Book of Numbers: A Novel (7 page)

I’d say he got in touch first, he’d say I got in touch
first, anyway we were meeting—I was hauling across the park from West 92nd, once
a month, every two weeks, whenever he didn’t have to get to the agency,
whenever he didn’t have a lunch, to meet him at a diner. Past
the mansions and into slummy deli territory—inconvenience must be treated as
ritual, ceremony.

The diner was a kitsch joint of a bygone pantophagy, all unwiped formica
and unctuous linoleums, leaks rusting into a bucket used for pickling. We always ordered
the same from the same smack casualty waitress who never remembered the order, so we
always had to order, Aar ordered: the smoked fishes for him, the poached eggs for me,
and we’d split, but with the roles reversed—with 15% going to the writer,
85% to the agent, who though he talked faster ate faster too.

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.

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?”

“Arg
ó
, argoúsa,
árg
i
sa,” Achsa said, “tha
arg
ó
, tha arg
í
s
o
.”

“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.