World Without You

by Joshua Henkin

  They cross the Massachusetts border and make a pit stop, and when she returns she says, “I’m ovulating.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just took a test.”

  “In the middle of Seven-Eleven?”

  She explains to Nathaniel what he should already know, that when the test turns positive you’re set to ovulate in twenty-four to thirty-six hours. But at that point you should already be having sex; the best time to start is two days beforehand. “We need to have sex right now.”

  “Absolutely,” he says. “We’ll just pull over to the side of the road. We’ll hump unobtrusively on the hood of the car.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Let’s check into a motel.”

  “We can’t,” he says. “We’re supposed to meet your sisters.”

  “We’ll make it.”

  “Not if we stop, we won’t. Anyway, you can’t just check into a motel at one in the afternoon.”

  “Of course you can.” She directs him to the nearest exit, where the signs promise food, gas, and lodging and where, when they get off the ramp, they see a Holiday Inn, a Red Roof Inn, a Hampton Inn, a Howard Johnson.” Which will it be?” she says, her voice a sing-song, taking on a jocund air she doesn’t feel.

  But Nathaniel won’t play along. He simply sits next to her, making clear through his silence that this is her project. When she pulls out her credit card at the Hampton Inn, he stands so far behind her it’s as if he doesn’t know who she is.

  She walks down the hall to the elevator, but Nathaniel is still standing at the front desk, staring vacantly at the Coke machine.

  “It’s a nice room,” she says when they get inside, realizing as she says this how inane she sounds. It’s like any motel room off the side of the road anywhere in the country.

  Nathaniel goes into the bathroom to get a drink, and when he comes back inside he flips on the TV. He removes his shoes and lies down on the bed. He’s making a show of settling in.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Renting a movie.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Actually, I am.” He has purchased a German movie, a black-and-white affair, a documentary, it seems. Clarissa recognizes the skyline of Berlin, a museum, plumes of smoke rising from refineries, the Bavarian countryside. “You could have chosen a language we actually speak.”

  “I speak a little German.”

  “Okay,” she says. “You’ve made your point. The court registers your objection.”

  Nathaniel turns off the movie and goes into the bathroom. She can hear the shower being run.

  “Nathaniel, come on, what are you trying to prove? You win. I cry uncle.”

  The bathroom is fogged up; in the mirror, she can make out only the barest outlines of herself. “You keep this up and we’ll really be late.”

  But he doesn’t answer her.

  When he gets out, he towels himself off and puts on his clothes: his underwear, his socks, his shirt, his trousers, moving slowly, meticulously, smoothing out the wrinkles. He opens the front door and steps out into the hall.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To get us some food.”

  “Nathaniel!”

  But the door has already shut behind him.

  He returns a few minutes later with two cans of soda, a couple of bags of chips, and a few candy bars.. He pops open a bag of chips and offers her one.

  “So what are you saying? I need to take you out to dinner in order to get laid?”

  He tears open a chocolate bar, and she thinks of the early days with Nathaniel, a sex act involving chocolate syrup, and hoping to hark back to those times, she drags her finger through the chocolate and touches it lightly to his cheek.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I know this isn’t very romantic.”

  “No,” he says. “It’s not.”

  Sex stripped of all sentiment, she thinks, though she does her best to inject sentiment into the act. It has never been this way with Nathaniel, and it won’t always be this way, but at the moment it’s hard for her to remember what sex was like between them, hard for her to envision anything but what it is now.

  She’s on her back, legs up in the air, while Nathaniel, mute as a Buddha, plunges in and out of her. He ejaculates inside her, and when he’s done she lies utterly still, following the experts’ advice, a pillow beneath her rear end to assist with gravity, while his sperm swims through her, swims toward its unknown destination.

  And then, because she and Nathaniel are exhausted, because they’re at a Hampton Inn where they’ve paid for their room and no one cares what they do until checkout time tomorrow morning, they allow themselves to close their eyes before driving to the airport. Limbs entwined, clothes strewn across the floor, they fall into a heavy sleep.

  2

  They’re over the Atlantic, having commandeered a whole row, Noelle with two boys on one side, Amram with the other two across the aisle, though Akiva, their eldest, always animated and voluble, especially when given the chance to speak English, has seated himself a row back next to a retired couple from Phoenix returning from their annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Noelle recognizes the type. UJA dinners and Israel Bond drives. Grandchildren’s bar mitzvahs in hotel ballrooms bedecked with palm trees (more bar than mitzvah, Noelle calls these affairs), not so different from the bar mitzvahs she used to attend, but she had no say in that, and now, twenty-five years later, she can afford to be disdainful. She has earned it, she thinks, sitting with her four sons on the flight to Boston, models of decorum, when she knows what boys are like, Israeli boys especially, soldiers as soon as they emerge from the womb.

  Akiva is eight, Yoni six, Dov five, and Ari three; it’s not so different from Noelle and her sisters. Her mother likes to say the girls were in diapers at the same time, testament, it would seem, to how close they were spaced, or perhaps to the fact that Clarissa still wore diapers at night when she was five. There must be some lesson in this, some predictor of what Clarissa has become, but Noelle can’t find any. She doesn’t wish to make too fine a point of this, but when she sees her children now, Akiva a row back chatting amiably in his unaccented English, she and Amram surrounded by the other boys, knit yarmulkes on their heads, their prayer fringes sticking out from under their T-shirts, she feels that she has outdone her mother, four small children at once instead of three—Leo came along later—no difficulty with toilet training.

  The flight attendant comes down the aisle dispensing snacks, and the boys negotiate over chips, pretzels, and cookies.

  “Let them have what they want,” Amram says.

  “Who’s stopping them?” says Noelle.

  “Where are we now?” Yoni asks.

  “Over the ocean,” she says.

  “But where?”

  “He wants a country,” says Dov.

  “There are no countries in the ocean,” Yoni says.

  Akiva says, “Three-quarters of the earth is covered by water.”

  “What difference does that make?” Yoni says.

  “The difference is, it’s true.” Akiva is only eight, but he thinks of himself as a surrogate parent. When the family sings zemirot during Shabbat dinner, the boys take turns sitting on Amram’s lap. Amram thumps his legs up and down and folds over the edges of the boys’ yarmulkes, trying to make them resemble cowboy hats. Friday night at the rodeo: you sing zemirot, you get to ride the bull. Once, when Amram was away, Akiva sat in his father’s seat and drank from his kiddush cup, and when it came time to sing zemirot he said, “Okay, boys, who wants to sit on my lap?”

  Yoni drops a pretzel into Dov’s soda, and Dov punches him in the thigh.

  “Boys!” Noelle says.

  Yoni drops another pretzel into Dov’s soda.

  “Would you take over for me?” Noelle says to Amram.

  “Doing what?”

  “Refereeing.”

  “I’m right here.”


  “You’re right here,” she says, “but you’re reading.”

  “They’re boys, Noelle. Let them be.” Amram closes his magazine. But a minute later, he’s reading again.

  “I just want you involved.”

  “I am involved.”

  “Listen to me, Amram. Step up to the plate.”

  Dov says, “Eema and Abba are fighting again.”

  Dov’s right, Noelle thinks. The past few months, she and Amram have been arguing more and more. Amram complains that he has spent the last year listening to stories about Leo, hearing her describe a relationship he never knew existed. Because the relationship Noelle lays out on the phone to her friends, the stories she tells their boys, the memories she says assault her, they’re a kind of fiction, Amram believes. How often did they see Leo in all their years in Israel? They didn’t even go to his wedding, because Thisbe wasn’t Jewish.

  Originally, Amram was threatening not to come on this trip, but Noelle convinced him to join them. It’s her brother’s unveiling: how can he miss it? And Amram is a buffer when she’s with her family; his simple presence reminds her that she lives six thousand miles away, because when she sees her parents and sisters, when they’re up in Lenox as they will be soon, another July Fourth, it’s easy to forget that her life is elsewhere. It’s how she felt when she first left home, what everyone must feel that first Thanksgiving back from college, except she’s thirty-seven now and she still feels it. Sometimes she thinks that’s why she moved to Israel: to put enough distance between her and her family. She recalls Abraham and Lot. Behold, all the land is before you. If you go left I will go right, and if you go right I will go left.

  She rests her head against the window, trying to fall asleep, but the vibrations of the plane are too disruptive. So she leans the other way and, arranged like this, her head covered in a kerchief as it always is, she manages to fall asleep.

  She’s woken by the sound of carts rolling down the aisle. “More food?” she says sleepily.

  “It’s a Jewish airline,” Amram says. He used to work for a catering company, and the reigning wisdom was, a third more food for a Jewish event, a third less drink.

  Reflexively, she checks the wrapping for kosher certification, though she doesn’t need to: all the food on El Al is kosher. Years ago, El Al used to fly on Shabbat, but no longer. Which is how it should be, Noelle thinks; Israel is a Jewish state. She knows what the secular say, that it’s the tyranny of the few over the many. But in a parliamentary system you have to negotiate, and it’s the religious the government negotiates with. The fact is, the Orthodox are becoming stronger. They have more children—most of Noelle’s and Amram’s friends have four—and almost all the new olim are religious, too. And they have the truth on their side; she’s not ashamed to say that.

  Once, visiting the States, she took Akiva, who was four at the time, to see the Christmas windows at Bergdorf Goodman. She likes the tinsel and lights; Christmas doesn’t threaten her any longer. Still, she’s happy not to have Christmas forced upon her, and that day, when Santa Claus was sitting in front of Bergdorf and all the children were screaming out his name, there was a moment of silence, and a voice called out: “Who’s Santa Claus?” It was Akiva. That, Noelle thinks, is why she lives in Israel. So her children won’t have to know who Santa Claus is, so they’ll live their lives as God intended, speaking Hebrew and observing the commandments, so their own children will be Jewish, while the secular Israelis, who knows where their children will be, off to India and Thailand once they’ve finished the army, devotees of Buddhism and Transcendental Meditation, searching for meaning—of course they are, Noelle thinks—because being a secular Jew in Israel, of all places, is a hollow existence.

  My sister the Hasidic Jew, Lily likes to say. The rabbi’s wife. Well, Lily can say what she wants to. Amram isn’t a rabbi, and they aren’t Hasidic. She and Amram both work, and their boys will serve in the army. They won’t spend their lives in yeshiva as the ultra-Orthodox do, expecting the rest of the country to protect them. Yes, she covers her hair, and she wears skirts and dresses instead of pants, and she won’t swim at the beach or pool when men are present. And, yes, her children go to Orthodox schools and they’ll marry Orthodox girls and marry them young. But don’t let anyone tell her she’s cut herself off from the modern world, that she’s placed herself inside a cloister.

  “Abba?” Dov says.

  “Be quiet,” Akiva says. “Abba’s working.”

  “Abba’s not working,” Noelle says. “He’s reading a magazine.”

  That’s the other thing they’ve been fighting about. Amram lost his job, which was bad enough, but worse, he didn’t even tell her when it first happened. He kept going to the office for another couple of weeks; at least, that was where she thought he was going, until she phoned his office and discovered that he’d been fired. She’s angry about that—she can’t stand dishonesty—and also about the fact that he’s been fired again; they have four children to support.

  The boys are speaking Hebrew to each other, and though she would normally object—English-only is the house rule—she allows them to go on. It’s vacation, she figures, and they’ll be in the States soon, where everyone speaks English. Her own Hebrew is fluent, but it will never be as good as her English is. In many ways, her children’s Hebrew is already better than hers. With Akiva, there are phrases in his homework she doesn’t understand, and he has to explain them to her.

  It wasn’t like that for her growing up—feeling like she was better than her parents, especially at anything having to do with school. She would daydream all semester in math, then rely on her mother to help her before the exam, but they would always end up fighting, with Noelle in tears. Even now, Noelle remembers math, remembers all of high school, really, as a word problem with water pouring into the bathtub at one rate per minute and being drained simultaneously at another rate per minute and she had to figure out how long it took to fill the tub. These problems seemed designed to assail her: why couldn’t someone just put in the plug and the bath would fill up as baths normally did? Angry at her mother, abandoning her math homework to smoke a cigarette Noelle would say to her mother as she was leaving for the hospital, “Fine, you want me to fail my math test?” (Her mother, a physician, was a rabid anti-smoker; there was nothing Noelle could do that would infuriate her mother the way smoking did—nothing until Noelle became Orthodox and moved to Israel.)

  “Believe me,” her mother would say, “I’d rather be home than going in to the hospital at three in the morning.”

  “Rather be helping me?”

  “Yes, sweetie, I would.”

  Always the sweetie to taunt her, when Noelle understood even then that it wasn’t a taunt. She still listens for that word when she calls home from Jerusalem. It returns her to infancy; she’s nothing but clay in her mother’s hands. Take me back, she wants to say. Make me whole again. She wants to crawl inside her mother, to return to some vestigial tadpole state. Coming home from the hospital, her mother would find her asleep, curled into herself like dough, and she would wake her gently to study again because Noelle demanded that she wake her, although her mother insisted those extra few hours wouldn’t make a difference and what she needed most was sleep. (No one, Noelle thinks—not Amram, not her children, not her sisters, not Leo when he was alive—no one has ever woken her as gently as her mother did, the act of waking her as if an apology.)

  It’s like the dream everyone has. You realize you’ve forgotten to go to class all semester and tomorrow’s the final in introductory Chinese. But for Noelle it’s not just a dream; it’s her life. She is, in fact, enrolled in introductory Chinese. She is, in fact, naked in school, always about to be discovered, because there’s something at the core transparent about her, the organs, the arteries and veins carrying the blood to her heart, just a body spread out for all to see, redheaded Noelle with the blue, blue eyes, fourteen years old and the prettiest girl in Mamaroneck High School. It’s where her
family moved, to Westchester, when Noelle was thirteen because she’d gotten expelled from two schools in Manhattan and her parents thought if they removed her from the city they might keep her out of trouble. (That, more than anything, Noelle thinks, is why Lily can’t stand her. Lily never forgave her for banishing the family to the suburbs, for making her leave her friends and start over in a new school. Well, blame their parents, Noelle thinks; she didn’t want to leave the city any more than Lily did.)

  Look at her, they would say, the boys on the football team and the swim team, Noelle’s own teammates, the boys who tried out for the swim team just to see her in a bathing suit. Why don’t you a wear a bikini, Noelle? Thinking about her at night in their beds, beneath the sheets they soiled, not washing them, not wanting their mothers to wash them, not wanting to wash Noelle out of them. You’re killing me, Noelle. Just thinking about you makes me come. Noelle lived for their voices, feeling she was nothing when the boys didn’t talk about her, that she didn’t exist at all. Noelle the nympho. The girl who couldn’t say no. When her mother was on call, Noelle, who promised her she’d be studying, was instead out with Campbell, the next-door neighbor’s boy, or Bruce Weinstein from around the block. She knew who was awake and who wasn’t, whose parents were out, could feel her way around the streets near her home, moving stealthily through the bushes, avoiding the occasional passing headlights, following her own internal compass. In basements and attics, behind locked bedroom doors, lovely Noelle, her hair sliding across her face, the almost soundless sound of it, like the almost soundless sound of Noelle’s panties dropping to the floor. Man, that girl’s efficient, Casey Hopkins would say—Casey, whose father was a doctor at the same hospital as Noelle’s mother—and sometimes, hearing a parent come home late at night, the sound of others stirring in the house, Noelle would escape out the window.