The Book of Jonah: A Novel

by Feldman, Joshua Max

  At the end of the coffee, they exchanged email addresses. He began to send her poems—Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden at first; later Pablo Neruda, e. e. cummings. Sometimes he would send her a message consisting of only a single sentence or phrase in the subject line: “There’s nothing so spiritual about being happy but you can’t miss a day of it.” “Glamorous nymph, with an arrow and bow.” She would track down the fragments of poems or song lyrics, buy the poets’ books, buy the albums, send poems and song lyrics back, saving, printing every email, and keeping them all hidden under her bed in a worn leather case that she’d pulled from her mother’s closet, and which she would sometimes take out at night—tracing the creases in the leather with her fingers, as though reading some private mystic Braille.

  They started meeting for coffee once or twice a week. He kept the mood casual and the topics generally teacher–student appropriate, but soon she began to notice that his leg would be shaking when she sat down, or that his finger would silently tap the side of his coffee mug as he watched her speak. He started telling her about his own writing, his novel (a bildungsroman about a man trying to model his life after the young James Joyce), his own plans for the future. “You’re an old soul,” he told her as they stood from one of their coffees. “Sometimes I think older than I am.” It was at that moment that she recognized he had lowered a barrier she had been trying with all her intellectual might to get him to lower: that she had succeeded in expanding the way he perceived her.

  Looking back on it as an adult, she sensed a certain inevitability to how events transpired after that—though maybe it had been inevitable from the first coffee, the first email. Regardless, at some point it had gotten to be that they both wanted the same thing, and then it was just a matter of time, until he offered to drive her home one afternoon; and they managed to collectively have the idea of taking a brief hike before he dropped her off; and this hike led them through a sparse woods to the side of a creek, afternoon sunlight glinting off its face, the two of them sitting side by side on a log so conveniently placed along its banks it seemed to have been put there just for them.

  “You are so extraordinary,” Gabe told her, almost sadly. Something in his tone caused her heart to start slamming itself against her rib cage; she had to breathe through her nose in order to hide the quickening of her breath. These were sensations familiar only from the end of her longer cross-country runs, but somehow here this was not really an unpleasant condition. “I feel such a connection with you,” he went on. “You must sense that. Judith,” he said, turning to her—his soft brown eyes only escalating the riot of nervousness and arousal inside her. “Let’s cut the bullshit. We are in very, very dangerous territory.” She managed to nod with equanimity. “You should know, I have a girlfriend. In California. Emma.” We have a new enemy was the phrase that popped into her head—a quote, she realized immediately, from The Empire Strikes Back, a movie she had seen an embarrassing number of times with her father. This might have alerted her to the fact that she really was too young to be doing this, but—her mind was occupied with a different set of concerns at the moment. “I have to take you home now,” he told her. Neither of them moved, of course. “I’ll still be your teacher. We can stay friends.”

  “I want more,” Judith said.

  Maybe she realized there was a line he would not let himself cross with her—maybe this impelled her even more powerfully to cross it, answering again the insatiable zeal that had induced her to steal the yad from off the principal’s desk. She reached up and took his head in her hands, pulled his face to hers. These first touches were searing in their intensity, and for a fifteen-year-old enamored of nineteenth-century American literature—enamored of the idea of it, enamored of its passions, and of passions she’d been seeking her entire life—to lose her virginity on the banks of a creek, her skin imprinted with twigs, her hair tangled in the grass: It was all about as much as Judith Klein Bulbrook could ask for. When he lifted himself off her and went to look in the grass for the underwear that had been tossed aside, she lay there watching the sky, the path of clouds between the branches at the tops of the trees, her fingers dangling against the cold surface of the creek. She thought of what she had just done, the home she had to go home to, the future that now offered itself before her—and she sensed a perfect wholeness across her entire life. It was the happiest moment of her life, she realized—and she thanked God for it.

  The moment didn’t last, of course. When Gabe returned, holding her sun-yellow panties dotted with little flowers (she hadn’t guessed today would be the day), she burst into tears—the blunt facts of what had happened suddenly, jarringly apparent. She was fifteen and she’d lost her virginity to her English teacher; she was lying half naked beside a creek; a man was standing over her with her underwear in his hand. But she would always judge him to be a good man for what he did next: knelt down beside her, stroked her coarse hair, promised her it would be okay.

  The affair did not last long. Really, it was all too, too intense for both of them, and maybe even more so for him. He felt a great deal of guilt: first for cheating on Emma, the California girlfriend; and more, he could never rid himself of the worry that he was “taking advantage” of her, no matter what she said or did to reassure him. The risks weighed on him, too, risks that only began with his relationship, his teaching career. Judith didn’t think her parents would go so far as to have him arrested for statutory rape if they found out—but she couldn’t be sure, either. She’d never had a serious disagreement with them. During the month Gabe and she were together, he lost weight, told her he didn’t sleep well, couldn’t work on his novel. Some mornings he looked so ashen in class she actually felt sorry for him.

  For her part, Judith was aware that her zealotry had gotten her in way over her head. She enjoyed the sex—this, a radical understatement—but indeed, that was the problem. It was shocking to her—it was frightening, almost—the way her body ran away from her as it neared an orgasm with him, to say nothing of what it did when it actually had one. She found it was hard on her to go in a single afternoon from a girl whose bra had never been unclasped by hands other than hers to a full-fledged sexual being. She started to wish she had been felt up at some point. And it all made her feel a little alien within her own life—alienated, if to a minor degree, even from her parents, to whom she now had to lie for the first time. She was by turns blithe and regretful; euphoric and then fearful, conscience-stricken. Such mood swings were so unlike what she knew of herself—seemed to her so teenager. It was at a diner twenty minutes outside town, as they were weighing whether he should spend a night at her house while her parents were out of town for the weekend, and she noticed she’d bent the cheap metal fork on the table into a figure eight, that they decided, without much discussion, that it needed to end.

  That night she reread all the emails and poems, as though reliving their former elation as present sorrow, sobbed herself to sleep. But when she woke up the next day, she discovered she was relieved. And as she walked down the halls of Gustav’s that morning, she realized that she now had a secret that would surpass that of any other girl in the school. She imagined as she went from class to class, her books clutched to her chest, her nimbus of black hair floating above her pale brow, that if anyone looked closely enough, they would see that the twinkle she had first seen in Gabe’s eye was now made permanent in her own. (At the time, she didn’t think this was why she had had the affair—but by the time she was in Las Vegas, she was not so sure.)

  * * *

  There was an unhappy coda to the relationship, however. Judith had been taking the pill since she was thirteen, in order to keep her periods regular—but no one gets A’s in everything. And Judith—being an extremely busy high school student with umpteen thoughts, assignments, activities on her mind at any one time—was less than perfect about remembering to take her birth control. She gave it a lot more attention after she started having sex, of course—but as she’d learned in her sixth-grade se
x-ed class, after you start having sex can be too late.

  After the fifth day without her period, she told him. They were sitting in the car at the trailhead, near where they’d first had sex. A pea soup greenness crept across his face, his expression not so much panicked as progressively catatonic. Then he burst into tears. “The last thing I ever wanted was to ruin your life,” he said.

  This time, she comforted him. As emergency appeared increasingly likely, one of her calms had come over her. She had thought it through: She would tell her mother but not her father; she would refrain from revealing Gabe’s identity and believed her mother would respect this choice; she would go to the college health center, where she had been taken her whole life for colds and strep, and she would have an abortion. And that would be terrible, she told herself, but it was the logical course of action—and in the end she would be okay. She would be able to live with it, and she would still get to go to whichever Ivy she chose, still become renowned in whatever field of study she picked. Her life, in short, would not be ruined: It would still play out just as it would have.

  When he’d stopped crying, he tried to rally himself—for some reason this involved him pulling off his tie—and he said, “Okay, well, let’s go get you a pregnancy test.”

  They drove to a Walmart forty minutes down the highway. When they got there, though, Gabe lost heart again. With shoulders slumped forward, his hands gripping the steering wheel, his eyes on the dormant speedometer, he told her, “I can’t go in with you.” Then he added, “You might as well just take it in the bathroom. We might as well find out now.” That he would make this suggestion stunned her—but, collecting herself, she tried not to blame him. After all, she reminded herself: He had prison to think about.

  She maintained her composure while walking across the parking lot. As she entered the cavernous store, alone, however, craning her neck to read the signs ten feet over the aisles—camping supplies, cookware, appliances, groceries—her sangfroid began to crack. She searched among endless shelves of vitamins and creams and tampons, finally found the pregnancy tests—dozens of them, on a rack rising from her ankles to her forehead; and, as she stared at all these boxes, she realized how badly she did not want to have to do this: take a pregnancy test in a Walmart bathroom—have an abortion at fifteen. “Oh, God,” she said under her breath. “Please don’t do this to me. I’ll be smarter now, I swear.”

  She selected the most expensive test, concluding that a flawed rationale for choosing one was better than none. She took it to the front of the store, placed it on the belt at the checkout line, then for cosmetic purposes piled two magazines and a pack of gum on top of it. The woman at the register was only a little older than her, African American, wore gold hoop earrings and had long, elaborately decorated fingernails. She ran the gum and the magazines over the scanner, then came to the pregnancy test—gave Judith a quizzical, up-and-down look.

  “You know what this is?” she asked. Judith stared back at her blankly. This was a conversation she deeply, deeply did not want to have. “What are you, thirteen?” Reason was abandoning Judith—a sensation all the more disconcerting as she’d never felt it before. She was terrified this woman was about to call her parents. But then the woman just shook her head, scanned the pregnancy test. “Thirteen year-old girl and you in here alone,” she said as the scanner beeped. “They always let you down, don’t they?”

  Judith grabbed the pregnancy test, left the magazines, hurried to the bathroom, managed to slam the door and lock it ahead of the tears. The reality of all this was encroaching further and further from the imagined landscape and into her actual life. “Oh, please, God,” she said. “Please, please, please.”

  The bathroom was, mercifully, a single-person unit—just her and the sink and the mirror and the toilet. She pulled the pregnancy test from the box, read the instructions from start to finish (though the gist was clear from looking at the device: Piss here), pulled down her pants, and sat on the toilet. She took one last, pleading breath—looked down at her underwear and saw she had gotten her period. “Thank God,” she whispered. “Oh, thank you, God, oh, God, thank you.”

  * * *

  After this trauma, Judith and Gabe restricted their interactions to the classroom. Even emails now seemed too emotionally fraught and risky. Occasionally when he read aloud in class, he did seem to be looking at her with special attention, but this aside, there was never again any outward indication from either of them that they had ever been more than exceptional student and favorite teacher. It was a somewhat sad way for their affair to end, Judith thought—though it was a kind of sadness she found she could enjoy. In any case, far worse endings had been possible.

  That summer she went on a youth trip to Israel, and by the time she returned, Gabe had moved back to California—had resigned from Gustav’s and taken a job teaching at a private school in Santa Barbara. She presumed he was living with Emma, but he didn’t specify in the brief, quietly heartfelt email he wrote her, the last one she put in the leather case underneath her bed. “Judith, you are a woman of tremendous promise,” he wrote. “I can’t wait to see all that you accomplish.” For a while she kept an eye out for his accomplishments, too—though the novel she expected to see never appeared.

  She didn’t date much, or try to, for the rest of high school. She did have the boyfriend her parents judged overmatched during her junior year, but overmatched was pretty much her assessment, too. He was the captain of a debate team Gustav’s had beat in a regional competition: She found him sweet but ultimately uninteresting, handsome but impatient and inexpert when it came to anything below her waist. Overall, there was no comparison to Gabe—and Judith was content to wait until later in life to find worthy romantic companionship. Really, she was content to be simply another Gustav’s girl for a while. She would never forget how lucky, how blessed—how watched over—she had felt in that bathroom to find that she had retained the privilege of this status; to find that her world, which for an instant had seemed so fragile, was in fact so durable.

  But by the time she was in Las Vegas, these were only memories—the sentiments enviable, and vain.

  3. BUT JONAH SET OUT TO FLEE

  Jonah had quit smoking during his first year of law school, but in the wake of what he’d seen in the bathroom at Becky’s party, it struck him that, lung cancer or not, if he was going to stop his hands from shaking and his mind from racing frantically over the details of what he’d witnessed, nicotine’s sedative powers were going to be essential. It was all hands on deck, in other words, and so he told the cab driver taking him home to stop at a bodega, and he bought three packs of American Spirits.

  The queasiness of smoking his first cigarette in eight years, though, only added to the helpless feeling he’d had on opening the door of his apartment, taking in the bare floors, the cardboard boxes behind the couch, the forty-six-inch television—and realizing this was all he had to come home to. He’d felt an instinct to call Zoey; whatever else she was, she was among the most genuinely caring people in his life, and she knew him in a way, with a depth, that even Sylvia did not. (He recognized this was a bad sign for the relationship he’d chosen to pursue, but figured he had enough to worry about at the moment.) By the time he’d peeled off his sopping wet clothes and changed into dry ones, however, he’d concluded that Zoey wouldn’t believe him—nor would Sylvia, nor either parent, nor any friend. The most they would do would be to try to convince him of their own doubts—and one of the most remarkable aspects of what he’d seen was how pitiably inadequate it had made doubt appear to be.

  As this thought occurred to him, the silence in his apartment became perceptible—as though he could apprehend the vacuum all around him, where doubt had been. He immediately turned on the television, cranked up the AC to full blast, began blaring a Rolling Stones album from his stereo, lit another cigarette, took a few swigs of three-hundred-dollar Scotch. This cacophony of sound, video, cigarettes, and alcohol succeeded in crowding away enough
of the fear and agitation to allow him space to think, and he’d grabbed a pen and an unopened letter from the Vassar Alumni Association, sat down at his coffee table, and begun a list he titled “Logical Explanations.” (He understood now that this list, currently crumpled in a ball on the floor, had in fact been his desperate attempt at the reassertion of doubt.)

  The first item written on the list was: “1) Smoked bad weed.” Theoretically, there was a great deal to recommend this explanation: circumstance, as he’d smoked the joint with the hipster only an hour or so before going into the bathroom; and convention, too, as the majority of modern hallucinations were attributed to hallucinogenics. The problem, though, was that he had smoked bad weed before—or anyway, weed that had been laced with angel dust. It had happened at an outdoor music festival he’d attended during college. There were no hallucinations, he’d only felt very, very high, then lost sensation in his arms and legs, and then had to spend the rest of the afternoon eating orange slices in the chill-out tent. He’d done mushrooms a couple of times, too, and dropped acid once. The former had only made him giggly and awed at everything he saw, and while the latter did produce some pretty intense delusions (most notably the notes from Trey Anastasio’s guitar appearing as orange butterflies that floated into the sky before merging with the sun), there had always been to these images an unmistakable tinge of the unreal, of the chemical. In other words, he’d known the whole time he was tripping that he was tripping. Whereas in the bathroom, what he’d seen had not struck him as a distortion of reality, but rather as a sudden and jarringly clear exposure of reality. Plus, more concretely, when you were tripping you didn’t take something, see some crazy shit, and then stop tripping. There was a rapid crescendo into the trip and then a long, slow decrescendo out of it, for better or worse the whole experience lasting at least four or five hours. And he’d never felt more hopelessly sober than when he’d been running down those stairs.