The Book of Jonah

by Joshua Max Feldman

He went through his desk, didn’t find anything worth salvaging, didn’t see what good ostensibly lucky Knicks ticket stubs, an extra mouse pad, would be to him now. He glanced for a moment at his framed diploma (Columbia, ’05)—decided it would be too pathetic to walk out with it under his arm. As he was about to leave, he noticed he had a new message on the phone on his desk, from Sylvia’s work number. With an eagerness and hope he would find embarrassing later, he grabbed the phone and checked the message: “Hello, this is Linda in Ms. Quinn’s office. Ms. Quinn asked me to make arrangements to pick up her personal effects from you. If you could call me back with a time that would be convenient, I’ll send over—” He hung up. She’d had her assistant call. It was, undeniably, very Sylvia. From her, there would be no tearful voice messages, no late-night confessions of remorse or regret. Whatever tears or regrets there were, she would be, for better and worse, too prideful, too strong—too smart—to share them with him. And he suddenly had a powerful urge to call her, to tell her—that she was the strongest person he had ever met.

  He got as far as lifting up the phone again before realizing this would be pointless. He would never get past her voice mail, would never get further than Linda. What would she care now, anyway, how strong he thought she was?

  He tried not to meet anyone’s eyes as he walked down the hallway to the elevators. He supposed everyone knew at this point, and he couldn’t face whatever reactions to him they had, or had settled on: He didn’t want to see embarrassment for his sake, he didn’t want to see insincere sympathy, he didn’t want to see barely disguised satisfaction that there was one less comer, one less rival to deal with. He didn’t want to see them all naked again.

  He came down the hall and pulled open the glass door to the reception area, wondering how the security guards might handle him (rudely? deferentially? He’d never been escorted out of anywhere by anyone before), and then saw that it was not security guards waiting for him but rather his cousin Becky, in an oversize sweatshirt with the hood up, her eyes covered with large black sunglasses; her fiancé, Danny, dressed in a neat black suit, his hands on his hips, as though to project Jonah doubted even Danny knew what; and Becky’s roommate, Aimee, who had an arm around Becky and glared disdainfully at Jonah as he appeared. It was such a strange tableau that at first he had no clue what to say. The woman sitting at reception was taking curious, surreptitious glances at the group, at Jonah, apparently trying to figure out how all these people fit together.

  But after his initial bewilderment, Jonah understood very well what they had come for—and rather than begin this conversation just yet, he turned to the receptionist and said, “Angelica, right?” She was a round-eyed, Hispanic young woman with black straight hair, dressed in a pink blouse. She nodded at his question with confusion, clearly surprised that, of all those gathered here, she was the one he had chosen to speak to. “Sorry about not putting in for your birthday.”

  “That’s okay,” she said quickly. She was now giving him a look that suggested she thought he might be deranged. He wondered what Dolores had told her—then he remembered about the bandage on his face.

  He turned to the others. “So I understand congratulations are in order!” It was, he realized immediately, a heartless joke, and if he hadn’t realized it, the looks on their faces (despondent, disgusted, wrathful, respectively) would have told him so. But it seemed to him that at best the situation was farcical, though evidently no one else was prepared to see it that way—and he couldn’t blame them.

  “Is that what this is to you? This is all a big joke to you?” Aimee started. “Don’t you realize there are people’s feelings—and I mean, like, this is your family? I mean, seriously? There are people like that in the world? Seriously? Wow. Y’know? Wow.”

  “Jonah,” Danny began, in a voice that was stern but suggested he was prepared to be reasonable—Jonah would have found this impossible to take seriously even if Danny’s hands had not remained steadfastly on his hips. “Maybe you had a good reason for telling the lie you told,” he said. “And maybe you didn’t have a good reason for lying. But you need to realize how damaging your lie was.” If he was trying to communicate the line he expected Jonah to take, he was not being very subtle about being subtle.

  “I mean, your cousin has been sobbing for hours,” Aimee said. “Does that even mean anything to you?” She still had her arm around Becky, who had her face, her covered eyes, toward the floor. Jonah had managed not to look closely at her until now. He noticed that she had on pajama pants. Seeing this, he suddenly understood how humiliating coming here like this must have been for her—how humiliating all of it must have been for her: getting the email, telling Aimee, talking to Danny. Obviously, as little as his attempts at goodness had done for him, they had done even less for his cousin. “Becky, can I talk to you alone for a minute?”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Danny.

  “Really?” said Jonah, with open disgust. The tremendous remorse he felt had triggered commensurate contempt for Danny for his role in all of this.

  “It looks like you’ve been injured,” Danny offered. “Maybe you have a concussion…?” he added helpfully.

  “No, I don’t have a concussion, my nose is broken.” He turned to Aimee. “Just give me five minutes.”

  But evidently Aimee and Danny were coconspirators at this point—conspiring for the well-being of a girl who, Jonah could now readily believe from her ashen face and crumpled form, had indeed cut herself for a time—because Aimee immediately said, “No one wants to hear any more of your bullshit. I don’t know if you’re a sociopath or whatever, or you just have a really, really sick sense of humor, like, but all you get to do right now is admit that everything in that email was a lie.”

  Jonah studied her face: cheeks flushed, eyes wrathful, determined. If it was an act, it was a good one. But no, he concluded, Danny had probably convinced her, too. Or rather, she hadn’t needed convincing.It was simply that no one believed him.

  “Look,” Danny said. “Maybe you were messed up on Friday night, or maybe there is something else going on with you, but you have to understand that doing things like what you did, out of the blue, whether you are joking or not, Jonah, that behavior is just really, really wrong.” He was actually meeting Jonah’s eyes as he said this, and with a reasonable approximation of conviction, too. Jonah might have been impressed if he was not so appalled. “All we want—the only reason we’re here,” he continued, “is for you to admit what you wrote in that email is not true, so Becky can hear it for herself, and we can put all of this behind us.”

  Jonah looked over to Becky again. She still had her face toward the ground, but her mouth and cheeks were working, as though struggling against the sobbing they’d mentioned. “C’mon,” Aimee said to him. “Don’t be an asshole. Okay?” With this last question, her look shifted, some other form of appeal entered into it—more earnest, less hostile. Perhaps she was in on it, too, even if Danny didn’t realize she was. It occurred to Jonah that this scene had the overlapping layers of deceit of a show trial. “She won’t stop crying. Okay?”

  “You all can’t do this in here, though,” Angelica now said from the reception desk. She might have said this sooner, but Jonah guessed she had gotten caught up in what was happening, too. “You’re all going to have to leave.”

  “Let’s just agree to put this behind us,” Danny said.

  Jonah gave a final look at Becky. It was too bad, he thought, that he hadn’t gotten to know her better. “It’s only a sick joke,” he told her. “Why don’t you forget all about it.”

  Aimee pulled her a little closer. “Okay, honey? We can go home now?” Becky moved her head in a way that might have signaled agreement, and Aimee immediately started pushing the elevator button, again and again. Jonah thought he could see in Danny’s face a flicker of relief, or gratitude—some acknowledgment of what they both knew to be true—but he turned away before it might develop into anything more than a flicker. Likel
y there were things Danny did not acknowledge even to himself.

  Danny now took a position behind the two women, facing the elevator, waiting. Apparently there was nothing further to say. But then, Jonah understood: When you got the deal you wanted, you didn’t wait around for the other party to change his mind. Finally the elevator doors opened—but as Aimee moved forward, Becky stayed where she was, and then she turned her face toward Jonah. “Stay out of my life, Jonah,” she said. Then the three of them stepped into the elevator, and the doors closed.

  Jonah waited for a few minutes, giving them time to get across the lobby, to get into a cab. After a while, Angelica asked, “Was it true?”

  He looked over at her. “Yup,” he told her. “It was.”

  Angelica nodded, taking this in. “What did—” The phone at the reception desk rang. “Cunningham Wolf,” she answered. “Mmm-hmm, this is she … No, actually, he’s um…” She turned away from Jonah in her chair. More quietly, she continued, “He is standing right here, as a matter of fact, would you … Mmm, is he…? Okay, I will … Mr. Jacobstein?” she said, addressing him. “We need you to vacate right now, Mr. Jacobstein, otherwise we—”

  He pushed the elevator button—got on when the doors opened, rode down to the lobby.

  * * *

  It was now approaching the middle of the afternoon. Whatever mildness Jonah had sensed of the day that morning had been succeeded by a pure ninety-five-degree heat—undiminished by wind, unadorned by humidity. The heat seemed to collect in bright shards and slivers of sunlight on all the metal surfaces—the hydrants, the roof racks of parked cars, the horizontal flagpoles at the entrances to Midtown buildings—to gather in a uniform layer over sidewalk and street. Jonah had been standing a few feet from the entrance of 813 Lexington for several minutes before he noticed he had sweated through the bandage, that it was sagging down his cheeks. But he made no move to adjust it, remained where he was. When he’d walked out of the building, he looked up and down the sidewalk—stretching off in both directions to a heat-hazy vanishing point—and had been struck by an unfamiliar dilemma, one he did not remember ever having faced in his entire life to that point: He had nowhere to go.

  “We,” Angelica had said to him. “We.” He kept thinking of this, over and over. Almost instantaneously, Cunningham Wolf had become “we,” and he had become Mr. Jacobstein—an outsider, as much as a stranger to them. It was the same with Becky and Danny and Aimee: He had been as though pushed through some permeable membrane, and they had re-formed as something new without him—or maybe something the same without him: a family. Danny and Aimee—they were Becky’s family. And he was the asshole that they had bound together to confront.

  Was he supposed to go back to Roxwood now? Move in with his mother? Besides how unmitigatedly depressing that idea seemed, he knew it wouldn’t do her any good to have her adult son suddenly move back in with her. She was an anxious person, had grown more so with age. She’d spend a lot of time asking him if he was okay and not-so-subtly implicating his father’s influence in whatever story he came up with to explain how the fuck he’d ended up there. The idea of moving in with his father wasn’t any more appealing. He wouldn’t want to be on the couch of his father’s apartment when his father brought women home, and his father wouldn’t want him there, either. The fact was, he and his parents were three adults who had been living separate lives for a long time now.

  Two laughing men brushed past him and went into the lobby. They were bankers from the upper floors—Jonah knew because he had seen them, more than once, running naked around the lobby tree on bonus day. He watched them as they carried their briefcases, their cups of coffee, their phones, past the tree, into the elevators.

  When they were gone, his eyes lingered on the tree. As always, its foliage was resplendent in green, its thick and twisted trunk evocative of immovable permanence. He had always seen the tree as a symbol of something, he realized—though he could not say exactly of what. It was not something to be admired, necessarily, though neither something to be disdained. But it was something he’d imagined he would always be a part of. He supposed, finally, that he had had a kind of faith in the tree—a faith that had been misplaced. He had never guessed at the fragility of his place in things.

  He remained outside 813 Lexington for a long time—finally started to walk, more from a desire to avoid being seen by his former colleagues in this state of defeated immobility than from an urge to be anywhere else. He walked without any idea of direction or destination—merely let himself drift up one avenue, down the next. Eventually, the blue of the summer sky thinned; the sun sank lower, the shadows lengthened, the heat relented and everyone who had to be outdoors suffered a little less. In cubicles, people logged out of accounts and turned off their monitors for the night; Penn Station and Grand Central and every subway station swelled with those heading home; the more cautious decided it was time to leave Central Park. As Jonah began to make his way among the vending carts being hitched to the back of cars, the growing knots of people beneath bus stop signs, a destination started fixing itself in his mind, soon more firmly with each step. By the time he arrived, the stone of the plaza outside Zoey’s building had taken on the faintly orange hues of a New York dusk: the amalgamation of all the headlights, the fluorescent lights in office windows, the burning tips of cigarettes, the neon signs, great and small, and—somewhere beyond the horizon of buildings, somewhere out over Hoboken, Jonah imagined—the sunset.

  As he waited for Zoey to appear, he sat down on one of the concrete planters that dotted the plaza’s border. The planter’s stone was hot, and its edge pressed uncomfortably across his buttocks, but he was too worn out to stand any longer—his legs aching, his nose keening with every breath. He would have called her, of course, but her number, all her numbers, were ensconced in his iPhone, which was ensconced in the offices of Cunningham Wolf—in a drawer in Doug Chen’s desk, he pictured, like where teachers kept the magazines and candy they’d confiscated. There was nothing he could do but wait for her.

  But by the time dusk had given way almost completely to evening, he still hadn’t seen her. At first, the foot traffic across the plaza had been steady as people left for the day, alone or in tiny groups, but now it was virtually empty. His fear was growing that he might have missed her, or that she hadn’t even come to work that day. Soon he would have to look for her at her apartment. But what if she was there with Evan? What if she refused to open her door to him at all?

  Then he saw her: a slender figure, more recognizable for her frame and distinctive gait than for what he could see of her face in what was left of the twilight. She crossed to about the middle of the plaza, stopped—and then did not, as he expected, immediately reach into her purse for a cigarette. Instead, she stood still for a few moments, and then she put her hand against her mouth, just below her nose, rested it there, her face set in a look of delicate concentration—as if she were trying to remember something, or were on a beach, searching for the lights of a distant ship. He saw something tender—touching—in this pose, and he had an impulse simply to leave her alone, as he’d promised. But, he thought, if they only gave it one more try—if only it wasn’t too late—

  She lowered her hand, took a few steps across the plaza. Her first look as she saw him approaching was terror, and she even took a step backward; he supposed this was a reaction to his bandaged face. Then she recognized him, and her mouth bent with concern—but she seemed consciously to push this expression and whatever thoughts inspired it aside, and her face settled into marked irritation. She started to walk quickly away.

  “Wait—Zoey,” he said, following after her. “I have to talk to you.” She didn’t stop. “Please, Zoey,” he said, trying to keep pace beside her, but walking quickly was difficult, because each step sent a jolt through his nose.

  “I have such a good guess what happened to your face,” she muttered, still walking.

  “Please, just give me a second,” he said. “Zoey, I—
I—” But how could he convince her it would be different this time, that he wouldn’t fuck it up, like he always had—like he had even the day before in her apartment? How could he explain what he’d realized as he’d made his way there, as he’d surveyed what was left of his life: that he was in love with her, had always been in love with her—that everything that had happened had happened because he had broken up with her—but it could still be undone, could still be made right? “I want to marry you!” was what he came up with.

  “Jesu Christo,” Zoey answered in response, not breaking her stride.

  “I mean it!” he said. They had crossed the edge of the plaza, he was following her down the sidewalk. “I was living the wrong way, I see that now, but I can change, I want to change! I want to be whatever you want, I swear, I want to have a family—I want to have babies with you. Jewish babies! I want them to have bar mitzvahs, I want to keep kosher, I want to take vacations to Israel, I…” He knew he was babbling—and could see how crazy he looked by way of the uncomfortable glances the shouting mummy chasing the young woman down the sidewalk was getting from everyone they passed—but he went on: Every motion of his mouth redoubled the pain in his nose, but he went on. He didn’t see that he had any other choice. “We’ll live in a house. In a neighborhood. We’ll leave New York.”

  “I like New York,” she said, not looking at him.

  “Yonkers,” he said. “I could practice law there. Or where you’re from, we’ll go back to Larchmont.”

  “Oh, now this is getting really romantic.”

  “Please, Zoey, please!” he cried, and something in his tone—its desperation, or how stark and uninhibited this desperation was—made her stop, at last, though she didn’t look at him, kept her face turned away, had her arms crossed over her chest, her purse dangling from her hand. She was standing beneath an illuminated streetlight; he saw all along the block, the streetlights were coming on for the night. “I know I made mistakes,” he said. He did not know which mistakes he was referring to, but undoubtedly there had been many. “And I want you to know how sorry I am, for all of it, for everything. Zoey, I never … I never understood…” For his own sake, he wanted very badly to be able to finish this sentence. But the truth was he felt he understood less than ever. “Maybe, maybe if in the beginning…”