The Best American Short Stories® 2011

by Geraldine Brooks

  Since their first argument, she had found herself doing and thinking things that she previously never could have envisioned: feeling unfamiliar pangs while eating pork, writing G-d instead of god in e-mails, sneering at strangers' pendant crucifixes, resenting churches, discovering within herself an out-of-nowhere identification with A Certain Small Country She Had Never Been To And Did Not Ever Want To Visit. She had no explanation for these things.

  They stood holding each other's hand outside the cheese store. There seemed no place for this already battle-weary argument to go, other than deeper into a bunker, where it might just as well blow its own brains out. Suddenly she was crying. His forehead lurched forward, lightly bumping hers. "Don't cry," he said.

  She shook her head. "I feel like I've disappointed you in a way I can't even control."

  "I'm not disappointed. Disappointment is a beautiful woman reading Ayn Rand. This is not disappointment. This is something we can get through."

  "But what if we can't?"

  "Then I guess it's a bridge under water."

  At the same time they squeezed each other's hand. His brother, a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps, had over the last five years of his eventful service become quite a collector of military-grade phraseology: unimprovised road, northeasterlyward, shrapmetal, validify, and increasely. "A bridge under water," which a gunnery sergeant had once used to describe to her husband's brother a particularly bad Ramadi neighborhood, was, as her husband knew, her personal favorite. She loved his brother.

  She hugged him now with real love, its smoldering edges suddenly extinguished. "I hope it's not a bridge under water. It would be a real blow to my parade if it were."

  His arms reached around her back. When he spoke into her hair his voice was unfamiliarly husky. "No need to reinvent the clock."

  When they reached their room she slept in her clothes for the rest of the afternoon and awoke around seven to find him writing in His Notebook. She admired that about him too. He could write anywhere. He claimed to have once written an entire op-ed in the bathroom at a friend's birthday party. But she knew that he had not been writing much lately. He told her a while ago that he felt convinced the time of the American voice was over, which sounded even more pretentious when he said it.

  She watched him for a little while, then said, "Hey," a drowsy creak in her voice breaking the word in two. "What are you doing?"

  "Writing," he said.

  "I gathered. What about?"

  "A monkey with an unusual level of curiosity. This gets him into trouble in the short term but consistently results in long-term gains for those around him. I think this is due to the purity of his motivation, though I have to admit, I'm just getting to know the character."

  When he got like this she really enjoyed throwing things at him and now launched across the room her big supernaturally downy pillow. He absorbed the blow and continued writing. She sat up and looked around the room, which was absurd, beginning with the fact that it did not have a number but rather a symbol. (The floors did not have numbers either; they had colors; they were on Green.) Their room's symbol resembled a Celtic cross. Upon check-in, they had been given a sheet with peel-away representations of this symbol, which they were supposed to affix to all relevant bills. It was apparently some sort of "art hotel," and everything in the room had a gadgety double function. The shower's clear glass door turned discreetly opaque when the water was running. The wall-hung flat-screen television could be pulled out from its steel rigging on some sort of extender arm and angled this way or that, allowing guests to see the screen from literally any point in the room. The day they arrived they had engaged in a long discussion about whether this last innovation was "worthless" or "next to worthless." The décor itself was Modern Android, everything shiny and smooth, with drawers and closets that made no sound when you opened them. She actually kind of loved it here.

  She looked at him. "Do you want to order room service and do it like teenagers?"

  He crossed something out, glanced over at her, and frowned in a hard-to-read way. They had not made love since the first night they were here, though they had tried. They had even tried last night, after arguing, and the effort had ended, quite literally for her, in tears. When they first got together it was not unusual for them to do it three times a day. Not that unusual, no, but they did it in cabs, in the kitchen, and once with her leaning out their opened living room window at night with all the lights on. Since the argument, they did it only before bed, and only in bed, and as far as she knew, he had not come once. And this was a man who took the greatest and sincerest pleasure in the sight of his own orgasm of anyone she had ever been with. Post-argument, the moment she came he would kiss her, withdraw, and roll over to sleep. The one time she asked him about this he had denied it, and then, she was sure, began faking his orgasms. Twice now he had made his coming noises and after he fell asleep she had squatted on the toilet with her hand cupped beneath her, to no avail. Last night he had not been able to get hard at all, which he blamed on the wine, and then the argument, and then the wine. She wondered why they were otherwise getting along so well, and had the brief, horrified thought that maybe couples in newly dead marriages got along in a way akin to the cheerfulness of people about to kill themselves.

  "Honey?" She was wounded, a little, by his lack of response. "Room service?"

  Still writing. "Sure, if you want."

  She picked up the phone and listened to the harsh European dial tone, so unlike the organic lushness of the North American dial tone. She thought about what to order, then looked over at him again. "What do you suppose is considered a good tip for room service here? Two Celtic crosses or three?"

  He did not look up. "I think you use real money for that, sweetie."

  She replaced the phone and began to unbutton her shirt. Off came her skirt. Underwear, be gone. Her socks were last. Amazingly, he had not yet noticed, though two-thirds of his back was to her. She swung her legs to the floor and walked softly over to him, careful now to stay out of his peripheral vision, appalled by the sudden determination of her ... lust? No. She did not even feel particularly wanton. She just needed to know if he still wanted her. She was self-conscious of her stomach, both proud of and slightly concerned by it (she touched it sometimes, when she was alone, as though it were an heirloom of uncertain provenance), and she wondered if this was why he refused to come, if somewhere within him was an animal self that considered her body territory that had already been marked. She was upon her husband now and began rubbing his shoulders. He had a big dog's dumb love of rubs and scratchings and at once his body went slumpy in his chair. His writing fist opened and his pencil toppled over and rolled to the bottom of the page.

  "God," he said. "Really needed that."

  "Stressed out?" She glanced at the page on which he had been writing and saw her name several times. Unlike him, to turn inward—to focus his writing upon his wife, of all people. Maybe the time of the American voice really was over. She looked away.

  "I don't know. A little." She knew his eyes were closed. That he made no effort to conceal what he was writing made her less worried. "That feels so nice."

  "It's supposed to."

  For a while he did not say anything. Then: "While you were asleep"—his voice had changed, become somehow artificially official—"I was reading the guidebook. And I noticed we're not too far away from Rome's biggest synagogue." She realized that at his mention of "synagogue" she had begun to pincer his deltoid too aggressively. "So what I thought was that maybe tomorrow we could go there together. I thought maybe you'd like that. I'd like it too. Maybe seeing it will make me..."

  "Make you what?" She was no longer rubbing him but was rather behind him, bent over, her hands behind her back, her chin set upon his shoulder, thrillingly conscious of the secret of her nakedness.

  "Maybe it will help us." He started to turn around in his chair. "I should warn you that it's a synagogue designed by two Christian archi—Sweetie. You're nak
ed."

  "Sit back," she said.

  He smiled in a worried way. "What are you doing?"

  "Just sit back."

  He did, and she went to her knees. She undid his belt with the poised delicacy of someone who already knew what the gift she was unwrapping contained. Without prompting, he lifted his ass off the seat, allowing her to tug off his jeans. She was relieved to find that he was already hard. It had been a hot day and he smelled like the skin underneath a not-recent bandage. She did not mind. She did not muck around, either. His cock was as warm as a mouthful of blood.

  "Jesus," he said, and she felt his whole body flex. She was not a huge fan of performing oral sex and took a fairly workmanlike approach to the act. But now she imagined the inside of her mouth as being florally soft and smooth, and was conscious, suddenly, that she would never know what this felt like, disappearing into the mouth of another. The realization made her bizarrely excited. "Jewish girls like to fuck": a Catholic boyfriend of hers had said that to her once. She certainly liked to fuck. But she had corrected the boyfriend: "Reform Jewish girls like to fuck." (Later, after they broke up but stayed friendly, he began dating a black woman and told her, "Black girls like to fuck." She was devastated.) She wondered if her husband did not want to come in her anymore because she was Jewish.

  "Jesus," he said again. He was thrusting lightly. Even the most artful blowjob grows repetitive, and, as a thought experiment, she imagined getting divorced. She supposed she would have to if he refused to allow their child to be Jewish. But she wondered if she could. She knew the story of his parents' divorce. It was one of the first intimate stories about himself he had ever told her. His mother used to put him in the back seat of her caramel-colored Cadillac convertible—a car, he said, as long as a submarine—and drop by Ernie's Party Store (she remembered that name, its small-town perfection) for comic books. On the days she took him to Ernie's she always put the top up, and this was a woman who kept the top down even when it was sprinkling. While he read his comic books his mother parked out in front of a strange house in a neighborhood not terribly far from their house. She made sure to park in the shade, at a discreet diagonal angle from the strange house. She would be gone for only a little while, she would tell him, making sure to roll down his window before leaving him to his crimefighting mutants and walking hurriedly toward the strange house. On the fifth or sixth time she took him here, he asked whom she was going to see inside the strange house. She said she was going to see a friend. After the eighth or ninth time he asked her what she had been doing with her friend, and she said, It's a surprise. For Daddy. So please don't tell him. What kind of surprise? She did not answer, so he had hazarded a child's guess: a surprise party? Yes, she had said, and started to cry. He naturally misunderstood her tears, and could not stand—no little boy could stand—being the secret sharer of such exciting information for long. When he told his father about the party, asking him to promise that he would pretend to be surprised, his father said he would, then asked a few short, expert questions, nodded, and walked from the room. His mother left the next day. So it was not surprising that the whole question of divorce was a rather knotty one for him. She wondered if he could divorce her. She had read once that every marriage was between a royal and a peasant, a teacher and a student. She wondered what would have to happen for her to know for certain which one she was. She knew what he thought she was.

  And with that, amid the pomp of some magnificent, Sasquatchian sounds, he was coming. She had never let anyone come in her mouth before and was not sure whether to swallow it or what. She was game, but the taste was not at all the seawater harshness she imagined it would be, but was rather something chemically nondegradable, like pool cleaner. Her mouth dropped open and what must have been half a cup of sperm and drool splatted against the carpet with water-balloon density. He looked down at her, breathing, his eyes crazed.

  It was a weekday morning, but even so, the night had not been gentle to the streets of Rome. Bits of paper tumbleweeded down the swaybacked sidewalk along the Tiber River, and every twenty yards they came upon a little area that looked as though an ill-disciplined army had bivouacked there: Peroni beer bottles with a single stomach-turning swallow left in them, paper plates made transparent by pizza grease, panino wrappers, even a half-deflated soccer ball. The morning was clear and the sunlight seemed to bronze everything it caught, but the air blew with some strange microscopic grit.

  The night had not been gentle with him either. She had actually slept well, but he had awakened her at five A.M. to describe the nightmare he had just experienced. In it he was somehow accepting the best director Academy Award for Revenge of the Sith, but no one could hear him speak over the music and then people began laughing at him. When she had told him that she would have laughed too were she in the audience, she could hear him sulk in the darkness.

  From a distance it did not much resemble a synagogue. It had a square dome, for one. Closer up it did not much resemble a synagogue either. It kind of looked like a bank. But what did she know? The temples of her youth had looked like junior high schools. She disliked the similarity of Christian churches' bland majesty and had never really believed that they were built with love. There was something arctic about their devotion, and the brutal awe she felt inside the churches of Rome annoyed her—a (more or less) innocent opinion, voiced on their first day here, to which her husband had responded with such a grenade of ire that he had apologized almost instantly.

  It occurred to her, as they approached, that she did not really care to see Rome's synagogue. The notion that they might discover anything here together struck her as fancifully at odds with what she knew were his real feelings. She was being sinisterly coddled. She felt unwell. The only thing worse than going into this synagogue would be telling him she did not want to go into this synagogue. Perhaps, in her own way, she was coddling him. It was too soon, she felt, to have this many secret motivations.

  Now she was standing before the synagogue and took in the penitentiary inelegance of its surrounding black gates, its eggshell marble, its colonnaded ledges and tiers, and its small but noticeable number of broken windows—no longer a bank at all, but the mansion of some once-wealthy eccentric who had gone broke in the middle of an ambitious and possibly demented renovation. All around the synagogue was a typical Roman neighborhood of sun-bleached buildings with windows covered by parsley-green wooden shutters. This neighborhood, she had read, had once been predominantly Jewish—it was indeed still called the Jewish Ghetto—but in recent years many of the Jews had been getting priced out. On the corner of the synagogue's block stood a Plexiglas box, inside of which a hatless police officer read a newspaper. As they walked toward what they guessed was the proper entrance, several signs let it be known that the Museo Ebraico di Roma was currently under AREA VIDEO SORVEGLIATA.

  She waited at the bottom of a stone staircase while he went up to an unpromising black-tinted glass door. Before he could give the handle an experimental pull, a short, bald man, whose near-perfect caricature of squat Semitic brusqueness was offset only by his pink sweater, opened the door and asked, "You pay ticket?" When her husband said no, the man jerked his thumb in a vaguely obscene way toward another gate farther down the block. Here they found a doorbell, which she pressed. She hated doorbells that did not make a corresponding sound for the benefit of the door-beller and, fearing it was broken, pressed again after fifteen seconds. With a disapproving buzz the gate popped open.

  They walked without comment through an open-air, yellow-walled corridor, the walls of which were affixed with chunks of old Sicilian synagogues, pieces of alms boxes, ancient fragments of synagogue doorjambs, all of them stamped with Hebrew letters, some of which she thought she might have recognized. All passed through her with no more moment than that of a parachutist through a cloud. He had already gone ahead into the lobby, where apparently tours were booked. The young woman who sat behind the ticket desk with a modest, makeupless presence informed her that ent
ering the synagogue cost seven euros. "An English tour begins at seven fifteen," she said. "We will call you."

  She paid, hoping he had not overhead this, but when she gave him his ticket he was smirking.

  "It costs seven euros to get in?"

  "It's a museum," she said.

  "So's Saint Peter's. They don't charge you to go in there because it's still a functional place of worship."

  She concentrated on not being angry. "The bone church cost money to get into."

  "The bone crypt cost money to get into. The church above it was free. And the bone crypt asked for a donation, not seven euros."

  She looked at him, nodding. "So you really plan on being a dick about this."

  He winced in the stalwart way of a man being injected with something intended to benefit him. "Permission to apologize?"

  "Authorization to forgive is pending." She poked him in the belly. "Behave and it might come through."

  The museum's capsule history of Rome's Jewish community was set out on a series of large, thick, spot-glossed poster boards. While they stood before the first of these highly reflective plaques, dim and faceless ghost versions of themselves stared out as though from an inescapable dimension. She read one subject heading ("From Judaei to Jews: The Jews of Rome During the Middle Ages"), noted a quote from a twelfth-century visitor to Rome ("Two hundred Jews live there, who are very much respected"), and was not surprised by how quickly the story turned unhappy ("The burning of the Talmud in 1553 dealt a terrible blow to the tradition of Talmudic studies in Rome").