All I Love and Know

by Judith Frank

  Rafi had become like another brother; she took his presence for granted without seeking it. He was the only kid around who lived in a more complicated linguistic ecosystem than she did, and her official position on him was pity. Once, she had asked Yossi if he was sad Rafi was deaf, and he’d said, “I’ve only ever known Rafi deaf. If he wasn’t deaf, he wouldn’t be Rafi.” That was an intriguing philosophical revelation to her, and she mulled and mulled it. Rafi could be wild—he could plow through a house with maniacal energy, leaping off of furniture and landing with an explosion of noise you didn’t think his small body could create, grabbing cherished or fragile objects and making the grown-ups have to chase him to snatch them out of his hands. Gal sometimes suspected he was just pretending he couldn’t hear so that he wouldn’t have to listen to anybody. But his blithe oblivion, which had been off-putting at first, had come to feel relaxing to her. When they were bored, he taught her signs in Israeli Sign Language, and in those few moments where they sat, moving only their fingers, palms, wrists, there was a strange pleasure in the silence, in pretending she was deaf.

  MATT STOPPED CALLING, RESPECTED Daniel’s wishes not to be in touch. Derrick, who went over to pick up his computer and printer, told Matt that he’d tried to talk to Daniel, only to be told that he welcomed Derrick’s support and friendship as long as they didn’t involve his agitating on Matt’s behalf. Matt knew there were things Derrick wasn’t telling him, too: When he asked about seeing Gal and Noam, Derrick was evasive, and said, “Just give it a little time.”

  After a few weeks, Matt found a house in Derrick and Brent’s neighborhood to sublet. It was owned by an anthropologist couple from Smith who were going into the field for a semester, and they were charging him next to nothing in exchange for his taking care of their deaf elderly springer spaniel, Molly. They worked in Japan, so the house was filled with Japanese prints and paintings and sacred objects that made him feel loud and hairy and big-footed, and at times, under the tranquil eye of the Buddha, pleasantly reverent. In the big sunny study the owners shared, the dog slumbering at his feet, Matt threw himself into his work, finishing a few projects that he had procrastinated over. Cam came over at night to visit, as did Brent, and they shook their heads woefully and recalled their own traumatic breakups. He made movie dates with a few people he liked but whose friendship he’d never had time, or was too complacent in his couple-hood, to pursue. He had dinner at Val and Adam’s, and endured a wearying meal of watery vegetarian lasagna, during which the older kids answered questions about school in monosyllables, hair flopped over their faces, and Lev, tired and irritable, baited his parents by throwing food on the floor. After Lev finally went to bed, Matt discovered that Daniel hadn’t told Adam and Val what he had done to make Daniel kick him out, and had to tell them himself, knowing even as he spoke that they wouldn’t have invited him over to dinner if they’d known. They tried to be cosmopolitan about the mysteries of queer desire and behavior, but they were clearly shocked. For the rest of the evening, Val couldn’t keep exasperation out of her voice. He suspected that she had planned to get them back together, but was sensing now that this breakup confounded even her abilities. He couldn’t wait to get out of there, and excused himself wearily as soon as he could without being rude.

  He called Yossi, whose company he missed, and left a message, but Yossi didn’t call him back. He wondered if he’d gotten the message; it was a chaotic household and someone could have deleted it. He wondered if Yossi knew what he’d done, in which case, okay, he deserved to be dumped. But if Val and Adam didn’t know, he didn’t think Yossi would either. After a week had passed, he figured that Yossi just didn’t want to be friends. He tried to be a grown-up about it; if he didn’t want to be friends, Matt couldn’t force him. But he’d thought they had a genuine connection, and as the days went on, the thought that he was so easily dispensable made him increasingly bitter.

  He put one foot in front of the other, functioning on the very edge of believing the breakup was final. He just didn’t believe that it could be, although he also vowed not to be one of those boyfriends who sent obsessive emails and left phone messages dark with meaning—beginning with a low, terse “It’s me”—one of those guys who refused to see the evidence staring him in the face, the evidence all of his creeped-out friends could see. One day, he fell over the edge, and then the agony of his loss shocked him. He’d lost his family because he’d failed them. He’d tried and tried to rise to the occasion of their loss, and he’d done a great job until the effort had become just too great. And then what? The most ignominious of failures, he simply couldn’t keep it in his pants. Was that the true Matt? The thought that there might be something fundamentally selfish and childish about him distressed him. And it made him rethink his whole relation to Jay’s illness, too. Had Kendrick been right, and he’d just been a big handful the whole time? He spent that day stunned and immobilized in bed, while the stiff old spaniel snored and twitched on the floor beside him.

  Other days, though, there was a glimmer of chilly optimism, a little piece of him that felt freed. In a few years, he thought, surely this whole awful, demented interlude would seem like a dream. In the quiet, scholarly rental house, it was sometimes hard to believe it had happened. Terrorism! The Occupation! The Holocaust! The grieving grandparents and stricken children! His house teeming with toys, diapers, strewn bedding, strange people washing dishes or cooking food. Jesus Christ, he thought at those moments, what a freaking melodrama! And what a stupid, deluded, paltry role he’d played in it. He so didn’t belong with those people: Hadn’t they made that abundantly clear?

  He thought about being in Israel, about every door that had slammed in his face, and every time, back home, that Daniel acted surprised when Matt did something that hinted of being an actual parent. Anger would worm into his throat then: they’d exploited him, and he’d let them. Had Daniel been waiting the whole time to pull out that legal crap that he alone was the legal guardian and the sole owner of the house? Throughout this whole nightmare, Matt had reassured himself that Daniel still loved him, but that his love was like a tiny sacred object buried under layers of grief and confusion, so he couldn’t find it. Now he thought that Daniel hadn’t loved him after all, and just kept him around because it was too hard to parent on his own. Maybe he even did it consciously; he could just imagine the cold calculus of need, affection, dissimulation, self-justification.

  And he—he’d reveled in the poignancy of being there to soothe the brokenhearted, the glamour of being a handsome man riding to their rescue. It made his face burn now to recall all that welling up of deep, tender feeling, as if he’d just come across and read his adolescent journal.

  Released, he could do as he pleased. He could break through this whole carapace of grief and horror and emerge, gleaming and tender, into a new life. Would he go back to New York, where any respectable gay man would choose to live? He knew he could be picked up by a design firm and make a fair living there, even though rents in Manhattan had gone through the roof in the years he’d been gone. There would be more than three excellent restaurants in walking distance, and things to do after dark; the thought of hanging out and drinking with more than two gay men made his lips twitch with a smile. And art! He missed art so much.

  He went through a few weeks of purification, cutting out smoking and eating meat, running in a pattern of two days on, one day off. He joined the gym so he could do weights. He circled the date of his sexual encounter on his calendar, counted six months and circled the date in June he’d get himself tested. He slept late in the mornings, enjoying not having a toddler who awoke at six, and kept the house super tidy, washing strange dishes and using up the laundry detergent in their laundry room, which made him experience a new, not unpleasant smell in his life that it took a few days to identify with his newly washed clothing.

  WHEN IT HAD BECOME clear that they would become a couple, Daniel and Matt had made a half-joking pact never to tell Daniel’s parents if they br
oke up, because they knew how gratified they’d be. Even these years later, with all the water under the bridge, Daniel couldn’t bring himself to tell his parents right away. He did, though, call the social worker, Christine, thinking it wisest to be up-front about his change in status. She came for a visit late one afternoon, files jutting out of the big purse beside her on the couch, her feet puffing against the strictures of her pumps. “I won’t lie to you, Daniel,” she said. “I was happier when you and Matt were together.”

  He shrugged.

  “I don’t like these kids experiencing another loss so soon, and I don’t like seeing them so dark and quiet.”

  “Do you think I do?” he asked, stung that she thought that. He’d actually been feeling pretty good with them, feeling that, as a parent, he was on his game. Last night at supper they’d both been on edge, Noam whining in his booster—he had a stuffed nose, and had been up a lot during the night because he couldn’t suck his passy and breathe at the same time—while Gal complained bitterly that she hated every single bit of food in front of her; and Daniel had sat down with them, his mind chugging about how to salvage dinner. “Remember the time we went to the fair and that llama spat on Cam?” he finally asked. “Wow, was she ever covered in llama spit!” Their scowling faces turned toward him. He imitated Cam touching her hair and bringing her hand away, looking at it with revulsion. Simultaneously, they laughed, disarmed, and dinner was saved.

  “Of course not.” Christine’s composed professional face relaxed for a moment, and the expression was kind and weary. “Look, it’s none of my business why you fellas broke up. Or to encourage an unhappy relationship. But if you can find your way back to each other, that would be the optimal situation for these kids.”

  Daniel was silent. Wasn’t it a commonplace that staying together for the sake of the kids was a bad idea, because it modeled a bad marriage for them?

  “And if you can’t, I sure hope you’re figuring out some arrangement where the kids can see him. He was an involved parent. They’re close to him.”

  “I will,” he said. “Just not yet.”

  “When?” she asked, waiting him out as he groaned and rolled his head on his neck.

  “Do I even have to, from a legal standpoint?” he challenged. “I’m the one who has full custody.”

  “Legally? No,” she said. “But I think you know this isn’t only about the letter of the law.”

  “Gal hasn’t even asked to see Matt.”

  Christine was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “That’s for a reason you don’t have access to, Daniel. For all you know, she’s just used to the world taking parents away, and can’t imagine that she has any control over it.”

  That surprised him, and wounded him too, her thinking of him as some pitiless force crushing his child; and it was still rankling when he opened the door to let her out. He was the one betrayed—how had he become the bad guy? He jammed his leg in front of Yo-yo, who was trying to barrel out into the cold, and watched as, with a jangle of a massive key chain, Christine got into her dinky Prizm.

  That night Derrick called, and they were barely into the conversation when he asked Daniel when Matt would be able to see the kids.

  “Did he ask you to ask me?” Daniel said, his voice sharp. He muted the bedroom TV, where he’d been watching a police procedural while drinking a glass of scotch.

  “So what if he did? There’s nothing underhanded about that,” Derrick said with some exasperation. “You won’t talk to him . . .”

  Daniel was quiet. “If I felt it was the wrong thing to do,” he finally told Derrick, “I’d really be struggling. But I know that it isn’t. I feel good, Derrick. So angry sometimes I can hardly see, but weirdly good. I know the kids are suffering, but I think I’m doing right by them.”

  “ ‘Doing right by them’? Are you sure? What must they think? I don’t mean to pull my professional training on you, but—”

  “Then don’t,” Daniel said. “Just don’t.”

  There was a long pause. Then: “He feels used. And you can sort of see why.”

  The subtitles on the TV indicated that the detectives suspected the husband of the murdered socialite. “Maybe I did use him a little,” Daniel conceded. “Sometimes I think I stayed with him because I couldn’t imagine coming home with the kids alone.”

  Derrick paused, then said, “Really? I don’t really buy that.”

  “What don’t you buy?” Daniel asked, irritated; apparently he couldn’t get anything right.

  “You’re saying that you didn’t love him anymore at that point. But I think you did.”

  “You always think people are better than they really are,” Daniel said. “I haven’t felt anything for him for a while.”

  Derrick shot back, “You haven’t felt much of anything, period, for a while. Including anger at the person who killed your brother. But Matt you can get angry with, Matt you can call a danger to your family.”

  Daniel groaned. “Did you call to harass me, Derrick?”

  “No,” Derrick said. “But I think you should let him see the kids.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Daniel said, willing to say anything at that point to get Derrick off the phone. He still needed to make the kids’ lunches for tomorrow and take out the dog. He hung up and lay there for a minute, regretting having settled down with a drink in the first place before finishing his evening chores. He was tired of everybody being on his case. Derrick knew what Matt had done, and he was still giving him a hard time. He wished he had asked him what he would have done if Brent had barebacked—Derrick would have gone on a tirade about responsibility and consequences so furious it would have set Brent’s hair afire. And of course he’d let the kids see Matt at some point soon; he wasn’t a monster, he knew it was wrong to make him just vanish, as their parents had. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it just yet.

  THE LONGEST JANUARY HE had ever lived through passed into February, and Matt was learning to live alone again, without a partner and without kids. He handled his anger at Daniel for cutting Noam and Gal out of his life by spitefully luxuriating, when he awoke in the morning, in visions of Daniel having to wake them, dress them, feed them, and hustle them out of the house by himself, along with feeding and taking out the dog. He’d relearned the austere pleasures of making coffee for one, fishing clean laundry out of the basket when he was ready to wear it instead of folding it and putting it in drawers, sprawling on the queen-sized bed and watching HGTV at night and groaning over the idiots who rejected a home simply because they didn’t like the color of the paint on the walls, downloading new music on his iPod for the first time in months. He revived a few friendships he’d been pursuing just when Joel and Ilana had been killed, which he hadn’t had the time or energy to pursue after that; he drank martinis at dinner parties and slept a full eight hours a night. He ran and worked out at the gym, and got something of his old lean muscle back, although there remained a little too much paunch for comfort, a sign of getting older that he deplored. He aggressively pursued a few big jobs, and got a piece of one of them, with the promise of more. Derrick had been working for a while on setting up an LGBT version of Big Brothers Big Sisters, pairing queer and questioning high schoolers with queer adults in the Pioneer Valley, and Matt volunteered to be a big brother if it got off the ground.

  It was exciting to revive his old self—fun, a good conversationalist, a sexual player. But he wasn’t, of course, his old self; he had so much baggage now, he told people, he practically had to hire a porter to come with him everywhere. One night, he had a drink with Alex Connor, Northampton’s one gay cop; he had a shaved blond head and an earring in one ear that he wore only when off duty, and his T-shirt stretched over his shoulders. Matt wasn’t into the whole Aryan thing, the pale lashes, but he found the tension between Alex’s sense of duty and his sense of irony appealing, and enjoyed Alex’s stories about Northampton’s seamy side. As he told Alex the story of his relationship with Daniel and the last year, Alex r
eacted with a series of “Whoa’s,” and he felt uncomfortable about how glamorously tragic it made him seem; he found himself underplaying things and omitting others, like the custody fight with the Holocaust-survivor grandparents. At the end of the story, he said, “So he just couldn’t deal with a partner; he had to scapegoat somebody in the end, and it was me.” He didn’t like the way he sounded when he said that, either; if he’d been Alex, listening to him, he’d wonder what bad behavior of Matt’s own he was leaving untold.

  “Did you like being a parent?” Alex asked.

  Matt thought. “I did. I didn’t think I would, but I did.”

  “Do you feel like”—Alex’s voice lowered dramatically, a little sardonically—“you never knew what it meant to love, till then?”

  Matt looked at him sharply. “Of course not,” he said. “That’s bullshit. What did those people spend their lives doing before kids, jerking off ?” As he spoke, he knew that he was overstating his objection to that cliché, out of worry that he was being mocked. Certainly he’d been willing to give up a whole lot for Gal and Noam, and sometimes he’d be walking down the street with them and know—just calmly know—that if a car swerved toward them, he’d fling his body between it and them. But somehow, that didn’t feel like noble parental self-sacrifice, it just felt like the right thing to do. And would he have done any of this if he hadn’t loved Daniel with his whole heart—if he hadn’t longed to soothe that deep, deep grief ?