The Book of Jonah

by Joshua Max Feldman

  Jonah stared at the closed door for a moment—and then began to laugh: at the absurdity of this last statement, and more—at how well his career was suddenly going. Something in his work must have impressed someone in the upper echelons of the Cunningham Wolf hierarchy—Doug Chen or Aja Puvvada or someone even higher up than that. And the greatest irony of all was how poor his work performance had been for the last several days. It was a joke, really: He’d been scrambling all afternoon after sleeping through the morning and the whole previous day, and now he would be taking the BBEC private jet with the BBEC CEO, picking the associates who would report to him.

  He realized: He was going to make partner. He’d known—he’d assumed—but it now attained some greater form of certainty in his mind. He really would ride on private jets, become a millionaire, accomplish what he’d spent so many years trying to accomplish—after all. “Those who don’t work rarely understand what’s asked of those who do, Doug?” he said, laughing. “You don’t know the half of it.” He felt so triumphant, so relieved and obliquely grateful, that he laughed almost to the edge of tears.

  When this laughter finally abated, it was with a kind of generosity of spirit that he reopened the Dyomax annual report—looked again at the picture of Dale Compstock. Sure, he could acknowledge that he was sorry for him, in some abstract way. It was his turn to lose. But sooner or later everyone took that turn, and losing might only inspire him to start another biotech and maybe this time to do the stealing instead of being stolen from—and to hire better lawyers.

  Jonah leaned back in his chair, and decided to celebrate his latest success by smoking another cigarette. It was too bad he’d gotten addicted all over again, but that only meant he’d have to do the work of quitting all over again. He’d done it once, he could do it again. This cigarette, he decided, would be his last.

  Now that he had days instead of hours to finish reading over the BBEC files, he found it harder to sustain the motivation to continue plowing through the thousands of pages of documents. He looked at the clock on his phone: It was almost four. He decided to have another cup of coffee. He took the Vassar mug on his desk and walked out of his office. Dolores was still not at her desk—was either at a late lunch or simply not doing her job. He smiled at this, though—identified something amusingly ironic in the fact that even as he ascended the Cunningham Wolf ladder, Dolores’s performance only declined. In any case, as a partner he would have an assistant who would never turn apostate on him.

  To reach the kitchen and the coffeemaker, he had to walk down a corridor bordered on one side by ten-foot-high filing cabinets and on the other by a hive of cubicles. As he turned down this corridor, he saw a naked man pull open a drawer and lean scowlingly forward to examine its contents. The man stood in perfect silhouette to Jonah—such that Jonah could follow the line of bare skin from the man’s neck down his shoulder and curved back and rib cage to his waist—ass and dick—thighs, calves, feet. Jonah’s first thought was that the i-bankers had taken their bonus ritual to the Cunningham Wolf floors, but when he turned his head he saw that all the cubicles, the passages between them, the corridors beyond and the office doorways were all filled with naked people: naked lawyers, assistants, paralegals, associates, and yes, partners—all working with no attention to their nudity. A fifty-ish bald securities lawyer scrunched his paunch into folds as he slouched at his desk, holding a phone against his ear with his hairy hand; the long, narrow breasts of an M&A attorney dangled from her chest, flapped gently against one another as she took a phone from her tan-armed and pale-chested colleague. Two lawyers from Jonah’s summer associate class, Steve Weisman and Rich Cameron, despite the exposure and nearness of naked genitals—circumcised and uncircumcised, respectively—sipped steaming hot coffee as they nodded seriously to each other. Everywhere Jonah looked: Folders were tucked into the hairy bend of armpits, belly buttons pressed into the edges of desks, arm flesh shook as fingers typed, legs were folded across pubic hair—asses spread doughlike against nylon seats and skin was squeezed wafflelike into the mesh of chair backs.

  “Can you do a five o’clock TC with Scott and the LJP team?” asked Veronica Snyder, a petite redheaded lawyer with an arc of moles and freckles across her chest and small dark areolae capping her breasts like tiny yarmulkes.

  Without answering Jonah headed to the elevator, which had provided escape from the last vision. But as the doors opened he saw that the janitor inside was naked, too—short, Indian, with little tufts of white hair above his ears and a kind face and his chest had an almost perpendicular slope starting at the nipples and everything else was luckily hidden by the four-foot trash bin he had before him. Jonah got on and pushed L and stared at the floor. But the elevator floor was tile polished to reflection, and as the janitor walked off Jonah saw the mirrored image of the V-shaped sagging of the flesh of his back, a vitiligo-white splash across his right calf—he caught a glimpse—brief but long enough—of the underneath of the man’s ball sack and his perineum.

  Once, Zoey had mentioned to Jonah that when she walked down the street in New York, she always felt she was the only person heading in whatever direction she was going—that every other person on the sidewalk was coming toward her. This was in the early, halcyon days of their relationship; the comment had struck Jonah as both very revealing (about Zoey’s psychology) and very insightful (about New York’s)—and it had the effect of pushing him even deeper into love with her—love for Zoey in those days being the only thing he seemed interested in feeling. Those days were long since over, of course—but whenever he observed this sidewalk phenomenon himself, he always thought of her, fondly. It was not, he didn’t believe, that New York necessarily made you feel isolated—though it often did—but rather that New Yorkers always walked with decided purpose: with a great belief in the importance of getting wherever they were going. When you stood in the way of such people, you inevitably noticed them more than the people walking beside you, behind you. Very often, too—they were the people between you and the very important place that you had to go.

  So as Jonah stepped onto the sidewalk and was confronted with a crowd of naked pedestrians moving toward him, he thought bleakly of Zoey—with a pang of nostalgia for better, simpler, more prosaic times. He was then swept up in a wave of masses and stretches and gatherings of flesh—juxtaposed against one another in size and shape and tint—a great farraginous jumble of white arms and darker arms, a leg here, naked arms there pushing a stroller and a naked toddler—a stomach across which black hair crept like a weed over unearthly soil. He started forward in what was his best guess as to the direction of home. Wasn’t this a fantasy? he asked himself—being able to see any person he wanted naked? But that fantasy proved a very different proposition from having to see every person naked: the nude street vendor whose shoulders contorted as he fished with tongs for a hot dog in steaming water—the protruding bumps of spine of a nude delivery man, tracing an arc toward a dropped quarter. When he did see young women, attractive women, something in the profusion, in the lack of awareness of their nakedness altered it—made the tautness of stomachs, the fullness of breasts, the firmness of thighs and coils of pubic hair more a simple fact of their bodies than features to be admired by him. Whatever might be attractive, erotic in a particular body was lost in the general wash of bodies—the commonality of all the bodies around him: all things soft, all things pendulous. He saw in it something terribly sad—because this was how these people were. Only the thinnest stretches of fabric hid them, protected them from this. Beneath the clothes of every New Yorker, beneath their job and title and urgent reason for being on the sidewalk—was a naked human being: and him, too—

  And Jonah found it heartbreaking.

  6. TREMENDOUS PROMISE

  One late August Sunday before Judith’s senior year of high school, she and her parents went to see a movie at the independent theater that had recently opened in the center of town. It was already dark out by the time the movie was over—the eve
ning air “more fall than summer,” Hannah, Judith’s mother, commented. They walked across the town common to a Chinese restaurant they often ate at, shared vegetable lo mein, chicken with broccoli, steamed dumplings—their usual order. Then they drove home—David, Judith’s father, letting her drive the new Saab he had just bought. Back at the house, Judith’s parents settled in the living room: Hannah sitting on the couch with the galleys of an anthology of twentieth-century women’s poetry she had edited; David answering emails on his laptop, typing with two fingers, every now and then asking his wife a question of phrasing or tact. Judith put a James Taylor CD on the stereo, took her copy of the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle (all three of them liked to do the Sunday crossword, so they got three copies of the paper delivered to the house on weekends), and lay down on the living room floor, knees bent and ankles crossed in the air, occasionally tapping her pen lightly against her nose in absent contentment as she made her way through the puzzle. At one point she looked up to see her father watching her.

  “What is it?” she asked him.

  “Just taking mental pictures,” he told her, smiled a little wanly, glanced at his wife, and went back to typing. College—the great trauma of American family life—was fast approaching.

  Judith had already taken her SATs and SAT subject tests, half a dozen AP courses and exams. She had exhausted Gustav’s course offerings in French, and so had arranged an independent study with a professor at the college where her parents taught. That summer, she had spent six weeks at a program for high school students at Yale.

  This last experience had cinched her decision to apply there early. She had been leaning in that direction, anyway—it was where Hannah had gone as an undergraduate—but mounting the steps of templelike Sterling Library, feeling, not unrealistically, that as she crossed its threshold she was entering the presence of the most accomplished, the most distinguished, the most promising minds in the country, stirred her zealotry pleasantly. And as she walked beneath the vaulted ceiling of the reading room, light pouring through great traceried windows onto rows of tables filled with students bent over notepads and laptops, flanked by stacks of books—she concluded that this was where she belonged.

  The application was a team effort. In a detail that would seem to her in later years touchingly anachronistic, they had to use a typewriter to fill it out: set up on the dining room table the old Olympia SM9 on which Hannah had written her dissertation, spread out around it all the forms and essays and recommendations and transcripts. Slowly, they assembled Judith’s entire academic life—which represented more or less her entire life—in a single envelope. Then they “sealed it with a kiss,” as David said—and sent it off to New Haven.

  Those in her class at Gustav’s who hoped their valedictorian would get her comeuppance when it came time for college acceptance letters were disappointed. She and her mother were cooking dinner together in the kitchen when her father came home from teaching—the propitiously fat envelope adorned with the blue Yale seal on top of the pile of mail. She remembered hearing the familiar, marchlike chords of “All Things Considered” on the kitchen radio as she tore it open. There wasn’t much doubt as to its contents, of course; but then, had there ever been any doubt? She had gotten gold stars, glowing assessments—A’s, 1600s, 5s, 800s—her whole life. She was the daughter of two PhDs, both of whom knew a thing or two about college admissions—knew a professor or two, for that matter, at Yale. It would not have been much of an exaggeration to say that they considered her getting into the college of her choice Judith’s birthright. But even if none of them was surprised, when she read from the top page of the bundle of papers inside the envelope the word “Congratulations,” they all wept and held one another.

  It was strange, Judith observed, as they ate ice cream from the freezer, their eyes still red, how they had all worked so hard to get to the point that would mark the dissolution of their family as they knew it. “It’s the way of things,” Hannah replied. “All we can do is prepare you as best we can for the life you’re going to have. We wouldn’t want to lock you in your room for the rest of your life.”

  “Pushing you out of the nest!” David added—but he couldn’t sustain the jocular tone with which he’d started, and as he finished he began to cry again.

  Over the following months, Judith at times did feel mournful at the prospect of leaving her childhood home, her parents. More often, though, she felt excited: for new challenges—for the next step. She read and highlighted the Yale course catalog; she emailed with professors in the departments she was considering for her major (English, French, Religion); she read about Puritanism, the New Haven Colony, the founding of Yale in 1701. And when she did feel worst about being separated from David and Hannah, she would remind herself, or they would remind her, that they would all always be only a car ride apart.

  In the spring, she got an email from her future roommate. This was a girl named Milim Oh: Korean, from northern New Jersey, also graduating that June from an all-girls private school. She seemed as concerned as Judith that they establish their room as a sanctum of mutually comfortable tranquillity: lights out at eleven, music they didn’t agree on in headphones. Suffice it to say, they hit it off from the start.

  On an appropriately sunny and clear-skied summer afternoon, Judith graduated from Gustav Girls’ Academy. She and her classmates dressed in white, wore garlands of white gardenias in their hair. White was not a good color for Judith. In the pictures she looked a bit like a giant candle with a stumpy, bulbous black wick. A former Gustav’s graduate, now a justice of the state supreme court, gave the commencement speech. “Wherever the years ahead take you,” she told them, “the lessons you have learned here at Gustav’s will be a wind at your back.”

  That afternoon, David and Hannah threw a party for Judith in the expansive backyard of their two-story brick Colonial home: hired caterers, had a tent set up, invited friends of the family, Judith’s friends and classmates, her favorite teachers (most of them, anyway). Everyone hugged Judith, told her how proud they were of her, how bright her future was. She did not quite know how to conduct herself as the center of all this attention; she was not arrogant enough to take it all as a matter of course, nor was she exactly humble enough to be genuinely embarrassed by it. She ended up making frequent trips to the bar for plastic cups of seltzer and then repeatedly needing to go into the house to pee.

  Judith’s aunt Naomi and her daughter, Margaretha, attended the party, as well. Judith’s mother and her sister did not get along well—were, as David put it, “incompatible at birth.” David and Hannah were reticent about the details, but from what Judith understood, Naomi had always positioned herself as the free-spirited ying to Hannah’s tightly wound, conventional yang, which for decades had been infuriating Hannah as nothing else did. And because Hannah and Naomi rarely saw each other, Judith rarely saw Margaretha, her only cousin, despite the fact that they were the same age.

  “Your house really kicks ass,” Margaretha told her as she sat cross-legged on the the lawn, away from where the other guests were mingling. In contrast to Judith’s white-and-lace, Margaretha was wearing a billowy tie-dye dashiki shirt and extravagantly ripped jeans.

  “Thanks,” said Judith.

  “I can’t believe you’re going to Yale. I mean, who actually goes to Yale? Y’know?”

  “Thanks,” repeated Judith. “Do you know where you’re going yet?” It was the middle of June, so if Margaretha was going anywhere she would know by now, but Judith was trying to be tactful.

  Margaretha shrugged. “I might go live in Holland with my dad.” She ran her palms over the tips of the grass. “I don’t really believe in an ordered existence. No offense.” Judith nodded with a certain unease—feeling she was enacting her mother’s relationship with her sister in this conversation with her cousin. “Do you want to go up to your room and get high?” Margaretha asked. “I have really good weed with me.” Judith had to admit she was intrigued—but the idea of smoki
ng pot when all her neighbors and teachers and parents’ friends had gathered at her house seemed dumb, inappropriate. (In later years, she would remember the offer kindly, though.)

  “No thanks,” Judith told her.

  “That’s cool,” Margaretha answered. “Wait a minute, stand right there.” She reached into the knit purse sitting beside her on the grass and took out a Polaroid camera. “I’m doing this art project. It’s like, people’s faces and the worlds they live in. And you and your house and the lawn and everything, it’s totally perfect.” Then, before Judith could respond, she said, “Smile!” and took the picture. “I’ll send you the whole thing when it’s finished,” Margaretha told her as she waved the Polaroid in the air. Judith nodded—in spite of herself greatly skeptical that she would ever see this Polaroid again.

  A few weeks later, the Bulbrooks took one last family vacation before Judith left home: went to Australia, snorkeled at the Great Barrier Reef. When they returned in early August, they started in to the practical work of getting Judith to college: loaded her belongings into cardboard boxes, bought her a new computer and a new bathrobe and new sheets and new anything else they could think of. She said her goodbyes to her friends, these girls scattering to elite colleges of their own—Columbia, Harvard, Dartmouth, Wellesley, and the rest. There was some sadness to these goodbyes, but it was a qualified sadness. They were all leaving for places they wanted to be.

  The night before she and her parents were to drive to New Haven, Judith found she couldn’t sleep, her mind too crowded with thoughts to be had—expectations, hopes, fears, remembrances—to find repose. Finally she got up and, walking quietly through the sleeping house, took the keys from the bowl in the foyer and got into the family’s station wagon, now packed with cardboard boxes they had filled with the possessions she would bring with her to college. She drove for a while with no destination in mind—simply retracing routes through her hometown she’d taken for as long as she could remember, until eventually she came to the trailhead, to the trail that led to the creek: the setting of the most potent, most piquant memories from what she had already begun to think of as her childhood. Dressed in her Gustav’s cross-country shorts and the Yale sweatshirt her parents had given her after her matriculation, she walked through the woods in the dark—trying to take in the fear she felt as part of the night itself—came to the edge of the water.