The World Without You

by Joshua Henkin

  “I hope I would.” But the truth is, Noelle doesn’t know. It’s beyond her ability to imagine winning the Nobel Prize. Even contemplating it is ridiculous.

  “Clarissa acts like his PR rep.”

  “She’s proud of him, Amram. I’d be proud of you, too, if you won a prize. I’m already proud of you.”

  “For what?”

  “Just for being who you are.”

  She rests her hand on Amram’s shoulder, and for a second he allows her to leave it there, but then he brushes it off. “Whose side are you on, anyway?”

  “Why do there have to be sides?” But then she adds, because it’s true, that she’s on his side, of course. She loves him: he’s her husband.

  He goes out onto the balcony, where, with his back to her, he smokes a cigarette. She wishes he wouldn’t smoke, especially not at her parents’ house. She herself has resolved not to smoke this holiday; she doesn’t want her mother to judge her. Or to judge Amram either. She will criticize Amram, but if anyone else criticizes him, especially someone in her family, she’ll rush to his defense.

  Back in their bedroom, Amram gets down on the floor and does fifty pushups and fifty sit-ups, then follows those with one-handed pushups, ten with his left hand, ten with his right, the way he was taught in the Israeli army. An oleh at twenty-eight, he could have served in the army for only a few months, but he wasn’t interested in cutting short his duties; if anything, he’d have liked to do the full three-year stint required of Israeli eighteen-year-olds. But Noelle persuaded him to serve only a year and a half. He’s a man of routine. He does the same number of pushups and sit-ups every morning, takes the same route to synagogue each Shabbat, and Noelle always packs him the same lunch: a turkey sandwich on rye, two pickles—one sour, one half-sour—a bag of corn chips, a piece of marble cake, an Orangina.

  “Help me stretch.” Amram lies on his back, his knees bent, his soles planted firmly on the floor. He ran twelve miles the other day, and he’s still suffering the consequences. He’s a weekend warrior, only those weekends have been coming less and less often. He won’t exercise for weeks, and then, inspired one day to go for a jog, he figures that, since he’s at it already, he might as well run ten, fifteen miles. Then he’ll spend the next week recuperating. Now he’s enlisted Noelle in his recovery: the lady he saws in half. Except she worries she’ll saw him in half, or, at the very least, that she’ll injure him doing what he tells her to do. Right now, she’s pushing so hard against his thigh it’s as if she’s trying to budge a stalled car. “Amram, I’m no good at this.”

  “Actually, you’re quite good. I can feel the muscles being stretched.”

  “Why don’t you hire yourself a personal trainer?”

  “Because it would be expensive to fly him here, don’t you think? Other leg,” he says, grabbing hold of his left knee and pushing it toward the right one. “Okay,” he says, “that’s enough.”

  He checks his stocks on the computer. His portfolio is small, but he follows it closely. He can talk at length about the companies he has invested in, and he keeps his holdings for the long term—he’s resistant to admitting a mistake—with the kind of determination that some might find pigheaded but that Noelle sees as evidence of more general loyalty. He’s always invoking Warren Buffett, whose newsletter he subscribes to. He’s a very poor man’s Warren Buffett, but this makes him no less dedicated to his principles.

  Noelle flips through the Berkshire Eagle, which someone has left up in their room. She’s checking out the TV listings. “Look what’s playing tonight. Another one of those Entebbe movies.”

  “Surprise, surprise,” Amram says. “They turn our heroism into entertainment while they rebuke us at the UN.”

  Noelle doesn’t disagree. But she’d rather not agitate him now. Already, he seems riled up. “Do you want to watch it?”

  Amram shrugs. It’s been twenty-nine years since Entebbe. It’s one of Noelle’s early memories, America’s bicentennial, up in Lenox for July Fourth, she and her sisters eating roast beef sandwiches while in the background the TV played. She recalls the footage of the boats tacking up the Hudson, then the news reports breaking in, her parents cheering at the announcement that Israeli commandos had stormed the airport and saved the hostages. A hopeless raid in a hostile country, Idi Amin providing haven for the PLO. Noelle can’t explain it, but she felt pride watching TV that day, as if she were Israeli and this was already her homeland, the instinctive sense of belonging in a country she didn’t even know. In the years that followed, when those TV movies kept being played, she would stay up past her bedtime to watch, in defiance of her parents’ orders. She can still see the flight taking off, the camera scanning the rows of seats, knowing there are hijackers in the cabin, but who they are she can only guess. Then the hijackers commandeer the plane and hold guns to everyone’s heads and they’re screaming things in a language she doesn’t understand. Even now, when she wants to irk her mother, she’ll say, “I’m in Israel because of you, Mom. I saw you cheering that day in front of the TV, and I got inspired.”

  In her closet, she finds her old wedding dress hanging in plastic. It’s the one from her first engagement, before she met Amram. Amram knows she was engaged, but he doesn’t like to talk about it, and the truth is, neither does she. He’s across the room from her now, and a feeling of revulsion sideswipes her. “I like you better in Israel,” she says.

  “Well, I like you better in Israel, too.”

  Israel is where they met, a Friday night at the Wailing Wall, a group of American backpackers congregating in the shadows behind the men lining up to pray. A few of the Americans were playing hacky sack, and Amram, trying to get into the mood of things, removed a harmonica and piped out a tune.

  Noelle, smoking a cigarette, watched him from the steps where she was sitting. “I know you,” she said. “You’re Arthur Glucksman. Mamaroneck High School, class of eighty-five? You were in my sister Lily’s class. I’m Noelle Frankel.” Between them, like a wreath of smoke itself, a group of yeshiva students danced up the steps of the

  Old City.

  It seemed for an instant as if her name had set off something, and Noelle wondered, Does he remember me? The girl who slept with half the class? Would she never be able to escape that? But if that was what he was thinking, he didn’t let on. He just continued to play his harmonica, and soon he was accosted by a guard, who told him there was no harmonica playing at the Wailing Wall, that playing music was forbidden on the Sabbath.

  Meanwhile, another guard approached Noelle and told her to extinguish her cigarette. Smoking wasn’t allowed on the Sabbath, either.

  “That’s another thing we have in common,” Arthur said. “We both broke the rules.”

  “And to think,” Noelle said, “that I flew all the way to Jerusalem just to be a bad Jew.”

  “When you could have been a bad Jew in Mamaroneck.”

  “Or a thousand other places.”

  The Old City, Noelle had heard, specialized in bad Jews. She knew the stories about Friday night at the Wailing Wall, rabbis inviting you for a Sabbath meal, and one rabbi in particular, a charismatic American who was legendary among the local backpackers for retrieving lost souls. “Is that what we look like?” Noelle said to Arthur. “Lost souls?”

  Arthur shrugged. He said he was happy to look like anything if there was a home-cooked meal in the bargain. He hadn’t had one in months.

  So they ended up at the rabbi’s house, a large building made of Jerusalem stone from whose living room window you could see the Wailing Wall itself. Noelle and Arthur and ten other lost souls, all being fed by the rabbi’s wife, the rebbetzin, who brought out chicken soup and gefilte fish and roast chicken and noodle kugel (so people really did eat these things, Noelle thought; it wasn’t just something you saw in the movies), and presently the rabbi was singing Hebrew songs and the rebbetzin was serving poppy-seed cake. The rabbi spoke about the weekly Torah portion, how Jacob wrestled with the angel and injured his
sciatic nerve and after that he was called Israel, not Jacob.

  When dinner was over, Noelle and Arthur said goodbye, and they walked through the hushed, redolent streets of the Old City. “Lookie here,” Arthur said, and he opened up his coat flap to reveal the bottle of Manischewitz wine. He’d filched it right off the rabbi’s table.

  Noelle laughed. “If you ask me, a certain someone isn’t getting invited back to the rabbi’s house.”

  “At least we got a souvenir.”

  They passed the Wailing Wall once more, and Arthur, feeling glad-hearted and transgressive, took out his harmonica and began to play again.

  “Arthur, you’ll get yourself arrested. I’ll have to bail you out.”

  “So be it.” He played a few more notes. “I bet I’m the first person to play the harmonica at the Wailing Wall.”

  “Are you kidding me? It’s probably been done hundreds of times. Maybe even thousands.”

  “Come on,” he said. “Humor me.”

  “Okay,” she said, “you’re the first person to play the harmonica at the Wailing Wall.”

  “Not the harmonica. Lynyrd Skynyrd. On the Sabbath. In defiance of Jewish law. And badly.”

  Noelle laughed. “You’re right. No one’s played it this badly.” She held her black pumps in one fist, Arthur’s hand in the other, and they walked through the Old City, back to Arthur’s sublet apartment.

  And there it was. A single Bunsen burner in what passed for a kitchen. And, in the main room, a futon and an armchair with one of the arms missing. “I figure it’s the Middle East,” Arthur said. “I’m lucky the building has a roof.”

  That night, standing in the dim light of Arthur’s bathroom, using a toothbrush he’d given her, Noelle said, “Look at my teeth.”

  “They’re beautiful,” Arthur said.

  That’s what everyone told her. The stuff of mouthwash commercials: lovely Noelle with the smile like meringue. Her teeth, her hair, her breasts, her buttocks: every piece of her like the cut of a cow. She could hear the boys’ voices, the sound of them so loud they drowned out everything else. “For a time I was studying to be a dental hygienist, but I made people’s gums bleed.”

  “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”

  “I did it more,” she said. “I did it worse.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I quit. In high school, I used to cut my sisters’ hair, and everyone complimented them on it, so I enrolled in beauty school. But I quit that too. I’ve spent my whole life quitting things. What about you?”

  “What have I quit?”

  “Sure.”

  “First law school, then accounting. Do you think the rabbi sensed something about us?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t consider myself a lost soul, but my parents moved to Arizona to play golf and gin rummy, and my sister is in Seattle, married to a banker, and if I don’t ever see them again—if the entire U.S. were to fall into the Pacific—I wouldn’t be the worse for it.”

  Noelle slept with Arthur that night, because there had never been a first night when she didn’t sleep with the guy (lately she’d been trying to find a reason, but there was never a good reason, and she didn’t want to seem like a tease), but the next morning Arthur said he wanted to take her on a proper date. No one in Israel wears a tie (Amram himself doesn’t even own one any longer), but the following night Arthur showed up at the youth hostel where Noelle was staying wearing a starched white shirt and a navy print necktie, holding a pint of cherry tomatoes. “For you,” he said. “I was planning to get flowers, but the florist was closed.”

  Noelle laughed. “You’re sweet, Arthur.”

  “My last girlfriend told me I was sweet and anxious.”

  “That’s my favorite combination.”

  They planned to see a movie that night, but when they got to the theater it was sold out. “What bad luck,” Arthur said. “No flowers, no movies.”

  So they settled for eating fish and chips at a restaurant on Ben Yehuda Street, where they sat outside under a blue and white umbrella, the colors of the Israeli flag. Afterward, they got lost wandering along Jaffa Street, through the back alleys lined with cats, and soon they came upon a fortune-teller who, for twenty shekels, promised to read their palms.

  “Let’s do it,” Noelle said. She dropped a twenty-shekel bill in front of the woman, who scooped it up like a hunk of bread. Then she took Noelle’s hand, gazed at it for a minute, and said in a language Noelle had only just started to learn, Kol chaya’yich tihiyi smeicha.

  All your life you will be joyous.

  She’d been taken for a ride, Noelle understood, but she didn’t care. She was with Arthur, getting lost in a city thousands of years old, and it made her feel older herself, less likely to be carried off by the things that had always carried her.

  The following Friday night, she and Arthur returned to the rabbi’s house, where another bottle of Manischewitz sat on the table, and this time they didn’t steal it. The Sabbath after that they went back again, and the one after that, too, and soon they were seeing the rabbi not just on Friday nights but on an occasional weeknight, staying up late to study the weekly Torah portion. Before long, Noelle had enrolled in a yeshiva for women and Arthur had enrolled in a yeshiva for men; slowly, they were taking on the strictures of religious observance. Noelle stopped eating bacon and shrimp; Arthur, in a ritual of mock ceremony, announced to Noelle one day that she was witnessing him eat his final cheeseburger, and when he got to the last bite she stood up and cheered.

  She felt as if they were on a venture together (even now, she can’t imagine having taken this journey without Amram at her side), and also that she was peeling back layers of herself, molting an identity she had wanted to molt for years and hadn’t realized she was capable of molting. Six hours after they’d met she and Arthur were having sex, but now, eight months later, they stopped sleeping together because they weren’t married. They shared a bed but they didn’t have intercourse, and soon they stopped sleeping in the same bed, and then they stopped touching altogether. Noelle knew what others would say, that her newfound chastity was just another side of the same coin, but she didn’t care. She had finally found something she could claim as her own. It was as if she’d unhusked herself, and this was what lay beneath it. She was joyous: the fortune-teller had been right.

  One day Arthur said, “I’m changing my name. From now on, I’m calling myself Amram.”

  “Okay, Amram,” Noelle said, trying it on for size. Arthur was like Jacob changing his name, and he hadn’t even had to wrestle an angel, hadn’t wound up with an injured sciatic nerve.

  Early on, Noelle and Arthur had gone to the beach, where he dragged her out into the waves. His Hebrew was still better than hers, and he spit water out of his mouth and shouted Hebrew words to her, and she was supposed to shout them back: they were conjugating Hebrew verbs. And there was Arthur’s voice as he emerged from the water—pagashti, pagashta, pagasht, pagash, pagsha, pagashnu, pagashtem, pagashten, pagshu, pagshu—and Noelle, emerging from the water herself, was repeating after him. Then Arthur was hit by a wave, and suddenly Noelle said, “Wait a minute, Arthur. You don’t know how to swim! You could drown!”

  “At least I’ll die knowing you learned Hebrew.”

  Noelle, dragging him back to shore, felt a warmth rise in her. Arthur had risked his life for her; she knew right then that she loved him.

  She still loves him. But it’s different now, and sometimes when she sees Amram in the pool with their boys, her husband who doesn’t know how to swim but who nonetheless insists on teaching them swimming, she remembers differently what happened at the beach—remembers less the fact that Amram risked his life for her than that he was teaching her how to conjugate Hebrew verbs, that he always has to have the answers.

  It’s worse when he’s in the States, an entire country where he doesn’t know how to swim. In Israel, they have their life, they have their friends, they have thei
r routine, they have their customs, but here in the States, and especially in Lenox with her sisters and parents, she finds herself growing embarrassed by him. Where, she wonders, was the young man she met, Arthur, at twenty-seven, sweet and anxious, giving her that box of cherry tomatoes? He’s immersed beneath layers, covered in the sediment of what he has become, the sweetness eclipsed by something else, the anxiety redirected into bullying.

  Now, in her old bedroom, she reminds herself of the ways she still loves him. How he reads to her in bed at night, only the little pen light illuminating the page, how he continues to read to her after she’s gone to sleep because she likes to hear his voice in her dreams. How every anniversary he buys her a stuffed animal, and now there are ten of them at the foot of their bed, one for each year of their marriage. Last week, when she came down with a fever, he went out at three in the morning in the rain, driving vainly through the desolate streets, searching for an open pharmacy. In those early months, he would take her dancing, though he didn’t like to dance, his feet on the dance floor moving this way and that, his arms jerking up and down like a robot’s. How he can pop open a bottle of champagne and catch the cork in his mouth. On her thirty-fifth birthday someone in a gorilla suit walked into her classroom and strung a wreath of bananas around her neck; the gorilla, it turned out, was Amram. How he can’t wink, though he tries to—he holds his hand over one eye and winks with the other one—and she loves that about him, loves the fact that he can’t wink, because she’s never trusted winkers. How one time when she needed to pee and the women’s room was locked, he stood guard outside the men’s room while she went, shouting, “Sick lady, sick lady, out of the way, sick lady!” How they were in a restaurant when there was a bomb scare and he rushed her and the boys out to make sure they were safe, then returned to the restaurant to help out. How in another restaurant, just weeks ago, they were out on a date, eating Chinese food, and when their fortune cookies arrived she asked him to switch fortunes with her, sight unseen. “Your fortune is my fortune,” Amram said, handing her his cookie—her handsome husband like the biblical Ruth, Your people are my people, your God is my God. How he can change a diaper with a hand behind his back. How one time he tried to do it with his feet—poor Akiva!—and she was behind him in their son’s bedroom, cheering him on. How he got her that box of cherry tomatoes.