Book of Numbers: A Novel Page 5

  Aar avoided talking about my writing, even avoided mentioning books by authors still alive and in this language—rather his topics were: sex, Achsa, aging, Miriam, and he’d vary them in the manner of the menu: Miriam, aging, Achsa, sex—aging, Miriam, sex, Achsa—bagel with creamcheese, bagel with egg and cheese, bagel with creamcheese and lox. Not that my own fixations were any more fixable, or more palatable: Rach and I had fought and I’d left, Rach and I had fought and she’d left, we’d fought and she’d thrown a jug (Moms’s), we’d fought and she’d thrown a mug (Moms’s).

  Absolutely, a refill. Pulp.

 

  Caleb—he was never mentioned either. Not what he was doing, not that Aar and I were both in touch with him and knew we were both in touch and knew what he was doing.

  Cal, he’d be able to write it. He’d be able to avoid all these redundancies, these doublings. This summary, synopsis. What in all the matinee movies and noon TV I took in was communicated by montage—time passing, elapsion: lie, sit, stand, sit, lie, drag to individual therapy, to couples therapy, sleep on the loveseat in the hall, wake up on the airmat in Ridgewood—today’s writing, especially Cal’s, is too impatient for.

  “What are you doing with yourself?” Aar asked me, just before last Passover.

  Any question might be the forbidden question, and any answer might expose present weakness, the latest changeable bandage for the writing wound (the not writing wound).

  “Nothing, nothing,” I said. “First seder by Rach’s mother’s, my Ramses-in-law, second in Jersey, chometz and matzah.”

  “I meant, what are you doing still married?”

  What could I say? I could have told him—that I’d wanted to marry (I had wanted to), or that I’d loved her (I had)?

  I, like my father before me, had been a wandering Aramean, seeking refuge in a distant land in the hopes of surviving the coming drought, the coming famine, only to become enslaved in that land, forced to make mud bricks and arrange them into pyramids for my own tomb? Not even—for the tomb of the man I used to be?

  All men are Arameans, whoever they are, and we commemorate our enslavement to our female taskmasters and their mothers—our mothers—not just two nights a year, but daily. L’chaim.

  Basically, though, the answer to his question was my book. Our book. That was the reason I married. That was the reason I was still married.

  Why I got and stayed together with Rach wasn’t the book’s nonexistence unto itself, but rather was within that nonexistence, was covered by it: the generations broken, the family broken, to be repaired like a dropped pot or snarled ark of reeds, that unshakeable Jew belief in continuity, narrative, plot, in plopping myself in creaky unreclinable chairs around tables of prickly leaves to commiserate through recitation: flight into Egypt, plagues, flight out of Egypt, desert and plagues—a travail so repeated without manumission that it becomes its own travail, and so the tradition is earned.

  But instead of explaining all that, I said, “I’m treating life like a book—like I’m the hero of my own life.”

  “A book you’re living, not writing?” Aar had never been so direct.

  I’m not sure it’s good writing to say what my reaction was—it was bad.

  I don’t want to continue with that meeting—but then neither do I want to have to prose just one of our regular meetings: who’d you fuck, who do you want to fuck, Achsa’s college application essay he wanted my read on (How I Dealt With My Grief), remember that guy who tried to sell Miriam his father’s library comprised entirely of a single book the father had published about how to make rocks talk on Wall Street—the father had bought enough copies to make it a bestseller and put him on the lecture circuit, when he died his son found pallets of the stuff, books still wrapped, in a vault registered to the father in Secaucus. Or that other guy who’d tried to sell some other inherited junk: a raft of detectives, Westerns, that tatty crap by two nobodies named Thoreau and Emerson (first editions).

  Or the way Miriam would pick her nose and silently fart at the register or if the fart refused to be silent how she’d slam the register drawer.

  The scarves she always wore.

  Let this meeting be as cryptic—as representative/nonrepresentative—as the Arameans, a people that never had a land of their own but still managed to leave behind their language—the only thing they left behind, their language. Aramaic. Ha lachma anya. This is the bread of affliction. Eli Eli lama shavaktani? Father, Father, why didn’t Christ quote the Psalms in Hebrew—was he that inept, or does excruciation always call for the vernacular?

  Aar would pay, and would say as he said every time: “I never gave you anything for your funeral.”

  He’d pay in cash—“My condolences on your continued nuptials,” and I’d slap down Rach’s card, and he’d put his hand atop mine and hold it, palm on palm on Visa and say, as if conspiring, as if pledging undying service, “Cash only.”

  Always has been. Always will be.

  Then I’d walk him to Lexington—leave him by the 4 train, or the M102 bus, and walk quickly, quickly, toward the museums, and don’t turn around, don’t judge him for never waiting or descending, rather striding to the curb to flag down a ride.

 

  That was the last we’d intersected before the spring—I’ll have to check the contract: 4/29/2011. I’d been sleeping—how to put this? where? I could say it was a time apart thing suggested by Dr. Meany, I could say I’d been sent back to Ridgewood for a spell due to a Bible-sized, though, given our history, more than passoverable, argument dating from Pesach, which was the most amount of time Rach and I had spent together in a while. After the seder at her mother’s, we drove to mine’s, and stopping at a backroad farmer’s market had bought a tree and given it to my mother who’d wondered aloud, who spends money on a tree? and then criticized the pot and Rach had taken that as a snub and refused to stay over and yelled at me all the drive back and yet all had been forgotten until we received in the mail a thank you note Rach took as begrudging—though that’s just what Rach would’ve done, sent a belated thank you with gritted teeth—enclosing a photo of a fresh pot thrown as criticism.

  I could say it was a disagreement over how I’d acted at Dr. Meany’s, refusing to talk about “trust as fatherhood/fatherhood as trust,” instead ranting about Jung, Lacan, hypergamy/hypogamy, gigantonomy/leucippotomy, modern male childhood as berdachism, modern male parenthood as couvade, or over how I’d acted at her mother’s house when the woman, who knew everything/thought she did, told me to wear looser underwear to promote sperm motility and I—exploded.

  I could hand to Bible or at least Haggadah swear on all of that, but the truth was—we weren’t having sex anymore. We weren’t trying anymore. Not even trying to try again. Trying to sneak in a jerkoff sessh on the toilet. “Don’t mixup the toothbrushes.” But both of them were green, which, because the brushes sold in twopacks are always different colors, meant Rach had bought two packs—“I’m not provoking you.”

  Cig out the window. No bourbon after toothpaste.

  Rach and I had been touch and go, no touch and yes go—since fall? check the archives—Rosh Hashanah/Yom Kipper 2010? Conjugally making each other’s lives unlivable but getting off on the correspondence. We’d flirted briefly, on chat, over email, another Meany suggestion, and so it was innocent, or it felt that way. Opening different accounts under different names, getting back in touch with each other and so ourselves by communicating our fantasies, her writing me something salacious or what for her passed as salacious as sexrach1980 or cuntextual (an injoke), as rachilingus or bindme69me (a cybernym I picked for her), but then just a moment later writing something serious again about her thyroid hypochondria or the decision of which dehumidifier to purchase, from her main account, her work addy identity.

  We’d even taken to posting personal ads on a personal ads site and then responding to what we guessed were the other’s—not following through unless—I’m sure she never followed through.

&nb
sp; It was early or still late when the ring woke me up—it was darkness and the only light was the phone, which displayed either number or time, never both. The ringing stayed in my head. I’d been drunk, I was still drunk, there was a cig burn at the cuticle of my middle finger. I never turned my phone off, when we were together and even apart, because Rach still called with crises and if I didn’t pick up, there would be wetter blood and trauma. She called between home and office, between meetings, at lunch’s beginning and end, from the lockers at the gym, between elliptical slots, before and after freeweights, in the showers at Equinox with her newer improveder phone wrapped in a showercap and kept on a ledge above the sprinkler on speaker, from the supplement aisle at Herbalife, while smoothieing in the kitchen, while abed dreamdialing. This flippity phone Rach purchased and programmed and forced me to keep charged and carry at all times, vibrating my crotch—for potency’s sake I wasn’t supposed to carry it in that pocket—or intoning L’chah Dodi, from the Shabbos eve service, her choice.

  Abandonment issues, resolving in engulfment. In stalkiness, if a husband can be stalked by a wife. Rach’s msgs as shrill as the matingcall of whatever locustal species mates as foreplay to the woman smiting, devouring, the man. prsnlty dsrdr is how I’d abbreviate for txt.

  This tone, though, wasn’t anything prayerful, just the default, and though I couldn’t program, I could still recognize the digits.

  But Aar didn’t want to talk. He said, “Let’s meet?” and I said, “Let’s,” and he said, “Just come across or, better, I’ll come to you,” and I said, because he didn’t have to have all the grindy geary details of my situation, “Best is for me to do the traveling—noon?”

  He said, “Now.”

  (212) faded to clock, 6AM.

  Manhattan was accessible by train—I’d have to change only once—by bus—I’d have to change all of twice—just as I was about to blow up the bike, the phone resumed its default panic.

  “Take a cab,” Aar said, “I’ll pay for it.”

  Cabs in Ridgewood weren’t for the hailing. There was never anything yellow not lotted. But up the block was a gypsy service and I’d like to be able to say I’m fictionalizing—they took their time serving me because all their drivers were directing another driver reversing a hearse into the garage. If I were fictionalizing I’d say they put me in the hearse, but it was a moving van and I was seated up front—take me past Ambien withdrawal, or on a tour of the afterlife according to Allah.

  We hurtled into the city before the rest of the rush with the sun a sidereal horn honking behind us. Manhattan was still in black & white, a sandbagged soundstage, a snorting steamworks, a boilerplate stamping the clouds. This can be felt only in the approach, from exile. How old the city is, the limits of its grid, its fallibility. Fear of a buckling bridge, a rupture deluging the Lincoln or Holland. Fear of a taxi I can’t afford.

  Off the FDR, I dialed Aar, who said, “Un momento, por favor—she’s taking forever to get slutty,” though I wasn’t sure which she he meant until 78th and Park, and it was Achsa—I never remembered her like that. But it takes just a moment.

  Aar paid the driver, “Gracias, jefe,” and we chaperoned Achsa to school—her last patch of school at an institution so private as to be attendable only alone, which was her argument. “You don’t have to drop me.” But Aar was already holding her dashiki backpack, “Not many more chances to ogle your classmates.” Achsa said, “That’s nasty, Dad, and ageist.” Then she laughed, so I laughed, and Aar was our unfinished homework.

  The sky was clear. The breeze stalled, stulted. We talked about graduation. About Columbia, which was closer, but too close, and anyway Princeton was #6 overall and #1 in the Ivies for field hockey.

  Achsa’s school was steepled at a privileged latitude, a highschool as elited high on the island as money gets before it invests in Harlem. Girls, all girls, dewperfumed, to blossom, to bloom.

  “This is where we ditch her,” Aar said, halting at a roaned hitchingpost retained for atmosphere. “You studied?”

  “Argó, argoúsa, árgisa,” Achsa said, “tha argó, tha argíso.”

  “He/she/it has definitely studied.” Aar swung the backpack and unzipped it and wriggled out a giftbox.

  “What’s that and who’s it for?”

  “I’m not the one taking the tests today—you are.”

  Achsa shrugged on her straps and said, “Hairy vederci”—to me.

  Aar said, “No cutting.”

  But she’d already turned away—from a shelfy front to a shelf of rear, enough space there for all the books she had, jiggling.

  “Blessed art Thou, Lord our God,” I said, “Who Hath Prevented me from Reproducing.”

  “Amen.”

  “But also she resembles her mother.”

  “My sister,” Aar said, “the African.”

  East, we went east again—away from fancy au pairland, the emporia that required reservations. Toward the numbered streets, to the street before the numbers, not a 0 but a York—Ave.

  Pointless bungled York, a bulwark. Manipedi and hair salons. Drycleaning. Laundry.

  Outside, the doublesided sandwichboard spread obscenely with the recurring daily specials still daily, still special, the boardbreaded sandwiches and soups scrawled out of scraps, the goulash and souvlaki and scampi, leftover omelets and spoiled rotten quiches, the menus inside unfolding identically—greasy. The vinyls were grimy and the walls were chewed wet. A Mediterranean grove mural was trellised by vines of flashing plastic grape. A boombox was blatting la mega se pega, radio Mexicano.

  The methadone girl was working, and so the methadone was working on the girl. Our counter guy wiped the counter.

  In this diner as in life, nothing came with anything, there were no substitutions—it was that reminder we craved. A salad wasn’t just extra, but imponderable. A side of potatoes was fries. We always went for a #13 and a 15—which was cheaper than getting the #s 2, 3, 4, and 5—a booth in the back like we were waiting for the bathroom.

  Aar ordered from the methadone girl, “The usual,” and then explained again what that was, and then explained the job: “Just your average lives of the billionaires vanity project, the usual.”

  I didn’t even have water in me—nothing to spit or sinuose through the nose. Just: “This is the guy who haunts me?”

  “Who called me directly and Lisabeth put him through, saying it’s you, and straight off he’s proposing a memoir.”

  “He wants me to be his ghost?”

  The caffeines came, and the juices—an OJ agua fresca.

  Aar went for his giftbox trimmed in ribbons. An expertly tied bow resembling female genitalia.

  He took his knife and deflowered it all to tinsel, tissue—“You’re the only one he wants.” Champagne.

  “We’re popping bottles?”

  “What do you suppose they charge for corkage?” He held the magnum under the table, until the radio repeated its forecast, a chance of showers onomatopoeia—no fizz, no froth, just a waft at the knees—and he took both juice cups down and poured them brimming and then setting the magnum at his side offered to clink chevronated plastics:

  “To the JCs! The one and the only!”

  “But which am I?” though I was sipping.

  “We’re dealing either with a dearth of imagination,” Aar swallowed. “Or an excess.”

  “I thought he hated me—I thought he’d forgotten me before we even met.”

  “May we all be hated for such money—Creator of the World and of all the Universe, Creator—may we too be forgotten under such munificent terms.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s already sold.”

  “A stranger’s autobiography I haven’t agreed to write yet has already been sold how? To whom?”

  “I wasn’t sure you’d agree so I went ahead,” and he reached for his pocket, for a napkin, a placemat.

  A contract stained with waiver, disclaimer.

 

  Sign an
d date here and here and here and here, initial. I have to fill them in—the what else to call them? the blanks?

  By now I’m through saying that my book changed everything for everyone around it, around me—I’d recognize the smell of burning ego anywhere.

  Not even the events—the explosions—changed everything for everyone. But still it’s unavoidable. He is, Finnity. After my book, he never went back to editing lit—meaning, he never again worked on a book I respected.

  Out of favor with the publisher—a press founded as if a civic trust by dutiful WASPs, operated as if a charity by sentimental Jews, whose intermarried heirs were bought out by technocrats from Germany—Finnity transferred, Aar said Finnity told him, or was transferred, Aar maintained, to another imprint, a glossier less responsible imprint where he acquired homeopathic cookbookery, class-actionable self-help, and a glossy, Strasbourg-born associate editor who also happened to be the only daughter of the chairman of the parent multinational, the top of not just the Verlagsgruppe but of the whole entire media conglomerate, getting intimate with the business from the bottom (missionary position).

  Two children by now, a house in New Canaan.

  He’s become a revenue dude—a moneymaker.

  Anyway, Aar—vigilantly sensitive to the vengeance of others—had gone to him first, and Finnity hadn’t believed him.

  “I’ll be straight with you,” Aar said to me. “First he tried to talk me out of you, then we both got on the phone to conference JC2, let’s say, and Finnity went naming all my other clients.”

  “But you insisted?”

  “He insisted—your double.”

  “He doesn’t assume from that dead assignment I know anything about online?”

  “What’s to know? You go, you hunt and peck, what comes up?”

  “Twin lesbians? My bank balance?”

  “Words, just words. You know this.”

  “Did you know he read my book?”

  “Joshua Cohen is always interested in books written by Joshua Cohen.”

  “Joshua Cohens or Joshuas Cohen?”