All I Love and Know

by Judith Frank

  Gently, his buzz began to run over him, as though someone had cracked an egg on the top of his head and the yolk was seeping down. Daniel’s pants were crumpled on the bedroom floor, the still-belted seat atop two accordioned legs. Matt rose and picked them up; they were dirty at the seat, where Daniel, his knees buckling as Matt led him out, had sat on the damp asphalt in front of his work building in his jacket and tie. Matt drew out the belt and stuffed them into the dry-cleaning bag. He took the joint off the dresser and, his hand cupped under it, went into the bathroom to tap off the long filament of ash. Then he finished it in two big hits and doused it in the sink. He emptied the trash in the bedroom and bathroom, threw the rest of the strewn clothes into the laundry hamper, stripped the bed and made it up with clean sheets, unpacked his clothes, ran the empty suitcases up to the attic.

  And suddenly he was so tired his legs almost buckled.

  He stumbled into the bathroom, shedding clothes, and after washing his face for a long time in very hot water and giving his teeth a quick, vigorous brush, fell into bed, where he turned on the TV and watched the last hour of Stepmom, sad for the Susan Sarandon character but identifying immediately with poor Julia Roberts, who was so shallow and thoughtless! Oh, but they came to respect her in the end. He blew his nose, grateful to be alone in his quiet bed, just him, deliciously, no one entering the room with a tear-stained face. If that made him a bad person, he thought, so be it.

  CHAPTER 6

  IT WAS WILD going through the messages. The New York friends had called! Stephen and Scott, guys he hadn’t seen for years. Lindsay Price had called to say he’d seen Daniel’s family on the news. The local Fox affiliate had dug up an old picture of Joel, and Lindsay said that he’d been horrified thinking at first that it was Daniel who’d been killed, and then relieved when he realized it was just Daniel’s brother. There was a long silence on the tape, then it clicked off, and the next message was from Lindsay again, saying, “Not that that’s really any better, it’s just . . .” Matt rolled his eyes. He played it again, for signs of whether Lindsay was using, but he couldn’t tell. He was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee for which he’d put milk through the steamer, in celebration of drinking good coffee again. Yo-yo was gobbling down his breakfast, his metal tags clattering against the bowl.

  “Anyway,” the message said, “if you want to call . . .”

  Matt snorted and erased the message. He had a lined yellow pad in front of him and was taking careful notes because he remembered his bewilderment in the months following Jay’s death, when he’d been mad at the whole world but actually not sure whether this or that friend hadn’t called after all. He wanted to keep track now for Daniel. His stomach rumbled. He had slept, on and off, for seven hours, which he thought was pretty good, and he was determined to be on a Northampton schedule today, and to stay up till nine at the earliest. He lit a cigarette he’d brought downstairs from his stash. Smoking was an indulgence of being home alone, like eating cereal for dinner and not making the bed. He rose to open the kitchen windows, and saw that the tulips along the backyard fence were in bloom, nodding and snoozing in the shade.

  He wasn’t even your boyfriend, Lindsay had said one night when Matt had come down to visit, maybe a year after Jay had died. He implied, with the significant look of someone breaking a hard truth, that he was speaking for all of them, which had infuriated Matt. But in fact, as it turned out, he had been. After that, every time one of his friends asked “How are you?” it became a huge minefield: If he said he was feeling shitty, their silence implied that he was a leech on Kendrick’s grief. It was just like now, when you thought about it—Daniel’s loss, not his. Him brooding and lurking along the edges of tragedy, trying his damnedest to be appropriate.

  He’d dropped them all because they were bad for his mental health, and because half of them were tweekers anyway and he just didn’t want to be part of that scene. It was an unprecedented act for Matt, who thrived in the light of friendship. That first year living with Daniel had been a hard and lonely one for him; Daniel had a lot of nice friends, but even as he’d integrated into their circle he’d felt them to be Daniel’s friends, not his. And even though it had been he who had cut off his New York friendships, it wounded him that they hadn’t tried harder to bring him back—especially Lindsay, whom he’d supported through meth addiction and rehab. The friendship had briefly flared up again after September 11, when Lindsay had been his point person for checking up on everybody, but even then Lindsay acted as though only New Yorkers could possibly understand the profundity and horror of the whole thing, and Matt was sure he was using again, so after many evenings of complaining bitterly to Daniel, he stopped returning Lindsay’s calls. Now the messages on his machine gave him a sense of bitter satisfaction. It was irrational, he knew, but he felt that this new tragedy proved that his sadness was legitimate, even his past sadness. He would never call any of them back. Let them just sit with their horrid fascination, and gossip with one another about how horrible it all was, and go get wasted in club bathrooms, and go to hell.

  Brent and Derrick, their best couple friends, had called twice. Derrick was Daniel’s steadiest, call-every-day friend—a fine, upstanding fellow, as Matt thought of him. Listening, he smiled; Derrick knew his way around a condolence call. He was a psychologist who taught schools how to introduce diversity programs, so he was trained in acknowledging others’ feelings. Then Brent took the phone, and there was his voice, a melodious, demonstrative baritone Matt loved, saying in a big rush, “We can’t wait for you guys to come home. Come home soon!”

  Matt looked at his watch. It was around 8:30, and Derrick would probably be at work, but Brent, who was a professor, might be home. He picked up the phone and dialed them on speed dial, and Brent picked up on the second ring, saying, “Matt?”

  “Hi.”

  “Matt,” he breathed, as though hearing Matt’s voice was the culmination of all his desires and he could now rest. “When did you guys get back?”

  “Just me,” Matt said. “Daniel’s still there.”

  “How was it?” Brent asked. “Wow, what a stupid question. How’s Daniel doing?”

  Matt shrugged. “You know,” he said. “He’s completely fucked-up. He’s dealing with his twin brother being blown to bits, and his parents are there, which doesn’t make it any easier, and then there’s the kids.”

  “What’s going to happen to them?” Brent asked.

  There was a pause. “We never told you?”

  “No.” And then, before Matt could say anything, he said, “Oh my God, are you guys taking them?”

  “We’re trying to,” Matt said. “Joel and Ilana wanted that; it was in their will.”

  “Wow,” Brent said.

  Matt was quiet, parsing that “Wow.” Of all Daniel’s friends, Brent was the one whom Matt had immediately clicked with; he was hilarious, and a media scholar at Mount Holyoke, and after Matt had stopped being a little intimidated about being friends with an academic, he loved being around someone so smart, someone who made his mind dance. But Matt had also been the laughing audience for many of Brent’s scathing performances about moms with kids, and he worried a little that he and Daniel would become the butt of Brent’s breeder jokes. Recently, Brent had stopped going to Woodstar Café, down the street from his apartment, since it had become a hangout for moms with kids in strollers, saying that being there made him want to stick a knife in his eye.

  “Does that make us uncles?” Brent asked.

  “Absolutely,” Matt said, smiling.

  “You guys will be all ‘Do your homework’ and ‘Clean your room,’ and we’ll be the place they go when they run away from home. And who takes them to the doctor when they want to transition. Well, I will. Derrick will want to make sure the lines of respectful communication remain open between you and them.”

  “Dude, they’re six and one year old,” Matt laughed.

  “What are their names again?”

  “Th
e girl is Gal, and the little boy is Noam.” Matt found he was still smiling. “Look, it’s not certain. It turns out that the will isn’t binding, and the kids’ Israeli grandparents are going to go to court to try to keep them there. And they’re Holocaust survivors, and Ilana was their only child. So we’re basically trying to take away the only thing they have left. Can you imagine?”

  “Shit.”

  “I know.”

  There was a long pause. Then Brent said, “How are you feeling about it?”

  Matt sighed. “I have no idea,” he said. “You know I’ve never wanted kids before. I feel awful about taking them away from their grandparents. But Daniel wants them. And it’s what Joel and Ilana wanted.”

  “Sure.”

  Matt drained his cup of coffee and put it down. “I think maybe I want them just a little bit,” he said to Brent, emotion rushing into his voice and surprising him. “Is that weird? Am I just being a competitive asshole?”

  “Probably,” Brent said, and they both laughed. “What do you think your chances are of getting them?”

  “I’m not sure. Fifty-fifty?”

  After another pause, Brent said, “Wanna come over? Since after the kids arrive, I’ll never see you again?”

  “Oh please,” Matt said. He opened the back door and looked down at the stoop, which was coated with pollen. “Let me do some cleaning up around here, and go through the bills, and I’ll call you later.”

  “See?” Brent said. “It starts already.”

  “Shut up,” Matt said. “It does not start already.”

  After he hung up, Matt swept off the stoop and the steps, propped the broom against the house, and sat down, looking out at the garden. His imagination was very gently entwining itself around the idea of being a father. He was ready for something new. He should learn Hebrew! He wanted to be able to understand his daughter—his daughter—when she spoke to Daniel, and it would be important for both kids to know their mother’s language. It felt a little weird, setting out to learn the language of the oppressor; it felt a little like learning Afrikaans. His mind worried the comparison for a while, as he hosed out the grime from the birdbath and filled it, dragged out a bag of birdseed from the garage, and filled and rehung the feeders. Then he began imagining himself in a classroom with little wood desk chairs and batik wall hangings of Hasidic fiddlers, with all the bar mitzvah boys—the bored kids with braces and chubby cheeks learning their Torah portion from a severe, bearded man.

  It was only an idea that caught his fancy; he didn’t intend to act on it, at least right now, when there was so much work to catch up on. But the next day, Brent called him to say that a colleague of his knew an Israeli artist named Yossi-something who was married to a physicist at UMass, who was apparently waiting for his green card and taught Hebrew under the table. Matt kept the paper with Yossi’s number on it next to the phone for a few days as he caught up on delinquent projects—a poster for a film festival and a boarding school annual report that accounted for about a quarter of his yearly income and that was, miraculously, only a week overdue. He lingered over the number when he came into or left the kitchen, and each time tender fantasies overcame his awareness that, to some people, Hebrew was the language of the set of byzantine, malicious laws that legitimized blowing up their houses or keeping them apart from their farms, their own spouses and children. The idea of learning Hebrew made him think of Gal and Noam as his daughter and son, he didn’t know why.

  He didn’t tell Daniel about it yet because their official attitude on the phone was a guarded neutrality on the subject of the children, as a way of protecting themselves in case they didn’t get them. And when he thought about it, he wasn’t really sure how Daniel would react. But finally, he put in a call to Yossi. Yossi was unpleasantly abrupt on the phone, asking midway through Matt’s spiel, “Who is this?” Which made Matt sigh and have to start over: “My name is Matt Greene.” Yossi made him tell him exactly how he’d gotten his number, and when Matt couldn’t remember Brent’s friend’s name, there was a stony silence on the other end that made Matt wonder: Do I need this crap?

  It occurred to him later that Yossi was being extra careful because he wasn’t legally allowed to hold a job. But when Yossi arrived at his door a few days later, he thought that he might just be a prick. He was gorgeous—tall and broad, with closely cut hair, a dark beard shadow, and blue eyes that looked a little washed out from gazing into the sun, perhaps, or inward, at his own weighty thoughts. A lovely sprout of chest hair showed above his shirt where it was open at the neck. Matt suddenly remembered that Brent had reported that Yossi had been an air force pilot. If he had extended his hand, Matt would have gripped it with all his might, but he was spared that display because all he got was a curt nod. When Yo-yo barged at him, Yossi quieted him by taking his head into his two large hands. “Don’t mind him,” Matt said, taking note of his wedding band. “He’s a goof.”

  “I don’t,” Yossi said.

  Matt got him coffee, which he drank black, and as they sat down at the kitchen table, Yossi asked him in a nonplussed way why he wanted to learn Hebrew. “Are you Jewish?” he asked.

  Matt felt himself bristle. As happened with some straight men, Yossi made him feel girly and silly. “No, I’m not,” he replied. “But my partner is.” He cleared his throat and gazed at the man across the table from him as he digested the word partner, enjoying for once the anticipation of telling their story, knowing that it would wipe the dismissive look off of Yossi’s handsome face. “My partner—his name is Daniel—Daniel’s brother and sister-in-law were killed in a pigua in Jerusalem, and there’s a chance that we are going to raise the children.”

  Yossi sat back in his chair and placed his hand on his chest. “Ah,” he said gently. “How old are they?”

  “Gal is six and Noam is eleven months.”

  Yossi heaved a sigh. “Terrible. It was the pigua at Peace Train Café?”

  Matt nodded.

  “So your first Hebrew word is pigua.”

  It hadn’t been, quite, but Matt didn’t correct him, Yossi was so obviously touched by the thought, and it felt delightful to have this Israeli warrior feeling bad for him. “Yes, and the word ptsatsa,” Matt said, bringing out the Hebrew word for “bomb,” and then thinking that he was perhaps working the pathos too hard. “But that’s about it. Oh—buba and miskena, things like that.”

  Yossi smiled faintly. “Miskena. Is there a word in English?”

  “I don’t think so. ‘Poor thing’?”

  Yossi shrugged. “Miskena, that’s for a girl. You must also learn the word for a boy poor thing. Misken.”

  “Misken,” Matt repeated.

  “Miskenim,” Yossi crooned, as though he were actually comforting children. Poor things. “Im, that is plural, for masculine.”

  Matt nodded.

  Yossi sighed and got out his books. Then he placed his hands on them and leaned forward. “It’s good to learn a language to speak to children.”

  Matt looked at him, confused, trying to parse the meaning of that sentiment, which seemed either very deep or very cloying, when Yossi added, “Because you will be on a similar level.”

  “Aha, true.”

  “I try to think—” Yossi cleared his throat. “What kind of things you might say to children in their situation.” He was lost for a moment, lashes fluttering, in tender, brooding thought. “ ‘Try to sleep,’ ” he said, turning his glance to Matt. “ ‘I love you. I will take care of you.’ Shall I teach you those phrases?”

  They worked on them for a while, and then Yossi opened a workbook with the Hebrew alphabet and lines for penmanship practice, and taught Matt to read a few basic words. He would break each lesson into two, he said, teaching him simple conversation for the first half hour, and reading and writing for the second. He watched as Matt drew his first Hebrew letters, and he gave him homework for the following week. They smoked a cigarette together on the back steps before he left. Matt asked him if he had kids, an
d Yossi said he did, three boys, one twelve, one ten, and one Gal’s age.

  “Oh,” Matt said. “Maybe they can play together.”

  “Rafi is deaf,” Yossi said bluntly.

  “Okay,” Matt said. “Does that mean they can’t play together?”

  “No,” Yossi laughed. “Of course not.”

  “Do you like it here?”

  Yossi opened his palms and shrugged. “It’s good for my wife, this job. And it’s a very good place for Rafi, because of the school for the deaf. But I miss home. People aren’t very friendly here.”

  “Really, you think?” Matt asked. He thought about this town, where men with gray beards and pedantic demeanors, and willowy ponytailed women, and the million and one psychotherapists and, of course, the stocky lesbians with severe and perfect haircuts engaged with one another with great, inculcated civility; civility he’d initially found, after living for years in New York, phony, almost comical.

  “At home, you can jump over to someone’s house without calling, and they will pull up another chair for dinner.”

  “Oh,” Matt said. “We don’t do that in New England.”

  On his way out, Yossi instructed Matt to say the sentences he’d learned one more time. He lifted his chin sternly, like a father demanding a recitation from a child. “Try to sleep,” Matt said, as Yossi raised his eyebrows and nodded. “I love you. I will take care of you.”

  Yossi gave him an approving clap on the shoulder and said, “Yofi! Le’hitraot. That’s mean ‘See you later.’ ”