ARI HESITATED TO PRESS SEND. “I don’t want to stalk the guy.”
“How can such a subtle, careful thinker as you be so dense about affairs of the heart?” said M, a bit of a gossip like most poets. “It’s as if there are only two choices, to be a stalker or a monk, and nothing in between.”
“It’s not that,” said Ari. “There are things you don’t know. I’m not ready.”
But M reached over Ari’s frozen fingers, went ahead and sent off the message. “You needed a little boost,” he said, kissing Ari on the cheek.
Ari stared at his words, now lit up in irrevocable blue. “Get out,” he said. M seemed to think he was joking, so Ari said, “I didn’t mean it as a request, M. I’m ordering you to get out of my fucking study.”
“Touchy,” said M in a small, cowed voice and obeyed. Ari buried his head in his hands, sat alone in his dark study. He felt like crying, but no tears came. Even with his eyes covered, he could feel the faint blue light of the laptop screen on his face. How did I end up with this, this person? We don’t belong together, like a mismatched pair of socks that happened to fall behind the dryer while doing the laundry. For too long, I’ve been lying to myself and to the world, boasting about our complimentary differences, his ying to my yang.
When he removed his hands, Ari discovered, to his surprise, that Justin had written him back almost immediately. Wow, yes, that is a coincidence. Yes, saying hi sounds great. Yes, here, this is my phone number. Go ahead and send me a text that Sunday. We’ll definitely meet up. Yes, yes, and yes.
That word, “definitely.” It was so startling. It sounded so definite.
NOW THAT VALENTINE’S DAY HAS FINALLY arrived, a few things have changed. For one, M is on suspension for making unwanted overtures toward a student and Ari’s been assigned to his review committee.
Ari had complained to his department chair, who wears thick socks with hiking sandals and has an enviable mop of thick gray on white hair. He’s an expert on the history of American dissent. “He’s my husband. How can I be impartial?”
“You weren’t actually married, not legally,” was the reply, which was true. They’d never undergone the formal procedure at City Hall, had never seen the need for it. Rather, they had had a ceremony in the gay synagogue, conducted by a real rabbi, just without benefit of a real civil license. M was against the idea of a civil marriage because it smacked too much of heteronormativity, and yet because he’d been born into a family of evangelical Christians, he loved the idea of being married by a rabbi. As for Ari, he was worried about the messy ramifications of legal marriage if he and M ever separated—all too prescient—though he wanted to mark their sense of commitment, no, not commitment, but achievement, with something tangible, like a high school diploma.
“Even so,” says Ari. “This is a very delicate matter.”
“It isn’t a judicial proceeding,” said his chair. “It’s a university committee, and we’ve got to appoint someone to serve on it. You’re the new guy, so it’s your turn.” He faux-punches Ari in the arm. “Just review the facts, and then make a recommendation.”
“To end my ex’s professional career? Oh, it’s that easy?”
The chair offers a helpless shrug. He knows the answer as well as Ari: of course not. Nothing in life that means anything is easy.
“There’s got to be some university policy about conflict of interest,” Ari continues.
“No, none,” he says cheerfully.
There’s an awkward pause as they stand in the chair’s office, which strangely is smaller than Ari’s office, though it has the better view. The chair wants to head out, to go home for the night to kick off his hiking sandals, maybe to watch the Woodstock documentary on Netflix for the umpteenth time while smoking pot and eating vegan brownies or something, and Ari’s blocking the door. Before stepping aside, Ari can utter his get-out-of-jail-free excuse, the ironclad one that will exempt him from this hellish duty of judging his friend, of hearing the nasty particulars of the story.
The thought is tempting for a few seconds. But invoking that excuse would be the coward’s way out, positively ungentlemanly. It’s the kind of crap his students would pull to get out of a reading assignment. “I’m triggered! I’m triggered!” No, he must not sink so low. He’s not triggered. He’s just fine. All that mess was over two decades ago.
Isn’t that why Ari steps aside, allows the chair to leave his own office?
SO NOW HE’S GOING TO THIS fucking basketball game all by himself without M at his side to coach him on what he must say, how he must behave. For instance, what would M have thought about bringing along this piece of Pesek Zman candy?
When Ari was in high school, he used to find Pesek Zman at a Jewish bookstore near home. Thanks to Amazon, there’s no need to trek out to a Jewish bookstore—a good thing, since he has no clue where there are Jewish bookstores in the DC area, and he has no desire to set foot inside one.
It really is a stupid idea, getting this candy, and now giving it to Justin, in public, no less. Like some dewy-eyed high school kid. Clearly Justin has moved on, onwards and upwards. How will it look if Ari appears not to have moved on?
But there’s no backing out. He’d promised to meet Justin, and if he doesn’t show up, they’ll never meet again. Until now, he hadn’t been aware he’d been hoping they might again.
Ari has stashed the bag of Pesek Zman on the bookshelves in his study, where in addition to the texts of his trade, he keeps multiple copies of his own two books, plus the journals in which he’s published his articles—his small paper castle that eventually will turn to yellow and then to dust and blow away.
Somewhere behind these books, there lurks another story, as yet unprinted, yet fully written, a story Ari carries with him everywhere, though he’s shared it with no one. Or at least, not the full version. During his first visit to a local therapist, he’d given her the short and sweet abstract of it, followed by “But I’m over all that now.”
She’d spent a couple of years showing him that wasn’t true.
Another story, another time, another Ari.
SELF-DEFENSE
DAD DIDN’T APPROVE OF SURPRISES. EVEN the Soviet Union’s recent collapse bothered him because it had happened without warning. A year later, he still grumbled that the whole thing was likely a plot to catch the Free World off our guard.
So when my father came home early from his dental clinic to take me for a drive, saying, “Come on, Ari, I’ve got a surprise for you,” I didn’t believe him. I figured it was another trick to get me out of my room with the blinds drawn and the lights low.
We headed down Northwestern Highway, toward rather than away from Detroit. Though we rarely went to the city, I’d heard all the Detroit stories on the news and repeated over dinner, stories of gangs and drugs, rap music and sawed-off shotguns, welfare queens and gold teeth. I wanted to scream, stop, stop! But Dad would have driven further, faster, to prove I didn’t have to be afraid, that past was not prologue, and from now on, I could trust him to keep me safe.
As the Mile Roads nudged closer to the Eight Mile border—Twelve, Eleven, even Ten—I gripped my seat cushion and bit the inside of my sweatshirt, impractical for a hot, humid Michigan summer afternoon, but for the past few months that was my uniform: puffy sweatshirts over extra-large T-shirts and track pants that ballooned around my legs, anything that swallowed the contours of my body.
Shortly before we reached Eight Mile, Dad steered our blue Chevy into a tired-looking strip mall. My father, a pediatric dentist, wasn’t quite successful enough to afford a Mercedes or a Beamer like the ones many of our neighbors drove. Even if he could