by Judith Frank
Closing the door, Matt took a huge breath. Yossi’s sternness and scrutiny and praise made him feel a little like a sheepish child, but he had a nice glow from that too, from being praised for being smart. He paced around the kitchen, feeding the dog and washing out the coffeemaker and setting water to boil for pasta. He wasn’t used to not being the most handsome man in the room. But he’d found that he gladly deferred to Yossi’s alpha hunkiness. A Magnetic Fields song playing and replaying in the back of his mind floated up to his consciousness, and he laughed to himself. He dialed Brent and Derrick’s number, and when Brent picked up the phone, he sang, without saying hello, “He’s amazing, he’s a whole new form of life.”
Brent laughed, and finished the couplet: “Blue eyes blazing, and he’s going to be your wife.”
“Well, not quite,” Matt said thoughtfully. “It’s more like he’s going to be my ward.”
He was having to work until pretty late, but now and then he took a little time to practice his Hebrew alphabet. It pleased him to form the letters; it reminded him of design school, where they made them learn to design by hand, painstakingly drawing the alphabet, or cutting out the listed ingredients from some random product and making a composition out of them. He was enjoying being alone, he found; he turned down invitations to dinner and movies from his friends.
ONE MORNING, WHILE CLEANING the bedroom, Lydia cried out; she emerged waving a DVD and crying, “We can see him again!” She clasped first Sam, then Daniel, looking into their faces with a tearful smile. She had come across the DVDs of Joel’s show, which were stored, it turned out, neatly labeled and dated, in a flat plastic tub under Joel and Ilana’s bed. When she went back into the bedroom to take out the box, Daniel murmured to his father, “She does understand that it’s not really Joel, just a film of him, right?”
Sam was making plans to go home, to take care of some business and to visit an old friend they were worried about, who was in the hospital with an undiagnosed ailment that had made him collapse several times. He was on the phone with the airlines, on hold; he took off his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose.
They couldn’t stay away—they had to watch them—but they dreaded it, too. After his father hung up, Daniel got in a few whispered moments on the phone with Matt, who told him he didn’t have to watch if he didn’t want to, which vaguely annoyed Daniel even though he knew it was sensible, and true.
When the kids were down, his parents sat next to each other on the couch. Daniel checked and double-checked on Gal before putting the DVD into the player; he just couldn’t face the idea of her waking up and coming into the living room and seeing an image of her living father. He was well into a second beer, and he fiddled with the remote control while perched on the edge of the recliner. The screen turned blue, and then it was on, Israel Today. And there was Joel, sitting behind a desk, welcoming the audience to a show about education in the development towns. He was going to be talking to a teacher from one of the towns down south—a new oleh from the U.S. who was agitating to get more resources down there—and to someone from the Ministry of Education.
There was a close-up of his face, and Daniel’s heart seemed to stop beating, it was so eerie and so piercing to see the brown eyes alive—alive!—and his light skin, textured and mottled, a freckle here and there. Joel’s face looked out into the living room. He was in that world and Daniel was in this one; for a moment Daniel had the sense that they were barely separated at all, that the television was a mere technicality. Joel’s presence was there in front of him, in its breathing, thinking, sentient animality. What was the difference, really, between that vivid picture and his actual self?
The camera broke away to a short video about the poor conditions in a dilapidated school somewhere in the south.
“It didn’t used to be like this,” his father said, his voice hoarse. “It used to be that when people died, they were dead, and you just looked at pictures, or imagined them.”
“I can’t decide if this is better or worse,” Lydia said, her hands in her lap, trembling.
They watched Joel interview his guests, clear, incisive, his voice warm, hunching over his crossed arms and leaning toward the guest in the studio. Daniel finished his beer; his father got up to go to the bathroom, and when Lydia asked if they should pause it, he waved his hand no. He stayed away until the show ended, and when he returned, said, “Is it over?”
“That such a lovely man should be killed for this . . . this, I don’t know what,” Lydia murmured. “It’s senseless. Even if he wasn’t my son, I’d be devastated by it. He’s a wonderful interviewer, isn’t he? He manages to be both hard-hitting and likable—you can tell that the interviewees like and trust him.”
“If he was hard-hitting,” Daniel remarked, “he’d ask how much the Ministry of Education invests in Arab Israeli education.”
There was silence as his parents turned to him in surprise. “I really don’t think that’s appropriate,” Sam said.
“Why not?” he said, unable to stop himself from rushing on. “That’s the big scandal in Israeli education. They’re citizens, and they’re funded at something like one-fifth the rate of Israeli kids. Their schools are a disaster.”
“It’s a pity you disapproved of your brother so much,” Lydia said bitterly.
“He was a good man with a blind spot,” Daniel said. He felt that it was a generous assessment. It had always bothered Daniel that Joel hadn’t stepped up; he had a responsibility, he felt, as a public figure.
“And I suppose you alone can see clearly,” his mother challenged.
“Not me alone, Mother. But I think I saw more clearly on this issue than Joel did.”
“That’s pretty arrogant, don’t you think?” Sam said. “After all, he lived here, and he had an entire research team at his disposal.”
Daniel shrugged.
They were quiet. “I had no idea you felt this way about your brother,” Lydia said. “Was he aware of that?”
“A little,” Daniel said, thinking about the one argument they’d had that had made Joel blow up, when Daniel had told him that Matt saw many analogies between Israel and apartheid South Africa. Joel had turned beet red and tried to pin Daniel to the wall with heated questions about security and self-defense and what specific techniques he was referring to. He’d asked scornfully if Matt was now such a big expert on the subject because he’d written a paper about it in college. Daniel should have known better: The South Africa comparison was like a red flag in front of a bull to most Israelis. And it was shitty of him to use Matt’s name instead of just being upfront about his own feelings. Joel was pissed off at Matt for a long time after that.
He sighed. “I could have worked harder at, I don’t know, showing him my point of view. But he lives here. Lived here.” And what? He hadn’t thought it was his place to precipitate a whole moral crisis in Joel. Which was sensitive of him, but also, when he stared it in the face, a little cowardly. When it came down to it, he just hadn’t wanted to get into it. They’d had such a great time when he’d come last year, and he loved them so much! And maybe it wouldn’t have precipitated a moral crisis at all—if it hadn’t yet, why would it now?—and he didn’t want to see that.
The blue screen was clear and unblinking; he rose to eject the disc, and discovered he was a little buzzed from his two beers. It hurt to be disappointed in Joel; it made his very soul feel sore. And what about himself, what had he done? Just these last weeks, the Israeli army had killed fifteen Palestinians, three of them children. The Israeli authorities denied it. But he’d been reading the Internet reports by human rights organizations and knew about the terrible toll on civilian life. And worse, this violence was supposedly happening on his family’s behalf.
His parents rose heavily, and seeing how perturbed they looked made Daniel feel horrible. He’d attacked their beloved dead son—what good did that do anybody? Had he done it to aggrandize himself? If he had, what kind of infantile impulse was that?
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nbsp; Lydia went into the kitchen to load the dishes in the sink into the dishwasher, and Sam shuffled in his slippers to the bedroom and closed the door behind him. Daniel used the bathroom, then murmured a good-night to his mother and went into his room and got into bed. He lay there for about an hour, his mind jangling busily and unpleasantly. Then he sat up and thought about how to make it stop. He rose and pulled on a pair of jeans and a tight T-shirt, and took his leather jacket off the back of the desk chair and slipped it on. Wearing it felt both protective and sensual; he lovingly treated it with lotion twice a year, at the beginning and the end of the leather-jacket season. He’d had the lining replaced once already.
He found his wallet and slipped it into the inside breast pocket, picked up the car keys. He patted his jeans pockets reflexively and turned off the small desk light.
Gal, he hoped, would sleep through the night. He couldn’t tell his parents he was going out, and they had gone to bed by now anyway. But he didn’t want them to worry if they found he wasn’t there. In the end he left a note on his pillow that said Be back soon. D. He looked at it uncertainly, scratching his chin, feeling how very quickly he could regress when left alone with them. It was only two days since Matt had left, and already his mother had begun doing things like telling him to clean up after himself, as though he hadn’t cleaned up after himself every day of his life for twenty years. Without Matt, there was nobody to help signify that he was an adult. No one to be more immature than he was.
He closed the front door quietly behind him, trotted down the stairs, and got into the car. He pulled onto the street and nosed his way out of the quiet neighborhood, making the only turns he could down the maze of one-way streets. Cars were parked every which way, on streets and sidewalks. He turned onto Ruppin; the Knesset was yellow and illuminated on his left, the Israel museum on his right. And then he was climbing another narrow street, and heading left down Aza. He turned onto Keren Ha’Yasod and found what he’d hoped he’d find, a small patch of dirt parking lot still untouched by the crazy development that had gone up around the park.
He pulled in, closed and locked the door behind him. He walked silently down the street to Independence Park, his steps quickening as he saw the high lights of the park ahead and, in their light, the crazy flitting shadows of bats. It was many years since he’d visited the old gay cruising ground; he wasn’t even sure whether now, in the Internet age, men still cruised here—in fact, whether regular old face-to-face cruising still existed at all. The mountain air was cold on his hot face and hands. He slowed down once he entered the park, put his hands in his pockets. An occasional person passed on the stone paths, and he could smell a verdant, spiny aroma—eucalyptus or cypress. The swoon of sensation and emotion suddenly made his legs watery. He made it to a bench, laid his arms along the top of it, threw his head back and breathed.
He was overwhelmed because it was Joel he wanted. Not like that, of course, but his heart strained for Joel. He closed his eyes, and memories of the summer of Joel’s wedding, when he’d come for two months to visit, came easily to him. Joel was reporting for the Jerusalem Post and living with Ilana in that apartment on Rehov HaPalmach. There was a ton of wedding hoo-ha, gifts arriving every day, Joel the bright, exotic center of their extended family. It was a time when Daniel’s critique of compulsory heterosexuality was especially honed, and it galled him that his brother accepted so comfortably the privilege heaped upon him. Meanwhile, various Rosen relatives were planning tours of the Holy Land, the kind that took tourists to Masada to climb before dawn and thrill to the desert sunrise, the story of Jewish fighters choosing death over capture, the motto Never again. And his increasingly keen awareness of the way oppression operated by making certain things invisible to the eye—things like his own emotional life—began to bleed into distaste and anger about the things he himself couldn’t see because Israel made them invisible. His relatives’ boosterism and romantic idealizing of the Israeli army and unthinking racism galled him; he read Said’s The Question of Palestine, and it blew him away. He thought about summer camp, which had offered Zionism as a glorious refuge from American suburban life, and his new knowledge made him have to rethink the whole thing.
His temples pulsed as he thought about that uncomfortable, angry, transformative time. It was the first time Joel had been in close quarters with an uncloseted Daniel, and he joked anxiously when Daniel came home in the dawn hours, just as he and Ilana were getting out of bed. It was 1990, and Daniel’s lack of knowledge of how to find gay men in Jerusalem was matched only by his determination to find them. He was shy by nature, and sexually diffident, but he’d experienced gay liberation and love and sex with men in the years since his junior year abroad in Jerusalem, and he felt almost driven to transpose the experience of that year into a gay key, as an act of recuperation, of self-assertion. He cruised Independence Park and answered personal ads in the local city papers, playing elaborate games of phone tag by pseudonym, sending letters to post-office boxes, and he had a few flings that summer with men who, it turned out, had felt as clueless as he did about how to find one another. During the day he read, met Joel for coffee or lunch, walked the city. But when he stole out of his bed and left Joel’s apartment at night, it was with hunger and anger both; it was a way of being separate from his brother, going off to a place Joel couldn’t imagine and had no cachet in. A secret Israel in which Joel couldn’t succeed brilliantly, where people defied their culture with their stubborn desires.
And here he was again, same place, only better lit, newly abutted by skyscrapers and by the huge crane omnipresent in busy, expanding Jerusalem, and of all those men, it was Joel, perplexed, disapproving, shrugging—It’s your life—he yearned for. He considered just going home, but a painful lassitude had settled over him, making it hard to move his limbs and rise. A figure was walking toward him, and his mind played a quick speculating game about what he would find when it materialized.
It was a man with a kipa pinned onto his curly hair and a wide ingenuous face. He sat down next to Daniel for a while, his knees cast wide, almost but not quite touching Daniel’s own. He wore a delicious scent, which Daniel breathed in with pleasure, and his knee jiggled nervously. The agitated presence of an aroused stranger steadied Daniel. Their knees touched. Finally, the guy stood, and Daniel did, too. He led Daniel through bushes into a small clearing, where he grabbed him and spun him around, breathing hard, his beard stubble scouring Daniel’s face. He was big and heavy in a way Daniel liked. He knelt and unbuckled Daniel’s belt with trembling hands; Daniel saw the glint of a wedding band. He felt the man’s hot breath on him and closed his eyes. The guy was more eager than skilled, but Daniel was excited by his nervousness, by the way the desire must have become intolerable for him to sneak out like this. Daniel clasped his hair, his thumb grazing the clip that held the kipa on, and that sent another surge of desire through him, getting a religious man on his knees.
His orgasm was bright and high. After he pulled his pants up, he turned the guy till he faced away from him, unzipped and unbuckled him and stroked him, pressing against his naked ass hard enough to give him pause. He would have liked to fuck him, but that wasn’t allowed under the terms of his and Matt’s monogamy agreement, which they had made one fine Fourth of July they now called “Monogamy Tuesday.” It allowed oral sex and hand jobs only, and sex with any given man one time only; it prohibited bringing anyone home.
The wind cooled his back where his shirt rose above his jeans. Candy wrappers and an empty paper container blew through the patch of hard dirt they stood upon and jammed against a scrubby bush. The man yelped and shuddered in his arms. He staggered away from Daniel for a moment, fumbling to tuck himself back in. Still breathing hard, he kicked dirt and leaves and cigarette butts over the snail’s trail of semen he’d left on the ground. “Tov,” Daniel said, indicating he was ready to go. He turned, and then suddenly the guy pulled him back and laid a kiss on him, and too shocked to protest, Daniel met his lips and tongue
, closed his eyes and felt the blood rush to his head. The man’s breath smelled of a hundred cups of coffee. When he pulled away, Daniel staggered, dizzy, clasped his jacket for balance. “O-pah,” the man said, steadying him like the nice husband and father he no doubt was.
Daniel drove home quickly through the empty streets, a smile twitching at his lips. He and Matt had debated the question of kissing other men, because they both loved kissing, but it created a dangerous intimacy. In the end they’d allowed it because it almost never happened with guys you picked up. Daniel ran his hand over his chapped mouth and chin, wondering whether his parents would notice that they looked red in the morning. He reached for the lip balm that was always rattling around in one of the coffee holders—Ilana’s, he knew—and ran it over his lips, and then he felt as though he’d kissed her too.
He was home in five minutes; he opened the front door as silently as a burglar and eased it shut behind him, crept into his bedroom and closed the sliding door inch by quiet inch, stripped down to his underwear and got in bed. His legs and groin tingled, and he caught and then lost the rumor of the guy’s scent. A sense of drowsy well-being gently washed through him. He placed his fingers on his ribs and felt them expand and contract with his breath. Through the open window floated the heavenly smell of the Angel factory. He listened into the silence and heard no rustle or cry.
CHAPTER 7
MATT AND CAM were hunched in front of his computer, reading a smackdown between two mothers on BabyCenter.com. Matt had found the site a few hours ago, and was so riveted he hadn’t heard Cam come in until the frantic scrabbling of claws against the wood stairs caught his attention and Yo-yo and Xena burst in, panting, and crashed against his knees. “Ouch!” he yelled. “Cam?”
“Hey,” she said, coming in with a squeak of sneakers and looking around his study. “I brought Chinese and a bottle of wine.”
