Again, he found he had to explain love to this boy, to detail what it was like when you felt a desperate connection with someone else, how you wanted to hold that person and just crush him with hugs. But as Martin fought through the difficult and ridiculous discussion, he felt as if he were having a conversation with a lawyer. A lawyer, a scold, a little prick of a person. Whom he wanted to hug less and less. Maybe it’d be simpler just to give Jonah what he wanted. What he thought he wanted.
Jonah seemed pensive, concerned.
“Does any of that make sense to you?” Martin asked.
“It’s just that I’d rather not say things that could hurt someone,” Jonah said.
“Well… that’s good. That’s how you should feel.”
“I’d rather not have to say anything about you and Mom. At school. To Mr. Fourenay.”
Mr. Fourenay was what they called a “feelings doctor.” He was paid, certainly not very much, to take the kids and their feelings very, very seriously. Martin and Rachel had trouble taking him seriously. He looked like a man who had subsisted, for a very long time, on a strict diet of the feelings of children. Gutted, wasted, and soft.
“Jonah, what are you talking about?”
“About you touching me when I don’t want you to. I don’t want to have to mention that to anyone at school. I really don’t.”
Martin stood up. It was as if a hand had moved inside him.
He stared at Jonah, who held his gaze patiently, waiting for an answer.
“Message received. I’ll discuss it with Mom.”
“Thank you.”
Without really thinking about it, Martin had crafted an adulthood that was essentially friendless. There were, of course, the friends of the marriage, who knew him only as part of a couple—the dour, rotten part—and thus they were ruled out for anything remotely candid, like a confession of what the fuck had just gone down in his own home. Before the children came, he’d managed, sometimes erratically, to maintain preposterous phone relationships with several male friends. Deep, searching, facially sweaty conversations on the phone with other semi-articulate, vaguely unhappy men. In general, these friendships had heated up and found their purpose around a courtship or a breakup, when an aria of complaint or desire could be harmonized by some pathetic accomplice. But after Jonah was born, and then Lester, phone calls with friends had become out of the question. There was just never a time when it was okay, or even appealing, to talk on the phone. When he was home, he was in shark mode, cruising slowly and brutally through the house, cleaning and clearing, scrubbing food from rugs, folding and storing tiny items of clothing, and, if no one was looking, occasionally stopping at his laptop to see if his prospects had suddenly been lifted by some piece of tremendous fortune, delivered via email. When he finally came to rest, in a barf-covered chair, he was done for the night. He poured several beers, in succession, right onto his pleasure center, which could remain dry and withered no matter what came soaking down.
The gamble of a friendless adulthood, whether by accident or design, was that your partner would step up to the role. She for you, and you for her.
But when Martin thought about Jonah’s threat—blackmail, really—he knew he couldn’t tell Rachel. In a certain light, the only light that mattered, he was in the wrong. The instructions were already out that they were not to get all huggy with Jonah, and here he’d gone and done it anyway. Rachel would just ask him what he had expected and why he was surprised that Jonah had lashed out at him for not respecting his boundaries.
So, yeah, maybe, maybe that was all true. But there was the other part. The threat that came out of the boy. The quiet force of it. To even mention that Jonah had threatened to report them for touching him ghosted an irreversible suspicion into people’s minds. You couldn’t talk about it. You couldn’t mention it. It seemed better to not even think it, to do the work that would begin to block such an event from memory.
The boys were talking quietly on the couch one afternoon a few days later. Martin was in the next room, and he caught the sweet tones, the two voices he loved, that he couldn’t even bear. For a minute he forgot what was going on and listened to the life he’d helped make. They were speaking like little people, not kids, back and forth, a real discussion. Jonah was explaining something to Lester, and Lester was asking questions, listening patiently. It was heartbreaking.
He snuck out to see the boys on the couch, Lester cuddled up against his older brother, who had a big book in his hands. A grown-up one. On the cover, instead of a boy dashing beneath a bolt of lightning, were the good old Twin Towers. The title, Lies, was glazed in blood, which dripped down the towers themselves.
Oh, motherfucking hell.
“What’s this?” Martin asked. “What are you reading there?”
“A book about 9/11. Who caused it.”
Martin grabbed it, thumbed the pages. “Where’d you get it?”
“From Amazon. With my birthday gift card.”
“Hmm. Do you believe it?”
“What do you mean? It’s true.”
“What’s true?”
“That the Jews caused 9/11 and they all stayed home that day so they wouldn’t get killed.”
Martin excused Lester. Told him to skedaddle and, yes, it was fine to watch TV, even though watching time hadn’t started yet. Just go, go.
“Jonah,” he whispered. “Jonah, stop. This is not okay. Not even remotely okay. First of all, Jonah, you have to listen to me. This is insane. This is a book by an insane person.”
“You know him?”
“No, I don’t know him. I don’t have to. Listen to me, you know that we’re Jewish, right? You, me, Mom, Lester. We’re Jewish.”
“Not really.”
“What do you mean, not really?”
“You don’t go to synagogue. You don’t seem to worship. You never talk about it.”
“That’s not all that matters.”
“Last month was Yom Kippur and you didn’t fast. You didn’t go to services. You don’t ever say Happy New Year on Rosh Hashanah.”
“Those are rituals. You don’t need to observe them to be part of the faith.”
“But do you know anything about it?”
“9/11?”
“No, being Jewish. Do you know what it means and what you’re supposed to believe and how you’re supposed to act?”
“I do, yes. I have a pretty good idea.”
“Then tell me.”
“Jonah.”
“What? I’m just wondering how you can call yourself Jewish.”
“How? Are you fucking kidding me?”
He needed to walk away before he did something.
“Okay, Jonah, it’s actually really simple. I’ll tell you how. Because everyone else in the world would call me Jewish. With no debate. None. Because of my parents and their parents, and their parents, including whoever got turned to dust in the war. Zayde Anshel’s whole family. You walk by their picture every day in the hall. Do you think you’re not related to them? And because I was called a kike in junior high school, and high school, and college, and probably beyond that, right up to this fucking day. And because if they started rounding up Jews again they’d take one look at our name and they’d know. And that’s you, too, mister. They would come for us and kill us. Okay? You.”
He was shaking his fist in his son’s face. Just old-school shouting. He wanted to do more. He wanted to tear something apart. There was no safe way to behave right now.
“They would kill you. And you’d be dead. You’d die.”
“Martin?” Rachel said. “What’s going on?”
Of course. There she was. Lurking. He had no idea how long she’d been standing there, what she’d heard.