Here I Am

VII. THE BIBLE

HOW TO PLAY SADNESS

It doesn’t exist, so hide it like a tumor.

HOW TO PLAY FEAR

For a laugh.

HOW TO PLAY CRYING

At my grandfather’s funeral, the rabbi told the story of Moses being discovered by Pharaoh’s daughter. “Look!” she said after opening the basket. “A crying Hebrew baby.” He asked the kids to try to explain what Pharaoh’s daughter said. Benjy suggested that Moses was “crying in Jewish.”

The rabbi asked, “What would it sound like to cry in Jewish?”

Max took a step forward, toward the unfilled grave, and said, “Maybe like laughing?”

I took a step back.

HOW TO PLAY LATE LAUGHTER

Use humor as aggressively as chemo. Laugh until your hair falls out. There is nothing that can’t be played for a laugh. When Julia says, “It’s just the two of us. Just you and me on the phone,” laugh and say, “And God. And the NSA.”

HOW TO PLAY THE DEATH OF HAIR

No one has any idea how much hair he has — both because our hair can’t be fully seen with our eyes (not even with multiple mirrors, believe me) and because our eyes are our own.

Sometimes, when they were still young enough not to question the question — and could be trusted not to mention it to others — I would ask the boys how bald I was. I’d bow to them, adjust my hair to reveal where I thought it was thinning, and ask them to describe me to me.

“Looks normal,” they’d usually say.

“What about here?”

“Pretty much the same as everyone else.”

“But it doesn’t seem like there’s less right here?”

“Not really.”

“Not really? Or no?”

“No?”

“I’m asking for your help here. Could you give it a real look and then give me a real answer?”

What there was of my hair was a prop, the product of pharmaceutical intervention — the tiny hands of Aaron and Hur clutching my roots from inside my skull. I blamed my balding on genetics, and I blamed it on stress. In that way, it was no different from anything else.

The Propecia worked by suppressing testosterone. One of the well-documented and widely experienced side effects is decreased libido. That’s a fact, not an opinion or defense. I wish I could have shared it with Julia. But I couldn’t, because I couldn’t let her know about the Propecia, because I couldn’t admit that I cared how I looked. Better to let her think she couldn’t make me hard.

I was taking a bath with Benjy a few months after the kids had started spending time at my house. We were talking about The Odyssey, a children’s version of which we had recently finished, and how painful it must have been for Odysseus to keep his identity secret after finally making it home, but why it was necessary.

“It’s not enough just to get home,” he said. “You have to be able to stay there.”

I said, “You’re so right, Benjy.” I always used his name when I was proud of him.

“You actually are kind of bald,” he said.

“What?”

“You’re kind of bald.”

“I am?”

“Kind of, yeah.”

“Have you been trying to protect my feelings all this time?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where am I bald?”

“I don’t know.”

“Touch the parts that are bald.”

I bowed to him, but felt no touch.

“Benjy?” I asked, facing the water.

“You’re not bald.”

I lifted my head. “Then why’d you say it?”

“Because I wanted to make you feel good.”

HOW TO PLAY TRUE BALDNESS

We used to go to Great Wall Szechuan House every Christmas, the five of us. We held the kids up to the aquarium until our arms trembled, and ordered every hot appetizer that didn’t involve pork. The last such Christmas, my fortune was “You are not a ghost.” When we read them aloud, as was the ritual, I looked at “You are not a ghost” and said, “There is always a way.”

A dozen years later, I lost all my hair in the course of a month. Benjy showed up unexpectedly that Christmas Eve with enough Chinese food for a family of five.

“You got one of everything?” I asked, laughing out my love of the wonderfully ridiculous abundance.

“One of everything treyf,” he said.

“Are you worried that I’m lonely?”

“Are you worried that I’m worried?”

We ate on the sofa, plates on our laps, the coffee table covered with steaming white boxes. Before refilling, Benjy put his empty plate on the crowded table, took my head between his hands, and angled it down. If it had been any less unexpected, I would have found a way out. But once it was happening, I gave myself over: rested my hands on my knees, closed my eyes.

“You don’t have enough hands, right?”

“I don’t need any.”

“Ah, Benjy.”

“I’m serious,” he said. “Full head of hair.”

“The doctor warned me, however many years ago, that this would happen: as soon as you stop taking the pill, you lose it all at once. I didn’t believe him. Or I thought I’d be the exception.”

“How does it feel?”

“Being able to slice bread with an erection?”

“I’m eating, Dad.”

“Being able to do push-ups with my hands behind my back?”

“Sorry I expressed interest,” he said, unable to pin the corners of his mouth.

“You know, I needed an egg once.”

“Did you?” he asked, playing along.

“Yeah. I was doing some baking—”

“You often bake.”

“All the time. I’m surprised I’m not baking as I tell this joke. Anyway, I was doing some baking, and found that I was one egg short. Isn’t that the worst?”

“There is literally nothing worse.”

“Right?” We were both starting to simmer in anticipation. “So rather than schlep to the store through the snow to buy eleven eggs I didn’t want, I thought I’d see if I could borrow one.”

“And that, right there, is why the 1998 National Jewish Book Award hangs in your office.”

“Yiddishe kop,” I said, tapping my forehead.

“I wish you were my real dad,” Benjy said, his eyes moistening with suppressed laughter.

“So I opened the window—” I wasn’t sure I’d make it to the punch line that was still forming as I approached it. “So I opened the window, wrote, directed, and starred in a five-second fantasy for which there aren’t enough Xs, and my tumescent glans rang the doorbell of the neighbor across the street.”

Almost convulsing with restraint, Benjy asked, “Did she have an egg?”

“He.”

“He!”

“And no, he didn’t.”

“What an asshole.”

“And I accidentally blinded him.”

“Injury to the insult.”

“No, wait. Wait. Do it again. Ask me if she had an egg.”

“I have a question.”

“Let me try to answer it.”

“Did she have an egg?”

“Your mom? She did.”

“Wonder of wonders!”

“And I accidentally fertilized it.”

The laughter we’d been containing never came. We sighed, smiled, sat back, and nodded for no reason. Benjy said, “It must be a relief.”

“What must?”

“Finally looking like yourself.”

I looked at “You will travel to many places” and said, “I am not a ghost.”

Benjy was five when we started Tales from the Odyssey. I’d read it to Sam and Max, and both times, the further we got in, the slower we read, until we were making it through only a page a night. Benjy and I got all the way through the Cyclops that first bedtime. I had a rare instance of recognizing what was happening as it happened — he was my final child, and this was my final reading of the passage. It would not last. “‘Why?’” I read. “‘Why do you break the stillness of the night with your cries?’” I gave space to each pause, opening the sentences as far as they would go. “‘Who harms you?’ ‘NO ONE!’ Polyphemus shouted, writhing on the floor of his cave. ‘No One tried to kill me! No One blinded me!’”

HOW TO PLAY NO ONE

I told Julia I didn’t want her to go with us to the airport. I would tuck in the children, like any other night, no overly dramatic goodbyes, let them know I’d FaceTime as often as possible and be back in a week or two with a suitcase of tchotchkes. And then I’d leave while they slept.

“You can do it however you want,” she said. “But can I ask you — or can you ask yourself — what it is you’re waiting for?”

“What do you mean?”

“Everything is no big deal. You’ve raised your voice once in your entire life, to tell me I was your enemy.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“I know. But you don’t mean the silence, either. If this isn’t a big deal — saying goodbye to your children before going to war — what is? What is the big deal you’re waiting for?”

My father drove us to MacArthur Airport in Islip, Long Island. I sat in the passenger seat, and Barak moved in and out of sleep against Tamir’s chest in the back. Five hours. On the radio, there was coverage of the first day of Operation Arms of Moses. Reporters were stationed at the designated airfields around the world, but as it was still early, most of the reporting was just speculation about how many would heed the call. It was the opposite of the ride we’d made only a few weeks earlier, from Washington National to the house.

What conversations there were in the car were segregated front and back; I could hear little of what passed between Tamir and Barak, and my father, who lacked an indoor voice, found his whisper.

“Gabe Perelman will be there,” he said. “I spoke to Hersch last night. We’re going to see a lot of people we know.”

“Probably.”

“Glenn Mechling. Larry Moverman.”

“Mom’s OK, right? She was worryingly nonchalant this morning.”

“She’s a mother. But she’ll be fine.”

“And you?”

“What can I say? The price of speaking unpopular truths. I turned the ringer off on the home phone. And D.C.’s finest put a car on the corner. I told them not to. They insisted, told me it wasn’t my choice. It’ll pass.”

“Not that. I mean with me going.”

“You read what I wrote. Every part of me wishes you didn’t have to go, but I know you do.”

“I can’t believe this is happening.”

“That’s because you haven’t been listening to me for the past twenty years.”

“Longer than that.”

Eyes on the road, he rested his right hand on my thigh and said, “I can’t believe it, either.”

We stopped curbside. The airport was closed, save for flights to Israel. There were about two dozen cars unloading men, and no one waving a stumpy lightsaber and saying, “Keep it moving, keep it moving,” but there were two men in army green with machine guns pressed to their chests.

We took our duffels from the trunk and stood by the car.

“Barak’s not going to get out?” I asked.

“He’s asleep,” Tamir said. “We said goodbye in the car. It’s better this way.”

My father put his hand on Tamir’s shoulder and told him, “You’re brave.”

Tamir said, “This doesn’t count as bravery.”

“I loved your father.”

“He loved you.”

My father nodded. He put his other hand on Tamir’s other shoulder and said, “Since he’s no longer here—” and that was all that was needed. As if the knowledge of what to do at that moment had been coiled into him at birth, Tamir put down his duffel, let his arms rest at his sides, and bowed slightly. My father placed his hands atop Tamir’s head and said, “Y’varech’cha Adonai v’yishm’recha. May God bless you and guard you. Ya’ar Adonai panav ay’lecha viy’hunecha. May God make His face shine upon you and be gracious unto you. Yisa Adonai panav ay’lecha v’yasaym l’cha shalom. May God turn His face unto you and grant you peace.”

Tamir thanked my father and told me he’d go for a walk, then meet me inside.

Once it was just the two of us, my father laughed.

“What?”

He said, “You know what Lou Gehrig’s final words were, right?”

“‘I don’t want to die’?”

“‘Damn, Lou Gehrig’s disease, I should have seen that coming.’”

“Funny.”

“We should have seen this coming,” he said.

“You did.”

“No, I just said I did.”

Barak rose from his sleep, calmly looked around, and then, perhaps assuming he was in a dream, closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the window.

“You’ll go to the house every day, right?”

“Of course,” my father said.

“And take the kids out. Give Julia a break every now and then.”

“Of course, Jacob.”

“Make sure Mom eats.”

“You’ve traded places.”

“A friend at the Times said it’s nowhere near as bad as it sounds. Israel is intentionally making the situation appear worse than it is with the hopes of getting more American support. He said they’re drawing it out to achieve the most propitious peace.”

“The Times is an anti-Semitic pap smear.”

“I’m just saying don’t be scared.”

As if the knowledge of what to do at that moment had been coiled into me at birth, I bowed. My father put his hands atop my head. I waited. As if the knowledge of what to do at that moment had been coiled into him at my birth, his palms began to close, taking my hair into the grip of his fingers, holding me in place. I waited for a blessing that would never come.

HOW TO PLAY SILENCE

First ask, “What kind of silence is this?” EMBARRASSED SILENCE is not ASHAMED SILENCE. WORDLESS SILENCE is not SPEECHLESS SILENCE, is not SILENCE OF SUBTLE WITHHOLDING. And so on. And on and on.

Then ask, “What kind of suicide or sacrifice is this?”

HOW TO PLAY RAISED VOICES

I’ve raised my voice to a human only twice in my entire life. The first time was when Julia confronted me with the texts and, pushed beyond my self-control, into my self, I shouted: “You are my enemy!” She didn’t remember that she had given me that line. When she was in labor with Sam — her only natural childbirth — she traced a forty-hour spiral into deeper and more isolating pain, until, surrounded by the same four walls, we were in different rooms. The doula said something absurd (something that, at any other moment, Julia would have dismissed with a roll of her eyes), and I said something loving (something that, at any other moment, Julia would have teared up about and thanked me for), and Julia moaned like a nonfemale nonhuman, grabbed the bed rail like it was a roller-coaster safety bar, looked at me with eyes more satanic than in any red-pupilled photograph, and snarled, “You are my enemy!” I hadn’t meant to quote her thirteen years later, and it didn’t even occur to me that I’d done so until I wrote about it after. Like so much that happened during labor, Julia seemed to have no memory of it.

The second time I raised my voice at a human was also at Julia, many years later. I found it so much easier to give what wasn’t asked for or owed. Maybe I learned that from Argus — the only way to get him to drop a fetched ball was to appear indifferent. Maybe Argus learned that from me. Once Julia and I were living separate lives, it was not only possible to push my inner life through our still-shared conduit, I longed to. Because she appeared indifferent to it—appeared, or was.

Julia and I hadn’t spoken in a long time, but she was the person I wanted to talk to. I called, she answered, we shared, just like old times weren’t. I said, “I guess I wanted proof.” She said, “I’m the gentle soul you called, remember?” I said, “Remember how they say the world is uniquely open?” She asked, “What happened to you?” She wasn’t accusing or challenging me. She said it with the indifference necessary for me to give everything.

I’ve raised my voice at a human only twice in my entire life. Both times at the same human. Put differently: I’ve known only one human in my life. Put differently: I’ve allowed only one human to know me.

In a sadness beyond anger, pain, and fear, I screamed at Julia: “Unfair! Unfair! Unfair!”

HOW TO PLAY THE DEATH OF LANGUAGE

In the synagogue of my youth — which I left when I went to college and rejoined when Julia became pregnant with Sam — there was a memorial wall with tiny bulbs lit next to the names of those who had died in the given week of the year. As a boy, I rearranged the plastic letters that formed the names into whatever words I could. My father used to tell me that there were no bad words, only bad usage. And then, when I became a father, I told my boys the same thing.

There were more than fourteen hundred congregants of fighting age. Of the sixty-two who went to fight in Israel, twenty-four died. Two ten-watt, candelabra-base, flame-tip bulbs for each name. Only 480 watts of light. Fewer than in my living room chandelier. No one touched those names. But one day they will be rearranged into words. Or so is the hope.

It feels like it’s been centuries since I wandered that building. But I can remember the smells: the siddurim like withered flowers, the must of the basket of yarmulkes, the new-car smell of the ark. And I can remember the surfaces: where the broad strips of linen wallpaper met; the Braille-like plaques affixed to the armrests of every velvet chair, immortalizing the largesse of someone unlikely ever to sit there; the cold steel banister of the plush-carpeted stairs. I can remember the heat of those bulbs, and the roughness of the letters. As I sit at a desk filled with thousands of pages, continuing to comment on the commentary, I wonder how one should judge the usage of words made from the dead. And the living. From everyone living and dead.

HOW TO PLAY NO ONE

There were several hundred men in the waiting area. Several hundred Jewish men. We were circumcised men, men who shared Jewish genetic markers, men who hummed the same ancient melodies. How many times, as a child, was I told that it didn’t matter whether or not I thought of myself as Jewish, the Germans thought of me as a Jew? In the holding area of that airport, perhaps for the first time in my life, I stopped wondering if I felt Jewish. Not because I had an answer, but because the question stopped mattering.

I saw a few people I knew: old friends, familiar faces from the synagogue, some public figures. I didn’t see Gabe Perelman or Larry Moverman, but Glenn Mechling was there. We nodded at each other across the enormous room. There was little interacting. Some sat in silence, or talked on their cell phones — presumably to their families. There were outbursts of singing: “Yerushalayim Shel Zachav” … “Hatikva” … It was emotional, but what was the it? The camaraderie? The most extreme version of the recognition I felt with the deaf father at the convention? The shared devotion? The sudden awareness of history, how small and big it is, how impotent and omnipotent an individual is inside it? The fear?

I had written books and screenplays my entire adult life, but it was the first time I’d felt like a character inside one — that the scale of my tchotchke existence, the drama of living, finally befitted the privilege of being alive.

No, it was the second time. The first time was in the lion’s den.

Tamir was right: my problems were small. I’d spent so much of my finite time on earth thinking small thoughts, feeling small feelings, walking under doors into unoccupied rooms. How many hours did I spend online, rewatching inane videos, scrutinizing listings for houses I would never buy, clicking over to check for hasty e-mails from people I didn’t care about? How much of myself, how many words, feelings, and actions, had I forcefully contained? I’d angled myself away from myself, by a fraction of a degree, but after so many years, finding my way back to myself required a plane.

They were singing, and I knew the song, but not how to join them.

HOW TO PLAY THE ITCH OF HOPE

I always believed that all it would take to completely change my life would be a complete change of personhood.

HOW TO PLAY HOME

The completion of Tales from the Odyssey left Max bereft.

“Why?” he asked, spinning to face his pillow. “Why did it have to end?”

I rubbed his back, told him, “But you wouldn’t want Odysseus wandering forever, would you?”

“Well, then why did he have to leave home at all?”

The next morning, I took him to the farmer’s market with the hope of finding some consolation in baked goods. Every other Sunday, a mobile pet rescue stationed itself by the main entrance, and we’d often stop and admire the animals. Max was drawn that morning to a golden retriever named Stan. We’d never spoken about getting a dog, and I certainly hadn’t intended to get a dog, and I don’t even know if he wanted that particular dog, but I told him, “If you would like to take Stan home, we can.”

Everyone but me bounded into the house. Julia was furious, but didn’t show it until we were alone at the top of the stairs. She said, “Again, you’ve put me in the position of either having to go along with a bad idea or be the bad guy.”

Downstairs, the boys were calling: “Stan! Here, Stan! Come on, now!”

I had asked the woman running the pet rescue how he got the name Stan — it struck me as an odd choice for a dog. She said the dogs were given retired names of Atlantic storms. With so many dogs moving through the facility, it made things easy simply to use a list.

“Sorry, a retired name of what?”

“You know how storms get names? There’s something like a hundred that are cycled through. But if a storm is especially costly or deadly, they retire the name — to be sensitive. There will never be another Sandy.”

Just as there will never be another Isaac.

We don’t know the name of my grandfather’s grandfather.

When my grandfather came to America, he changed his name from Blumenberg to Bloch.

My father was the first person in our family to have an “English name” and a “Hebrew name.”

When I became a writer, I experimented with different versions of my name: various uses of initials, the insertion of my middle name, pseudonyms.

The farther we got from Europe, the more identities we had to choose between.

“No One tried to kill me! No One blinded me!”

It was Max’s idea to rename Stan. I said it might confuse him. Max said, “But we need to make him ours.”

HOW TO PLAY NO ONE

We were given some simple forms to fill out, and an announcement was made that we were to pass, single file, in front of a middle-aged man in a white lab coat. He gave each person a quick visual inspection and pointed toward one of about a dozen long lines, which began to roughly correspond to age. The resonance with the selections upon entering the concentration camps was so explicit and undeniable, it was hard to imagine it wasn’t intentional.

When I reached the front of my line, a stocky woman, perhaps seventy, invited me to sit opposite her at a plastic folding table. She took my papers and started filling out a series of forms.

“Atah medaber ivrit?” she asked without looking up.

“Sorry?”

“Lo medaber ivrit,” she said, checking a box.

“Sorry?”

“Jewish?”

“Of course.”

“Recite the Sh’ma.”

“Sh’ma Yisrael, Adonai—”

“Do you belong to a Jewish community?”

“Adas Israel.”

“How often do you attend services?”

“Maybe twice a year, every other year?”

“What are the two occasions?”

“Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.”

“Any languages besides English?”

“A little Spanish.”

“I’m sure that will be very useful. Health conditions?”

“No.”

“No asthma? High blood pressure? Epilepsy?”

“No. I do have some eczema. At the back of my hairline.”

“Have you tried coconut oil?” she asked, still not looking up.

“No.”

“So try it. Military training or experience?”

“No.”

“Have you ever fired a gun?”

“I’ve never held a gun.”

She checked a number of boxes, apparently feeling no need to ask the next sequence of questions.

“Can you function without your glasses?”

“Function highly?”

She checked a box.

“Can you swim?”

“Without my glasses?”

“Do you know how to swim?”

“Of course.”

“Have you ever been a competitive swimmer?”

“No.”

“Do you have any experience with knot tying?”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

She checked two boxes.

“Can you read a topographical map?”

“I suppose I know what I’m looking at, but I don’t know if that qualifies as reading.”

She checked a box.

“Do you have any experience with electrical engineering?”

“I once took a—”

“You cannot disarm a simple bomb.”

“I mean, how simple?”

“You cannot disarm a simple bomb.”

“I cannot.”

“What’s the longest you’ve ever gone without eating?”

“Yom Kippur, a while ago.”

“What is your tolerance for pain?”

“I don’t even know how one would answer that question.”

“You answered the question,” she said. “Have you ever been in shock?”

“Probably. In fact, yes. Often.”

“Are you claustrophobic?”

“Hugely.”

“What is the greatest load you can carry?”

“Physically?”

“Are you sensitive to extremes of heat or cold?”

“Is anyone not?”

“Allergic to medications?”

“I’m lactose intolerant, but I guess that’s not really what you were asking.”

“Morphine?”

“Morphine?”

“Do you know first aid?”

“I didn’t answer about morphine.”

“Are you allergic to morphine?”

“I have no idea.”

She wrote something down, which I tried, without success, to decipher.

“I don’t want not to get morphine if I need morphine.”

“There are other forms of pain relief.”

“Are they as good?”

“Do you know first aid?”

“Sort of.”

“That will sort of be a comfort to someone sort of in need of first aid.”

While perusing the paperwork I’d filled out in line, she said, “Emergency contact information…”

“It’s there.”

“Julia Bloch.”

“Yes.”

“She’s who?”

“What?”

“You didn’t fill in your relationship.”

“Sure I did.”

“So you used invisible ink on that one.”

“She’s my wife.”

“Most wives prefer permanent marker.”

“I must have—”

“You are an organ donor in America.”

“I am.”

“If you are killed in Israel, would you allow your organs to be used in Israel?”

“Yes,” I said, allowing the s to skid for a hundred feet.

“Yes?”

“Yes, if I’m killed—”

“What is your blood type?”

“Blood type?”

“You have blood?”

“I do.”

“What type? A? B? AB? O?”

“You’re asking for giving, or receiving?”

Finally, for the first time since we started speaking, she looked me in the eye. “It’s the same blood.”

HOW TO PLAY SUICIDE GROWTH RINGS

For left-handedness, or twins, or red hair, to run in one’s family — as all of those do in mine — there need to be multiple occurrences. For suicide to run in one’s family, there needs to be only one.

I received my grandfather’s death certificate from the Maryland Department of Records. I wanted to know that I knew what I already knew. The coroner’s handwriting was as good as typeset, the opposite of a doctor’s: asphyxiation by hanging. He killed himself at approximately ten in the morning. The certificate said that it was Mr. Kowalski, the next-door neighbor, who made the report. That my grandfather’s name was Isaac Bloch. That he had been born in Poland. That he hanged himself with a belt wedged between his kitchen door and its frame.

But when I was imagining it in bed that night, I saw him outside, hanging by a rope from a tree. The grass in the shadow of his feet slowly died and powdered to a little patch of dirt in an otherwise wild, overgrown garden.

Later in the night, I imagined plants ascending to meet his feet, as if the earth were trying to atone for its gravity. I imagined palm fronds holding him up like hands, the rope slack.

Even later — I barely slept — I imagined walking with my grandfather through a redwood forest. His skin was blue and his fingernails were an inch long, but otherwise he looked like the man at whose kitchen table I used to eat black bread and cantaloupe, the man who, when told not to change into his bathing suit in public, asked, “Why not?” He stopped at a massive overturned tree and pointed at the rings.

“This, here, is my parents’ wedding. It was an arranged marriage. It worked. And here,” he said, pointing at a different ring, “is when Iser fell from a tree and broke his arm.”

“Iser?”

“My brother. You were named for him.”

“I thought I was named for someone named Yakov.”

“No. We just told you that.”

“How does Iser become Jacob?”

“Iser is short for Israel. After wrestling with Jacob through the night, the angel renamed him Israel.”

“How old was he?”

“And here,” he said, pointing at another ring, “is when I left home. With Benny. Everyone else stayed — my grandparents and parents, my other five brothers — and I wanted to stay, but Benny convinced me. He forced me. And here is when Benny and I got on different boats, one for America, one for Israel.” He touched a ring, and let his long fingernail slide outward toward the bark as he spoke. “This, here, is when you were born. Here you were a boy. Here you got married. Here is Sam’s birth, here is Max’s, here is Benjy’s. And here”—he touched his fingernail to the rim of the trunk, like a record needle—“is right now. And out here”—he pointed to a spot in the air, about an inch outside the trunk—“is when you’ll die, and here”—he gestured at the area slightly nearer to the trunk—“is the rest of your life, and here”—he pointed to just outside the trunk—“is what happens next.”

I understood, somehow, that the weight of his hanging body had pulled the tree over, making our history visible.

HOW TO PLAY SEVEN RINGS

I could never anticipate which religious rituals Julia would find beautiful and which misogynistic, morally repugnant, or simply foolish. So I was surprised when she wanted to walk the seven rings around me under the chuppah.

In our preparatory reading — her preparatory reading; I gave up fairly quickly — she learned that the rings echo the biblical story of Joshua leading the Israelites into Canaan. When they came to the walled city of Jericho, and the first battle they would have to fight on their way to the Promised Land, God instructed Joshua to march the Israelites around the walls seven times. As soon as they had completed the seventh ring, the walls came tumbling down, and the Israelites conquered the city.

“You hide your greatest secret behind a wall,” she said, with a tone that suggested both irony and earnestness, “and I will surround you with love, and the wall will topple—”

“And you will have conquered me.”

“We will have conquered ourselves.”

“All I have to do is stand there?”

“Just stand there and topple.”

“What’s my greatest secret?”

“I don’t know. We’re only beginning.”

It wasn’t until we were ending that she knew.

HOW TO PLAY THE LAST WHOLLY HAPPY MOMENT

“Let’s do something special,” I suggested a month before Julia’s fortieth birthday. “Something unlike us. A party. A blowout: band, ice cream truck, magician.”

“A magician?”

“Or a flamenco dancer.”

“No,” she said. “That’s the last thing I’d want.”

“Even if it’s last, it’s still on the list.”

She laughed and said, “It’s sweet of you to think of that. But let’s do something simple. A nice dinner at home.”

“Come on. We’ll make it fun.”

“Fun for me would be a simple family dinner.”

I tried a few times to persuade her, but she made clear, with increasing force, that she didn’t want “a big deal.”

“You’re sure you’re not protesting too much?”

“I’m not protesting at all. The thing I most want is to have a nice, quiet dinner with my family.”

The boys and I made her breakfast in bed that morning: fresh waffle, kale-and-pear smoothie, huevos rancheros.

We whispered wishes to the elephant at the zoo (an old birthday ritual, origin unknown), collected leaves in Rock Creek Park for pressing into the Book of Years (another ritual), ate lunch at one of the outside tables of her favorite Greek restaurant in Dupont Circle. We went to the Phillips Collection, where Sam and Max feigned interest so earnestly and poorly, Julia was moved to tell them, “I know you love me. It’s OK to be bored.”

It was getting dark when we made it home, with half a dozen bags of groceries for dinner supplies. (I insisted that we not shop for any other meals, even though there were things we needed. “Today,” I said, “will not be utilitarian.”) I gave Sam the key, and the boys ran ahead into the house. Julia and I unloaded the bags on the island and started putting away the perishables. Our eyes met, and I saw that she was crying.

“What is it?” I asked.

“You’re going to hate me if I tell you.”

“I’m sure I won’t.”

“You’ll be extremely annoyed.”

“I’m pretty sure there’s an annoyance moratorium on birthdays.”

And then, really letting the tears come, she said, “I actually wanted a big deal.”

I laughed.

“It’s not funny.”

“It is funny, Julia.”

“It’s not that I knew what I wanted and hid it from you. I wasn’t trying to be disappointed.”

“I know that.”

“I meant what I said at the time. I really did. It wasn’t until right now — not even when we entered the house, but right this second — that I realized I really wanted a big deal. I did. It’s so stupid. What am I, eight?”

“You’re forty.”

“I am, aren’t I? I’m a forty-year-old who doesn’t know herself until it’s too late. And to make matters worse, I’m dumping it on you, as if you could respond with anything other than guilt or hurt.”

“Here,” I said, handing her a box of orecchiette. “Put these away.”

“That’s as far as your sympathy can reach?”

“What happened to the annoyance moratorium?”

“That’s a one-way street, and you know it.”

“Put the pretentious pasta away.”

“No,” she said. “No. Today, I won’t.”

I laughed.

“It’s not funny,” she said, banging the counter.

“It’s so funny,” I said.

She grabbed the box, ripped off the top, and poured the pasta on the floor.

“I made a huge mess,” she said, “and I don’t even know why.”

I told her, “Put the empty box away.”

“The box?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” she asked. “To create a depressing symbol?”

“No,” I said, “because understanding oneself isn’t a prerequisite for being understood.”

She inhaled, understanding something she didn’t yet understand, and opened the pantry door. Out spilled the boys, and the grandparents, and Mark and Jennifer, and David and Hannah, and Steve and Patty, and someone turned the music on, and it was Stevie Wonder, and someone released the balloons from the hall closet, and they jangled the chandelier, and Julia looked at me.

HOW TO PLAY EXISTENTIAL SHAME

The IKEA encounter with Maggie Silliman haunted me for years. She was the embodiment of my shame. I would often wake in the middle of the night and write letters to her. Each began the same way: “You were wrong. I am not a good man.” If I could have been the embodiment of my shame, I might have been spared it. I might even have been good.

HOW TO PLAY UNBROKEN RINGS

For his first trick, the magician asked Julia to pull a card from an invisible deck.

“Look at it,” he said, “but don’t let me see it.”

With a roll of her eyes, she obeyed.

“You know your card?”

She nodded and said, “Yeah. I know my card.”

“Now please throw it across the room.”

With an overdramatized windup, she hurled the invisible card. The gesture was beautiful to watch: the fakeness of it, the generosity of its spirit, how quick it was and how long it took, the movement of her ring through the air.

“Max. Your name is Max, right? Can you go fetch the card your mother just threw?”

“But it’s invisible,” he said, looking to his mother for help.

“Get it anyway,” the magician said, and Julia nodded permission.

So Max happily waddled across the room.

“OK, got it!” he said.

“And could you please tell us what the card is.”

Max looked to his mother and said, “But I can’t see it.”

“Tell us, anyway,” the magician said.

“And I can’t remember what the different kinds of cards are.”

“Hearts, spades, clubs, and diamonds. Any number two through ten. Or joker, jack, queen, king, or ace.”

“Right,” Max said, and again looked to his mother, who again let him know it was OK. He examined the invisible card, held it right up to his squinting eyes. “It’s a seven of diamonds.”

The magician didn’t have to ask Julia if that was her card, because she was crying. Nodding and crying.

We ate some cake, we cleared out the dining room and did some silly dancing, we used paper plates and disposable cutlery.

The magician stuck around for a while, doing close-up magic for whoever would pay attention.

“That was really great,” I told him, patting him on the back, surprised and repelled by his skinniness. “Just perfect.”

“I’m glad. Feel free to recommend me. It’s how I get my jobs.”

“I certainly will.”

He did the classic linked-rings trick for me. I’d seen it countless times, but it was still a thrill.

“My dad was the magician at my fifth birthday,” I told him. “He opened with that.”

“So you know how it’s done?”

“Broken rings.”

He handed them to me. I must have spent five full minutes searching for what had to be there.

“What happens if the trick goes wrong?” I asked, not yet ready to return the rings.

“How would it go wrong?”

“Someone takes the wrong card, or lies to you, or the deck falls.”

“I never perform a trick,” he said. “I perform a process. There’s no outcome I need.”

I told that to Julia in bed that night: “There’s no outcome he needs.”

“Sounds Eastern.”

“Definitely not Eastern European.”

“No.”

I turned off the bedside light.

“That first trick. Or process. Max really said your card?”

“I didn’t actually pick one.”

“No?”

“I wanted to, but I just couldn’t bring myself to.”

“So why did you cry?”

“Because Max still could.”

HOW TO PLAY NO ONE

The night I came back from Islip, I went straight to the kids’ rooms. It was three in the morning. Benjy was contorted into one of those almost inconceivably bizarre sleeping-child positions: his tush way up in the air, his legs rigid, the weight of his body driving his cheek into the pillow. He had sweated through his sheets and was snoring like a tiny human animal. I reached out my hand, but before I’d even touched him, his eyes sprang open: “I wasn’t asleep.”

“It’s OK,” I said, brushing his damp hair with my hand. “Close your eyes.”

“I was awake.”

“You were doing sleep-breathing.”

“You’re home.”

“I am. I didn’t go.”

He smiled. His eyes closed too slowly for it to be voluntary, and he said, “Tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

He opened his eyes, saw that I was still there, smiled once again, and said, “I don’t know. Just tell me.”

“I came home.”

He closed his eyes and asked, “Did you win the war?”

“You’re asleep.”

He opened his eyes and said, “I’m only thinking about how you were in a war.”

“I didn’t go.”

“Oh. That’s good.” He closed his eyes and said, “I know what it is.”

“What what is?”

“The n-word.”

“You do?”

“I googled it.”

“Ah. OK.”

He opened his eyes. And though he didn’t smile this time, I could hear, in his full exhalation, that he was again relieved by my permanence.

“I’ll never use it,” he said. “Never.”

“Good night, love.”

“I’m not asleep.”

“You’re falling asleep.”

His eyes closed. I kissed him. He smiled.

“Is it a g like gun?” he asked. “Or like ginger?”

“What’s that?”

“The n-word. I don’t know how you say it.”

“But you’re never going to say it.”

“But I still want to know how.”

“Why?”

“You aren’t going to go away again, are you?”

“No,” I said, because I didn’t know what to say — to my child, or to myself.

HOW TO PLAY LOVE

Love is not a positive emotion. It is not a blessing, and it is not a curse. It is a blessing that is a curse, and it is also not that. LOVE OF ONE’S CHILDREN is not LOVE OF CHILDREN, is not LOVE OF ONE’S SPOUSE, is not LOVE OF ONE’S PARENTS, is not LOVE OF ONE’S EXTENDED FAMILY, is not LOVE OF THE IDEA OF FAMILY. LOVE OF JUDAISM is not LOVE OF JEWISHNESS, is not LOVE OF ISRAEL, is not LOVE OF GOD. LOVE OF WORK is not LOVE OF SELF. Not even LOVE OF SELF is LOVE OF SELF. The place where LOVE OF NATION, LOVE OF HOMELAND, and LOVE OF HOME meet is nowhere. LOVE OF DOGS is to LOVE OF ONE’S CHILD’S SLEEPING BODY as LOVE OF DOGS is to LOVE OF ONE’S DOG. LOVE OF THE PAST has as much in common with LOVE OF THE FUTURE as LOVE OF LOVE has with LOVE OF SADNESS — which is to say, everything. But then, LOVE OF SAYING EVERYTHING makes one untrustworthy.

Without love, you die. With love, you also die. Not all deaths are equal.

HOW TO PLAY ANGER

“You are my enemy!”

HOW TO PLAY FEAR OF DEATH

“Unfair! Unfair! Unfair!”

HOW TO PLAY THE INTERSECTION OF LOVE, ANGER, AND FEAR OF DEATH

At my annual cleaning, the dentist spent an unusual amount of time looking in my mouth — not at my teeth, but deeper — his instruments of pain slowly tarnishing, untouched, on the tray. He asked if I’d been having a hard time swallowing.

“Why do you ask?”

“Just curious.”

“I suppose a bit.”

“For how long?”

“A couple of months?”

“Did you ever mention it to your doctor?”

He referred me to an oncologist at Johns Hopkins.

I was surprised by my instinct to call Julia. We hardly ever spoke anymore: she had long since remarried; the kids were masters of their own logistics, being adults; and as one gets older, there is less and less news to share, until the final piece, which is delivered by someone else. The dialogue in the show is virtually identical to what actually transpired, with one significant exception: in life, I didn’t cry. I screamed: “Unfair! Unfair! Unfair!”

JACOB

It’s me.

JULIA

I recognize your voice.

JACOB

It’s been a long time.

JULIA

And your number comes up on my phone.

JACOB

As Jacob?

JULIA

As opposed to what?

JACOB

Listen—

JULIA

Is everything OK?

JACOB

I was at the dentist this morning—

JULIA

But I didn’t make an appointment for you.

JACOB

I’ve become remarkably capable.

JULIA

Necessity is the ex-wife of capability.

JACOB

He saw a lump in my throat.

Julia starts crying. Each is surprised by her reaction to nothing (yet), and it goes on for longer than either would have imagined or thought bearable.

JULIA

You’re dying?

JACOB

The dentist, Julia.

JULIA

You’re telling me he saw a lump, and you’re calling me.

JACOB

Both a lump and a phone call can be benign, you know.

JULIA

So now what?

JACOB

I have an appointment with an oncologist at Hopkins.

JULIA

Tell me everything.

JACOB

You know everything I know.

JULIA

Have you had any other symptoms? Stiffness in your neck? Difficulty swallowing?

JACOB

Did you go to med school since we last spoke?

JULIA

I’m googling while we talk.

JACOB

Yes, I’ve had stiffness in my neck. And yes, I’ve had difficulty swallowing. Now will you please give me your undivided attention?

JULIA

Is Lauren being supportive?

JACOB

You’d have to ask the man she’s presently dating.

JULIA

I’m sorry to hear that.

JACOB

And you’re the first person I’ve told.

JULIA

Do the boys know?

JACOB

I told you, you’re the first—

JULIA

Right.

JACOB

I’m sorry to have laid this on you. I know I haven’t been your responsibility for a long time.

JULIA

You were never my responsibility.

(beat)

And you still are my responsibility.

JACOB

I won’t tell the kids anything until there’s something real to tell them.

JULIA

Good. That’s good.

(beat)

How are you holding up?

JACOB

I’m fine. He’s just a dentist.

JULIA

It’s OK to be scared.

JACOB

If he were so smart, he’d be a dermatologist.

JULIA

Have you cried?

JACOB

On November 18, 1985, when Lawrence Taylor ended Joe Theismann’s career.

JULIA

Enough, Jacob.

JACOB

He’s just a dentist.

JULIA

You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you cry. Other than tears of happiness when the boys were born. Is that possible?

JACOB

At my grandfather’s funeral.

JULIA

That’s true. You wailed.

JACOB

I wept.

JULIA

But remembering it as the exception proves—

JACOB

Nothing.

JULIA

All those repressed tears metastasized.

JACOB

Yes, that’s exactly what the dentist thought the oncologist will think.

JULIA

Throat cancer.

JACOB

Who said anything about cancer?

JULIA

Throat malignancy.

JACOB

Thank you.

JULIA

Is it too soon to observe how poetic that is?

JACOB

Way too soon. I haven’t even been diagnosed, much less gone through super-fun chemo and recovery only to learn that they didn’t get it all.

JULIA

You’ll finally have your baldness.

JACOB

I already do.

JULIA

Right.

JACOB

No, really. I went off Propecia. I look like Mr. Clean. Ask Benjy.

JULIA

You saw him recently?

JACOB

He came by on Christmas Eve with Chinese food.

JULIA

That’s sweet. How did he look?

JACOB

Enormous. And old.

JULIA

I didn’t even know you were on Propecia. But I guess I wouldn’t know what pills you take anymore.

JACOB

I’ve actually been on it for a long time.

JULIA

How long?

JACOB

Around when Max was born?

JULIA

Our Max?

JACOB

I was embarrassed. I kept them with my cummerbund.

JULIA

That makes me so sad.

JACOB

Me, too.

JULIA

Why don’t you just cry, Jacob?

JACOB

Sure thing.

JULIA

I’m serious.

JACOB

This isn’t Days of Our Lives. This is life.

JULIA

You’re afraid that letting anything out will leave you open to letting things in. I know you. But it’s just the two of us. Just you and me on the phone.

JACOB

And God. And the NSA.

JULIA

Is this the person you want to be? Always just joking? Always concealing, distracting, hiding? Never fully yourself?

JACOB

You know, I was hunting for sympathy when I called.

JULIA

And you killed it without having to fire a shot. This is what real sympathy is.

JACOB

(after a long beat)

No.

JULIA

No what?

JACOB

No, I’m not the person I want to be.

JULIA

Well, you’re in good company.

JACOB

Before I called, I found myself asking — literally asking aloud, over and over—“Who’s a gentle soul? Who’s a gentle soul?”

JULIA

Why?

JACOB

I guess I wanted proof.

JULIA

Of the existence of gentleness?

JACOB

Gentleness for me.

JULIA

Jacob.

JACOB

I mean it. You have Daniel. The boys have their lives. I’m the kind of person whose neighbors will have to notice the smell for anyone to realize he’s dead.

JULIA

Remember that poem? “Proof of Your existence? There is nothing but”?

JACOB

God … I do. We bought that book at Shakespeare and Company. Read it on the bank of the Seine with a baguette and cheese and no knife. That was so happy. So long ago.

JULIA

Look around, Jacob. There is nothing but proof of how loved you are. The boys idolize you. Your friends flock to you. I bet women—

JACOB

You? What about you?

JULIA

I’m the gentle soul you called, remember?

JACOB

I’m sorry.

JULIA

For what?

JACOB

We’re in the Days of Awe right now.

JULIA

I know I know what that means, but I can’t remember.

JACOB

The days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The world is uniquely open. God’s ears are, His eyes, His heart. People, too.

JULIA

You’ve become some Jew.

JACOB

I don’t believe any of it, but I believe in it.

(beat)

Anyway, it’s during these ten days that we’re supposed to ask our loved ones to forgive us for all of the wrongs we committed—“knowingly and unknowingly.”

(beat)

Julia—

JULIA

He’s just a dentist.

JACOB

I am so sincerely sorry for any times that I knowingly or unknowingly wronged you.

JULIA

You didn’t wrong me.

JACOB

I did.

JULIA

We made mistakes, both of us.

JACOB

The Hebrew word for sin translates to “missing the mark.” I am sorry for the times that I sinned against you by small degrees, and I am sorry for the times that I sinned against you by running directly away from what I should have been running toward.

JULIA

There was another line in that book: “And everything that once was infinitely far and unsayable is now unsayable and right here in the room.”

The silence is so complete, neither is sure if the connection has been lost.

JACOB

You opened the door, unknowingly. I closed it, unknowingly.

JULIA

What door?

JACOB

Sam’s hand.

Julia starts to cry, quietly.

JULIA

I forgive you, Jacob. I do. For everything. All that we hid from each other, and all that we allowed between us. The pettiness. The holding in and holding on. The measuring. None of it matters anymore.

JACOB

None of it ever mattered.

JULIA

It did. But not as much as we thought it did.

(beat)

And I hope that you will forgive me.

JACOB

I do.

(after a long beat)

I’m sure you’re right. It would be good if I could let my sadness out.

JULIA

Your anger.

JACOB

I’m not angry.

JULIA

But you are.

JACOB

I’m really not.

JULIA

What are you so angry about?

JACOB

Julia, I’m—

JULIA

What happened to you?

They are silent. But it’s a different silence than the kind they’d known. Not the silence of just joking, concealing, distracting. Not the silence of walls, but the silence of creating a space to fill.

With each passing second — and the seconds are passing, two by two — more space is created. It takes the shape of the home they might have moved to had they decided to give it one more shot, to go deeply and unconditionally into the work of re-finding their happiness together. Jacob can feel the pull of the unoccupied space, the aching longing to be allowed into what is wide open to him.

He cries.

When was the last time he cried? When he put down Argus? When he awoke Max to tell him he hadn’t gone to Israel, and Max said, “I knew you wouldn’t go”? When he tried to encourage Benjy’s budding interest in astronomy, and took him all the way to Marfa, where they got a tour of the observatory and held galaxies in their eyes like oceans in shells, and when that night they lay on their backs on the roof of the Airbnb cabin and Benjy asked, “Why are we whispering?” and Jacob said, “I hadn’t even noticed that we were,” and Benjy said, “When people look at stars, they tend to whisper. I wonder why”?

HOW TO PLAY LATE MEMORIES

My earliest memory is of my father handling a dead squirrel.

My last memory of the old house is leaving the key in the mailbox in an envelope with a stamp and no destination or return address.

My last memory of my mother is spoon-feeding her yogurt. I reflexively made the airplane sound, though I hadn’t done that for fifteen years. I was too embarrassed to acknowledge it with an apology. She winked, I was sure.

My last memory of Argus is hearing his breathing deepen, and feeling his pulse slow, and then watching myself reflected in his eyes as they rolled back.

Despite the texts and e-mails that we have continued to send back and forth, my last memory of Tamir is from Islip. I told him, “Stay.” He asked, “Then who would go?” And I said, “No one.” And he asked, “Then what would save it?” And I said, “Nothing.” “Just let it go?” he asked.

My last memory of my family before the earthquake is by the front door, my parents about to take Benjy for the night, Sam and Julia about to leave for Model UN. Benjy asked, “What if I don’t miss you?” Of course he didn’t know what was about to happen, but how could I remember it any way other than as prophetic?

My last memory of my father is dropping him and his girlfriend at Dulles for his bucket-list trip to the Warsaw Ghetto — his Cooperstown — and my saying, “Who’d have thought it? Taking a shiksa to the Reverse Diaspora Prom?” I always felt that he withheld his laughter from me, but that got a good one. He patted my cheek and said, “Life amazes.” Of course he didn’t know he wouldn’t make it onto the plane, but how could I remember it any way other than as ironic?

My last memory of being married to Julia: the burnished handle of the snack drawer; the seam where the slabs of soapstone met; the Special Award for Bravery sticker on the underside of the island’s overhang, given to Max for what no one knew was his last pulled tooth, a sticker Argus saw many times every day, and only Argus ever saw. Julia said: “It’s way too late in the conversation for that.”

HOW TO PLAY “WHAT IS YOUR NAME?”

Max asked to have a bar mitzvah. Even if it was the expression of something subterranean, even if it was some kind of hypersophisticated act of aggression, it still pleased Julia and me. The year of study went off without a hitch or complaint, the service was beautiful (Julia and I stood together at the ark, which felt good and right), the party was themeless and genuinely fun, and he banked enough savings bonds to buy something pretty great just as soon as they matured to their face value in twenty years, at which point twice as much would seem like half as much.

Max’s portion was Vayishlach, in which Jacob — the last of the patriarchs — is assaulted by an unknown assailant in the middle of the night. Jacob wrestles him down and refuses to let go, demanding a blessing of him. The assailant — an angel, or God himself — asks, “What is your name?” As Jacob holds on to the man with all his strength, he answers, “Jacob.” (Jacob means “heel-grabber”—he grabbed the heel of his older brother, Esau, as he was being born, wanting to be the first out.) Then the angel says, “Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel — which means ‘wrestles God.’”

From the bimah, with a poise far beyond his years or mine, Max said, “Jacob wrestled with God for the blessing. He wrestled with Esau for the blessing. He wrestled with Isaac for the blessing, with Laban for the blessing, and in each case he eventually prevailed. He wrestled because he recognized that the blessings were worth the struggle. He knew that you only get to keep what you refuse to let go of.

“Israel, the historical Jewish homeland, literally means ‘wrestles God.’ Not ‘praises God,’ or ‘reveres God,’ or ‘loves God,’ not even ‘obeys God.’ In fact, it is the opposite of ‘obeys God.’ Wrestling is not only our condition, it is our identity, our name.”

That last sentence sounded a lot like Julia.

“But what is wrestling?”

That sounded like Dr. Silvers.

“There is Greco-Roman wrestling, WWF wrestling, arm wrestling, sumo wrestling, lucha libre wrestling, wrestling with ideas, wrestling with faith … They all have one thing in common: closeness.”

And there I was, the intended recipient of his speech, sitting so close to my ex-wife that the fabric of our clothing touched, on a pew with children half of whose lives I was missing.

“You only get to keep what you refuse to let go of,” Max said.

“A Jewish fist can do more than masturbate and hold a pen,” my dad once said.

“To see your lifeline you have to let go,” I pulled from a fortune cookie one Christmas.

Max kept getting smarter and smarter. Julia and I had always assumed that Sam was the brains of the bunch — that Max was the artist and Benjy would be perpetually adorable — but it was Max who took chess seriously (he placed third in the D.C.-area sixteen-and-unders), Max who elected to have a Mandarin tutor twice a week (while his brain was still “supple”), and Max who was accepted to Harvard after his junior year of high school. (Not until he chose to apply a year early did I realize that all that extra credit — those supplemental courses, that summer school — was a way to be away more, and get away sooner.)

“Closeness,” he said, surveying the congregation. “It’s easy to be close, but almost impossible to stay close. Think about friends. Think about hobbies. Even ideas. They’re close to us — sometimes so close we think they are part of us — and then, at some point, they aren’t close anymore. They go away. Only one thing can keep something close over time: holding it there. Grappling with it. Wrestling it to the ground, as Jacob did with the angel, and refusing to let go. What we don’t wrestle we let go of. Love isn’t the absence of struggle. Love is struggle.”

That sounded like the person I wanted to be, but couldn’t be. It sounded like Max.

HOW TO PLAY NO ONE

I heard the shutter before I saw the photographer. It was the first and only shot of my war.

“Hey,” I said, stomping toward him. “What the hell are you doing?”

Why the hell was I so upset?

“I’m here for the Times,” he said, showing me the press pass hanging from his neck.

“You’re supposed to be here?”

“The consulate gave me authorization, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Well, I didn’t give you authorization to take a picture of me.”

“You want me to delete the photo?” he asked, neither assertive nor conciliatory.

“It’s fine,” I said, “but don’t take any more.”

“I don’t want a problem. I’m happy to delete it.”

“Keep it,” I said. “But no more.”

He walked off to take pictures of other groups. Some of them posed. Some were either unaware of his presence or unwilling to recognize it. My knee-jerk anger — if that’s even what it was — surprised me. But harder to explain was my insistence that he keep the photo he’d taken but not take any more. What two ways was I trying to have it?

My mind wandered to all those years of school portraits: the licked palms wrestling cowlicks under the pretense of a loving stroke; letting the boys watch a cartoon while sliding them into handsome, uncomfortable clothes; clumsy efforts to subliminally communicate the value of a “natural” smile. The pictures always came out the same: a forced grin with unparted lips, eyes vacantly gazing into the haze — something from the Diane Arbus scrap pile. But I loved them. I loved the truth they conveyed: that kids aren’t yet able to fake it. Or they aren’t yet able to conceal their disingenuousness. They’re wonderful smilers, the best; but they’re the very worst fake smilers. The inability to fake a smile defines childhood. When Sam thanked me for his room in my new house, he became a man.

One year Benjy was genuinely disturbed by his school portrait, unwilling to believe that the child in the picture was either him or not him. Max took it upon himself to prod Benjy’s distress, explaining to him that everyone has a living self and a dead self existing in parallel—“kind of like your own ghost”—and that the only time we ever get to see our dead selves is in school portraits. Soon enough, Benjy was crying. In an effort to calm him, I took out my bar mitzvah album. We’d already looked through several dozen photos when Benjy said, “But I thought Sam’s bar mitzvah was in the future.”

At my bar mitzvah party, relatives, friends of my parents, and complete strangers handed me envelopes with savings bonds. When my suit’s jacket pockets started to strain, I’d give the envelopes to my mother, who put them in the purse under her chair. My father and I tabulated the “righteous plunder” at the kitchen table that night. I can’t remember the figure, but I remember that it was evenly divisible by eighteen.

I remember the albumin archipelago on the salmon. I remember how the singer smudged ve-nismecha in “Hava Nagila,” like a kid singing the alphabet, believing that l-m-n-o is one letter. I remember being lifted in the chair, high above the Jewish masses, the coronation of the One-Eyed Man. Back on the parquet, my father told me to go spend a few minutes with my grandfather. I venerated him, as I was taught to, but it was never not a chore.

“Hi, Grandpa,” I said, offering the top of my head for his kiss.

“I put some money into your college account,” he said, patting the empty chair beside him.

“Thank you.”

“Did Dad tell you how much?”

“No.”

He looked to both sides, beckoned my ear to his lips, and whispered, “One thousand four hundred forty dollars.”

“Wow,” I said, reestablishing a comfortable distance. I had no idea if that many dollars justified that presentation, but I knew what was expected of me: “That’s so incredibly generous. Thank you.”

“But also this,” he said, straining to get a grocery bag from the ground. He placed it on the table and removed something wrapped in a napkin. I assumed it was a roll — he often stashed rolls in napkins in bags — but then I felt its weight. “Go on,” he said. Inside was a camera, a Leica.

“Thank you,” I said, thinking the gift was a camera.

“Benny and I went back after the war, in 1946. We thought maybe our family had found a way to survive. At least someone. But there was no one. A neighbor, one of my father’s friends, saw us and brought us to his house. He had kept some of our things, in case we ever came back. He told us that even though the war was over, it wasn’t safe, and that we had to go. So we went. I only took a few things, and this was one of them.”

“Thank you.”

“I sewed money and photographs into the lining of the jacket I wore on the boat. I was so worried that someone would try to steal my things. I promised myself I wouldn’t take it off, but it was so hot, too hot. I slept with it in my arms, and one morning when I woke up, my suitcase was still at my side, but the jacket was gone. That’s why I don’t blame the person who took it. If he’d been a thief, he would have taken the suitcase. He was just cold.”

“But you said it was hot.”

“It was hot for me.” He rested his finger on the shutter release as if it were the trigger of a land mine. “I have only one picture from Europe. It’s of me. It was marking my place in my diary in my suitcase. The pictures of my brothers and parents were sewn into that jacket. Gone. But this is the camera that took them.”

“Where’s your diary?”

“I let it go.”

What would I have seen in those lost pictures? What would I have seen in the diary? Benjy didn’t recognize himself in his school portrait, but what did I see when I looked at it? And what did I see when I looked at the sonogram of Sam? An idea? A human? My human? Myself? An idea of myself? I had to believe in him, and I did. I never stopped believing in him, only in myself.

In his bar mitzvah speech, Sam said, “We didn’t ask for a nuclear weapon, and didn’t want a nuclear weapon, and nuclear weapons are, in pretty much every way, horrible. But there’s a reason people have them, and it’s to never have to use them.”

Billie shouted something I didn’t understand, but I understood the flicker of happiness in Sam’s eyes. The tension in the room flowed to the corners; Sam’s speech divided and redivided into small talk. I brought him some food and told him, “You’re so much better than I was at your age. Or am now.”

“It’s not a competition,” he said.

“No, it’s progress. Come with me for a second.”

“Where?”

“What do you mean, where? Mount Moriah, of course.”

I led him upstairs, to my dresser, and took the Leica from the bottom drawer.

“This was your great-grandpa’s. He brought it over from Europe. He gave it to me on my bar mitzvah and told me that he had no pictures of his brothers or parents, but that this camera had taken pictures of them. I know he wanted you to have it.”

“He told you that?”

“No. But I know that—”

“So you’re the one who wants me to have it.”

Who was leading whom?

“I do,” I said.

He held it in his hands, turned it around a few times. “Does it work?”

“Gosh, I don’t know. I’m not sure that’s the point.”

He said, “Shouldn’t it be?”

Sam had the Leica refurbished; he brought it into the world and it brought him out of Other Life.

He studied philosophy in college, but only in college.

He left the Leica on a train in Peru on his honeymoon with his first wife.

At thirty-eight, he became the youngest judge ever appointed to the Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit.

The boys took me to Great Wall Szechuan House for my sixty-fifth birthday. Sam raised his bottle of Tsingtao and gave a beautiful toast, ending with “Dad, you’re always looking.” I didn’t know whether he meant searching or seeing.

Tamir was sitting on the terminal’s floor, his back against the wall, his eyes on the phone in his hands. I went and sat beside him.

“I’m having second thoughts,” I said.

He smiled, nodded.

“Tamir?”

He nodded again.

“Can you stop texting for a second and listen?”

“I’m not texting,” he said, and turned his phone to face me: a grid of thumbnails of family photos.

“I’m having second thoughts.”

“Only second?”

“Could you talk this through with me?”

“What is there to talk through?”

“You’re returning to your family,” I said. “I would be leaving mine.”

“Would be?”

“Don’t do that. I’m asking for your help.”

“I don’t think you are. I think you’re asking for forgiveness.”

“For what? I haven’t even done anything.”

“Every thought after the first thought will lead you back to Newark Street.”

“That’s not necessarily true.”

“Not necessarily?”

“I’m here. I said goodbye to my children.”

“You don’t owe me an apology,” he said. “It’s not your country.”

“Maybe I’ve been wrong about that.”

“Apparently you were right.”

“And like you said, even if it isn’t my home, it’s yours.”

“Who are you, Jacob?”

For three consecutive years, Max’s eyes were closed in his school portrait. The first time, it was a small disappointment, but mostly funny. The second year, it was harder to excuse as an accident. We talked about why such photos are nice to have, how much his grandparents and great-grandfather cherished them, how it was a waste of money to spoil them on purpose. The morning of picture day that third year, we asked Max to look us in the eye and promise to keep his eyes open. “I’ll try,” he said, his eyes blinking wildly, as if to flush out a fly. “Don’t try,” Julia said, “do it.” When the photos came back, all three boys had closed their eyes. But I’ve never seen more genuine smiles.

“Maybe this is who I am,” I said to Tamir.

“You say that as if you couldn’t choose to be who you wanted to be.”

“Maybe I choose this.”

“Maybe?”

“I don’t know what I should do, and I’m asking you to talk this through with me.”

“So let’s talk it through. Who are you?”

“What?”

“You said, ‘Maybe this is who I am.’ So who, maybe, are you?”

“Come on, Tamir.”

“What? I’m asking you to explain what you meant. Who are you?”

“It’s not the kind of thing that can be articulated like that.”

“Try. Who are you?”

“OK, never mind. I’m sorry I came over here.”

“Who are you, Jacob?”

“Who are you, Tamir?”

“I am someone who goes home, no matter how difficult.”

“Well then, you took the words out of my mouth.”

“Maybe. But not out of your heart. Wherever you go, you won’t be going home.”

When my mother first got sick, she mentioned that my father visited Isaac’s grave once a month. When I asked him about it, he deflected, as if I’d confronted him about a gambling addiction.

“Penance for burying him in America,” he said.

“What do you do there?”

“Just stand around like a jerk.”

“Can I go with you next time?” I asked my father; I told Tamir, “Stay.”

“Then who would go?” Tamir asked.

“No one.”

“Then what would save it?”

“Nothing.”

“Just let it go?”

“Yes.”

I was right: my father cleaned the site of twigs, leaves, and weeds; he wiped down the gravestone with a wet rag he’d brought in a ziplock in his jacket pocket; and from another ziplock he removed photos.

“The boys,” he said, turning them toward me for a moment and then laying them on the ground, facedown, above his father’s eyes.

I’d wanted to make an eruv around the suicides and carry the shame away from them, but how would I bear my own shame? How, coming home from Islip, would I face Julia and the boys?

“It feels like we were burying him five minutes ago,” I said to my father; I said to Tamir, “It feels like we were picking you up at the airport five minutes ago.”

My father said, “It feels like everything was five minutes ago.”

Tamir brought his lips to my ear and whispered, “You are innocent.”

“What?” I whispered, as if I were looking at stars.

“You are innocent.”

“Thank you.”

He pulled back and said, “No, like, too trusting. Too childlike.”

“What, gullible?”

“I don’t know that word.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“Of course Steven Spielberg wasn’t in the men’s room.”

“You made up that whole thing?”

“I did.”

“You knew who he was?”

“You think we don’t have electricity in Israel?”

“You’re very good,” I said.

“I see you,” my grandfather would say from the other side of the glass.

“You’re very innocent,” Tamir said.

“See you,” my grandfather would say.

“And yet we’ve never been older,” my father said, and then chanted the Mourner’s Kaddish.

HOW TO PLAY THE LAST THING ONE SEES BEFORE COMMITTING SUICIDE

Six closed eyes, three genuine smiles.

HOW TO PLAY THE LAST THING ONE SEES BEFORE BEING REINCARNATED

The EMERGENCY exit from MacArthur Airport’s terminal; the EMERGENCY entrance to the world.

HOW TO PLAY SUICIDE

Unbuckle your belt. Slide it back out the five loops of your pants. Wrap it around your throat and tighten, buckle on the back of your neck. Place the other end of the belt over the door. Close the door, so that the belt is held firmly in place between the top of the door and the doorframe. Look at the refrigerator. Allow full body weight to fall. Eight closed eyes.

HOW TO PLAY REINCARNATION

A few months after moving out, on yet another day without a letter in the mailbox on my bedroom door, I was emptying the kids’ hampers and found a poop in a pair of Max’s underwear. He was eleven. I got several such dispatches in the coming weeks. Sometimes I was able to turn the underwear inside out over the toilet, scrub at any stain that was left, and throw them into the wash. Usually they weren’t salvageable.

I didn’t mention it to Dr. Silvers, for the same reason I didn’t mention my persistent throat pain to my actual doctor: I suspected it was a symptom of something that I didn’t want revealed. I didn’t mention it to Julia, because I didn’t want to hear that Max never did it at her house. And I didn’t mention it to Max, because that was something I could spare him. Spare us.

As a child, I used to leave bowel movements on the lilac carpet of my grandfather’s bathroom, a few inches from the toilet seat. It was on purpose. Why did I do such a thing? Why did Max?

I desperately wanted a dog, as a boy, but was told they were dirty. As a boy, I was told to wash my hands before going to the bathroom, because the world was dirty. But I was also told to wash my hands after.

My grandfather mentioned the poops on his floor only once. He smiled, covered the side of my head with his enormous hand, and said, “It’s OK. It’s great.” Why would he say such a thing?

Max never mentioned the poops in his hamper, although he came upon me hanging a pair of his hand-washed underwear on the drying rack and said, “Argus died the day we started coming to this house. Do you think this ever would have felt like home to him?”

HOW TO PLAY MATTERS OF DEATH AND REBIRTH

Never speak about them.

HOW TO PLAY BELIEF

At Julia’s second sonogram, we saw Sam’s arms and legs. (Although he wasn’t “Sam” yet, but “the peanut.”) So began the exodus from idea to thing. What you think about all the time, but can’t — without aids — see, hear, smell, taste, or touch has to be believed in. Only a few weeks later, when Julia was able to feel the peanut’s presence and movements, it no longer only needed to be believed in, because it could also be known. As the months progressed — it turned, kicked, hiccupped — we knew more and more and had to believe less. And then Sam came, and belief fell away — it wasn’t necessary anymore.

But it didn’t fall away completely. There was some residue. And the inexplicable, unreasonable, illogical emotions and behavior of parents can be explained, or partially explained, by having had to believe for the better part of a year. Parents don’t have the luxury of being reasonable, not any more than a religious person does. What can make religious people and parents so utterly insufferable is also what makes religion and parenthood so utterly beautiful: the all-or-nothing wager. The faith.

I watched Sam being born through the viewfinder of a video camera. When the doctor handed him to me, I put the camera on the bed and forgot about it until the nurse came to take him for measuring, or warming, or whatever utterly necessary thing they do with newborns that justifies the teaching of that most important life lesson: everyone, even your parents, will let you go.

But we had twenty minutes with him, so we have a twenty-minute video of the view of the dark window, with the soundtrack of new life — Sam’s new life, ours. I told Sam how beautiful he was. I told Julia how beautiful Sam was. I told her how beautiful she was. All of it was understatement, all of it imprecise — I used that same inadequate word to try to convey three entirely different, essential meanings: beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.

You can hear crying — everyone’s.

You can hear laughter — Julia’s and mine.

You can hear Julia calling me “Dad” for the first time. You can hear me whispering blessings to Sam, prayers: be healthy, be happy, know peace. I said it over and over—be healthy, be happy, know peace. It wasn’t the kind of thing I would say, and I hadn’t intended to say it; the words were drawn from some well far deeper than my life, and the hands raising the bucket weren’t my own. The last thing you can hear on the video, as the nurse taps on the door, is me saying to Julia, “Before we know it, he’ll be burying us.”

“Jacob…”

“OK, so we’ll be at his wedding.”

“Jacob!”

“His bar mitzvah?”

“Can’t we ease into it?”

“Into what?”

“The giving away.”

I was wrong about almost everything. But I was right about the speed of the losing. Some of the moments were interminably long — the first cruel night of sleep training; cruelly (it felt) peeling him off a leg on the first day of school; pinning him down while the doctor who wasn’t stitching his hand back together told me, “This is not a time to be his friend”—but the years passed so quickly I had to search videos and photo albums for proof of our shared life. It happened. It must have. We did all that living. And yet it required evidence, or belief.

I told Julia, the night after Sam’s injury, that it was too much love for happiness. I loved my boy beyond my capacity to love, but I didn’t love the love. Because it was overwhelming. Because it was necessarily cruel. Because it couldn’t fit into my body, and so deformed itself into a kind of agonizing hypervigilance that complicated what should have been the most uncomplicated of things — nurturing and play. Because it was too much love for happiness. I was right about that, too.

Carrying Sam into the house for the first time, I implored myself to remember every feeling and detail. One day I would need to recall what the garden looked like when my first child first saw it. I would need to know the sound of the car seat’s latch disengaging. My life would depend on my ability to revisit my life — there would come a day when I would trade a year of what remained to hold my babies for an hour. I was right about that, too, without even knowing that Julia and I would one day divorce.

I did remember. I remembered all of it: the drop of dried blood on the gauze around the circumcision wound; the smell of the back of his neck; how to collapse an umbrella stroller with one hand; holding his ankles above his head with one hand while wiping the insides of his thighs; the viscosity of A&D ointment; the eeriness of frozen breast milk; the static of a baby monitor set to the wrong channel; the economy of diaper bags; the transparency of new eyelids; how Sam’s hands lurched upward, like those of his falling-monkey ancestors, whenever he was placed on his back; the torturing irregularity of his breathing; my own inability to forgive myself for the moments I looked away and something utterly inconsequential happened, but happened. It happened. All of it. And yet it made a believer out of me.

HOW TO PLAY TOO MUCH LOVE

Whisper into an ear, listen for an echo.

HOW TO PLAY PRAYER

Whisper into an ear, don’t listen for an echo.

HOW TO PLAY NO ONE

The night I came home from Islip was the last night I spent in bed with Julia. She shifted when I got under the covers. She mumbled, “That was a short war.”

I said, “I just kissed the kids.”

She asked, “Did we win?”

I said, “As it turns out, there is no we.”

She asked, “Did I win?”

“Win?”

She turned onto her side and said, “Survive.”

HOW TO PLAY “HERE I AM”

A clause near the end of our legal divorce agreement stated that should either of us have more children, the children we had together would be treated “no less favorably” financially, either in life or in our wills. Despite all the longer thorns, and there were many, this one dug into Julia. But rather than acknowledge what at the time I assumed was the source of her distress — that because of our ages, having more children was realistic only for me — she attached herself to the issue that wasn’t even there.

“I would never, in a million years, remarry,” she told the mediator.

“This doesn’t concern remarriage, but rather having children.”

“If I were to have more children, which I will not, it would be in the context of a marriage, which is not going to happen.”

“Life is long,” he said.

“And the universe is even bigger, but we don’t seem to be getting a lot of visits from intelligent life.”

“That’s only because we’re not in the Jewish Home yet,” I said, trying at once to calm her and to create a bit of innocent camaraderie with the mediator, who shot me a confused look.

“And it’s not long,” Julia said. “If life were long, I wouldn’t be halfway through it.”

“We aren’t halfway through it,” I said.

“You aren’t, because you’re a man.”

“Women live longer than men.”

“Only technically.”

As ever, the mediator wouldn’t take the bait. He cleared his throat, as if swinging a machete to clear a path through our overgrown history, and said, “This clause, which I should say is entirely standard for agreements like yours, won’t affect you in the event that you don’t have any more children. It merely protects you and your children if Jacob does.”

“I don’t want it in there,” she said.

“Can we move on to something genuinely contentious?” I suggested.

“No,” she said. “I don’t want it in there.”

“Even if that means forfeiting your legal protection?” the mediator asked.

“I trust Jacob not to treat other children more favorably than ours.”

“Life is long,” I said, winking at the mediator without moving an eyelid.

“Is that some kind of joke?” she asked.

“Obviously.”

The mediator cleared his throat again and drew a line through the clause.

Julia wouldn’t let it go, not even after we’d removed what wasn’t there to begin with. In the middle of a discussion of something entirely unrelated — how to handle Thanksgiving, Halloween, and birthdays; whether it was necessary to legally forbid the presence of a Christmas tree in either’s home — she might say, “Divorce gets an unfair rap; it was marriage that did this.” Such out-of-context statements became part of the routine — at once impossible to anticipate and unsurprising. The mediator showed an almost autistic patience for her Tourettic eruptions, until one afternoon, when splitting the hairs of medical decision-making in the event that one parent couldn’t be reached, she said, “I will literally die before I remarry,” and, without clearing his throat or missing a beat, he asked, “Do you want me to put in some language legally codifying that?”

She started dating Daniel about three years after the divorce. To my knowledge, which was greatly limited by the kindness of kids who were trying to protect me, she didn’t date very much before him. She seemed to relish the quiet and aloneness, just as she’d always said, and I’d never believed, she would. Her architecture practice flowered: two of her houses were built (one in Bethesda, one on the shore), and she got a commission to convert a grand Dupont Circle mansion into a museum showcasing the contemporary art collection of a local supermarket oligarch. Benjy — who was no less kind than his brothers, but far less psychologically sophisticated — would increasingly mention Daniel, usually in the context of his ability to edit movies on his laptop. That humble skill, which could be learned in an afternoon by someone willing to devote an afternoon to learning it, dramatically changed Benjy’s life. All the “babyish” movies he had been making on the waterproof digital camera I got him two Hanukkahs before were suddenly brought to life as fully realized “adult films.” (I never suggested that the camera should stay at my house, and we never corrected his terminology.) Once, when I was dropping the boys back at Julia’s after a particularly fun weekend of adventures I’d spent the previous two weeks planning, Benjy grabbed at my leg and said, “You have to go?” I told him I did, but that he was going to have a great time and we’d see each other again in just a couple of days. He turned to Julia and asked, “Is Daniel here?” “He’s at a meeting,” she said, “but he’ll be back any minute.” “Aw, another meeting? I wanna make an adult film.” When my car rounded the corner, I saw a man, about my age, in clothing I might wear, sitting on a bench, no reading material, no purpose but to wait.

I knew he went on the safari with them.

I knew he took Max to Wizards games.

At some point he moved in. I don’t know when; it was never presented to me as news.

“What does Daniel do?” I asked the boys one night over Indian. We ate out a lot in those days, because it was hard for me to find the necessary time to grocery shop and cook, but more because I was obsessed with proving to them that we could still have “fun.” And eating out is fun. Until someone asks, “Where are we having dinner tonight?” At which point it begins to feel depressing.

“He’s a scientist,” Sam said.

“But not a Nobel Prize winner or anything,” Max said. “Just a scientist.”

“What kind of scientist?”

“Dunno,” Sam and Max said at the same time, but no one said “Jinx.”

“He’s an astrophysicist,” Benjy said. And then: “Are you sad?”

“That he’s an astrophysicist?”

“Yeah.”

Julia asked a few times if I would go out for a drink with him, get to know him. She said it would mean a lot to her, and to Daniel, and that it could only be good for the boys. I told her, “Of course.” I told her, “That sounds great.” And I believed myself as I said it. But it never happened.

As we were saying goodbye after one of Max’s teacher conferences, she told me that she and Daniel were going to get married.

“Does this mean you’re dead?”

“Excuse me?”

“You would sooner die than remarry.”

She laughed. “No, not dead. Reincarnated.”

“As yourself?”

“As myself plus time.”

“Myself plus time is my father.”

She laughed again. Was her laugh spontaneous or generous? “The nice thing about reincarnation is that life becomes a process rather than an event.”

“Wait, you’re serious?”

“Just stuff from yoga.”

“Well, it flies in the face of stuff from science.”

“As I was saying. Life becomes a process rather than an event. Like that thing the magician told you, about tricks and outcomes. You don’t need to achieve enlightenment, only move yourself closer to it. Only become a bit more accepting.”

“Most things shouldn’t be accepted.”

“Accepting of the world—”

“Yes, I live in the world.”

“Of yourself.”

“That’s more complicated.”

“One life is too much pressure.”

“So is the Marianas Trench, but such is reality. And by the way, what was all that shit about Max being too conscientious?”

“Staying in at recess to go over his homework?”

“He’s diligent.”

“He wants to control what is possible to control.”

“Stuff from yoga?”

“I actually got myself a Dr. Silvers.”

Why did that trigger my jealousy? Because my feelings about her marriage were too extreme to be felt directly?

“Well,” I said, “I believe in a lot of things. But at the very top of the list of things I don’t believe in is reincarnation.”

“You’re constantly coming back, Jacob. Just always as yourself.”

I didn’t ask if the kids knew before me, and if so, for how long. She didn’t tell me when it was going to happen, or if I was going to be invited.

I asked, “Does this mean I’m going to be treated less favorably?” She laughed. I hugged her, told her how happy I was for her, and went home and ordered a video game system, as we’d always agreed we wouldn’t.

The wedding was three months later, and I was invited, and the kids did know before me, but only by a day. I told them not to mention the video game system to her, and that was the actual missing of the mark.

I can’t help but compare it to our wedding. There were fewer people, but many of the same people. What did they think when they saw me? Those who had the guts to approach either pretended there was nothing remotely awkward going on, that we were simply making small talk at the wedding of a mutual friend, or they put their hands on my shoulder.

Julia and I were always good at catching eyes, even after the divorce. We just had a way of finding each other. It was a joke between us. “How will I find you in the theater?” “By being you.” But it didn’t happen once all afternoon. She was preoccupied, but she must also have been keeping track of where I was. I thought about slipping out at various points, but that was not to be done.

The boys gave a charming speech together.

I asked for red.

Daniel spoke thoughtfully, and lovingly. He thanked me for being there, for welcoming him. I nodded, I smiled. He moved on.

I asked for red.

I remembered my mother’s speech at my wedding: “In sickness and in sickness. That is what I wish for you. Don’t seek or expect miracles. There are no miracles. Not anymore. And there are no cures for the hurt that hurts most. There is only the medicine of believing each other’s pain, and being present for it.” Who will believe my pain? Who will be present for it?

I watched the horah from my table, watched the boys lift their mother in the chair. She was laughing so hard, and I was sure that with her up at that vantage we would catch eyes, but we didn’t.

A salad was placed in front of me.

Julia and Daniel went from table to table to make sure they said hello to every guest, and for pictures. I saw it approaching, like the wave at a Nats game, and there was nothing to do but participate.

I stood at the margin. The photographer said, “Say mocha,” which I did not. He took it three times to be sure. Julia whispered to Daniel, gave him a kiss. He walked off, and she took the seat beside me.

“I’m glad you came.”

“Of course.”

“Not of course. It was a choice you made, and I know it’s not uncomplicated.”

“I’m glad you wanted me here.”

“Are you OK?” she asked.

“Very much so.”

“OK.”

I looked around the room: the doomed flowers, sweating water glasses, lipstick in purses left on chairs, guitars becoming detuned against speakers, knives that had attended thousands of unions.

“You want to hear something sad?” I said. “I always thought I was the happy one. The happier one, I should say. I never thought of myself as happy.”

“You want to hear something even sadder? I thought I was the unhappy one.”

“I guess we were both wrong.”

“No,” she said, “we were both right. But only in the context of our marriage.”

I put my hands on my knees, as if to further ground myself.

“Were you there when my dad said that thing? ‘Without context, we’d all be monsters’?”

“I don’t think so. Or I don’t remember it.”

“Our context made monsters of us.”

“No, not monsters,” she said. “We were good, and we raised three amazing kids.”

“And now you’re happy, and I’m still me.”

“Life is long,” she said, trusting me to remember.

“The universe is bigger,” I said, proving myself.

Sea bass was placed in front of me.

I picked up my fork, so as to touch something, and said, “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“What do you tell people when they ask why we got divorced?”

“It’s been a long time since anyone has.”

“What did you used to tell them?”

“That we realized we were just really good friends, good co-parents.”

“Aren’t those reasons not to get divorced?”

She smiled and said, “I had a hard time explaining it.”

“Me, too. I always sounded like I was hiding something. Or guilty about something. Or just fickle.”

“It’s not really anyone else’s business.”

“What do you tell yourself?”

“It’s been a long time since I asked myself.”

“What did you used to tell yourself?”

She picked up my spoon and said, “We got divorced because that’s what we did. It’s not a tautology.”

While the waiters were bringing dinner to the final tables, the first tables were being brought dessert.

“And the boys?” I asked. “How did you explain it to them?”

“They never really asked me. Sometimes they’d trace the outline, but they’d never enter. With you?”

“Never once. Isn’t that odd?”

“No,” she said, a bride in her dress. “It’s not.”

I looked at my boys being silly children on the dance floor and said, “Why did we put them in the position of having to ask?”

“Our love for them got in the way of being good parents.”

I ran my finger around the rim of my glass, but no music came.

“I’d be a much better father if I could do it again.”

“You can,” she said.

“I’m not going to have any more kids.”

“I know.”

“And I don’t have a time machine.”

“I know.”

“And I don’t believe in reincarnation.”

“I know.”

“Think we could have made it?” I asked. “If we’d tried harder? Gone back into things?”

“Made what?”

“Life.”

“We made three lives,” she said.

“Could we have made one?”

“Is that the question?”

“Why not?”

“Making it. Not failing. There are more ambitious things to do with life.”

“Are there?”

“I hope so.”

On the drive to the party, I’d listened to a podcast about asteroids, and how unprepared we are for the possibility of one heading toward us. The physicist being interviewed explained why none of the possible contingencies would work: nuking it would just turn a cosmic cannonball into cosmic buckshot (and the debris would likely re-form in a few hours due to gravity); robotic landers could deflect the asteroid with mounted thrusters, if such things existed, which they don’t and won’t; similarly implausible would be sending up an enormous spacecraft as a “gravity tractor,” using its own mass to pull the asteroid away from Earth. “So what would we do?” the host asked. “Probably nuke it,” the physicist said. “But you said it would only break it into lots of asteroids that would hit us.” “That’s right.” “So it wouldn’t work.” “Almost certainly not,” the physicist said, “but it would be our best hope.”

Our best hope.

The expression didn’t awaken anything in me at the time. It took Julia’s hope attaching itself to the other terminal of my mind to jump-start my sadness.

“Remember when I smashed the lightbulb? At our wedding?”

“Are you really asking me that?”

“Did you like that moment?”

“That’s a funny question,” she said. “But yes, I did.”

“Me, too.”

“I don’t even know what it’s supposed to symbolize.”

“I’m glad you asked.”

“I knew you would be.”

“So, some people think it’s to remind us of all the destruction that was necessary to bring us to the moment of our greatest happiness. Some people think it’s a kind of prayer: let us be happy until the shards of this lightbulb reassemble. Some people think it’s a symbol of fragility. But the interpretation I’ve never heard is the most straightforward one: this is what we’re like. We are broken individuals, committing to what will be a broken union in a broken world.”

“It’s less inspiring your way.”

It’s not, I thought. It’s more inspiring.

I said, “There is nothing more whole than a broken heart.”

“Silvers?”

“In fact, the Kotzker Rebbe.”

“Listen to you.”

“I’ve been studying with the rabbi who did my grandfather’s funeral.”

“Curiosity converted the cat.”

“Meowzel tov.”

How I loved her laugh.

I looked at Julia, and in that moment I knew we never could have made it. But I also knew that she had been my best hope.

“Isn’t it strange?” I said. “We had sixteen years together. They felt like everything when we were in them, but as time passes they will account for less and less of our lives. All of that everything was just a … what? A chapter?”

“That’s not how I think about it.”

She tucked her hair behind her ear, as I’d seen her do tens of thousands of times.

I asked, “Why are you crying?”

“Why am I crying? Why aren’t you crying? This is life. I’m crying because this is my life.”

Just as the sound of the scooper going into Argus’s dog food used to bring him running from wherever in the house he was, the boys seemed almost telepathically drawn to their mother’s tears.

“Why’s everyone crying?” Sam asked. “Did someone win a gold medal?”

“Are you sad?” Benjy asked me.

“You don’t have to worry about me,” I told him.

“It’s OK,” Julia said. “Let it be OK.”

There was nothing more painful than being the center of attention at my wife’s wedding, save for continuing to think of her as my wife.

“Overjoyed?” Max asked, handing Benjy the maraschino cherry from his Shirley Temple.

“No.”

“Flabbergasted? Cattywampussed? Diaphanous?”

I laughed.

“So, what?” Sam asked.

What? What was the feeling? My feeling?

“Remember when we talked about absolute value? For physics, maybe?”

“Math.”

“And do you remember what it is?”

“Distance from zero.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Benjy said.

Julia pulled him onto her lap and said, “Neither do I.”

I said, “Sometimes feelings are like that — not positive, not negative, just a lot.”

No one had any idea what I was talking about. I didn’t know what I was talking about. I wished I could get Dr. Silvers on the phone, put him on speaker, and ask him to explain me to myself and my family.

After the divorce, I had a series of brief relationships. I was lucky to have met those women. They were smart, strong, fun, and giving. My explanations of what went wrong always came down to an inability to live fully honestly with them. Dr. Silvers pushed me to explore what I meant by “full honesty,” but he never challenged my reasoning, never suggested that I was self-sabotaging or creating definitions that were impossible to meet. He respected me while feeling sorry for me. Or that’s what I wanted him to feel.

“It would be very difficult to live like that,” he told me. “Fully honestly.”

“I know.”

“You would not only open yourself to a great deal of hurt, you would have to inflict a great deal of hurt.”

“I know.”

“And I don’t believe that it would make you happier.”

“I don’t, either.”

He swiveled his chair and looked out the window, as he often did when thinking, as if wisdom could be found only in the distance. He swiveled back and said, “But if you were able to live like that…” And then he stopped. He removed his glasses. In my twenty years of knowing him, it was the only time he’d ever removed his glasses. He held the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “If you were able to live like that, our work here would be finished.”

I was never able to live like that, but our work finished a year later, when he had a fatal heart attack while jogging. I got a call from one of the therapists who had an office in the same suite. She invited me to come and talk about it, but I didn’t want to talk to her. I wanted to talk to him. I felt betrayed. He should have delivered the news of his death.

And I should have delivered the news of my sadness to the kids. But just as his death precluded Dr. Silvers from sharing his death with me, my sadness kept my sadness from them.

The band members had assumed their positions, and forgoing any musical foreplay, went straight into “Dancing on the Ceiling.” The sea bass that was once in front of me no longer was; it must have been taken away. The glass of wine that was once in front of me no longer was; I must have drunk it.

The boys ran to the dance floor.

“I’ll slip out,” I told Julia.

“Islip,” she said.

“What?”

“Islip out.” And then: “I’m sorry. I didn’t—”

When we visited Masada, my father filled his pockets with rocks, and without knowing what he was doing, knowing only my need for his approval, I filled mine. Shlomo told us to put them back. It was the first time I’d ever heard him say no to one of us. He said that if everyone took a rock, Masada would be dispersed across mantels and bookshelves and coffee tables, and there would be no Masada. Even as a boy, I knew that was ridiculous — if anything is permanent, mountains are.

Islip out.

I walked to my car beneath a sky clotted with near-Earth objects.

Somewhere in the wedding guest book are my children’s signatures. They developed their handwriting on their own. But I gave them their names.

I parked out front with two wheels on the curb. I might not even have closed the front door behind me.

Here I am, writing in my half-buried office while my family is dancing.

How many synagogues did Sam end up building? Did any survive? Even a wall?

My synagogue is made of words. All the spaces allow it to shift when the ground moves. At the threshold of the sanctuary is the mezuzah, a doorframe nailed to the doorframe: the growth rings of my family. Inside the ark are the broken and the whole: Sam’s crushed hand, beside the hand that reached for his “I-know”; Argus lying in his own shit, beside the ever-panting tail-wagger who would pee as soon as Max entered the house; Tamir from after the war, beside Noam from before the war; my grandfather’s never-unbending knees, beside my kiss on his great-grandson’s nonexistent boo-boo; my father’s reflection in a mirror draped with black cloth, beside my sons falling asleep in the rearview mirror, beside the person who will never stop writing these words, who spent his life breaking his fists against the door of his synagogue, begging to be allowed in, beside the boy who dreamed of people fleeing the enormous bomb shelter for the safety of the world, the boy who would have realized that the heavy, heavy door opens outward, that I was inside the Holiest of Holies all along.