by Judith Frank
Were the distinctions really so fine?
He folded the paper neatly and put it in his briefcase, and turned to the email messages waiting for him in his inbox.
AT HOME, MATT HAD the features section spread out on the kitchen counter, and he and Brent were reading, elbows resting on the counter, pricked by cracker crumbs, shoulder muscles pulsing through their T-shirts. The sun flooded through the kitchen’s screen door, and at Matt’s elbow, crackers lay cascaded out of a ripped sleeve, beside a container of hummus with its plastic top off. His parents had left the previous morning, and an airy, expansive feeling of being in charge of his own domain was mingling with irritation at Brent, who, before Matt had brought in the paper, had been telling him a long story about something one of his colleagues had said that had made him anxious about his tenure case, which was coming up in the fall. Brent’s book manuscript had been accepted by a great press, and as far as Matt could make out, he was a total rising star in his field. Now that his materials were all in, he had the summer to wait till his case came up. “There’s nothing more you can do, right?” Matt had said. “So you might as well try to relax this summer.”
Brent had been quiet for a moment, and Matt could tell that he was brooding about how little Matt understood about the complexity and direness of his situation. But he didn’t have the energy to draw him out. He knew that made him a bad friend, but honestly, after what he’d been through in the past few months, it was a little hard to listen to Brent obsess over what was clearly a nonproblem.
Gal was upstairs in their bedroom watching The Parent Trap for the gajillionth time, and Matt had put Noam in the playpen with every single toy he had. He studied his own face in the picture. It was a good picture; he looked handsome; his gaze into the camera was self-assured and masculine, his hair flawlessly messy. It was a picture he wouldn’t mind his old New York friends seeing, which weirdly seemed to be his criterion for what was acceptable and what wasn’t, even though he didn’t even care about them anymore. The dog sniffed around his ankles for crumbs. “Hey, Yo-yo,” he said, “once you’re in the public domain, there’s no telling what can happen. Next thing you know we’ll be seeing your head on a naked Labrador’s body.”
He scanned down the article to find his name.
Sitting on the floor, his partner, Matthew Greene, looks on with a small smile, his blond hair long and disheveled, and his long legs stretched out on the carpet as he leans back on his hands. He projects the aura of a man who belongs in a West Village nightclub rather than in a New England farmhouse, sitting on a crumb-strewn carpet remnant surrounded by toys and stuffed animals.
Matt tsked, irritated at how the writer was hammering at the urban gay male angle; his sensitive ear heard something smug in it. He put his finger on the paragraph. “She’s all, ‘Look at the shallow gay man brought down by a dose of the real world.’ ”
“Oh,” Brent said, peering at it and wrinkling his nose. “I hate that.”
They grunted, settled down, and read some more. The writer described Noam as “a genial butterball of a toddler,” and wrote of Gal:
It was hardest to move the six-year-old, Gal (pronounced “Gahl”), who had the rich social life of the kindergartener in Israel, and who, while raised in a bilingual family, is now living in a new linguistic universe. Gal is full of penetrating questions, the thirty-eight-year-old magazine editor says, about what happened to her parents and about the dangers that she or her new guardians might face as well. “There’s nothing you can say to her,” Rosen admits, “that can really reassure her. If this happened to her parents, how can I convince her it won’t happen to me or Matt? How can I convince her that it won’t happen to her?”
THAT WAS AN EXCELLENT quote, Matt thought. Glancing at Brent, who was reading, his face sharp and intent, he had a small feeling of excitement over being in the paper; it brought back those urgent days when he had felt himself to be a rocky pier against which dark and stormy waters pitched. Certainly the storm was still there, somewhere, but it was buried now, somewhere in Daniel’s strange disappearance, and indistinguishable from mind-numbing tedium—sitting on the floor, playing endless games of Spit, Chicken Cha Cha Cha, Gulo Gulo, Zooloretto, Tsuro (which Daniel called “Tsuris”), keeping Noam from putting Gal’s Legos in his mouth, trying to retrieve the piece that had skittered under the couch without having to heave his whole long body off the floor and then sit down again, so slithering onto his stomach and reaching, fingers outstretched, grunting, spitting dust off his lips, a twinge shooting through his shoulder, while Noam said—mildly, regretfully—“Uh-oh.”
There was a loud thump at the bottom of the stairs, then a flurry of pounding feet on the wood floors, and Gal came in, saying in Hebrew with affectionate condescension, “Mordechai, how are you, little uncle?”
“I’m fine, my diminutive niece,” he replied. He tilted up her chin to examine the gap where her bottom front tooth had fallen out that morning. Her upper teeth were pushed a bit forward from thumb-sucking, and he wondered whether the adult ones would come in that way as well; he remembered someone once telling him that his kid’s braces came with a little payment book, like a mortgage. “Where did you put it?” he asked, and she dug into her shorts pocket and pulled it out, held it out in her palm.
“Can I see?” Brent asked, and she held it out in front of him for a second, then closed her fist protectively. “How much does the tooth fairy give these days?”
“We don’t know yet,” Matt said. “She’s probably off consulting her conversion charts from shekels to dollars right now. Hey, Gal, your picture is in the newspaper.”
“Where?” She raised her arms so that Matt could lift her onto the counter beside him, and as he hoisted her he was glad his mother wasn’t there to see her bare feet on a kitchen surface, which would put him in the category of people unfit to live in a nice home. “That’s me!” Gal looked at him and at Brent with such astonishment they laughed.
“What does it say about me?” she demanded.
“Let’s see,” Matt murmured. “Try not to scratch.” He grabbed her hand gently; her legs and ankles were studded with mosquito bites, some covered with Band-Aids because she’d scratched them till they bled.
He looked at the passage describing Gal again. What should he tell her? Normally, it was Daniel who was in charge of all the official stories about difficult things: where their parents were, where we went when we died, whether he and Daniel would die too, whether the Arabs were bad, why she had to listen to him and Matt even though they weren’t her actual parents, why some of the women who came over looked like men. He let Daniel do it because he worried he’d get it wrong and Daniel would be mad at him for screwing up the kids even more. But it was clearly his turn here; her quick eyes were turned up at him, and there was no Daniel to judge his response. “It says,” Matt told her, “that it was sad for you to leave Israel, and that you miss your parents very much, but you’re adjusting to life in the U.S.”
She nodded. “I’m adjusting,” she said.
“Yes you are. You’re a very brave girl,” Matt said, touching her cheek.
“I could never be as brave as you, Gal,” Brent said, shaking his head gravely.
She regarded him, taking his measure. “Your parents are alive?” she asked.
“Yes,” Brent said.
“Mine are dead,” she informed him.
“Honestly, I don’t know how you put one foot in front of the other,” he said.
Gal’s eyes filled with mirth. “It’s called walking!” she cried. “It’s not very hard to do that!”
Brent laughed. “You’re a funny kid,” he said.
“Thank you very much!” Gal drawled, with scathing kid sarcasm, a recent acquisition she was enjoying taking out for a spin.
“She hates me,” Brent mouthed to Matt.
ONCE THE PARENTS HAD all gone, the summer seemed to ripen and slow and warm. Noam was an urchin in a diaper, his skin warm and damp, dirt and crumbs stuck
to the heels of his hands; Gal’s tongue was stained purple and red from Popsicles. They enrolled her in swimming lessons with Rafi at the Y, and while a teenager worked with them on the different strokes for forty-five minutes, Matt plopped himself and Noam in the baby pool, holding the baby under the armpits and swirling him in the water to show him what floating felt like. At night they all huddled in Daniel and Matt’s bed, the air crisp and cold, where they watched movies selected for their strong images of girls.
Matt enjoyed this, being on the big bed with Daniel, the kids, and the dog—enjoyed it despite the crumbs, despite the fact that before he went to sleep, he lay there thinking over and over, Don’t be a huge princess, it’s just a crumb, till he had to get up and brush off the sheet with long swipes. Just them, no parents, Noam and Daniel falling asleep mid-movie, Daniel’s light snore, Noam’s cheeks working the pacifier, the clicking sound of his sucks, Gal’s fierce, silent attentiveness. He’d lie back on the pillows and watch her face in profile, those crazy beautiful lashes of hers, wondering what kind of intense thoughts were churning away in there. One night they watched Fly Away Home, which, if Matt and Daniel had known it opened with a car crash that kills a girl’s mother, they never would have brought home. Matt grabbed the DVD box and examined the back, where the summary began, “When a young girl loses her mother in a car crash . . . ,” and passed it to Daniel, who’d chosen it, an acerbic little feeling brewing inside that it was ironic that he was considered the fuckup. Gal froze watching it, and they held their breath; she turned and looked each of them in the face. It was only when the father comes to fetch the little girl in New Zealand to take her to Canada that she spoke. She turned to them and said, “But he was her real father.”
“Yes,” Matt said. “Her biological father.”
She blinked sadly at him. “That’s really different,” she said. She got up a few minutes later and went to bed, and he and Daniel argued briefly, in tight, insistent whispers, about whether to go talk to her, each implying that the other was dealing with her grief irresponsibly. Finally, Daniel got off the bed with a put-upon sigh and went to Gal’s room. He came back a few minutes later, shrugging. “She doesn’t want to talk about it,” he said.
Later, as he brushed his teeth in his boxers, Noam sacked out in the middle of their bed, Matt inspected the small bulge at his stomach in the bathroom mirror. “You’re gorgeous, Matt, relax,” Daniel said.
“If you say it automatically like that, you lose all credibility,” Matt said.
“Has the dog been out?” Daniel asked. They used passive voice to ask each other whether any one of their thousand daily tasks had been done, to avoid sounding accusatory even while they were in fact accusing each other.
“No,” Matt said. “I made coffee and emptied the dishwasher.”
They looked at each other steadily, with poorly suppressed challenge and irritation.
“Crap,” Daniel said, pulling his T-shirt on and going back downstairs.
Noam was wearing only a diaper, his thumb in his mouth. Matt quietly pulled back the covers, punched and arranged pillows, and got into bed. When Daniel came back up, he got in bed on the other side of the baby, facing Matt.
“Are those thighs the juiciest things you’ve ever seen?” Matt whispered naughtily.
“Oh God, I know,” Daniel said with a playful groan. He ran his finger gently across Noam’s forehead, his eyes half-closed and soft. “You’re all right, right, buddy?” he whispered.
They were a little worried about him; they’d read up on his developmental stage, and learned that at seventeen months, Noam was late walking. He could stand if they lifted him up by the hands and held on to him, but the moment they moved backward to encourage him to take a few steps, he lowered his bottom to the floor, straining at their hands. Nor was he speaking, any words at all save the syllables da and na, and while his demeanor was uniformly placid during the day, his eyes were evasive and he didn’t respond readily to the sounds of his name when they called him. It hadn’t occurred to either of them to worry about that—they just appreciated how easy he was, how you could set him in his playpen in the kitchen or Matt’s study and he’d play happily with his toys without bothering you. But then, at Val’s urging, and galvanized too by the way Noam loved going over to the stereo and turning it up to blasting, they’d taken him to the doctor for a hearing test. His hearing was normal, but the pediatrician had said that they couldn’t rule out autism, at the mildest end of the spectrum. Daniel had been furious, and wanted to fire the pediatrician. “That’s the most irresponsible thing to say!” he raged. “Noam’s a sweet, beautiful boy who’s been through unimaginable upheaval, and this jerk jumps to autism!” But they obsessively read everything they could find on autism on the Web anyway, and argued about whether Noam’s passy, or growing up in a bilingual household, was responsible for delaying his speech. Matt knew that autism was unlikely. He saw the way Noam got engrossed with a toy and then brought it over to Gal so she’d admire it with him or show him what to do with it; he noticed his drowsy gaze when you rocked him, the way he reached up to hook his fingers over your lips or grasp onto your ear. He thought about the grief held by that little body, wondering whether by now it was anything more than an inchoate, restless drift of the organs, a confusion he’d moved past because it couldn’t be settled. To his friends, Matt joked that Noam was “slow,” dramatically mouthing the word.
Matt turned off the light and for a few moments the only sound was the lap of the dog’s tongue as he washed himself. Then Daniel’s voice came through the darkness. “I was talking to my dad tonight, telling him about the businesses on Green Street being uprooted for the new engineering school,” he said. “He’s certain they’re being abundantly compensated.”
Matt smiled. “Oh, well that’s a relief,” he said. It was a running joke between them, Sam’s reflexive trust of powerful institutions. They lay with their fists tucked under their chests and chins. Desire stirred in Matt, and for the next hour, thoughts about their sexual future and the cluelessness of the privileged classes rankled him, until the air conditioner finally hummed him to sleep.
AS THE DAYS PASSED, Matt progressed on the engineering school project with decent speed, got his aesthetic groove back for a stretch of five glorious days in mid-August, fortified by patched-together babysitting and Daniel doing extra kids duty at night. A teenager named Michelle from a few streets away had left a flyer in their mailbox, offering babysitting services, and they went over to her house to meet her and her parents; they used her in the mornings when Matt was upstairs working. Val or Adam took the kids for playdate afternoons, above and beyond the call of duty, sending them home with painted faces, or fancy paper hats, beaded necklaces, bracelets, crowns made of flowers—always one especially extravagant item they were instructed to give to Matt.
It was corn season in the valley, and the kids were crazy about corn. Daniel bought half a dozen ears from a farm stand every day on his way home, and they boiled them for no more than three minutes and ate them with salt, because as Gal, quick study that she was, learned to say, “They’re so sweet you don’t need butter.” It was her job to shuck, and she picked every single silk strand off and held it in the air to scrutinize it before depositing it in the garbage, or more likely, draping it onto the outside of the trash bag. “A little lesson in Zen mindfulness,” Daniel commented to the fidgeting Matt.
The tobacco harvest began, farmers hanging the large, glossy leaves used for fine cigars in weathered and slatted tobacco barns. And the sunflowers were up, like crowds of periscopes sent up by inquisitive aliens, craning this way and that. Daniel and Matt let the machine take most of the calls, unless it was Val calling to offer them some new kind of fabulous favor. Most of the time, they didn’t even pick up for Derrick and Brent, which made Matt feel deeply guilty; his friends had once been everything to him, and deserting them because he now had children seemed like an enormous violation of a queer ethical standard. While Daniel cooked dinne
r, they let Noam pull all the pots and pans out of the cabinet and play with spatulas and wooden spoons, and Matt lay on the floor with a colander on his head and the tea strainers over his eyes, croaking, “Take me to your leader.” Then he took up a wooden spoon and, using it as a microphone, sidled up to Daniel as Daniel skewered vegetables for the grill, and sang:
’Cuz I’m a one man guy in the morning,
Same in the afternoon.
One man guy when the sun goes down,
I whistle me a one man tune.
One man guy, one man guy,
Only kind of guy to be,
I’m a one man guy, I’m a one man guy,
I’m a one man guy
Is me.
Daniel shimmied a chunk of purple onion onto a skewer and gave him a quizzical look. “Doesn’t it end up that the guy is, like, himself ?”
“That’s if you keep that last stanza in there,” Matt said, in the voice of a teacher energized by a smart student. “Which I don’t.”
“Aha,” Daniel smiled. “I see.”
YOSSI LEANED OVER GAL and showed her a mistake she’d made. They were working on writing down the months; they’d taken down the calendar from the kitchen wall and placed it on the table. She swung her bare feet and twirled her hair, feeling the edges of his body ruffle the edges of hers.
He was coming over twice a week to work with Gal; Matt’s lessons with Yossi had become her lessons too as she worked on writing in Hebrew. There was something about Yossi’s presence, Matt mused as he watched him focus on the child, one arm on the back of her chair, that made the family a little cuckoo. Although it made him feel like a jerk and he tried very hard not to, sometimes Matt found himself subtly competing with Gal for Yossi’s affection and approval. And Daniel too changed imperceptibly around him, his body language more purposeful, less soft, his voice a note lower, Matt could swear, acting with him like a man among Israeli men, speaking in rapid Hebrew that elbowed the others out of the conversation. And Daniel always handled the money. They paid in cash, since Yossi’s immigration status forbade him to work, and it somehow always worked out that it was Daniel who peeled off bills from his wallet, the way it was Matt who always brought the coffee or emptied and refilled the ice trays. It felt weird to Matt, as though Daniel were his father paying for his piano lessons, or as though he, Matt, were a housewife on a strict allowance.
