“Please don’t,” she said, shaking her head. Fine shadows cast by the streetlight above crossed her face as it moved back and forth, so that he could make out only the shapes of it, intermittent and indistinct: lips, eyes—beloved nose.
“We can start over,” he told her. “It can be like it was before.” She was still shaking her head. “Please, Zoey,” he said. “Marry me. You’re my last hope.”
She probably didn’t mean to hit him exactly in the face, but then again, it was a large purse, it was a large bandage—she really might not have hit him at all. In any event, in the next moment his entire head was bursting with pain, he was crouched on the ground, knees to chest, forearms over his face—as if he were doing a cannonball into a pool.
“Y’know … sorry,” she said, without much conviction.
He managed to say, “So you’ll think about it?” And she laughed. It seemed so long since he’d heard her laugh—and he realized he’d done everything wrong again.
“So here’s my guess,” she said. “Schlampe found out you were a philanderer and beat you with her Louboutin. Since I’m sure my name is going to come up between you two again and again from now on, and, I’d wager, get slandered mercilessly, please mention to her that I always imagined her as the kind of woman who wears beautiful shoes.
“As for me, I quit smoking, I ate kale for lunch, and I’m no longer going to be the girl you run to when your real relationship gets too complicated and you’re in the mood for someone with exactly zero demands and expectations. And yes, you’ve been that person for me when I’ve wanted that, but the whole point is that I don’t want to want that anymore, because I know it isn’t good for me. And someday someone I love is going to propose to me and actually mean it, and when that happens you know what they’re not going to say? They’re not going to say, ‘You’re my last hope.’ I hope you remember, Yonsi, that’s not altogether flattering to us girls.” He lifted his face to try to answer, but she continued. “The simple truth is that I’ve given up hoping you’ll ever stop trying to become a bigger asshole than you are. I mean, if all you want to be is a corporate lawyer who cheats on his girlfriends, why should I think you’ll end up any different? And that’s certainly not the kind of father I want for my Jewish babies. But really, if that’s all you’re looking for, believe me, there are plenty of Jewish Schlampes out there. And while I obviously don’t want to get into anything now, I mean I absolutely refuse, let’s just admit that when it comes to Jewish babies, our ship sailed ten years ago.” He could see the familiar trembling in her forehead that signaled she might start to cry—but she didn’t, she kept talking instead. “I mean, does it matter that it was pretty great, in the beginning? Does it matter that I’ve been more or less in love with you for a decade? I dunno. Maybe in theory. But in practice it just seems like … It just seems like…” Whatever force had propelled her speech gave out. More quietly, and with a certain puzzlement—as though what she said perplexed her—she resumed, “You said you wanted to marry me, Yonsi. You talked to me about having babies.… And you know me better than any single person in the world.” She had started to cry, though with a lightness he had never seen before: tears in fine, slender lines sliding down her cheeks. He got to his feet; he reached out to touch her arm, but she jerked it away from his hand. She avoided looking at him, too—stared at some invisible point on the sidewalk before the point of her shoe.
“I’ve been trying to change,” he told her. “You have no idea how much I want to change.”
She shook her head toward the sidewalk forlornly. “Don’t you see? I don’t want you to change. I never wanted you to change, Yonsi.” The shaking of her head stopped; she sighed in and out through her nose. “It’s just, why do you have to be so selfish? You’re just so goddamn selfish.”
“I’ve been trying to—I want to do the right thing!”
She finally looked at him—with irony, with regret, with weary affection, with scorn. “This was your idea of the right thing, Jonah?”
He didn’t know what to say—sensed that he shouldn’t say anything else. And as if in acknowledgment of this, she brushed the tears off her face quickly with her fingertips and lifted her purse up onto her shoulder. But even though he knew she was right—about all of it—to have these be the last words was more than he could bear. “I saw you, standing, on the plaza,” he said. “I thought you looked so beautiful. What were you doing?”
She smiled faintly at herself. “I was praying,” she said. “I don’t want to be so scared all the time.” For a moment she seemed to turn this smile in such a way as to make him its object—and then she walked away. He watched until the top of her head, the last thing he saw of her, disappeared among the crowds on the sidewalk—like she had drifted away over the horizon.
* * *
It was fully night now: the street as Jonah looked down it an unwinding scroll of doorways and lights, taxicabs and illuminated storefronts. It’s going to be okay, he said to himself. It’s going to be okay. He did not know why he thought so, nor could he imagine by what course of events “okay” would be achieved. He did not even really know what “okay” would look like anymore. He understood, with a stark clarity of perception, unshaded either by hope or self-pity—a clarity he was aware he had rarely allowed himself—that he would never be asked to return to Cunningham Wolf; that his career as a white-shoe attorney was over; that Sylvia would never speak to him again; that he had managed to betray Becky not once but twice; that Zoey was right to think she was better off without him. And somehow, all this had happened in the space of time between a Friday and a Tuesday. And confronting all these facts, all his mind could come up with was the dull, convinctionless assurance—that it would be okay.
This thought, he realized, was a sort of reflexive solace, a last defense: the comfort you offered—offered someone else, offered yourself—when there was no other comfort to give. It was going to be okay: This too, he saw, was a kind of faith—a blind faith—that by some immutable quality of events, something tolerable would emerge. It was the faith of the lucky—those for whom things had always been okay before. It was the faith of Aaron Seyler, and Philip Orengo, of everyone who walked daily past the tree in the lobby of 813 Lexington, the faith of those who did not feel they had or needed any faith at all, exactly because, whatever happened, it was going to be okay—or, more precisely: It would be for them. It was a faith, Jonah now discovered, you didn’t even notice you had until you’d lost it.
No, he said to himself, it was not going to be okay—at least, it would not be for him. And the city, as he looked around it, suddenly appeared as it was often described to him by those who didn’t live there: vast, and bewildering.
He turned and started walking in the opposite direction from Zoey—and as he walked, he could hear—faint at first, but as he listened—growing, gathering—a roar—a storm—rolling beneath the sidewalk—rolling across the sky—red and electric blue and aqueous green—shaking up and down the faces of buildings—shaking up and down his spine, rumbling under the soles of his feet—through the shattered fragments of his nose—and then he saw the rain of it: roaring, hot, ceaseless—water falling from the sky—bubbling up from the storm drains and subway mouths and bursting from hydrants and gushing from the windows of the buildings—and every person caught in it—drenched, soaking—whether inside or out, whatever they wore—water against their skin, and water in their eyes—in everyone’s eyes—and his, too—the roar of it only increasing—until Jonah had to cover his ears—but pressing his hands to his ears only made it louder—until in the midst of the roar—a voice, still and small—in words he couldn’t understand—and then in words he could—
Jonah: Here I Am. Go There and Offer the Words Inscribed in Your Heart.
He was blinking away tears—his pulse hammering in his ears and in the veins in his neck. He felt himself toppling over and grabbed onto a streetlight. He looked around. It was a warm August night in New York City. Its bustle was predict
able, it was unremarkable: people in restaurants, people in taxis; chatter on the sidewalks, chatter in the bars; this one cheerful, this one distraught, this one listening to headphones, this one heading to a first date, and to a child’s piano recital, and to a baseball game, and to a subway. But if he listened, he could still hear the roar of it: that need; if he looked closely, he could still see—everyone soaking wet—just like him—
Jonah began to laugh.
Offer words inscribed in his heart? He laughed harder, and it hurt his nose more, but he didn’t try to restrain it. Indeed, he reveled in the laughter. He was supposed to talk about a relentless storm? About a universal nakedness? To what end? The little good he had tried to do—even if it was done out of pure terror and self-interest, as Zoey had deduced—had destroyed everything he’d known of his life, maybe destroyed the lives of a few other people, too. He was meant to do more? Of that? No, he thought, looking around the sidewalk, fuck these people. Fuck their trees and their show trials and the nakedness that they were obviously much, much happier ignoring—just as he had been. Fuck all of it, and fuck the notion that he might have anything to offer to anyone—whatever that meant. And, he thought further, laughing hysterically now, fuck whatever power actually conceived of any of this as a good idea—as anything like wisdom, or justice.
No, he would not be offering any words inscribed in his heart. What he would be doing was drinking mai tais or their equivalent, and adjusting to the world not as it was, but rather as everyone wanted it to be.
And Jonah decided to take a vacation.
II. “IN CASE OF LOSS, PLEASE RETURN TO ______________”
9/2
Went for a run today. Defunct towpath along a canal through the woods south of Princeton. No one else on the trail. Sound of my breath through my mouth (nose still painful), footfalls on the dirt. Exhausted after only five or six miles, stopped to catch my breath. Leaning against a tree, palm pressed to the bark. The late-afternoon sunlight turning red between the branches overhead, leaves in their late summer colors: fulvous, ocher, vermilion. Delicate cooling in the air, so familiar it seemed to echo some seasonal cooling in my own body. Thought appeared in my head: school starting soon. It was several more breaths before I noted my error. This morning, sent formal letter requested by dean, renouncing all rights and privileges. Received a letter from housing office, informing me I must vacate student housing, as I will no longer be a student. The anticipation of another year of school was just a trick of association: contemporaneity of a certain quality of air, a lifetime of first days of school. Need to disentangle myself, my sense of time, from the rhythms of the academic year. Surely everyone has to do this, at some point, to some degree? The emptiness of the woods became ominous next, though, the disappearing light forbidding. Turned around and ran back to the street, walked the rest of the way along Alexander Road, finding reassurance in traffic. Hadn’t been frightened of the conventional things, nothing so particular as the fiend behind the tree with the knife. More fundamental fear, more nebulous feeling of pursuit.
9/3
Began to pack my apartment. Incapacity for practical tasks again rears its ugly head. In the course of assembling a box, managed to tape all the openings closed. (Apt example of Pyrrhic victory?) The rooms filled with cardboard bring back unpleasant memories of packing up the house in B. Mom’s papers bursting out the bottom of an overstuffed box. This afternoon, went through my own papers. Tests, essays, going back to elementary years at Gustav’s. Odd to see that it all ended up here, in the present. I suppose I assumed it would be of interest to someone else (scholars? mate?) at some point. Sufficiently humbled to recognize this as narcissism. Opened a plastic-sheathed report, 6th-grade Judith’s take on the Battle of Gettysburg. Tumbling out comes Dad tromping around the battlefield that spring. Muddy, wearing green rubber boots. That and a long car ride. Interesting what floats on the sea of memory, when so much else sinks. In any event, plan to leave most of the essays, etc., behind.
* * *
Resisting strong impulses to make edits on entries thus far. No instructor to please, in the first place, and, in the second, do not want to make this a journal about me journaling. Tedious, again narcissistic.
9/4
Dream about Claudette: cutting each other’s hair. Not savage, not sexy. Weirdly intimate, though. Relief we were back together, sad to admit. Also sense of unnaturalness to the event. Grotesque piles of hair at our feet. Signal that I am not, finally, bi, despite evidence to the contrary? More likely, simple recognition of how wrong we were for each other. Cutting each other to pieces. She’ll marry Gilbert, I suppose. And I’ll spend the rest of my life tearing up every time I sneeze. This is justice, oui? Surprised I’ve turned out so angry. Surprised by all of it. And she was the last friend I made. Looks a little melodramatic on the page, I admit, but, reader, how does one make friends? Outside of a school, I mean. Out here in le monde réel. I look at people and don’t know how to see them. Schools provide context. They affirm similarities (affiliation, interests), they categorize difference (grade level, major). I look at people and see on their faces the pressure of my looking at them. They don’t know how to look back. And then I find myself too dumb to know what to say. Starting a conversation seems lately an epic task. Entering into communication with another person, crossing that … gulf? breach? distance? I glance away, I scurry away. I open this Moleskine and find I am the last person I know how to talk to, and with more self-pity than eloquence, as these pages show.
9/5
This morning tried for an hour to rent a van. Called six different numbers, reached six different answering machines. Finally thought to look at a calendar. Labor Day. Becoming increasingly clear that even as I cultivated a specific kind of intelligence, I also fostered a specific stupidity. Perhaps the same is true, inversely, for those who don’t bother with education at all. They never learn what the aorist tense in Greek is, but they know how to rent a van. Later, on my way to Small World for coffee, passed a family coming out of Labyrinth. Impossibly young-looking daughter, though must have been a freshman. Loaded with books. Displaying in all ways the heady feeling of first arrival. Admittance, belonging. Her parents proudly draped in orange and black. Had strong and sudden urge to berate them. To explain something to them. But what? That everyone dies? That you end up stupid, one way or another? At bottom, probably just wanted them to know how unhappy I am. Watching them from across the street, became dizzy, short of breath, throat constricting like from thirst. Panic attack? Similar to the sensation in the woods, but more immediately physical. Returned without coffee. I would like to procure a bottle of wine for the night but can never get the cork out, end up having to push a broken chunk through with a fork. Reader, I don’t even know how to get drunk properly.
9/6
Ran again this morning. Didn’t feel like it, but no better ideas what to do. Down Stockton, up Russell. Passed the Hun School, über-elite prep school, even by Bulbrook standards. Saw some children (eight-year-olds?) scratching around in the dirt, planting a garden amidst posters diagramming photosynthesis. I think I would have been at home there. Occurs to me now I never envision motherhood. Always identify with the children I see. Some type of psychological malformation I could identify if I were a Freudian, I suppose. Mom said she lacked the propensity, too, until my arrival, but not convinced this is parallel. Imagine pregnancy as a feeling of unwelcome crowding, another person swimming inside me. Closest thing to a maternal instinct I can detect in myself is that I would not want myself as a mother. And now a thought that makes me bark with laughter. Better off if I had been pregnant in high school? Carting my brat through the aisles of a grocery store, while Grand-mère looks on with vivid disappointment. This a very odd form of wishful thinking.
9/7
Rented the van. A minor victory, yielding a greater challenge. Namely, where will I go in this van? Yes, until now I had succeeded in not thinking about it. So, reader. Where does one live? How does one locate oneself
? Again, problems I imagine are easy for other people to solve. But is it merely self-pity, worldly incompetence, that make me think these questions are especially difficult in my circumstance? No close friends. No contact with family, aside from the odd email from Margaretha. Went so far as to take out a map to aid me. Failure of this predictable in retrospect. Scores of tiny dots beside places I have never been, have no conception of: Santa Fe, Milwaukee, Boise, Kansas City. In between rivers, lakes, mountains, deserts. Or else bare stretches of color the cartographer did not even bother with. All of it looked more vast than it ever had before. Like France could fit snugly in the jutting corner of Texas. Felt another choking, dizzy spell incipient. Turned the map over. Looked around to see myself surrounded by cardboard. Retreated to the closet, eventually turned on the light to do this. However one might characterize this.
9/8
Going through last of the books this afternoon, came across Dad’s copy of Rilke, Selected Poems. German verso, English recto. Duino Elegies (German & English) adorned with checks, circles, brief notes, all of it in his hand. Cursive left-to-right tilted, loops narrow, stars beside passages made in one motion of unlifted pen. I had forgotten what his handwriting looked like. And, seeing it again, I could remember seeing it. Notes he used to leave for Mom on the refrigerator door. Lists of what he had to pack for vacation. Comments in the margins of the papers he’d edit for me, and the peculiarly optimistic nervousness I would feel, reading over those comments. There was such warmth to these memories. To be plain, they made me happy. When I looked up from the book, it was already 4 o’clock. Not that 4 o’clock is one thing or the other to me. But it was like the time had been swallowed into the past, sweetly.
The Book of Jonah Page 24
