All I Love and Know (35 page)

“Why not? It's not like you haven't done it before.” Matt felt carefully for the words. “I think . . . It's not that you're grieving. It's that you're . . . frozen. You're different.”

“What do you think grieving is?” Daniel cried. “Do you think you can really grieve—and I mean grieve
so hard it takes your breath away, day after day after day
—and not be changed?”

Matt was quiet. Was that true?

“Christ!” Daniel said, his face red and his nostrils flared. “It's not—it's not pretty, or ennobling. And if you think therapy can touch it, well—”

Matt stood gazing at him, leaning against his dresser with his arms crossed. Daniel was acting as though Matt had never grieved himself, but as Matt thought resentfully about that he also felt embarrassed, because he had felt his grief for Jay to be a little bit ennobling.

“So excuse me if I'm not exactly lusting after you,” Daniel said, sensing an advantage from Matt's pensiveness.

“Stop it,” Matt snapped. “You're like straight people, acting like sex is trivial. I can't stand that! And I'll tell you something, we're setting a crappy example of a healthy couple for these kids. They're going to think we hate each other!”

“I don't hate you,” Daniel said, his eyes glistening. “I really don't. You've been a total saint, and I don't know what I'd be doing without you.”

“Well, thanks,” Matt said, thinking,
A total saint: just kill me.

They sat down on the bed and slumped against each other. “What now?” Matt asked.

“Let me go make sure Gal hasn't flooded the house,” Daniel said.

That night, curled against a sleeping Matt, Daniel's mind continued to churn. Therapy! What were they thinking? Sure, he believed in it—back in college, it had been a lifeline as he struggled to become comfortable with his sexuality. But to make him all better from terrorism, from one of the biggest and most violent losses a person could sustain? It felt so galling, so puny and trivial, in the face of what he was going through, so massively deluded as an enterprise. He couldn't get past that. You might as well tell that guy Ibrahim, or the woman whose cousin was killed in Jenin, to go to therapy.

Thinking of them let in a fresh wave of confusion and self-reproach. He'd felt so victimized, as a gay man, in the face of the Israeli legal system. What a joke that was! It mortified him now to even think about it. What an obscene luxury to have all his friends worrying and whispering about his mental health, while the children the Israeli courts had handed to him slept in a safe house that would never get bulldozed, when he would never be stuffed into a tiny strip of land he couldn't get out of and then bombed, or have one of his kids shot and then, on top of that, have the very people who had committed the murder blame him for being a negligent parent.

He didn't know what to do with all that, except to scorn his friends for their naïveté and privilege. His mind stalled there for a while, clotted and pulsing. Who was this man whom his friends said they missed? It was so hard to remember him! He knew, somewhere in the shadows of his mind, that he was a good and loving person, even a charismatic one—or that he
had
been anyway. In their early days together, Matt had prodded him: “You know that that whole shy and sweet thing you've got going on is irresistible, right? Remember fifth grade—‘He's cute but he doesn't know it'? That's you.” It had been hard to fully believe that Matt was in love with him. Sometimes he still had trouble believing that he could command the attention of such a smart and beautiful man.

His mind cast about for the sweetest moments in his life, the ones where he felt most himself, and most connected to others. Playing guitar, for sure: girls curled up in beanbag chairs in his dorm room, or on his bunk at camp, to listen to him play and to sing with him. He suspected now, although it hadn't occurred to him back then, that more than one of them had been crushed out on him. He remembered sitting barefoot on his bed in the darkened cabin, practicing a new melody line or picking pattern till the fingers of his left hand became red and tender, then calloused, as the shrill voices of campers rose from the moist New Hampshire heat that blanketed the woods and fields outside.

He grew drowsy, and his mind drifted and played in camp memories. He and Joel had loved Camp Ramah, lived for the chance to be away from their parents for four weeks and be steeped in Jewish
ruach
. Camp confirmed for them their sense of the soullessness of their manicured, suburban upbringing, where their accomplishments were paraded by their parents and even their bar mitzvahs seemed like just another opportunity to perform. He remembered the bliss of being without parents, the bracing feeling of competence that came over him when he was freed to take care of himself. To this very day he could conjure it. He remembered the beautiful grove where Shabbat services were held—a lovely peaceful shrine as dusk fell and the smells of dinner drifted in from the dining hall—and the Israeli counselors, who worked there in the summer before or after their army service. They were fair and curly-haired or dark-skinned with thick hair cut short, small and soft-spoken, their masculinity different from the masculinity he'd been, till then, making it his business to emulate. They were unspeakably glamorous, with their Ray-Bans, their flat leather sandals, and their throaty accents. Well into his young adulthood, they played a big role in his erotic fantasy life. His counselor, Ilan, a quiet and gentle soul who went everywhere barefoot and who had been a member of an elite infantry unit, loved hearing him play, and Daniel had basked in his attention—because for whom did he endlessly practice if not for Ilan, hoping for his attention and praise?

Where was Joel all day as he was practicing? Probably in the lake, or on the softball field. He thought of the long, thrilling games of Capture the Flag, and remembered one fine day when Joel actually captured the flag. Daniel himself was the kind of player who didn't imagine he could actually capture the flag. He'd thought of it as a crude, obvious goal, while the less glamorous roles—busting teammates out of jail, drawing a contingent of the other team toward you so another could advance—held risks that were more subtle and complex. Was that true, he wondered now, or was it just the defense of someone who hadn't wanted to take such a big risk? Or someone stepping back so his brother could shine, because his brother wanted to so very badly?

And then his memory shifted and he opened his eyes. Joel had wanted to be elected something or other—he couldn't dredge the desired thing from his memory now—and campaigned by going from bunk to bunk and introducing himself and bringing cookies that he'd had their mother make. Then one night, some of the older campers did a skit in which one of them played Joel, whose Hebrew name was Yisrael, bursting into bunks, singing—instead of “
Hevenu Shalom Aleichem
,” We've brought peace upon you—“
Hevenu Ugiot Eleichem
,” We've brought cookies upon you. It was silly and harmless enough, but the guy who played Yisrael mimicked Joel's ingratiating eagerness, and the slight childhood speech impediment that made Joel's
n
's extra heavy, to a tee. Joel was sitting a few rows ahead of Daniel and to the side, and Daniel could see him laugh and then a cloud of uncertainty pass over his face, and that killed Daniel right then and there, stabbed him right in the heart. That pain returned to him over the rest of the camp session whenever he saw Joel going about his enthusiastic business—but he was also furious at him, because vulnerability that accrued to Joel accrued to Daniel as well.

He pressed his cheek to Matt's back. Joel had put himself out there, and Daniel, with a mixture of relief and contempt, had let him be the twin who did that. He stayed on the margins, and told himself it was somehow more noble, more interesting, to stay there. Honestly, when it came down to it, he'd just wanted to be distinguishable from Joel. He wanted people to know which one he was.

So who on earth was this man all his friends seemed to miss? Who did they want him to be? Who was the man whom
Matt
missed? Would Mr. Personality have even looked at Daniel twice if Jay hadn't died, if he hadn't had to flee the New York scene to save his own skin?

He blinked into the dark night, his mind throbbing, his heart choked.

T
HERE WAS A
skeleton hanging from Cam's front porch. Gal caught a glimpse of it swaying, antic and ghoulish, through the backseat window one windy gray Saturday afternoon as they pulled into the driveway. “
Ma zeh?
” she asked, whipping around to follow it from the back window.

But by then Noam was crying and the uncles were arguing, as Daniel wrestled him out of the car seat, about Matt driving too fast. She shouted, “I'm going over to Cam's house!” and crossed their lawns and marched up Cam's porch steps, keeping her distance from the skeleton, suddenly determined not to look at it, but not trusting herself to keep her eyes averted, as if in spite of her best effort, they might swivel in their sockets and look.

By the time she rang the doorbell she was terrified of it, could feel it behind her and hear the clicks of its bones as it moved. She heard Xena's wild bark get louder as the dog rocketed toward the front hall, and she took a step back, although she knew that by the time Cam opened the door, Xena would be at a polite, attentive sit-stay by her side.

The door opened and Cam said, “Hey, buddy, how's it going?” She was barefoot, wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, and her thick dark hair was smashed in one direction, as though it had been fiercely blown and then frozen. “Okay,” she instructed the dog, and Xena came forward with a gently wagging tail, thrust her muzzle into Gal's hand. Gal pulled off the new mittens the uncles had bought her for the coldest weather she'd ever known, so Xena could smell her, and she could feel the dog's fur and wet nose.

“Why do you have bones hanging up on your porch?” she demanded, her mind fumbling for the word even in Hebrew but not finding it.

“What? The skeleton? That's James.”

“Who's James?”

“The skeleton, that's his name.”

Gal stared at her. Was Cam making fun of her? Sometimes Cam played jokes on her, like knock-knock jokes that made her say, “I eat mop who?”

Behind Cam a woman was coming to the door; she had short frosted-blond hair and held a cup of coffee in two hands. She poked out a friendly freckled face. “Hi, cutie!” she said. “Crikey, it's cold out here.”

“Don't treat her like a baby,” Cam said gruffly. “This is Gal. She's mature.”

“Hi,” Gal said.

“You can play with him if you want,” Cam said. “It's fun to make him dance.” She stepped out onto the porch in her bare feet, and as she approached the skeleton Gal let her eyes drift that way too, let them take in the legs and the long, intricate hand bones and move up to the frozen gape of a face. Cam started moving the skeleton's arms and legs around in a grotesque jig. “I'm freezing, give me some skin!” she piped in a high squeaky voice. “Poor James,” she sighed in her normal voice. “His eating disorder got out of hand.”

Gal reached out and touched a bone of the hand, but she was too embarrassed and too repulsed to play with it, or even to examine it, in front of Cam. Had it really once been a real person named James? She was dying to ask, but feared risking one of Cam's jokes.

Cam smacked him fondly on the shoulder blade. “I got him on Craigslist, from a former yoga teacher who used him to show her students their pelvic floor.”

“Okay,” Gal said.

Over the next few days Gal began to see skeletons and witches and bloody faces everywhere—in shop windows, on TV commercials, in the front of people's houses. The people in one house on her block hung a spiderweb made of string between two oak trees, a hairy plastic spider the size of a dishwasher suspended inside it. On the front lawn of a house on her school bus route, a headless scarecrow in faded overalls and a checked flannel shirt held his head—a pumpkin with a very surprised expression—under his arm. She didn't know what to make of the gruesomeness that had burst out all over; she could tell that it was supposed to be fun and make her laugh, but it didn't feel fun to her; instead it cast a shadow over her mind and made her move through her days with a sense of foreboding, as if anything she looked at might be gross and terrible. She studiously avoided looking at those houses as the bus passed by, busying herself with her backpack or her shoelaces, but she couldn't shake the feeling that her eyes might look inadvertently, or—and this fear grew and festered over the span of a single afternoon—that her mind would see them even if she managed to keep her eyes averted. At recess, one of the boys told a story about going into a haunted house and putting his hand in a bowl of squishy eyeballs, and several other kids yelled, “It's just peeled grapes!” The image of a bowl of eyeballs tormented Gal.

The next day, Ms. Wheeler told them to come to school next Friday in a costume for Halloween. Gal mouthed the word, her hands tingling. It was a holiday, like Purim. “I'm going to be a ghost!” someone hollered. “Whoo,” he said, waving his fingers in the air to express how spooky he was.

She didn't know what a ghost was, although she reasoned that it must be part of Halloween. She thought of waiting till she got home and asking the uncles, but now that she knew a little bit about what she was dealing with, her curiosity became urgent, and she risked sidling up to Hannah as they were waiting for the bus. Hannah was the smartest girl in the class, and asked the best questions during show-and-tell. While most kids asked, “Where did you get it?” Hannah asked things like, “If you lose it do you think your parents will get you another one?” or, if someone brought in a book, “Do you like it better or worse than
Charlotte's Web
?” She was nice to work next to on a project, although she never went out of her way to make friends with Gal. She was friends with Sophia and Lexi and sometimes Ava.