by Judith Frank
He paused, considered. “Jay died four years ago,” he said.
Dalia looked up. “AIDS?”
He narrowed his eyes. Was she stereotyping gay men, or just knowledgeable? “Yes.”
“Do you know your HIV status?”
“Yes.”
They gazed contemplatively at each other for a few moments.
Dalia looked away first, and cleared her throat. She invited him to talk more about his parents, whom, he hastened to assure her, he was now on good terms with. She asked about his work, his move to Northampton, how he met Daniel. It was close to one o’clock by the time she set down her pen again and pushed back her chair. “Okay, let’s break for lunch, and when you come back, Dr. Schweig will administer some personality tests.”
Matt stood, wondering if Daniel would be done, too. He opened the door, then turned back.
“Negative,” he said.
“Okay,” she said. “Thank you for telling me.”
Daniel was standing by the elevator. They went downstairs and emerged onto the hot, bright plaza, the sun making them blink and sneeze, and stood uncertainly while people surged around them and buses roared past them with grinding gears. In the near distance rose the craggy walls and golden domes of the Old City. Daniel took Matt’s sleeve and steered him toward a falafel stand on the adjoining street that they’d passed on their way in. The street was dingy and shaded. “What did you guys talk about?” Daniel asked.
“Oh, this and that,” Matt said lightly.
“Really?” Daniel said. “Us too!”
The falafel stand was manned by a large bearded man in a kipa, who was intimidatingly quick and efficient. His spoon flew over pitas, slathering on tahini and eggplant; he turned from the fixings to behind him, where falafel was cooking in baskets dunked into boiling oil, and back to the front. They carried the beautiful warm sandwiches and two bottles of Coke back to the plaza, and found a bench in the shade, where they ate bent forward, so that tahini and hot sauce wouldn’t dribble onto their pants. “Wow,” Matt said through a burning palate. “Heaven.” When he was done, Daniel handed him a napkin and he wiped his hands finger by finger, then took a long swig of Coke.
“I’ve been thinking,” Daniel said, wiping his own face, casting a look at Matt. “You’re not going to like this.”
“I’m already crazy about it,” Matt said. “Go ahead.”
“I’m just thinking aloud, okay? Don’t jump all over me.”
“Dan, just say it.”
Daniel reached behind his glasses with a finger and rubbed his eye. He cleared his throat and spoke. “Why shouldn’t we just stay here?”
Matt blinked. You have got to be kidding: That was his thought.
“I’m not talking forever, just a few years. Think about it. It would make everything so much easier! It wouldn’t tear Gal away from her friends, and both kids from their grandparents. We could live here, in the apartment. We could get work here; we both have skills that would make us a good living. For design work, you don’t even really need Hebrew.”
“Dan,” Matt sighed.
Daniel’s face was reddening with emotion. “I just can’t stand the idea of tearing Gal away from here. It’s wrong! It’s the wrong thing to do!”
Matt rubbed his face. Maybe if he just let Daniel talk it out, he would work it out of his system.
“What do you think? Don’t just have a knee-jerk response.”
That was irritating. “We don’t live here,” Matt said. “Our life is in the States. My life is in the States.”
“That’s not a reason,” Daniel said.
“Should I give more?” Matt asked, beginning to heat up. “I thought you were just thinking aloud. Have you decided this?”
“No!” Daniel said.
“It sounds as though you have. You have all the reasons down.”
“It’s not a decision I can make without you,” Daniel said. He was saying the right thing, but Matt, looking at him with narrowed eyes, didn’t believe him, and that scared him. Suddenly he had a premonition that Daniel was using this to leverage himself out of their relationship, a premonition that came with such dark fury, he knew it must be true.
“Are you breaking up with me?” he asked.
“No! Jesus!”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m asking you to do this with me!”
“But you know I can’t!”
“Why not?” Daniel demanded.
“Do I have to say it?” There was no answer. “Do I? Okay. Because it goes against everything I believe in to live here,” Matt said, leaning toward Daniel and giving him a gentle piercing look, trying to bring him back to himself. “And everything you believe in too, by the way.”
Daniel shook his head. “This isn’t about politics,” he said. “It’s about these children.”
“Oh please!” Matt cried. “I don’t even know where to start! You’re doing just what they do to us all the time, dismissing our politics as though they have nothing to do with real life. You know that’s not true.”
“It’s just that, I’ve been thinking, parenthood means sacrifice, living for someone other than yourself.”
Matt looked at him. “Wow, you thought that up all by yourself?” he asked with wide-eyed mockery. “Who are you?”
Daniel sat back, resolute. “Maybe I’m not the same man anymore.”
Maybe that was it, Matt thought, his heart flailing in his chest. He’d always thought, when wondering whether they’d stay together forever, that no one could be one hundred percent confident. Sure, he’d stay with Daniel through many changes—although, admittedly, some of them might be especially challenging, like quadriplegia, a possibility he’d spent many an hour pondering in some torment. But what if circumstances made Daniel unrecognizable to him?
“You’re the same man, Daniel,” he said softly, with a silent prayer.
Daniel passed a hand over his face. “It’s not as though the U.S. is such great shakes from a moral perspective.”
Matt took heart from the weakness of that salvo.
“I just can’t stand the thought of tearing Gal away from here,” Daniel said, his mouth twisting. “I can’t.”
“She’ll be okay. . . .”
“No she won’t!” Daniel cried. “She’s going to lose everything she knows! She’s such a little trouper, it kills me to watch her get up and soldier through her day.”
Matt looked at his watch. They had to be back inside in ten minutes. “I can’t believe you sprung that on me right now,” he said. “We have to go in there now and take personality tests, for Christ’s sake. If you’ve decided you’re staying, what’s even the point?”
An old Arab woman rolled by, her heavy, lined hand on the shoulder of a young boy, and catching the boy’s eye, Matt wondered what he was seeing when he looked at the two flushed, angry American men.
“I haven’t decided,” Daniel insisted.
“Whatever,” Matt said, standing.
They went back in and spent the afternoon associating to Rorschach blots and telling stories about TAT pictures. Matt found the TAT pictures profoundly depressing, not only in their content, but in their style as well. The figures seemed utterly isolated, the cloud formations menacing. The portrayal of gender was taken straight from the 1950s. He kept looking at the psychologist, wondering if this was a joke test, but when he met his eyes he saw no glimmer of connection or humor, just the patient waiting of the diagnostician. He wondered how the hell he’d gotten into this mess, how it came to be that he was sitting in a dingy office in the middle of this hot, teeming, smelly, violent, godforsaken city, being forced to make up stories like a mental patient. For every picture, he wanted to make up a story about deviant gender or sexuality.
When Dr. Schweig finally released him, he was exhausted. He had to wait for Daniel to take his tests, and he didn’t want to have to pass through security again, so he sat on a chair by the elevator for an hour, cursing the fact that he hadn’t broug
ht something to read, until Daniel came out of a room and closed the door softly behind him. They looked at each other; Daniel crossed his eyes. Then, as Matt raised his eyebrows, Daniel put a finger to his lips and walked quickly to the elevator, his mouth twitching. Only when they burst out onto the plaza did he begin to laugh.
“Were those cards messed-up, or what!” Daniel said. “They were a disgrace!” He started giggling. “Did you get the blank card?” he asked.
Matt began laughing, too. “There was a blank card?”
“Oh yeah,” Daniel said. “I said to the psychologist, ‘That represents the blankness of God’s intent to Man’s scrutiny.’ I mean, what the fuck?” His mirth was broken through with confused indignation, and that set them off again. People on official business were walking past the giggling men, avoiding them with varying degrees of curiosity and irritation.
“You did not!” It was exhilarating: Daniel had misbehaved, and not him! There was a little bit of hardness to the feeling, for wasn’t Daniel a hypocrite for treating him as a fuckup, and then cutting loose himself? Still, it was lovely to watch him seized by the giggles. They went down the steps to the parking garage, Daniel’s back shaking in front of him, his shirt damp from sweat. Maybe, Matt thought, the idea of staying in Jerusalem was just a momentary faintness of heart, a streak of crippling empathy for Gal. They passed together into the dark, cool underground, their shoes making soft, clean noises on the concrete floor. “Do you think we could get away with not going straight home?” Daniel asked. He flung his arm around Matt. “Let’s ditch the grieving children and stop somewhere for a beer.”
“Absolutely,” Matt said. Daniel feeling frisky was a treat under any circumstance. “But if you just lost the kids for us because you failed to take this test with the proper seriousness, you’re in big trouble.”
TWO WEEKS OF FURTHER tests passed. Daniel didn’t bring up wanting to stay in Israel again, but a low current of anxiety buzzed through Matt as he waited for the moment he’d have to fight it out again. After they were interviewed and tested separately, Dalia and the psychologist met with them together to discuss their relationship, and then came over to the apartment twice to see them with the kids. It hurt Lydia’s feelings that she was asked not to be there for those interviews. “Won’t I be a big part of these kids’ lives if they go to you?” she importuned Daniel privately, and he knew that it killed her that Matt was being tested as a parent and she wasn’t. For his part, Matt noticed that Daniel wore to both interviews shirts that had belonged to Joel, and he wondered if he was trying to channel Joel, or to look like a respectable and upstanding straight man, or maybe enacting some creepy version of those twins who dressed alike well into their adulthood and then married twins, a phenomenon Daniel had spent a lifetime loathing. But it was funny to see how the straightest-looking of clothes—a polo shirt tucked into chinos—got a gay twist when the marvelously delicate Daniel wore them. The interviews themselves—the two of them sitting on the floor, stiff and smiling, among the playing children—were, to his mind, a bit of a charade, although when the psychologist asked Gal what she liked most about Uncle Matt and she said, with a decisiveness that made them all smile, “He’s really funny,” he felt inordinately proud, both of her response itself and of the fact that he understood the Hebrew.
In Gal, Matt found an even more exacting Hebrew teacher than Yossi—although he didn’t have quite the same drive to impress her as he did Yossi—and, as an added bonus, one who was learning to read and write herself. They sat next to each other at the kitchen table, drawing letters and writing simple words onto lined sheets of paper, Gal’s eyes darting back and forth from her own paper to Matt’s. “You know, Mordechai,” she said one day—she had inexplicably begun calling him Mordechai. Why? When he asked, she just shrugged, but when Daniel asked her, she said she thought he needed a Hebrew name. “Your letters are better than mine.”
“That’s because I’m an artist,” he said, “and also, I already know how to write in one language. But often I can’t understand what I’m writing, and you can understand everything you write.”
She studied her own letters and said, “Oof! Let’s do a vocabulary test instead.” She never tired of testing his vocabulary. She’d call out words she thought of off the top of her head, in English, and he’d have to translate. If he got the word right, she’d ask him to modify it with an adjective like good or bad, or big or small, so he could learn its gender. When he got that right, her eyes would widen and she’d give him an indulgent pat on the hand. “Col ha’cavod,” she’d say. Good job! or, as the literal translation went, All honor to you!
Lydia came into the room, got out a loaf of bread that Daniel had bought that morning, and set it on the cutting board. “Time to set the table, kidlets,” she said.
Matt knew that they wouldn’t be eating for another half an hour; this was Lydia’s way of making it hard for him to have a relationship with Gal. She’d told Daniel that she felt horrible about Matt’s learning Hebrew with Gal, because there was no way for her to participate since he’d thought of it first. Daniel had told her that that was silly, that it was a good idea for all of them to know Hebrew. And then she made him facilitate it: He had to ask Matt and Gal if Grandma and Grampa could join them, even though Sam had no intention of doing so. She participated from time to time, and when she did, they always had to say how smart Grandma was, and how good her memory was. “Who got ‘window’?” she’d demand.
“You did, Grandma,” Gal would say.
Since Matt’s return, Sam was busying himself with what he called Joel and Ilana’s “effects.” He and Daniel went through Joel’s clothes, a ravaging experience for both of them; halfway through, Sam sat hard on the bed, his face stricken and drooped, and said, “I can’t believe I’m doing this.” Daniel kept a lot of them. As for Ilana’s clothes, Sam insisted upon calling in Malka to help. He’d become the emissary to the Grossmans; he had a calming effect on them—probably, Daniel imagined, because of the quiet, benign quality of his attention, one of Daniel’s own favorite things about his father. He and Malka spent an afternoon in the bedroom with the door closed, and Malka left with an armful of clothes, her face pale and set against the indignity of seeming to slink off with the dregs the victor left behind, as hyenas do. They saved Ilana’s jewelry for Gal, except for one necklace that had particular sentimental value for Malka that Sam hadn’t quite understood.
Sam made two duplicates of the wedding video, and additional prints of all the negatives he found stuffed into the pockets and between the pages of the photo albums. Then he bought photo albums and compiled them. One set for him and Lydia, one for Malka and Yaakov, one for Daniel and Matt and the kids. He set himself up at the kitchen table, wearing khaki pants and sandals, and an untucked, short-sleeved button-down shirt, reading glasses perched on the end of his nose. He was solitary, focused, in his element. He had dealt the photos into three piles, like cards, and now he was trying to manage one of the large piles, putting it into chronological order, using Joel and Ilana’s album as the key.
When she got home from school, Gal climbed on a chair next to him and studied the piles. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m making three different albums, so we can all have pictures of your parents, and of you and Noam when you were babies,” Sam said. “Careful, honey, that belongs here.”
Daniel was on the floor, playing with blocks with the baby. He stood and came over; he could tell that Sam was worried Gal would disrupt his piles and his concentration. The photo Sam had taken from her was a wedding picture in which Joel and Ilana were disarranged, drunk, grinning. “They didn’t have me yet,” Gal said experimentally, craning her neck up at Daniel. Just checking. She picked up a picture of herself as a newborn, held by Ilana, who was touching her nose to hers. Ilana’s hair in a ponytail, eyes half-closed. Content, drowsy.
“That’s me,” Gal said.
“That’s you,” Daniel said, putting his hand on her head. �
�You and Ema. Look how much she loved you.”
Gal studied it, then placed it carefully on the correct pile.
“Thanks, honey,” Sam said.
“Was I a good baby?” Gal asked in a small voice.
“Yes, you were,” Daniel said somberly, turning her face to his. “And a good girl, too.”
Did she take it in? Who knew? She looked at him with enormous eyes, then got up and opened the snack drawer. The baby squawked and Daniel picked him up and jiggled him.
Matt flew back home to return to work, and another few weeks passed, in which Daniel had to appear in family court twice. The judge seemed taken by the fact that he and Joel were identical twins, which Daniel hoped meant that he was considering that, genetically speaking, the kids could actually be his.
Then one day Daniel got a call from Assaf, who had gotten a call from Yaakov and Malka’s lawyer. “They want to settle, Daniel,” Assaf said. “They agree to have you and Matt take the children, under the condition that they can visit them once a year, and that you bring them here once a year. That’s fantastic news. Of course, the court has to approve.”
Daniel sank onto the couch with the cordless phone. “What happened?”
“There was a car accident,” Assaf said. “A minor one, but it looks as if Malka blacked out for a second behind the wheel, and that frightened them. The attorney said they simply want the best for the kids. But I have a feeling that they also didn’t do too well with the parental competency visits.”
Poor, poor Malka, Daniel thought.
Assaf said that he most likely wouldn’t be allowed to adopt the children, at least not yet. Adoption, he reminded him, was the most binding form of custody a court could award to a nonbiological parent. But there were other gradations of custody, ones that were more temporary and contingent upon follow-up visits and testing.
