A Brilliant Novel in the Works

by Yuvi Zalkow

  “Can I do one more thing?” I say. “Can you leave the pages with me? I promise that they will be ready for you by the end of the week.”

  “Who do I need to crucify to finally get to see this thing?” It’s her tired voice, and the tired voice is a very bad sign at 9 am, especially after a cup of coffee.

  “Give me a few more days,” I say.

  “Yuvi,” she says, “we’re on the same side.”

  “I know,” I say, and I think about whether I know this.

  My wife pulls the pile of a novel out of her purse. She holds the thing tight, wiggles it in her hand. She squats down and carefully places the pile on the floor.

  “Friday,” she says to the pile on the floor. “End of business Friday. Last chance.” And then she clicks her way right out of the house.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Brother, Can You Spare a Palindrome?

  Shmen still calls. Late. Too late.

  Oh, he has important things to say. Aibohphobia is the fear of palindromes. “Spiro Agnew” and “grow a penis” are anagrams. So are “Desperation” and “A rope ends it.”

  Some of them are repeats, but at this hour, who’s counting? We still laugh even though he only allows for anagrams and palindromes and none of my awkward prodding about his health. Except at this hour, it’s easier for me to let go of prodding and just enjoy whatever he gives me.

  He also keeps talking about my novel.

  “Here’s your problem,” he tells me. “You’re getting there with the book, but you’re not out of the woods yet. Your train is still rickety. There’s a big matzo ball ahead.”

  Even though it’s the telephone, I nod. He hasn’t read my novel and his metaphors are dripping with meshugas, but I can’t disagree with him either. He knows me. He knows my problems. And my problems are my novel’s problems. Even so, I’m scared to ask him for more information.

  “How are you feeling?” I say.

  He says, “Well, it’s time to go.”

  The phone goes click before I say goodbye.

  I listen to that dial tone for a sign of things to come. And I worry that this is it. That he will be gone before we meet again.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Out to Dry

  Here is how it goes: I hammer two nails on opposite walls. I tie a string between the two. Now I’ve got a clothesline going across my living room. I hammer two more nails. Another clothesline. And two more nails. Eventually the living room is covered with rows of strings. I open up six bags of fifty clothespins each. I bring in my thirty-nine-chapter novel and I hang each damn page up on its own clothespin. This ritual is an easy one. It only takes twenty minutes, and I don’t think much of it until I stand back against the wall farthest from the pages and look at what I’ve got.

  It’s absurd to imagine this big room full of my pages crammed into a little electronic book reading device. Maybe someone else’s book might fit in one of those contraptions. But my bulging, unformed mess of a book doesn’t even fit in our goddamn living room.

  What I’ve got is a thirty-nine-chapter conceit. I could have been busy trying to make millions or to save the world or to save just one soul or even to kill a dragon or even to slay the hero. What I’ve chosen to do is write this thing that requires 16 clotheslines, 32 nails, and 261 clothespins.

  I grab all the childhood pictures of Julia I’ve stolen and hidden under the mattress. This includes the one with her sideways-face-smile and the one with her birthday hat that says “Everyone Loves Me” on it and the one where she has a finger up her mom’s nose. I tack them up on the living room wall. And then I put the picture I stole from Yousef of his father on the wall. And then I grab those napkins I’ve collected, Save Me, Julia, which turned out to be from Shmen, and I put them up on the wall, too.

  I push my desk into the living room. It involves some twisting and turning and it results in some cuts up and down my arms and hands and the taste of salt in my mouth from sucking the blood. But these are unintentional cuts, I should remind you. I feel like a vampire who has tried to become good and has stopped killing people but then comes across someone recently killed and so he sucks what’s left of their blood but he has to keep reminding himself that he hasn’t done anything wrong. It feels just like that.

  I get a beer out of the refrigerator and then open it and then I pour the entire contents of the beer into the sink and then I hold the empty beer bottle in my hand, just for comfort. The day is getting warm and the air inside the house feels stale and I decide not to open a window. I stand up on my desk with my empty beer and look at what’s in front of me.

  MOUNT PISGAH

  I don’t remember much in the way of Hebrew teachings from Hebrew school, but what I do remember is a rabbi talking to us about Moses. How, in the end, he wasn’t allowed to enter the Promised Land. Not in his lifetime. But he was able to stand on Mount Pisgah and see it. “Imagine it!” this rabbi cried out to us. “Moses could taste it between his teeth, but he couldn’t swallow it!” Of course, none of us appreciated his words because we just wanted class to end. But I still remember how intense he was about this story. And from then on, I started getting dreams about Moses. No joke. I dreamed about him. Except I screwed the whole story up. In my dreams, he was standing on Stone Mountain—that granite mountain in Atlanta with the ninety-by-two-hundred-foot carving of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson on their horses. In the dream, Moses stood on the carving of Lee’s horse (on the horse’s nose actually), and he was looking out toward something that I couldn’t quite see. There was something he wanted so badly and it was just out of reach. But in my dreams, it didn’t seem like he was looking at a place exactly. It was more about people than place. Maybe he was just missing an old girlfriend, some gorgeous Egyptian lady with long legs that he hadn’t seen in forty years. But in my dream, I never found out what he was looking for. I always woke up empty-handed.

  Chapter Forty

  From Up High

  When my wife walks in, I’m sitting on the floor in the middle of the room and I jump to attention.

  She says, “Jesus H. Tap-dancing Christ.” And then she looks around the living room in silence.

  “I know,” I say, about her silence. And about the reference to her tap-dancing savior.

  My wife walks up and down the aisles as if browsing at a secondhand store. She’s in that pretty black dress with the hemline down below her knees and the hem floats off her skin as she walks. When she looks up on the wall and sees these pictures of her from thirty years ago, I hear a little gasp inside her little mouth. But she still doesn’t say anything. And then she walks right up to me.

  I try to play the role of the detached cashier, only mildly interested in whether she wants to buy anything. “Can I help you with anything?” I say to my dear wife.

  She is almost crying. It’s not that there are tears. And it’s not that her eyes look moist. And it’s not that she is making a crying face. But it’s still there. The lips tremble if you look closely. The eyelids aren’t completely opened. Her hand rests on my wrist, and she says, “You can’t help me right now. Not yet.”

  I nod. It’s all I can do. Just that one vague, three-letter gesture.

  “You’ve written a lot,” Julia says.

  “Come here,” I say to my wife, even though she is standing right next to me. And I grab her by her hand, which is warm from the outside world, and I bring her to the desk. We’re in a particular state of mind at this point. I know this because I’m not worried about anything right now. And because Julia has not said a word about my desk being in the wrong damn room. I lift her hand and she understands this means to get up on the desk and so she gets up there. She’s shaved her legs today and they are smooth except for the one little scab at the ankle.

  “What do I do now?” she asks from up high on the desk.

  “Look at this mess,” I say, and I point all around the room for effect. “What do you see?”

  Chapter Forty-oner />
  What Do You See?

  “It is a mess,” Julia says from up on the desk. “No wonder your people wandered so many years in the desert.”

  “Thank you,” I say. It’s harder to hear someone else say it’s a mess even though I’ve been using that word all these months.

  Julia steps back down from the desk and then straightens out her dress. “But it’s a mess with heart.” When she looks at me, I understand that she has already read my novel, somehow, and that she knows exactly what happens, somehow.

  “Thank you for saving my brother from the piano,” she says to me.

  “I couldn’t let it happen to him.”

  “That’s good,” she says. “Because he’s coming over for dinner and he’s bringing the food.”

  “You convinced him to come over?” I ask. I’ve been having no luck with anything other than late-night calls and I’m nervous at the idea of seeing him. Feels like it’s a blind date to prepare for. “Is he okay? Is it bad?”

  “No,” Julia says. “He actually sounds good. He said he just needed some time after moving out of Ally’s place.”

  I’m quiet. She’s quiet. We both want to believe this. But we both don’t know if we should. “Good,” I say, almost like a question.

  “So let’s see here,” Julia says, browsing my manuscript again.

  My wife walks among the pages. She starts at the beginning and walks along the first row while looking quickly at each page, as if speed-reading my novel. She continues along each row until she gets to the end. And then she goes back to the first row and yanks a page from the clothespin.

  “Here’s a problem,” she says.

  It’s that part where I mention my mother was buried in Israel and my father was cremated—a part I tried to pull out of the damn book except whenever I pulled it out, the rest of the book kept unraveling.

  “What’s wrong with it?” I say.

  “You haven’t closed off the loose ends.”

  “You mean you see some ends around here?” I say, thrilled by the prospect that my novel has something worth closing. But also not excited to hear what I have to do. Probably she’ll tell me that it’ll take some actual work.

  “First of all, you have to reconcile some things with your father,” she says.

  “Haven’t I been doing that the whole time?”

  “Sort of,” she says.

  Even though I’m a professional narcissist, I’ve learned some things about my wife at this point in the novel. Like the fact that “sort of ” is a synonym for “Hell no, you stupid schmuck.”

  She says, “You can’t just mention that a Jew gets cremated and not tell about it.”

  “I thought I already told about it.” In this context, “I thought” is a synonym for “Stop making me feel like an even bigger schmuck than I am.”

  She crumples the page she is holding, drops it on the floor (clearly proving who wears the pants in this manuscript), and then walks over to the end of the novel. She goes right to Chapter 41. “Oy,” she says with the guttural sound of an old, fat Ashkenazi wise man. “You can’t just leave it this way. The first step in finishing this is for you to go back to that river. See where it takes you.”

  I look at all the pages across this room and I consider ripping them up. I can’t imagine that I have the energy to do this and I wonder why I write this stuff in the first place.

  But my wife, she is unwavering. Her gentile red hair and her gentile freckles, they know me better than I know me.

  Just then, I see a sadness in Julia’s eyes. She says, “I can’t rewrite the fact that I slept with another man. I can’t rewrite the story of my mother. You can’t rewrite your parents into existence. But you still have the chance to reshape your novel.”

  She puts a hand on her stomach. Carefully, like she doesn’t want to disturb anything. I could swear that her belly has a different shape to it. And I try to think when was the last time she had a period. I realize that for all I know she hasn’t had a period for the whole novel. This novel is period free. But still, something is going on in her body.

  Fuck. I know I should feel a joy in all of this, but I don’t. You know what I feel? Terror. Another terror on top of all the other terrors. Fuck.

  “Forget it,” I say, “I can’t do this.”

  I’m not looking at her anymore. I’m looking at my pages. I grab pages from the clotheslines and I pull them out so fast that the clothespins don’t even notice. So many pages on the floor that I’m slipping on them as I try to bring the whole novel down. Worse than bananas in a cartoon.

  I fantasized we would be one of those couples who struggles across three years to have a baby. I wanted us to be frustrated and exhausted and required to learn all about crazy fertility issues that neither of us ever wanted to know about. I wanted that whole emotionally and financially costly mess. Because it would have bought me some more time.

  “Yuvi!” the wife yells at me. “Stop it!”

  She grabs me from behind and holds me so that I can’t move my arms enough to grab more pages. Gentiles can be quite strong. And I stop struggling, the heat from her body pressed against me.

  I take deep breaths. I know this novel can’t withstand me struggling with the idea of being a parent. I haven’t even told you about my nightmares where it rains foreskins. And then the idea of a little neurotic, redheaded Yuvi running around, whining even louder than me. It’s too much.

  “It’s going to be fine,” she says to me. I don’t actually believe her, but I like her confidence. She must be right even if I’m sure she’s wrong. If only she followed around my stream of consciousness everywhere it went.

  She says, “Just take this one step at a time.”

  It’s a tired cliché, I could never get away with a line like that in my novel, but when she says it, it feels fresh. First I go back to the river, then I finish this novel, then I learn how to change a shit-filled diaper. I don’t have to do it all at once.

  And then my confident wife says, “Come on. It’s time to take a break. We have two hours before Shmen will be here. So let’s go to bed.” She grabs me by the hand, and we leave the sixteen clotheslines and all those clothespins behind.

  Except for two. Because you never know when you might need a pair of makeshift nipple clamps.

  ODE TO FATHER

  My father didn’t want to be buried like my mother was. He wanted to be burned up. He wanted to be cremated and “splashed all across the Davidson River.” He told me this about three months after she died.

  “What?” I said. “You can’t do that. It’s too late.” I had my hands in fists and could feel my fingernails pressing into my palms. Jews aren’t cremated—that is what I thought to say.

  “It isn’t the betrayal that you think it is.”

  “It is,” I said. “Mom is buried down there waiting.” This was not something I expected to say. I didn’t believe in any kind of afterlife, but I still imagined my mother’s rotting body, all alone down there.

  “Waiting for what?” my father said. He took deep and calm breaths.

  “For you,” I said.

  My father handed me the note. It was written on that tissue-thin paper, which my mom used for international letters, when writing to her sisters in Israel. It was a mix of my mother’s English and her Hebrew.

  I am made of adamah and you are made of miyeem and so that is where we need to go when it ends. We will meet again along the shores of the river, where the miyeem embraces the adamah.

  Her English was never so good, and her Hebrew began fading from the day I was born. But what I didn’t think about was the new language she was creating between the worlds of English and Hebrew. Her story about earth and water was the kind of thing that made total sense once I read it. I wondered about all the other things she had said in my lifetime that I might have unfairly written off.

  I began to cry into the tissue-thin paper. This was a kind of paper too fragile for tears. So my father pulled the note away from me. He cl
eaned the note with his shirt and I put myself back together.

  “So you’re going to do it,” I said to my father, somewhere between a statement and a question.

  “I think so,” he said to me.

  “You never wanted to be buried anyhow,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “I guess I was just doing it for your mom. But if she would’ve suggested this mishugas while she was alive, I would have stopped the discussion before it started. She knew me well enough to know that the only way she could win an argument with me was to start one after she was gone.”

  “What about all the money you spent on that plot of land?”

  My father smiled. The color of his lips was darker than I remembered. “Why?” he said. “Are you in the market for an extra burial plot?”

  “No,” I said. “Maybe I’ll follow in your footsteps.”

  “Well,” he said. “You better get yourself a fly rod.”

  #

  I got the call early one morning. A heart attack. Right on the river. He died instantly, the policeman told me—a man who knew and respected my father. The man said, “One of his wooly buggers was still in his fist.” He said it thinking it would make me feel better. And it did. Well, later anyway.

  #

  I always imagined I’d scatter his ashes alone, but in the end, it went differently. I was freshly married to Julia and had just gotten close to Shmen, and the two of them asked if they could go and support me. And I said okay.

  We flew to Asheville and drove into the Pisgah National Forest, right up to the Davidson River. The forest was different than in Oregon. The pine trees were smaller, but their needles were thicker. It smelled of something sweet and sticky in the woods. There was a cold wind. The summer was nearly over, you could see it up in the tall oak trees—their leaves were green, but barely. I went up to the river and squatted beside it. The soil was spongy underneath me. I tried to read the water like my father once had. There was the noise of the water over the rocks and the ripples in the water and it was muddy in the water and the smell of the wind and the fish. But I couldn’t piece it all together.