by Judith Frank
Daniel nodded. They had been over this before.
His mother came into the room and saw the expression on his face, and was hovering around him whispering “What? What?” as he flapped his hands at her to shush her so he could hear Assaf.
“I’ll call back when I know more about what comes next,” Assaf said. “Daniel. I’m glad.”
Daniel hung up, told his mother what had happened, hugged her and his father.
“Thank God,” Lydia said, clutching her chest. “Thank God.”
“I have to call Matt,” he said, taking the phone into the bedroom and closing the door. He sat down, placed the phone on the desk, and buried his face in his hands. Then he placed his hands on the desk and took a deep breath. He dialed, and the phone was picked up immediately by a breathless Matt.
“Hey, it’s me,” Daniel said. “Who were you expecting?”
“Hey!” Matt said. “The woman from the Forbes Library, who might have some design work for me.”
“Not your new lover?”
“You mean the young one without the crying children?”
Daniel laughed with a tiny wounded pang. “Speaking of the crying children, Assaf called today to say that Malka and Yaakov have decided not to contest custody.”
Matt shrieked.
“It still has to go through the courts,” Daniel said. “But who else can they give custody to?” He was listening very hard for Matt’s response, but all he could hear was the sound of his breathing on the other end. “Are you hyperventilating?”
“Kind of.”
“Do you need to put your head between your knees?”
“Let me just lie down.” Daniel heard a grunt and a sigh. “Okay,” Matt said. “Phew. How long do you think before we can bring them home?”
“I don’t know.”
They were quiet for a few minutes. Daniel took off his glasses and covered his eyes with his hand. Here it is, bucko, he thought: the moment your bluff is called. “Do you think we can do this?” he asked.
“You’re asking if I think I can do it, right?” Matt said.
“No, both of us.”
“Oh my God, you’re such a liar,” Matt said. “Absolutely.”
MATT LAY ON THE bed for a while after they hung up. It was still morning in Massachusetts, and the bed was unmade; he hadn’t had coffee yet. He would have to move his study up to the guest room, an attic refinished by the previous owners. His current study, a big, boxy, sunny room across the hall from their own bedroom, would be perfect for the kids’ bedroom. The guest room was smaller, and the roofline slanted down to cut off some of the usable space.
He thought that all in a rush, then felt a pang: No more guest room! Guests would have to sleep in the living room or in his study. And what, he wondered, would they do with the beautiful guest bed? Was it appropriate to put a six-year-old in a double bed, and would it even fit in the room with a crib? Not if they put a little desk in there, for Gal to do her homework. And when Gal got older and needed her own room, she’d want the attic one, a funkier and more private space than the bedroom she’d be sharing with Noam, so he’d have to move his study again. He supposed he’d rent office space in town. Would they have to buy a bigger house? He sat up and placed the phone back on the night table.
He got up and washed his face, then went up the creaky, bowing stairs and stood in the guest room doorway, running his hand through his hair and trying to imagine where he’d put his computer, his printer, his bulletin board. He sighed. When he moved in, he’d poured his energy into trying to put his own stamp on Daniel’s house, becoming a regular at the local antique shops, stripping and refinishing tables and benches, repainting the drab conventional white walls in a palette of boysenberry, deep olive, and lemon. He’d put mismatching chairs, of a variety of materials, around the dining room table. Daniel had put up a fight about the changes, arguing that Matt’s sleek tastes didn’t suit a farmhouse, but Matt convinced him that Daniel needed to expand his idea of the farmhouse, and besides, he needed to feel as if the house were his, too. Daniel had come to love the warm colors of the rooms. And now they’d have to remake the house again, only this time, making it uglier. He’d do something nice with these walls, though, which he’d never gotten to. And get a small air-conditioning unit. He looked glumly at the antique two-pronged electrical outlet under the window. And call an electrician.
He went downstairs and made himself coffee, fed the dog. He opened the door onto a sunny day, and late-spring cold surged into the kitchen through the screen door. He got Yo-yo’s leash and snapped it onto his collar, a lingering heaviness at his heart over what was about to happen to his house, thinking, Let it go, it’s okay, let it go.
DANIEL WENT TO COURT the next week, and Judge Fuchs, a man with a flat bowl of black hair and enormous wire-rimmed glasses, awarded him custody of the children, and permission to take them to the U.S. Daniel had come with his father and Assaf, and the whole thing felt a little anticlimactic. What had he expected? he wondered later. For the judge to rehearse the course of this tragic case, sum it up in sonorous Hebrew? To exchange a hearty, moved look with him? After all, he’d been ruling on their case from the beginning, and Daniel had developed a transference attachment. But the judge’s eye contact was sporadic and impersonal. There were certain conditions, which he switched to English for the first time to say. Daniel looked at his father. “Excuse me, Judge. May my father come up and listen?” he asked.
“Of course,” the judge said.
His father approached and put his hand on Daniel’s shoulder. Daniel, the judge said, was to bring the children to Israel once a year to visit their grandparents for a minimum of two weeks, and allow their maternal grandparents to visit in the U.S. at least once a year, also for a minimum of two weeks. They were to be followed by a social worker in the U.S. They were to return to this court after two years, so that it could follow their progress.
“Do you understand?” he asked Daniel.
“Yes.”
“The court expresses its hope that you will give the children every opportunity to express and cultivate their Israeli heritage, and will foster in them love of Israel. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Judge,” Daniel said. He did understand, but he’d have to think about how to do that later.
And that was that. Nothing about Matt, about the fact that he was awarding custody to two gay men. No comment about how well they’d done on their parental competency exams, and how great the tests showed their personalities were, and how they had confounded the court’s expectations. He didn’t even give a knock of the gavel. They filed out of the court and Daniel and his father embraced, Sam clutching the back of Daniel’s head with his hand. When they let go, they were flushed. Daniel turned to Assaf and took his hand in both of his. “Thank you,” he said.
Assaf took them to lunch in the courtyard of the American Colony Hotel, where they sat at an elegant iron table on a flagstone floor, surrounded by a burbling Turkish fountain and olive trees and flower beds. Daniel brought up the fact that there had been no mention of Matt, and Assaf pointed out that the actual custody, after all, was to Daniel alone. “But you’re right,” he added. “I think he probably left that out so there won’t be any gay rights implications to the case.”
Sam ordered a bottle of expensive champagne, and when the waiter had ceremoniously poured it, held up his glass. When they’d raised theirs, he said, “To my grandchildren, Gal and Noam. May their lives, which have gotten off to such a terrible start, get brighter by the day.”
“L’chaim,” Assaf said.
“And to Daniel,” Sam said, turning toward his son and contemplating him with a smile bright with love and pain. “Raise them well, son. I know you will.”
Daniel bit his lip and tried not to be a total girl in front of his father. “That means a lot to me, Dad,” he said.
THEY DECIDED THAT THEY wanted to tell the children that they were going to move to the U.S. in the presence of their other grandp
arents, to indicate that it was a decision that the family as a whole was making, for their benefit. It was Daniel who called, and he spoke with Yaakov.
“Yaakov, I want you to know how much I appreciate this.”
There was a long silence, so he soldiered on, in stiff Hebrew. “I will take very good care of the children, I promise, and we’ll work it so you can see them as often as possible. You’re very welcome to stay with us when you come to visit them in the States. Have you ever been to the U.S.?”
“No,” Yaakov said. “Only to Europe. And Istanbul.”
“I think you’ll like where we live,” Daniel said, resolutely conjuring in his mind the gentle verdant mountains and rippling streams instead of the tattooed lesbians who lounged and smoked and made out on the streets of his town. He proposed to Yaakov that he and Malka come over that evening for dinner, and to talk to Gal. “It’ll be good,” he said, quietly calculating how to convey that Matt wasn’t there, “if all the adults—you and Malka, my parents, me—could tell her together that we’ve made a collective decision.”
There was a long pause on the other end. Then Yaakov said, “I don’t know what there is to talk about. You are taking the children. How hard can that be to tell Gal? It doesn’t require an international convention.”
Daniel bit his lip. “Don’t you want to tell her that you and Malka love her, and that we all agreed that this is how we’d take care of her and Noam?”
“She knows we love her,” Yaakov said. “There’s no need for a formal declaration.”
When Daniel hung up, he had a tremendous headache. It was much harder to talk to Yaakov from the position of the victor than from the position of antagonist, because even though Yaakov was being a big prick and not thinking of what Gal needed, he felt horrible for him. He went into the kitchen to report dejectedly to his mother, who said, “You can’t expect them to be happy about it, honey. Just to behave well in front of the children.”
But the bad feeling persisted through a trip to the supermarket, through picking up Gal from school. Gal had been irritable all afternoon; her teacher took Daniel aside and told him that she had hit another kid pretty hard, and that she’d had to put her in a time-out. On their way home, carrying her backpack and an art project with macaroni glued onto construction paper, Daniel had tried to ask her about what had happened, but she refused to talk, giving him a lot of the shrug/tsk combination that played such a big part in Israeli children’s bad moods. “Are you feeling sad?” he asked as they approached the tiny makolet near her school for her traditional after-school Popsicle.
“Are you feeling sad?” she said in a mocking voice, her face twisted into grotesque concern.
“Hey,” he admonished, and she ran inside, mingling with the other little kids gathered around the square white freezer. He watched her wait obediently in line, then give her coins to the elderly man in a kipa, who handed her an orange Popsicle. She brought it outside, struggling to peel off the wrapper without getting her fingers sticky, and then dropped the whole thing onto the grimy sidewalk. Daniel’s heart sank. She looked at it and up at him, and he said quickly, “Ain davar, we’ll get another one.”
“I don’t want!” she said, and marched toward home, and he followed her the whole way, watching her stalwart, angry back.
At home, Daniel snapped at his mother, and he picked a fight with Matt on the phone when Matt asked if he should come help them pack and fly back with them, by saying, “It’s not necessary, we can really manage on our own,” and finally, after Matt persisted with further questions, saying, “You’re going to have to decide this one for yourself, Matt, I already have two children to deal with.”
“Whoa,” Matt said.
“Look, I can’t talk right now, okay?” Daniel waited. “Let’s talk later.”
“Sure,” Matt said, hanging up the phone before the word was even out.
MATT COOKED DINNER FOR Cam later that evening, and he told her about his dilemma as he cleared the dishes and put them into the dishwasher, spooned the leftovers into Tupperware containers. He wanted to be part of their coming home. He was wondering if he could just show up a few days before they left, or whether that would be unpleasant or unhelpful in any way. But even if it seemed unhelpful, he still wanted to do it! “We really can’t afford it,” he said. “Already, two round-trips to Israel for me, and one for Daniel, have been about thirty-six hundred dollars, although I think Daniel’s father’s going to pay for one of those. This would bring it up to almost five grand, and we’d have to float it on a credit card.” He paused. “But I just don’t think that money should be the issue here.”
“Oh, go!” Cam said.
Matt laughed. “Of course you’d say that.” Cam was an impetuous girlfriend, a lover of the grand gesture. She loved to do things like spring a weekend trip to Miami Beach on a girlfriend, secretly canceling all the girlfriend’s appointments and packing her suitcase, and then, when she showed up for a supposed coffee date, whisking her away in her car to the airport without telling her where they were going. Matt and Daniel privately thought that that wasn’t romantic, it was controlling.
“So I should just show up, even though Daniel said not to?”
“Did he say not to, or did he say he doesn’t need you to?”
Cam was arguing exactly what he wanted to argue, and that made him doubt himself. He wet a sponge and wiped down the counters. It really wasn’t a good idea. It would be far more sensible to wait for them at home, to pick them up from the airport, and have everything lovely and welcoming when they arrived. But the impulse to go was persistent, and he believed in listening to your instincts, too.
CHAPTER 9
DANIEL DREAMED THAT he was in the café. It wasn’t the Peace Train Café, it was one he’d never seen before, a café with a huge mirror on one wall that made it seem as though there was a whole duplicate café on the other side. A man entered, bulky, his face sweaty, and Daniel knew he was the bomber. He tried to get someone’s attention, but the waitress was talking to a group at another table, with her back turned to him. An enormous cappuccino stood steaming on the table before him, crisp brown grains of sugar speckling and staining the foam. Sunshine slashed across one knee, and he scooted his chair over into the shade. Then Ilana was sitting across from him—she must have been there all along—and he felt embarrassed that he was so baldly standing in for Joel. Someone laughed and shouted in Hebrew, “I told you so! Didn’t I tell you so?” His chest was knotted, and he was sweating. The bomber had disappeared, but Daniel knew with terrible dream-certainty that the man’s fingers were reaching for the cord that hung under his coat. In the spinning chaos of his thoughts, Daniel pictured his flesh blown from his bones, wondered murkily if his brain would register the agony even if his head was blown clear off.
He woke up screaming, and sat up, stunned, his voice echoing in his ears. He’d never produced such a sound, and for a second he thought someone else was screaming. When he realized where he was, he leapt out of bed as though it were on fire, and burst from his room. The house was quiet in the early dawn light: Incredibly, no one had heard him. He sank to his knees on the living room rug, then sat on his heels and bowed his head and breathed, waiting for the panic to stop.
His headache didn’t go away; it persisted through the packing, the visits to various government offices to arrange papers and passports, the accelerated pace of bringing the children back and forth from their house to their grandparents’. A hamsin moved into Jerusalem, the sky turning white, hot wind whipping up sand and garbage and twisting laundry on the line. His eyes became swollen, the skin under them chafed and tender. They pulled down all the blinds in the apartment, making it into a dark cave, and congregated whenever possible in the master bedroom, which had the apartment’s only air-conditioning unit, as the wind rattled the blinds. They ate cold foods, yogurt and salads and spreads on bread. Lydia complained about crumbs in the bed, where Gal was eating her snacks in front of the TV. “Use a plate, honey!” s
he said, swiping at the crinkled bottom sheet. Even Noam was cranky, shrieking when they took anything sharp, or a choking hazard, away from him. Daniel took him into the bathroom to splash cold water on his pink, sweaty face, and laughed when he saw Noam’s thrust-out lower lip in the mirror, it was the very picture of infantile indignation.
Sam had spent the morning at the kitchen table, writing numbers on a pad of paper, with quick punches at the calculator. He called Daniel into the kitchen in the tone he used for important matters, usually financial, and pulled out a chair for him. “Listen, Daniel,” he said, “I’d like you to be able to keep the apartment for the next few years, so you’ll have a place to be when you bring the children to visit their grandparents. So I’m going to pick up the mortgage and taxes, to make that possible. Maybe we can find someone to manage it and rent it out for the periods when you’re not here.”
“Really, Dad, are you sure?” Daniel asked, and when his father nodded, he said, “Thank you so much. I can’t tell you how nice that is of you.” In the past, he’d turned down all of his father’s attempts to help him out financially, except for this most recent gift of Matt’s plane ticket, because those offers made him feel that his father thought he couldn’t make it on his own. But this gift didn’t feel like that at all. It felt like an amazing act of understanding and empathy. The apartment felt to him like a living thing, its light and smells, its tiled floors and thick, strong blinds, the sheets they put on the beds, the gas stove that clicked noisily four times before lighting, the nicked and pocked coffee table, the broom closet stuffed with pails and plastic bags, the mop handle falling down every time someone opened the door. Living in it was like loving a middle-aged person who’d been around the block a few times.
And then their departure was only a week away. Gal’s class threw her a going-away party, and when Daniel came to pick her up he stood for a few minutes at the edge of the classroom, watching kids say good-bye with varying degrees of social competence and drama, their faces bearing the traces of chocolate frosting. Gal was flushed and wearing a crown, and when she saw him, she came over to him. “Look,” she said, thrusting a small, leather-bound book at him. They had taken pictures of themselves, individually and in groups, and had composed a photo album. Daniel flipped through it, trying not to bawl. There were also cards with crazy first-grade writing all over them, and a bag of candy—candy Daniel was sure he’d be finding in corners of his house a year from now. Gal’s teacher, Sari, stooped to give her a tearful hug, and Gal, with a pained look on her face, allowed herself to be squeezed. “You’d better come see me when you come visit,” she said huskily. “Or else, oy vey!”
