To Be a Man

by Nicole Krauss

  Rafi and his wife had not made any rules before they started. To make rules about freedom had seemed antithetical; either that, or they had been too impatient to hold the dreary, diplomatic conference that would have been necessary to establish such rules. But very quickly it had become clear that the absence of rules led to enormous pain, and though love can be mutual and shared, pain only ever happens in a place of radical aloneness.

  During the tumultuous period that followed, both Rafi and his wife, Dana, had often called her to talk. She had heard the story from both sides, or the two different stories, which as the weeks passed came to resemble one another less. She’d had to be careful not to share with Rafi what Dana confided in her, and not to share with Dana what Rafi confided in her, which became more difficult and exhausting as their stories diverged, and the pain and anger on both sides became greater.

  Dana remained with the younger man for five months. The days and nights when she would return to their apartment after making love to him, or during which she would endlessly check her phone for his texts, were nearly unbearable for Rafi. He would sit smoking a joint on the terrace, surrounded by the brown, shriveled potted plants that hadn’t survived the brilliance of the Israeli sun, and sometimes he listened to the sea, and sometimes he realized that he was talking aloud to himself. What did the young boyfriend give her that he didn’t? He, who all his life had been a dancer, had always found that everything began and ended with the body, but Dana was an actress and a playwright, and she had always moved as fluently and swiftly in language as she had through space, and he couldn’t always reach her there, in the realm of words. Could the boyfriend? Rafi had experienced enough pleasure in new bodies to know how exciting it was; that much he didn’t have to imagine. And yet of course he couldn’t help but imagine it all, regardless. He drove himself crazy imagining it, and when at last he couldn’t take any more pain, he broke down and asked Dana to end the relationship with the boyfriend, but two days later he changed his mind again, having absorbed the fact that if she ended it because he’d asked her to, that might also be the end of the experiment, and he was no longer who he had been before it began. In other words, he no longer wondered whether he was a man for whom the main force in his life was the one woman he was married to. He was finding things out about himself, his sense of himself was expanding, and he didn’t want to lose his new freedom, however painful it was to live next to his wife while she enjoyed hers.

  But it was too late. In the meantime, Dana, who had taken his pain to heart and did not want to destroy their marriage or their family, had told the boyfriend that they had to end things. And he came to agree: the situation was too much for the boyfriend, too. He wanted to have children, and though he was in love with Dana, he wished to find a woman he could make a life with, one his own age who wasn’t already married to someone else. Dana was heartbroken, and even more so when she found out, soon afterward, that he had begun to date a yoga teacher. She watched his online activity on WhatsApp so closely that she could tell when he was doing something outside of his normal schedule. If she texted him, she waited to see how long it took for there to be two blue checks, and if the checks stayed gray, she was miserable, and if the checks became blue, even if he didn’t reply, she knew that he still thought about her. Dana missed everything about him, but most of all, she became obsessed with the sex that she’d had with him.

  During this period, Dana spoke to her so often about the size of the boyfriend’s anatomy that at a certain point, after many weeks and months, she finally had to tell Dana that she could no longer hear about it. Though she understood that it had become a sort of stand-in for many other things that Dana wanted or needed, all the same she found it hard to relate to Dana’s obsession, since, in her experience, an enormous penis wasn’t always the most comfortable sort to have inside you, especially when one had a fine penis at home already, one that had been enjoyed for twenty-three years, belonging to a man with whom one had gone through so much and still loved. To this, Dana replied that what had looked like happiness had, in the light of fresh experience, turned out not to be happiness after all, but something she’d told herself was happiness because she hadn’t known better. But we very rarely can know better, she pointed out to Dana, we simply know something different, since our memories of the past must always adjust to keep our stories coherent. A point with which Dana agreed, but was helpless to employ.

  It was around the time that a ban had been placed on the discussion of the penis that, during one of the many terrible fights that Rafi and Dana had, Dana had let something about it slip. She had said it, and once she had, there was no way to take it back. After that, according to Dana, the fights became more violent, and for the first time in their long relationship, the illusion of equality began to break down. Money, which Rafi earned and Dana did not, moved from being something that simply made it possible for them to live to being a source of power, since now Rafi lost no opportunity to remind her that she was dependent on him, that he was the one working a job all day while she was at home trying to write her play. In time, Dana came to feel that the experiment of opening their relationship had only brought pain and confusion, and that whatever growing they had done had only brought misery.

  On the other hand, during the many conversations she had with Rafi during that time, he never mentioned anatomy, violence, or money. What he said was that for as long as he could remember in his relationship with Dana, he had been the one who gave more, who gave most willingly and easily, and that he had grown tired of it. That what he wanted was for the exchange between them to be more equal. And yet while he spoke of wanting an equality of giving and receiving, he never gave up on speaking about wanting freedom, though the first concerned how one was treated and valued by another inside a system of relationship that involved compromises and limitations, and the other concerned the destruction or transcendence of that system, of going beyond it to that no-man’s-land where one stood utterly undefended, with nothing that one has promised and nothing that has been promised to one, but with a bright, clear view that goes on and on, all the way to the horizon.

  Childhood

  My boys are in the back seat, exhausted by the heat and the daylong sun, leaning their heads back and staring with glassy eyes at the passing sea, and either they are driving away from freedom, or toward it. After the difficult months of my undoing—months during which they watched over me with worried eyes, wanting to know how I’d slept, how I was feeling, not wanting to leave me, wanting to know whether my struggle would ever pass—they have been restored to their carefree state: midsummer, joyous, watched over.

  My store of knowledge about them seems to me the closest I’ve ever come to possessing something infinite, and only a small part of it can find a foothold in language. And that’s part of what is asked of us, isn’t it? To be a witness, to be able to recount our children’s stories from the very beginning? Exactly when and where they were conceived, how the older favored the right side of the womb and showed little interest in the left and punched against my belly skin from the inside with a knee or fist, how the younger came into the world with a furrowed, philosophical look, a slight skepticism almost, but a willingness to be convinced, and a downy fur on his shoulders that later fell out. I’ve told them the stories of their births many times, but at some point something shifted, they began to insist on making me the hero of these tales rather than them. Now what they want to hear is how hard I needed to work to push them out, how I refused any pain medication because I wanted to be able to stand and walk and writhe however necessary to help them through the birth passage. They want to hear, again, how great the pain was which I had prevailed over—can I describe it? To what could it be compared? What they like, it seems to me, is to hear what an act of terrible strength it took to push them into the world, and that I, their mother, was capable of it. Or maybe what they want is to celebrate, again, the old and fading order of things, where they are not called on to protect, but are themselv
es watched over and protected.

  Enormous at birth, both are now so slender that their rib cages are visible under their skin when they lift their shirts over their heads. I know everything about what is visible of their bone structure beneath the skin, and about the skin itself, the precise location of each beauty mark and when it arrived, and the scars and what caused them; I know in what direction the hair on their heads grows, and the way they smell at night and in the morning, and all the many faces they went through before the ones they each wear now. Naturally, I do. When the older one worries that he is too thin and weak, I tell him how my brother had been built the same way when he was young, until—without warning, like a storm come so suddenly that someone, somewhere, must have prayed for it—a change came over him. That the thinness is in their genes, the sticks for arms and narrow waist and ribs poking out, all of it written into their bodies like an ancient story, but that sooner or later the time will come when this smallness and thinness will be overwritten, subsumed by mass, and the boys they are now will disappear, buried inside the men they will become.

  Your brother? he asks, trying to imagine it. My brother who he once, but only once, saw, in a moment of fury he failed to contain, push me across the room and threaten me with a fist.

  The small one is still too young to long to fall in love. He is surrounded by love, and that is still enough for him. The older one has already begun to long for it, but his body hasn’t yet caught up with him. About this, he can still joke with me. For now, desire and the workings of the body are still subjects for humor, but as the months pass, something has begun to loom behind it, larger and larger. He is waiting for the changes he sees overtaking his friends and worries they will never come to him, that he will never desire the way the others do.

  It’s like a switch, friends who have boys tell me: one day it goes on, and after that things are never the same, the door closes on one side and opens to another, and that’s that. Another friend, a man, says that he had been a quiet reader all through childhood, and then between one month and the next he began to throw chairs. This worries the older one, too: the possibility that he will no longer be who he has always been, that he will lose something of his sensitivity, so valued by everyone who loves him, that he will become capable of violence. When I go to kiss him good night, he curls his body into mine and in a nervous voice tells me that he wants to remain a child, that he doesn’t want anything to change. But already he is no longer a child. He is standing out on a bank between the shore and a sea that goes on and on, and the water, as they say, is rising.

  Acknowledgments

  Grateful acknowledgment is due to the following publications, in which these stories first appeared:

  “Future Emergencies,” originally published in Esquire, November 1, 2002.

  “Future Emergencies,” selected for Best American Short Stories, edited by Katrina Kenison and Walter Mosley (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003).

  “In the Garden,” originally published as “An Arrangement of Light” by Byliner, August 2012.

  “I Am Asleep but My Heart Is Awake,” originally published in the New Republic, December 30, 2013.

  “Zusya on the Roof,” originally published in the New Yorker, February 4, 2013.

  “Seeing Ershadi,” originally published in the New Yorker, March 5, 2018.

  “Seeing Ershadi,” selected for Best American Short Stories, edited by Anthony Doerr and Heidi Pitlor (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019).

  “Switzerland,” originally published in the New Yorker, September 2020.

  “To Be a Man,” originally published in the Atlantic, October 1, 2020.

  About the Author

  NICOLE KRAUSS is the author of the novels Forest Dark, Great House, The History of Love, and Man Walks Into a Room. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories, and her books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. She is currently the inaugural writer in residence at Columbia University’s Mind Brain Behavior Institute. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Also by Nicole Krauss

  Man Walks Into a Room

  The History of Love

  Great House

  Forest Dark

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  to be a man. Copyright © 2020 by Nicole Krauss. All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  first edition

  Cover design by Robin Bilardello

  Cover photograph by Anna Morosini

  Digital Edition NOVEMBER 2020 ISBN 978-0-06-243103-5

  Version 10012020

  ISBN 978-1-4434-4942-7 (Canada)

  Print ISBN 978-0-06-243102-8

  ISBN 978-1-4434-4940-3 (Canada hc)

  ISBN 978-1-4434-4941-0 (Canada pbk)

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