The Book of Jonah: A Novel

by Feldman, Joshua Max

  He made it to the ground floor and out of the building. Unfortunately, the humidity had thickened as the morning continued, and he managed only a few steps toward his intended target—the metal-caged base of a tree—before he vomited an incompletely digested bagel onto the sidewalk. After that, he dry-heaved for several minutes, beads of sweat dripping from his forehead onto the ground. Maybe there were worse things than the lightning bolt.

  A paper napkin appeared at the corner of his eye. He looked up from his doubled-over position. Brett was offering him the napkin, smiling sympathetically. Jonah took it, wiped his mouth. “I have breath mints when you’re ready,” he said.

  “Thanks,” muttered Jonah, still doubled over.

  “Few too many last night?”

  “Something like that.”

  Brett nodded with understanding. He held out another, clean napkin, with this took the dirty one from Jonah, walked to a trash can, and threw them away. When he returned, Jonah straightened, and Brett gave him a breath mint.

  “I think we want the place,” Jonah said. “Don’t hold this against us, okay?”

  Brett laughed. “When I was at Lehman I used to do that every morning. I used to spend twenty dollars at dinner, tip the waiter a hundred so he’d charge me three, expense the whole thing, and then use the other two hundred to buy coke. EAB, we called it: expense account blow. And you know what I worked on? Sure, I’ll say it. Mortgage-backed securities. Jonah, I’ve learned not to hold anything against anyone.”

  The nausea returned and Jonah was doubled over with dry heaving again. Brett continued, “I’ve learned that nothing matters in this world except happiness. That’s an incredibly liberating idea. Look at this magnificent, sunny day!” The muscles of Jonah’s torso felt as if they were trying to yank themselves free of the bones of his rib cage; he was physically incapable of moving his head to look at anything but the puddle of vomit on the sidewalk directly beneath him. “When I worked at Lehman, do you think I ever took a moment to appreciate this?” He sighed with satisfaction. “Forget the past. Forget the future. How are you doing right now? Right this second?” Jonah’s stomach spasmed violently, and a guttural anti-chortle shook out of his windpipe. “Jonah, maybe you’d be interested in meeting my guru.”

  Finally, Jonah collapsed back into a seated position, his face dripping, his arms limp at his sides. Brett was holding out a business card—Jonah reached up and took it. It had a picture of a sage white man with a long gray beard; phone numbers and a URL and a Twitter handle appeared beneath the words “Guru Phil,” written in a mustard-yellow Oriental font.

  “This is some kind of … Eastern thing?”

  “Not exclusively,” Brett said. “Guru Phil teaches the best of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. His message is one of universal love, acceptance, and self-esteem. Jonah, I think he could help you. Guru Phil will show you that whatever your drinking is about, it’s really not that important.”

  “I’m not an alcoholic,” Jonah answered, offering the card back.

  Brett chuckled knowingly. “You know how I knew I wasn’t an alcoholic? Because I took a quiz online. The guru teaches that it doesn’t matter what’s on the Internet. True knowledge can only be found on the inner-net.”

  Jonah found this unspeakably corny—but it was clear Brett wasn’t going to relent and take the card back, so he put it in his pocket. Brett looked pleased. He helped Jonah to his feet and gave him another two breath mints.

  “Can we not make a point of mentioning this to Sylvia?” Jonah said—ashamed enough at having to ask this that he felt his cheeks redden.

  “No problem,” Brett said. “Just make me one promise. The next time you think about having a drink—”

  “I’m really not an alcoholic.”

  “Remind yourself that God loves you, and Jesus loves you, and the Buddha loves you, and the Prophet Muhammad loves you, and all these faces of God love you for one simple reason: Because. You. Exist.” He put his hand on Jonah’s shoulder. “I exist. You exist. You exist, Jonah.”

  “I know.”

  “You exist,” Brett repeated, nodding.

  “How much is the security deposit?”

  “It’s eighteen thousand dollars. Plus the broker’s fee. You exist, Jonah.”

  “Let’s go upstairs now, Brett.”

  * * *

  Sylvia and Jonah ate lunch (Jonah had a salad, for which Sylvia praised him, but really there was nothing else on the menu he could stomach), and then they got on the subway to go to his apartment. She had a couple of hours of work to do before dinner; he would begin filling out the paperwork for the loft so they could submit their application on Monday morning. Sylvia held Jonah’s arm as they descended the subway steps, discussing possible furniture configurations for the loft. He still felt physically overwrought, emotionally overwhelmed, and on top of that was enduring the itch of a nicotine craving—entirely familiar, even after all these years. But he was thinking he could at least take a nap before dinner, which would help on all fronts.

  “What if we ask my friend Maya to help us decorate?” Sylvia said as they swiped their MetroCards at the turnstile. “Do you know who Patrick Robinson and Virginia Smith are?” She knew she didn’t need to bother to wait for his response. “She did their townhouse in Tribeca.”

  “I dunno,” Jonah said, pushing through the turnstile behind her. “Wouldn’t it be better if we did it ourselves?”

  “This from a man who didn’t even own a bath mat when we met,” Sylvia laughed, taking his arm again as they descended another set of stairs to the platform. “It’s not like either of us has the time over the next few months to go hunting around for furniture. Besides, I’d only ask Maya where to go. Why not have her go there for us?”

  “Yeah, but hiring a decorator, doesn’t that seem a little…” He wiped his forehead with his hand; it was fifteen degrees hotter on the subway platform than it was outside. “I just think it’s a little bourgie,” he told her.

  She drew in her lips briefly, let go of his arm, took out her phone. Scrolling through emails, she said, “It’s going to take a lot longer to do it ourselves.”

  “That’s okay with me.”

  She held down the button to lock the phone, dropped it back in her bag. She hadn’t taken off her sunglasses when they headed down into the subway, was facing across the platform to the tracks—a view that, with or without sunglasses, was a barely differentiated field of sooty grays and dust-blackened rusts and browns. “You realize that this is something I’ll have to do, right? If we don’t hire a decorator, it’s going to fall on me to furnish and decorate our apartment?”

  “I’ll help.”

  “You’ll veto.”

  She was right, of course—and by way of acknowledging this, he rested a clammy hand on her lower back. “Can I at least talk to Maya before we hire her? I mean, I feel like if it’s your friend, it will skew toward your style, and okay, maybe that’s inevitable, but I just want it to be clear when you walk in that a guy lives there, too.”

  She was looking into his face, he could see her eyes darting to watch his behind the honey-colored lenses of the sunglasses. “Why are we fighting about this?” she asked.

  He hadn’t even noticed that they were fighting—or rather, hadn’t noticed any difference between it and not fighting. He said—to reassure himself as much as her—“Apartment hunting is stressful. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t making the right decision.”

  She leaned her head forward and rested it on his chest, wrapped her arms around his back. “Jesus, you’re sweaty,” she laughed.

  “It’s fucking eight thousand degrees down here.” And she laughed again. He kissed her on the top of her head. It wasn’t easy—to love her so much and to end up fighting so often. Then with a tremendous Doppler roar and grinding of hundred-year-old metal against metal and the labored moan of air brakes and brake pads and the cataclysm of thousands of pounds of subway train redistributing its weight from spe
ed to stillness as it foreshortened madly toward them—the train was in the station.

  The subway wasn’t crowded; they took two seats toward the middle of the car. “I wish you could stay tonight,” he said to Sylvia. He’d immediately felt better entering the hyperactively air-conditioned train—believed he could spend the rest of the afternoon sitting there.

  “I’ll bet you do,” she said.

  “No, I mean it. It’d just be nice if we could, y’know—have a few more hours together.”

  “Believe me, if it were up to me…” she muttered. “I don’t exactly love spending my weekends in a hotel. Did I tell you what happened with the bedspread? I came back to my room last night and—”

  “I’m sorry ladies and gentlemen,” a woman’s voice cried out. She stood by the door at the back of the car: dark-skinned, scrawny, hair a kind of tangled explosion from the top of her head, dressed in flip-flops, jeans torn above scabby knees, a T-shirt that dangled loosely at her neck—so filthy it looked like she had been rolled in ash. “I’m sorry,” she bellowed again, and then stopped—mouth open, eyes haggard—as if not knowing or not remembering or simply too strung out to know what to say next. She just stood by the door, wavering slightly on her feet.

  “Jesus,” Sylvia muttered. She went on. “I put the bedspread in the closet every day when they put it on the bed, and every night I come back and the housekeeper has put it on again. So this time—”

  “Ladies and gentlemen can you help me?” the woman called in a hurried tumble of syllables—as though suddenly remembering her lines.

  “So this time I wrote her a note, and I left it on the bed.”

  “Can anyone … Can anyone please help me out?”

  “And it said, ‘Please do not make up the bed with the bedspread on it.’”

  “Ladies and gentlemen!”

  Jonah glanced around the car. There was a narrow-faced young man in horned-rimmed glasses and headphones with a soul patch on his chin; a black teenage girl reading from a biology textbook; a dour man whose brown and baggy hooded sweatshirt gave him an oddly monklike appearance; two large Hispanic men in matching orange construction vests, their faces torpid and eyelids drooping. Closest to the woman sat a balding man in a tuxedo shirt and bow tie with a violin case across his lap. Though the woman was directly in front of him, he stared ahead with a sort of willed vacancy.

  “And that night she’d put the bedspread back onto the bed—and left the note on top of it.”

  “Please, please.” The woman took a step forward. There was no movement for purses, for wallets. The woman dropped to her knees. “Please…” she whimpered—mewled—as if now overcome by a still deeper sorrow, her eyes closed, hands clasped before her chest. “Please help me!” All on the train avoided looking at her, at one another.

  Jonah had seen this before: The most dramatic, the most humiliating pleas from panhandlers were almost always ignored. The song, the joke, the tidy request for a dollar or a quarter for something specific like a sandwich: This was what people responded to. The greater shows of desperation seemed to violate somehow the social contract between the beggars and those from whom they begged.

  “I mean, can you believe that? Now, I know it’s possible she couldn’t read it. But I’ve mentioned it to the concierge and I’ve called housekeeping about it.”

  The woman was still on her knees—head down, eyes closed, lips moving soundlessly. Her body was tilting to one side, threatening to topple over onto the man with the violin. He was pressing himself into the corner at the end of his bank of seats—seemed to be weighing whether he could stand and move away without brushing against her.

  “For what it’s worth, I am Starwood platinum.”

  Jonah took out his wallet; he had only twenties. “Jesus,” Sylvia whispered sharply.

  He didn’t, as a rule, give to people on the subway. The musical performances annoyed him, he simply didn’t credit the requests for shelter money or bite-to-eat money; was sure his spare change would end up going for drugs and or alcohol. What prompted him now was not the woman, not even the reactions to the woman from the others on the train: It was noticing it—it was that he couldn’t ignore it.

  “Look, do you have any singles?” he asked Sylvia.

  “No,” she said—her sunglasses-covered face inclined toward her knees, her purse now clutched between her arms against her chest. The woman was shuffling toward them, supporting herself by grasping the metal bar fastened to the roof of the train. From under her arm a great tuft of black hair was visible, flecked with beads of moisture and dandruff. Jonah could smell her from ten feet away—urine, sweat, and a thick, indistinguishable commingling of other bodily odors. She now dangled above him from the subway bar, her face still distorted in folds of anguish. He could see a strange whitening at the corners of her eyes and mouth, dark purple bruises on her forearms and legs. He took out forty dollars. Her fingertips were as if charred black, her palm was ashy. He tried to hand the money to her so that the bills stayed between their skin, but as she clasped them, her coarse fingertips dragged over his palm, and something in his stomach and his balls clenched reflexively.

  The woman stared at the money in her hand for a moment like she saw in it only another object of grief—and then she closed her hand around the bills and shoved her fist into the pocket of her jeans. She looked very agitated, very frightened now, and, hand still balled in a fist in her pants, she took awkward and clumsy steps to the end of the car, and pulled open the door, was gone.

  “And now she’s doing the exact same thing in there,” Sylvia muttered without looking at him. They rode in silence to their stop.

  Sylvia didn’t speak again until they had surfaced, a few blocks from Jonah’s building. When she did, she said, “You are such an asshole, you realize that?” He felt too worn out to disagree. He waited for her to elaborate, which she did. “You realize that woman was an addict, right? Those people are dangerous. Did you ever think about that? Do you know what addicts will do for a fix?”

  She was saying “addict” the way commentators on CNN said “satanist,” he thought. “Nothing was going to happen,” he muttered.

  “Of course, you’re so worldly about these things,” Sylvia shot back. “Sorry if it offends your liberal sensibilities, but you can’t just go around throwing twenties at every homeless person you see.” She shook her head. “This all goes back to the warped values of your Roxwood upbringing.”

  With this she had succeeded in irritating him—which, he guessed, was her intention. “Right, I should have told her to write her congressman about lowering the capital gains tax.”

  “Make fun of me all you want, but those of us who understand how the economy actually works—”

  “Jesus Christ, Sylvia.”

  “It’s not like forty dollars will change anything for her. In fact, it will probably only make things worse. You probably gave her enough to OD on.” These words were shot out with a rapid, staccato wrath, as if she were trying to pelt him with stones.

  “What the fuck is your problem?” Jonah shouted, a day’s worth of hangover and seemingly unbroken and unbreakable frustration now finding shape in anger. He understood that this anger involved Sylvia only tangentially—but none of its other sources were around to be yelled at. “Okay, I gave money to a crack addict because I’m some naïve tree-hugging socialist. What the fuck does it matter to you?”

  “Because you did it just to insult me!” There was another tone entering her voice—something more tremulous and wounded. He knew that when he yelled it brought back all the bad old memories of her shitty father. But he felt justified in ignoring this. She’d wanted to fight—so here they were.

  “That’s right, Sylvia, no one gives money to a homeless person without thinking about how it will affect you.”

  “You’re so hung up on class issues and the way I was raised!”

  “Giving that woman money has nothing to do with your fucking house in Nantucket!”

 
“Then why did you say it would be bourgie for us to use a decorator?”

  “Because it would be bourgie to use a decorator!” He couldn’t believe the argument, by its own ineluctable gravity, had reached such an absurd point—but of course, neither was he willing to let any of it go. Evidently, neither was she.

  “Forgive me for wanting more in my apartment than a couch and a giant television!” she shouted. “Forgive me for wanting to live in a place that actually feels like a home!”

  “The ABC Carpet showroom is not a fucking home!”

  “So to prove to me what a, a, a man of the people you are, you put me in danger and probably—”

  “I just wanted to give that fucking crack addict some fucking money! And if you’re too much of a spoiled, conservative snob to accept that…” The bottom of her face was bent in a sorrowful frown; he felt entitled to ignore this, too. “You’ve never given a shit about anyone but yourself,” he finished.

  “Fuck you, Jonah.” Tears were sliding from behind the lenses of her sunglasses. Of course they were, he thought. Hadn’t she wanted that, too? Maybe they both had wanted it, all of it: Maybe this was all they had to offer each other.

  When they got back to his apartment, she went directly to the small table adjacent to the kitchenette—the one they’d gotten so they could eat breakfasts together. She took out her laptop and began silently to adjust some mammoth flowchart. After an hour or so, he started to feel regretful, guilty—but any attempts he made to talk to her, to touch her, were ignored or shaken off. He stoically filled out the apartment paperwork: the salaries, the employers’ addresses, the names and numbers of references.

  As the afternoon light ebbed toward dusk, she abruptly closed her computer, stood. He was seated on the couch—for some reason he stood, too. “I changed my flight,” she announced matter-of-factly. “I’m going to the airport now.”