and settle his own mind, he felt—like a physical pressure at the base of his throat—the sharp desire for another looping dialogue with Masoud.
He began heading uptown. Bringing awareness to each precious step, he noticed how his arms and legs moved in effortless symmetry, as if in time to a nursery rhyme. One began to run through his head: London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling . . . Maybe he would walk until all the anger drained away and he wearied, and then he wouldtake the subway back downtown toward the studio apartment. Or hop a taxi if he felt like it. When Masoud took Jonas’s wallet, he gave Jonas fifty bucks, like an allowance, which Jonas had in his back pocket now. At this point, why save money? Masoud had called it his emergency fund, but the irony of that almost made Jonas laugh, even at the time. The only real emergency was the one Jonas would trigger, and then miss.
He saw a woman ahead of him pausing in front of a store, the only person he’d seen hesitating on the street this morning. She was digging in a big leather purse, and when she lifted her head, he stopped short. It was his mother. God, what horrible, clumsy timing; what would he say? He felt a mounting panic.
But only for a second did she look like his mother, and then she glanced down the street, meeting his eyes, and she looked nothing like his mother, who was more fine-boned and favored flowing, rainbow-colored clothes, and besides, had reddish hair these days.
Jake and Carol. Carol and Jake. When they were young, Jonas’s parents must have been something. They must have thought the very linking of their names was a prayer. They were, he imagined, so juicy once. He envisioned his mom, the bohemian potter busy at her wheel, his father, the struggling painter before the canvas, the two of them breaking from work to meet in a collision of limbs and laughter.
Jonas had a vague childhood memory of some late-night giggling between them. He remembered the curve of his mother’s arm embracing both father and son. He remembered sitting at the wooden table with his father, eating slices of his mother’s whole-grain bread and listening to her sing while she showered in the bathroom off the kitchen. Jake and Carol. Hippies trying to grow up in their own way.
But most of that had faded by the time he was five or six. What heremembered then was the mood in his house transitioning from steamy to sterile, which was a loss but manageable, and then to nasty, which was not. In the black period, Jonas’s Sunday mornings were punctuated by the sound of yelling and the scent of bacon, which his mother said his father cooked because she hated the smell, which may have been true, since two or three strips invariably ended up in the trashcan, uneaten. After several months, the yelling gave away to a silence that vibrated, that seemed to him briefly hopeful before it was replaced by sentences that began, “Well, your father believes . . .” or “Your mother thinks . . .” Differences Jonas hadn’t even known about, seemingly significant but in ways he couldn’t understand, emerged in discussions that each of them had with him alone. His mother, it turned out, loved to read, while his father gravitated toward theater. His father longed to see Venice, and his mother wanted to return to Paris. His mother was a committed atheist, his father the son of Hasidic Jews. Who had known all this mattered?
Not long afterward, his father vanished from their Upper West Side apartment in one last spasm of yelling, and by the time Jonas was ten, his father owned a gallery on Lexington Avenue, with large paintings that seemed to have been thrown on the ivory walls in haste. The haphazard charm of the gallery soon attracted a throng of unconventional young art-lovers. The paintings were not by his father, as Jonas thought when he first saw them, but by artists his father represented in his new incarnation. “Up-and-coming” was the phrase his father
He began heading uptown. Bringing awareness to each precious step, he noticed how his arms and legs moved in effortless symmetry, as if in time to a nursery rhyme. One began to run through his head: London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling . . . Maybe he would walk until all the anger drained away and he wearied, and then he wouldtake the subway back downtown toward the studio apartment. Or hop a taxi if he felt like it. When Masoud took Jonas’s wallet, he gave Jonas fifty bucks, like an allowance, which Jonas had in his back pocket now. At this point, why save money? Masoud had called it his emergency fund, but the irony of that almost made Jonas laugh, even at the time. The only real emergency was the one Jonas would trigger, and then miss.
He saw a woman ahead of him pausing in front of a store, the only person he’d seen hesitating on the street this morning. She was digging in a big leather purse, and when she lifted her head, he stopped short. It was his mother. God, what horrible, clumsy timing; what would he say? He felt a mounting panic.
But only for a second did she look like his mother, and then she glanced down the street, meeting his eyes, and she looked nothing like his mother, who was more fine-boned and favored flowing, rainbow-colored clothes, and besides, had reddish hair these days.
Jake and Carol. Carol and Jake. When they were young, Jonas’s parents must have been something. They must have thought the very linking of their names was a prayer. They were, he imagined, so juicy once. He envisioned his mom, the bohemian potter busy at her wheel, his father, the struggling painter before the canvas, the two of them breaking from work to meet in a collision of limbs and laughter.
Jonas had a vague childhood memory of some late-night giggling between them. He remembered the curve of his mother’s arm embracing both father and son. He remembered sitting at the wooden table with his father, eating slices of his mother’s whole-grain bread and listening to her sing while she showered in the bathroom off the kitchen. Jake and Carol. Hippies trying to grow up in their own way.
But most of that had faded by the time he was five or six. What heremembered then was the mood in his house transitioning from steamy to sterile, which was a loss but manageable, and then to nasty, which was not. In the black period, Jonas’s Sunday mornings were punctuated by the sound of yelling and the scent of bacon, which his mother said his father cooked because she hated the smell, which may have been true, since two or three strips invariably ended up in the trashcan, uneaten. After several months, the yelling gave away to a silence that vibrated, that seemed to him briefly hopeful before it was replaced by sentences that began, “Well, your father believes . . .” or “Your mother thinks . . .” Differences Jonas hadn’t even known about, seemingly significant but in ways he couldn’t understand, emerged in discussions that each of them had with him alone. His mother, it turned out, loved to read, while his father gravitated toward theater. His father longed to see Venice, and his mother wanted to return to Paris. His mother was a committed atheist, his father the son of Hasidic Jews. Who had known all this mattered?
Not long afterward, his father vanished from their Upper West Side apartment in one last spasm of yelling, and by the time Jonas was ten, his father owned a gallery on Lexington Avenue, with large paintings that seemed to have been thrown on the ivory walls in haste. The haphazard charm of the gallery soon attracted a throng of unconventional young art-lovers. The paintings were not by his father, as Jonas thought when he first saw them, but by artists his father represented in his new incarnation. “Up-and-coming” was the phrase his father
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