by Judith Frank
“Stop, I am,” Matt said.
“There’s this new Israeli law,” he said. “Actually, I think it might be an extension of an old law.”
A shadow fell across the table, and they looked up to see Yossi, his face bright and benign, standing over them. His hair, which had grown out since Matt had last seen him, was disheveled, his T-shirt dark with sweat. He had a gym bag slung over his shoulder and a cup of coffee with a lid on it in his hand. Matt’s heart popped with surprise and revived anger, the inevitable ribbon of attraction tied around the whole messy package.
“I was just getting my coffee,” Yossi said. “I understand that mazal tovs are in order!”
Daniel stood and they hugged, while Matt remained seated, watching their hands clap each other’s backs in the way of straight men while Yossi held out his coffee cup so it wouldn’t spill. He didn’t know how he was supposed to greet Yossi, who had clearly decided he wasn’t worth remaining friends with after the breakup; he refused to stand and hug him. But he was conscious of sitting there, slumped and sullen, like a big baby.
“I’m very happy for you,” Yossi said in Hebrew, beaming at them. “I, for one, support gay marriage a hundred percent.”
“Great!” Matt said, and felt Daniel give him a sharp look. A sparrow landed a few feet away, and he broke off a tiny piece of bread and tossed it in its direction, onto the stone terrace ground, then watched as the bird bustled over, seized it in its beak, and flew off. Yossi and Daniel were making a plan for a Rafi drop-off later that afternoon after school, looking at their watches. “Metzuyan,” Daniel said. Excellent.
When Yossi had left, Daniel sat back down and took a bite out of his sandwich. Matt sensed his gaze on him, and turned. “What?”
Daniel raised an eyebrow.
“How about a little loyalty?” Matt asked heatedly. “You know he dumped me as a friend, right? And still, you’re nice to him.”
Daniel flushed and blinked as he took in Matt’s anger. He swallowed his food. “I’m sorry. It’s just—he’s really been there for me and the kids. Coming to Israel for the memorial—”
“Well, he wasn’t there for me,” Matt said flatly. “Do you care at all about that?”
“I do, Matt.” Daniel leaned over and slipped his arm around Matt’s waist, nuzzled his cheek. “I do. But maybe you’re madder at me than you are at him? Maybe I’m the one who wasn’t there for you?”
Matt sat stiffly, accepting his embrace and kiss, half mollified. “He’s always been a condescending prick with me. He’s not like that with you.”
“No,” Daniel said.
“Like I’d lost sleep over his support of gay marriage! Give me a break.”
Daniel laughed, and they ate in silence for a while, Matt fretting over the various slights he’d experienced from Yossi. They weren’t exactly slights, he thought—they didn’t even rise to that level; it was as if Yossi didn’t take him seriously enough to slight him. As soon as he thought that, he wondered if it was true—or whether it was just his own insecurity that made him feel like a less substantial person than Yossi.
“This Israeli law I was telling you about?” Daniel was saying. “Get this: The law states that if a Palestinian living in Jerusalem marries someone from the West Bank, they can’t live legally together in either place. In either place! Can you believe it?” He was looking at Matt, waiting to see the information register on his face. “And did you know that if a Palestinian kid lives with one of its parents in Jerusalem, that kid has to leave Jerusalem when it turns eighteen and go live on the West Bank?”
“What? Why?” Matt turned his head in Daniel’s direction, bewildered; it sounded nonsensical, and he thought that maybe he’d missed the initial sentences while he was brooding about Yossi, the ones that explained what the hell Daniel was talking about.
“Why? They always say it’s for security reasons. But this is about demographics. About keeping the Jew-to-Arab ratio in Jerusalem stable.” Daniel had read about the law quickly, when the materials from B’Tselem had first had arrived, and then more slowly and carefully; but it was so convoluted and had so many poisonous ramifications, it had taken him a while to even understand it. He’d read the testimonials from Palestinians about standing outside in line all night at the Interior Ministry with their infants and documents, only to be told they were missing a document, or to return in three months, or that their claims were denied, or that the ministry was closing early so clerks could get home for an approaching Jewish holiday. It had made him think how pathetic and subhuman a long weary line of humans always looked, like refugees or convicts with their wooden bowls, waiting for their portion of rice. It made him think that a big strategy of the Occupation was to flood the brain space of Palestinians with the countless cryptic details of petty bureaucracy. And it made him think, irately: Sorry, Joel, but how is that not like apartheid?
“I just don’t know what to do with this information,” he told Matt now, irate all over again. “Seriously. What am I supposed to do with it? Just be glad that I get to get married, and to hell with everybody else?”
“I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re supposed to do with that information.” Matt couldn’t say it, but he was secretly glad that Daniel also had complicated feelings about getting married. It made him feel less alone with it.
Daniel took the straw out of his iced tea, sucked on it, and laid it on the table. “I called the Bereaved Families Forum,” he said.
Matt turned sharply and looked at him. “Seriously? When? What did they say?”
“The guy’s going to call me back on Tuesday.”
“Good for you, honey! I’m glad.”
Daniel shrugged. “Yeah, they probably don’t let American Jews join—it’s a group for Israelis and Palestinians—but maybe, if not, they can suggest another group.”
“I’m glad,” Matt said.
He’d disarmed him, Daniel knew; Matt had been wanting him to join an activist group for a while now. Even if they did let him join, which he doubted, he didn’t know what kind of role he’d have, and what kind of travel that might entail. He didn’t know if it was the right way to enter the fray. But a yearning had overtaken him, to connect in a human way with Palestinian people. Maybe the impulse was silly or naïve. It was hard to explain, even to Matt. But his fate was tied so intimately to people he’d never met in the flesh—unless you counted that hot, shocking moment when flesh was blown off of bodies. Unless you counted his brief handshake with that Palestinian man, Ibrahim, at the Smith College panel, who’d been too busy or distracted to focus on him. Or maybe he hadn’t been. Maybe, it occurred to Daniel as he diffusely took in the heat of the afternoon, the murmur of people’s conversations around him, he’d needed so much from Ibrahim at that moment—so much that he couldn’t even name—that no response could have lived up to his hopes.
Matt ran his hand gently over Daniel’s, and Daniel turned over his palm and entwined his fingers with his. He appreciated how lucky he was to have Matt in the flesh, not to be kept apart from him by a sinkhole of military and legal space. He squeezed Matt’s hand hard, to feel him, because it was hard sometimes to feel Matt’s presence even when he was right there. Hard to be there for him, when sometimes the dead and the dispossessed felt more real than the man breathing right beside him.
And yet, Matt—Matt had been there for him. He’d been an ark to him and to the kids, carrying them out of dark, catastrophic waters. Solid, durable, sensual, he’d carried them through.
THE UNCLES WERE GETTING married. They said that men could marry each other now, and they weren’t teasing her, it was really true. Gal sat aboard Caesar, swaying easily with his walk, while Matt watched, forearms resting on the ring’s railing and chin propped on his folded hands. She was waiting for permission to canter and feeling the cool air encase her bare arms; right before she went in, she’d stripped down to her T-shirt and tossed her sweatshirt to Matt. It was hard to wait, because cantering was the most thrilling thing sh
e’d ever done in her entire life. Her heels were down and straight, her thighs pressed easily into the saddle, the reins looped around her soft, able hands. She remembered being at weddings in Israel, running around with other kids in huge, brilliant banquet halls, round tables with white tablecloths as far as her eye could see, flower arrangements and dishes of hummus and olives and wine bottles and glasses of water placed on them, the grown-ups talking in loud voices over the deafening music. Dancing with her father, straddling his hip, while he held her hand straight out in front of them and put on a pompous dancing-master face. The memory moved through her with a languorous ache, like a pearl falling through honey. She gathered in her reins to raise Caesar’s head and grazed him with her heels, gathering him, keeping her eye on Briana, who was the teacher today, and who was reminding them to pull the rein near the railing and nudge the horse with that heel. She didn’t need to hear that instruction again. She was ready. Her body was light and airy, a knitted baby blanket, a round crystal glass with water shimmering inside.
“Okay,” Briana said, and Gal broke into a canter.
CHAPTER 20
BEHIND A DOZEN other couples and a crowd of kids, Daniel, Matt, Gal, and Noam stood in line at the Northampton courthouse, waiting for a marriage license on the first day they would be issued to gay couples in the United States. Some courthouses in Cambridge and Provincetown, Matt knew, had opened at midnight to let their gay citizens be the very first in the U.S. to receive marriage certificates. Despite that gall to his competitive spirit, he took in with pleasure the sun warming his shoulders, the feel of Gal’s hand resting in his, the sheer gorgeousness of the blue spring sky, doubly precious because they’d earned it by slogging through the grueling, grueling winter. Lesbian couples stood in front and in back of them, wearing their pretty dresses, their suits, whatever counted for them as finery. He himself was sporting bright blue shoes and a fedora. A butch passed by them, scanning for someone in line and muttering to herself; she was wearing a cowboy dress shirt with pearl buttons tucked into black jeans. Matt whispered, “Check out Farmer Brown over there.”
Daniel slapped his arm. “It’s her wedding day,” he admonished.
Around them, people milled and called out to each other. “Tying the knot?” “Taking the plunge?” “Making an honest homo out of him?” They laughed at the idea that those everyday expressions could have anything to do with them. A small Asian-American girl passed by on her father’s shoulders, playing the “Wedding March” on a child-sized violin. Several people circulated in caterers’ clothes—black pants, white dress shirt—proffering trays of canapés, business cards stacked prettily around the trays’ edges. Matt watched them, a smile pulling at his lips at their entrepreneurial spirit.
History had come down and tapped them on the shoulder, and it was hard to know what to feel in the moment. Marriage wouldn’t have been Matt’s fight, but now it had happened, and that was pretty remarkable. He was proud to live in Massachusetts, USA; other than that, he drew something of a blank. Maybe, he thought, you could only feel these moments in retrospect. He remembered the day that Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court case that had overturned Texas’s sodomy law, had come down, the Court’s majority writing that Bowers v. Hardwick—to gay people, an infamously repulsive decision—had been misguided and wrong. He and Daniel had happened to be at Derrick and Brent’s for dinner, and they’d all lifted their wineglasses and looked at one another with bemusement, at a loss for the right words, the right emotions, until Brent piped up, “To sodomy!” and they’d all laughed and touched glasses.
The line inched forward. Noam, who was wearing a T-shirt with a bow tie and tuxedo front silk-screened on it, and whose stroller’s handlebars had been bedecked with a small rainbow flag, said, “Out! Out!” and Matt unbuckled him, lifted him out, and set him down. “This is taking forever,” he said to Daniel. “I’m going to take a walk with him. C’mon, Shorty.” Matt let Noam lead him around, a tiny hand clasping his pointer finger. People smiled at the sight of the tall, graceful gay man with the toddler chugging along at his side. They walked to the edges of the crowd and Matt stood watching while Noam stooped to pick up and examine some gravel pebbles at the edges of the parking lot.
“Hey,” he heard behind him. It was Brent, smiling, wearing jeans and a blue T-shirt with the big yellow equals sign on the front, a baseball cap to protect his head where his hair was thinning. “We found Daniel in line, and he said you guys had gone for a walk.”
“Change your mind?” Matt grinned.
“No,” he said. “We just came to join the celebration.” He and Derrick had decided not to get married. “It’s not for us,” Derrick had said in tactful nonjudgment. “At least not right now.” They’d been together for fifteen years, since freshman year in college, with only an experimental break when Brent had gone abroad to Paris his junior year.
Now Brent looked into his friend’s face with an expression both sweet and keen, and slid his arm around his shoulder.
“I’ve been thinking about Ilana and Joel today,” Matt said.
Brent nodded.
“I think they’d be happy. They trusted us. They trusted us together.” He stepped forward abruptly. “No, honey, that’s yucky,” he said to Noam, before Noam’s fingers could close over a cigarette butt on the ground.
“Dass yucky,” Noam repeated. He turned to Brent. “Dass yucky,” he said solemnly.
“Yes it is,” Brent said. “And let me commend you on your good talking!”
“It turns out I wasn’t so trustworthy,” Matt said. “I don’t know why. Well, I do know why. I didn’t want to have to spend the rest of my life worrying about being safe. Or something.”
Brent was quiet, his thoughts playing across his face.
“It feels good to say fuck you to the universe!” Matt said. He scanned the courthouse, the peaceable crowd, the cars passing by with supportive beeps, the serene blue sky, and he and Brent laughed, struck at the same time by how very benign the universe was looking at that moment. “Seriously, though,” he said. “That’s what this marriage is, too. A leap of faith. Like: We’re not going to wait to climb this mountain till they’ve put up guardrails and signage along all the cliff faces. We’re not! Because we want to climb.”
Noam came over to Matt and gave him a handful of stones and street sand left over from the winter plows. “What am I supposed to do with this?” Matt asked, looking at the dirty pile in his hand.
“Take home,” Noam replied.
Matt looked at him, sighed, and emptied it into the pocket of his clean, pressed pants. “Nothing,” he said to Brent, “and I mean nothing, makes me feel like a parent more than holding out my hand so they can spill or gag or spit disgusting shit into it.” He rubbed his hands together to clean them off and picked Noam up, raked his bangs back from his forehead with his fingers. “You’re a good friend,” he said to Brent. “I’m sorry I haven’t been a very present one lately.”
Brent waved his hand and shook his head, his face pinking with little blots of emotion. “It’s okay—”
“It’s not okay,” Matt said, and Brent clasped his shoulder hard.
When they got back to the line, Daniel and Gal had gotten almost to the courthouse door, and Daniel was anxiously looking around for him. Gal was watching as a little boy on the verge of a tantrum was alternately diverted and scolded by his moms, who were worried their impending moment would be ruined by a screaming toddler. A middle-aged lesbian couple in a suit and a dress were emerging from the courthouse’s other door, and raising their clasped hands in the air as reporters took photos of them; there was a wave of applause, then it became rhythmic, and people began to chant, “Thank you! Thank you!” Matt cocked his ear toward a woman next to him. “Goodridge,” she told him. “One of the couples who filed the lawsuit.”
Then Daniel was holding the door open for him, peering into the paneled, crowded hallways in front of them, and then they’d stepped inside. Standing around tables and
sitting on benches against the walls, couples were bent over forms, writing. Four clerks behind the long counter were handing out forms, gesturing and talking, collecting money. Daniel and Matt took theirs from a middle-aged woman with curly hair, big glasses, and a face pink from the humid warmth of bodies, who said in a voice whose hassled quality was just barely covered by mirth, “Good luck finding a place to sit down!”
Daniel, who attributed his ability to slice through lines and crowds to the years he’d spent getting on buses in Israel, disappeared for a second, and when Matt found him, he’d slipped onto the corner of a bench and was patting it in an invitation to sit next to him. Matt sat, excused himself to the woman he was making shift over, and smoothed the form over his thigh; they sat and wrote, knees touching. Addresses, parents’ names, city of birth. There was a burst of joyful noise, and they looked up—it was two of the Jewish lesbians; their rabbi had arrived, and was singing a shehechianu. Gal and Noam had disappeared down the hall, and just as Matt turned to ask Daniel where they were, they returned, Gal holding a hunk of cake on a paper plate, both of their mouths covered with frosting; in a room down the hall, the city of Northampton was celebrating the right of its gay and lesbian citizens to marry with a wedding cake. “Give me a bite,” Daniel said, leaning forward chin-first. He leveled a stern look at Gal when the plastic forkful she offered had just cake on it, no frosting, and she rolled her eyes and stabbed the fork into a gooey heap of white frosting, held it out to him. He grunted with approval, eyes glinting, and took it in his mouth. Matt turned back to his form with a smile.
