by Judith Frank
“Yes I do,” Daniel said. He said it fiercely, thinking about what a goof Matt was, how imaginative and affectionate and funny. If the kids had any shot at having a fun home with them, it would be because of Matt, not him, who couldn’t really be called a fun guy under even the best of circumstances.
She leaned back on the counter. “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you think that.”
It was this kind of shot, Daniel thought, that made him hate fighting with her. A feeling of shame stole over him, and he flushed. She thought that because she had seen him treat Matt like shit over the past couple of weeks.
“I’m through with this conversation, Mom. He’s my partner. If I get these kids, he will raise them with me. And I’m just hoping—I’m hoping—that you’re going to help me get them, and not sabotage me.”
“Of course I am!” his mother cried. “I’m just being honest with you. Would you prefer I lied about my feelings?”
Daniel groaned. They always asked you this, and you always had to say no, of course you wanted them to be totally honest about how disgusting and inferior they thought you were.
“Enough,” Sam said.
Daniel opened his mouth to speak.
“I mean it,” Sam said, his voice breaking and his face red. “Enough! Isn’t it hard enough? These kids—their lives are over! That bastard—”
Lydia stepped up to him and laid her hand on his back. “Shh,” she murmured.
“It’s okay, Dad,” Daniel whispered. It was hard to look at him: emotion was grabbing and contorting Sam’s normally equable face and making it grotesque. Daniel stepped up to his father and touched his forehead with his, eyes shut, gripping his shoulder. “Their lives aren’t over. Just very challenging.”
Sam clutched the back of Daniel’s neck and squeezed, nodding, his chest shuddering.
A FEW DAYS LATER, he drove to Yaakov and Malka’s to pick up the kids. He’d had a blessedly quiet two and a half days, and had finally caught up with some work, emailing the various writers for progress reports, and having a long phone conversation with April about the various news stories that needed to go in the College Notes section in the front of the magazine. The president of the college had given a speech on the importance of area studies in the wake of 9/11—along with a blistering attack on the reduced grant monies for scholars in those fields—that had been covered in the New York Times, and they sat over it for a while, deciding whether to print the whole thing or just portions of it; after they decided to write a story about it instead of simply printing the speech, they went through and chose the quotations they thought most important to preserve and to highlight. When he hung up the phone, Daniel stayed at the kitchen table for a little while, the yellow legal pad beside him covered with notes, basking in that hour or so of quiet concentration and small problem solving, the knowledge of how very good he was at his work.
He had gotten a call scheduling the first parental competency visit for the following week, and had spent some time haggling with various social service administrators about bunching the visits so that Matt wouldn’t have to come more than once. Now they had four bunched within a two-week period, and Matt had bought a round-trip ticket for that length of time. The back-and-forth was starting to be a financial strain, and Sam had offered to pay for this flight.
He parked with two wheels on the tiny sidewalk in front of Yaakov and Malka’s apartment. He loved Rehavia: it was one of the oldest European neighborhoods in Jerusalem, stone buildings cast into lovely shade by a profusion of plants and trees, climbing plants shooting up the buildings’ sides, the occasional professional building—of doctors or small Europe-based companies—marked by modest gold plaques in Hebrew and English. He walked up the walkway and into the cool dark hall, and up the half-flight to their apartment, where he knocked softly on the door.
Malka opened the door and stepped backward in surprise.
“Shalom,” he said.
“Shalom. Are you early? The children are at the park with Yaakov.” The apartment was dim behind her, and he could smell the sweet mustiness of an old people’s house.
Daniel looked at his watch. “No, I’m on time,” he said. “But I can wait. Would you like me to wait outside?” The lawyer had forbidden them to discuss the custody case with anyone, especially the opposing parties, and he dreaded the idea of making small talk with Malka.
She blinked nervously, smoothed down her dress. “No, come in,” she said.
She led him into the living room; the blinds were half-closed. Over the couch, which had a tasseled cover on it, hung a fanciful painting of a Hasidic violinist, in the style of Chagall. On the side wall hung a batik of the Dome of the Rock and the Western Wall at sunset. He sat on the couch. A huge oak display cabinet that held decorative eggs and birds, spun-glass clowns, and china plates on stands darkened the other side of the room. On the side table next to him stood some black-and-white photos in heavy silver frames. His eye ran along a few faded photos of Yaakov in groups of khaki-clad pioneers with caps and rifles. One had fallen over, and Daniel reached to stand it up again. It showed a young Malka wearing a white blouse and black skirt, her hair pulled back, holding a violin to her chin with a faraway look in her eyes. He looked up; she was hovering at the doorway.
“Did I hear once that you played in the Jerusalem Symphony?”
“Yes,” she said, “first violin,” with a touch of pride.
“I play violin, too,” he said. “Played. It’s been a long time. I was in the Chicago youth orchestra.”
She nodded. “I used to play a lot when Ilana was a baby, because the music soothed her,” she said, perching on the arm of a chair.
They talked violin concerti. He felt as though he needed to be very, very gentle around her. He was remembering a conversation he’d once had with Ilana, in which she told him that her mother carried the burden of the Holocaust for all of them—as though if she only carried enough despair, she could spare them. Yaakov, meanwhile, had suffered the same inconceivable losses—of his entire family, his very sense of personhood—but he had remained moving, surviving labor camps and death marches. It was striking, she told him, what a psychological difference it made to be able to move, even if under the constant threat of machine-gun fire, should you falter and slow.
He sat there for a while longer. Malka went into the kitchen, and he heard shuffling, a cabinet opening, a clink of silverware on a plate. He looked around and tried to imagine a teenage Gal in this apartment with her friends. Where would they sprawl around and talk smack in this silent, stuffy place where dust motes turned silently in the few glimmers of light let in from the blinds? He knew the answer immediately: She would never bring her friends here—she would spend her afternoons and evenings at their houses, while Malka made Yaakov call their parents to check up on her, and Noam played endless computer games behind a closed bedroom door.
Malka emerged with a piece of poppy seed cake, the kind sold in grocery stores in long plastic bags. He wasn’t a big fan of poppy seed cake, but he ate it politely. She fussed about what might be keeping Yaakov. When they heard voices sound from the hallway, they stood up with relief.
TWO DAYS LATER, MATT was giving Daniel’s guitar to a flight attendant to stash and trying not to think about the last time he’d been on this flight to Tel Aviv. The flight was full, and, already feeling greasy from the stale air, he fought his way to the back of the plane, past people aggressively claiming baggage space, blankets, and pillows. Was it anti-Semitic to think of them as aggressive? he wondered.
Flattening himself to pass a Hasidic family, he found his row and stowed his bag overhead after removing his book, a magazine, and a bottle of water. The memory of taking down Ativan for Daniel flashed through his mind and made him feel faint; he steadied himself and tiptoed past the two children seated in his row, who swiveled their knees to the side, and collapsed into his window seat. He sat there with his eyes closed for a few moments, feeling his heart gallop, pulling the plastic bag
–covered headphones out from under him and letting them drop onto his lap. His skin was clammy; he wondered whether he was going to have a full-blown panic attack. He began to take concerted deep breaths, and after a few minutes, aside from the sweat that coated his face, he was able to compose himself.
The plane took off by imperceptible, jumbo jet degrees. Next to him, a little girl was writing in Hebrew, in a Hello Kitty diary with a tiny lock on it. She saw him look at her and ever so slightly slanted the cover so he couldn’t spy on what she was writing. The idea that he would want to see how she felt about her best friend’s betrayal, or her mother’s new boyfriend, cheered him a little. Beside her sat her brother, his eyes narrowed, his thumbs madly mashing a Game Boy.
Matt got up and washed his face. He drank a soda; he napped.
When he awoke he reached for the book in his seat pocket, a book Brent and Derrick had bought him. He had gone over to their house the previous evening. They were in the kitchen, making a late dinner—one of their fancy homemade pizzas—when he arrived; Derrick was slicing pears into slivers while Brent, wearing an apron over his bare torso, rolled out the dough. Matt helped himself to a beer and perched on a bar stool. Brent and Derrick exchanged a significant look, and then Derrick wiped his hands on a towel and said, “We wanted to give you something.” He disappeared into the living room and returned with a book. It was called Gay Dads.
Matt colored and laughed. “Thanks, guys.”
“It’s okay if you’re ambivalent,” Derrick said, standing before him and looking into his face, kind and forthright.
“I know,” Matt said, flipping through, looking at the handsome photographs of men and their kids.
“We know one of the guys in the book,” Derrick said, “which is how we heard about it.”
Now Matt opened the book and leafed through again, and then began to read. It was kind of moving, but kind of horrifying, too. Many of the guys had moved to the suburbs, many had turned into stay-at-home dads, many said that most of their best friends now were straight. Many said that parenthood offered them a connection to their extended families. “We’re just a boring normal family,” more than one of them said. It horrified him. He came from a boring normal family; he wanted something else. If that made him selfish, he couldn’t help it.
When he’d read it through, he closed the book, a little pissed at Derrick and Brent for giving it to him. Derrick seemed so invested in him and Daniel being parents. He felt like saying to him, If you’re so into having kids, you have them! And from Brent, it just felt like a setup. He ran his fingers along the spine. The guys in the book went to such lengths to have children. It wasn’t at all like his and Daniel’s situation, where the children had fallen into their laps. He wondered how his parents would take it, old John and Shirley Greene from Naperville, Illinois. They’d probably say “Gosh” or “Dear Lord” when he told them about these Jewish children whose parents were blown to kingdom come. They already had four grandchildren whom they doted on: his brother and sister were five and seven years older than he was.
They were fine; he just didn’t have that much to say to them. It was something Daniel, whose family was so close and intense, had trouble understanding, even after he’d been home with Matt for several Christmases, and noticed that there were no books in the house, and played every game known to creation—from Hearts to checkers to Monopoly to Matt and Daniel’s personal favorite, Taboo—and heard the kids tease Matt’s dad about the plastic tree he’d bought because he didn’t like having to clean up the needles. Each time Daniel was there, Matt’s brother, Craig, came into the house and said, “Oh, the scent of fresh pine, nothing like it!” Same joke every time.
DANIEL WAS WAITING FOR him; he picked him out from among the crowd clustered at the exit. He was wearing sunglasses, and hadn’t shaved, and looked like the handsomest Jewish man ever. Matt clasped him to him, but they didn’t, as was their custom, kiss each other till they were in the car, and even then Matt saw Daniel’s eyes darting around to make sure nobody walking by could see.
It had grown hotter, and there was a wavy haze down on the plains; the pale ocean appeared and disappeared between the dunes. “Thanks for bringing my guitar,” Daniel said.
“No problem. I stopped off at your office and picked up some stuff, too.”
“Did you pay the bills?”
“Yeah, we’re good to go till the end of next month. Your salary went in, and I finally got paid for the reunion brochure.”
“It’s about time,” Daniel said, closing the window now that the air conditioner had taken hold.
They didn’t speak much as they climbed to Jerusalem, other than Daniel briefing him on what he knew about the parental competency exams that were going to start the next day. They would undergo a battery of tests he’d never heard of, except for the Rorschach. “Yay, tests,” Matt joked faintly. Daniel nodded, getting the joke but worrying just a little about how Matt would perform on them. He felt the disconcerting alienation he always felt when they got together after being apart, as though this large man would make demands of him and thwart him from doing what he’d been doing, which was handling things on his own, his own way. On the other hand, it was thrilling to be seated next to a handsome man giving off delicious male smells; they’d been together for four years, and he never got over it.
“They still do the Rorschach?” Matt asked.
“Apparently.”
“Wouldn’t you think they had something more electronic, or digitized, now? It seems so, I don’t know, I’m thinking Elizabeth Taylor in Suddenly, Last Summer.”
A smile softened Daniel’s face, and he reached over to touch Matt’s hair. “Hey there,” he said.
“Hey there,” Matt smiled, taking Daniel’s hand in his two hands and kissing the palm. He had a thought. “What do you wear to a Rorschach, I wonder?”
Daniel thought about it. “A solid color, not a pattern.”
“Ah, yes,” Matt said, stroking an invisible beard.
CHAPTER 8
MATT DRESSED FOR the tests in khakis, a white polo shirt, and loafers, and gelled his hair so that it lay close to his head from a side part. It was his idea of conservative, and it made Daniel laugh because it made him look like the new boy at boarding school, ripe for hazing. The tests were held in one of the labyrinthine municipality buildings, new buildings set around a stone plaza right on the very edge of the Old City. An elderly guard sat at a table inside the shadowed hallway, and made them wait till he called up to verify that they were expected. Dalia met them as they stepped inside a vast room with smoky-blue carpets and dozens of cubicles where city employees did their work. She greeted them in a businesslike manner and told them that she would separate them for the day as the staff interviewed them and did a few diagnostic tests. She introduced them to Dr. Mickey Schweig, the psychologist on their case, a small, elderly man with a morose aspect. He would interview Daniel, and administer both of their tests. As she took Matt’s elbow to steer him toward his room, he looked back at Daniel in mock alarm, feeling as though they were suspects who were going to be interrogated separately to discover the discrepancy in their story. He wondered: What was their story?
Dalia sat him down at a small round table and offered him coffee, and he said, “That’d be great. With milk?”
She boiled water in a small electric kettle and made him a small glass of Nescafé with milk, and then sat opposite him. She asked him to tell her about himself; she asked if it was okay to take notes. She wanted to know about his parents and siblings, where he grew up, his childhood activities and conflicts. He told her about his parents, friendly midwesterners: how his father glad-handed waitresses, calling them by name and asking them what they’d recommend; how his mother made succulent roasts, meat loaf, Jell-O molds, and ambrosia.
“As for conflicts,” he said, looking directly at her, “of course the main one was being a queeny kid.”
“Tell me about that,” she said.
“I guess
I’d like some reassurance that it won’t be used against me and Daniel,” he said, surprising himself with his ferocity.
Dalia set down her pen, looking mildly surprised herself, and he wondered whether she was just that instant discovering that she should take him seriously. “I can’t speak for every actor in this custody process,” she said. “But as far as I’m concerned, in my own personal evaluation, I’m less interested in your being homosexual than in the way you handle the conflicts that arise around it.”
That made so much sense he thought it quite possibly might be true, and disarmed, he relaxed. “I caught a lot of flak in school. You know, they call it bullying, but let’s face it, what goes on in schools is actually child abuse. When kids beat you up and then adults deny your reality, or blame you, that’s child abuse. It didn’t just happen to me; I saw it happen all the time.”
“What do you mean by adults denying your reality?”
“I mean, saying things like, ‘Oh, that’s just the way boys are,’ or ‘You must have done something to provoke it.’ Yeah,” he sneered, “it’s my fault I walked the way I walk.”
“You feel strongly about this.”
“Would you talk to a battered woman that way?” he challenged. “Would you ask her what she did to provoke it?”
“No,” she said, and paused. “Would you describe yourself as at peace with your homosexuality?”
“I always have been—it’s others who haven’t been at peace with it.” He said that quickly and belligerently, and then apologized. “I feel strongly about it,” he said. “It’s about supporting kids when they need support.”
“Okay,” Dalia said.
“When my best friend, Jay, and I started the gay-straight alliance in high school, things got better. We were still harassed, but there was comfort in numbers. The best day of high school was a demonstration we held—there were maybe twelve of us, and probably half were girls who were ‘allies’—against homophobic harassment. These students we’d contacted from the U of I—that’s the University of Illinois—came up on a bus to support us. It was covered for eighteen seconds on ABC News in a segment on the new gay activism.”
