothbrush with flattened bristles in the glass next to her mother’s.

  That evening they all take a taxi to Jaffa to visit the new baby. He has a head of black hair, but otherwise he is the spitting image of Tamar and Shlomi’s father. From deep within the turquoise wrap that Dan already ties like an expert, the infant looks out in great peace, as if he has already seen the world beyond and has come back to observe, with bottomless compassion, the fucked-up earthly things they’ve all gotten up to. When at last he is unpacked from the carrier and handed round, and Tamar lays him down on her thighs, he bestows on her his cloudy, beatific gaze. On and on everyone goes about how he looks exactly like Eli—Eli down to the little cleft in his chin! but an Eli without a bark, an Eli without claws!—and Tamar can’t help but feel the real point being made by her mother and brother, the not-so-subtle subtext, is that her father is looking down on it all—Shlomi’s marriage, her divorce, the arrival of the Husband who plans to replace him—with a vast and yielding acceptance, with the kind of tolerance that had not been available to him on this side of life. It was not an accident that Shlomi waited until their father died before marrying Dan. Nor that Tamar hung on in her marriage as long as she did, until, less than a year after her father was gone, she finally let go. Eli’s strong opinions, and the volume and intensity with which he expressed them, made it easier to just work around him rather than confront his forcefulness head-on. They’d learned it early on from their mother, who would let their father bluster and blow, and afterward, once he was asleep, or at work, or with his back turned, would let them have what they’d asked for, or find a quiet way to show them how to take it for themselves.

  The baby lurches and grabs Tamar’s finger. It really is eerie, she thinks, the way this nameless child brought into existence from a combination of Shlomi’s sperm, the egg of Dan’s sister, the womb and sweat of a Nepali woman, and a dash of fairy dust, looks the spitting image of their father. How did it work?

  But, all the same, she isn’t having it. Her cantankerous father has not regrouped in Nepal to send back to them a beneficent message. Eli would have had plenty to say about it all, and it wouldn’t have been pretty. Eli, the doyen of Israeli shlumpadik, who wore baggy cargo pants and the same shirts until the buttons fell off, who had no feel for the elegance of math, would have crushed the Husband’s brown hat in one hand and told him what he could do with his jam and his Erdős.

  Prying her finger loose from the baby’s grip, she passes him off to Iris, who takes him onto her chest as if she knows exactly what to do with babies, having been one herself. Tamar goes over to the plate-glass window and looks out at the sea. Had she stayed in Israel, she might have woken each day to a view like this, one that went all the way out to the horizon. But instead she went to New York to do her PhD, married David, and somewhere along the way lost her sense of expansiveness. It wasn’t David’s fault any more than it was her own. She had simply arrived too late to the conversation that might have made clear to her the many unconsidered possibilities. To listen to her patients in their twenties and thirties, monogamy was a great beached whale, its bloated, rotten carcass stinking to high hell, and the sooner one got away from it, the better. Whether th
e wave of polyamory they were all trying to ride would ever really carry anyone, or whether jealousy and the horror of instability would always sink them, Tamar couldn’t say. Look at Shlomi: he has ridden the high crest of free love, has loved and been loved by all of Mykonos and Ibiza, but in the end he wanted what everyone has wanted for as long as people have been remembering themselves—how did the poem go? Not universal love, but to be loved alone.

  She turns away from the window in time to see Iris hold her cousin in the air to sniff his bottom. She has always tried to instill in Iris the conviction that she doesn’t need to get married, doesn’t need the stability of the conjugal life to ground her. But to look at her daughter now, her nose in the baby’s bum, it seems more likely that Iris, davka, will be married by twenty-five, and remain so until she is surrounded by grandchildren at her dying husband’s bedside, rubbing his cold feet. Tamar turns back to the window and watches the blue waves roll in from far away. What is the good of expansiveness if one doesn’t expand? What is the good of so much possibility if one only feels it as a widening in the chest while driving down a country road at dusk, or when, standing still in the rooms of the house when the children are shared out at their father’s, one suddenly becomes aware of a silence so pure that it raises the hairs on the back of one’s neck?