Read Online Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer - Free Book Online

with a dismissive grin.
    “That’s right.”
    She handed him the knob: “Mark, it’s your interior monologue calling. He was mugged by your id in Nigeria and needs you to wire it two hundred fifty thousand dollars by the end of the day.”
    “Maybe it sounds silly. Maybe I sound selfish—”
    “Yes and yes.”
    “—but I lost what made me
me
.”
    “You’re an adult, Mark, not a Shel Silverstein character contemplating emotional boo-boos on the stump of a tree whose trunk he used for a dacha, or whatever.”
    “The harder you push back,” he said, “the more sure I am that you agree.”
    “Agree? Agree with what? We’re talking about
your
life.”
    “We’re talking about the endless clenched-jaw worrying about the kids all day, and the endless replaying of unhad fights with your spouse all night. You wouldn’t be a happier, more ambitious and productive architect if you were alone? You wouldn’t be less
weary
?”
    “What, me weary?”
    “The more you joke, the more sure—”
    “Of course I would.”
    “And vacations? You wouldn’t enjoy them more alone?”
    “Not so loud.”
    “Or someone would hear that you’re human?”
    She ran her thumb over the head of the knob.
    “Of course I’d miss my kids,” she said. “You wouldn’t?”
    “That’s not what I asked.”
    “Yes, I’d prefer to have them with me and them on vacation.”
    “Tough sentence to assemble?”
    “I would choose their presence. If it were a choice.”
    “Is it the never sleeping in, the never enjoying a meal, or the hypervigilance at the edge of a beach chair that your back will never touch?”
    “It’s the fulfillment that has no other source. The first thought I have every morning, and the last thought every night, is about my kids.”
    “That’s my point.”
    “It’s
my
point.”
    “When do you think about yourself?”
    “When I think that one day, a few decades from now, which will feel like a few hours from now, I’ll be facing death all alone, except that I won’t be all alone, because I’ll be surrounded by my family.”
    “Living the wrong life is far worse than dying the wrong death.”
    “No shit! I got the same fortune cookie last night!”
    Mark leaned closer to Julia.
    “Just tell me,” he said, “you wouldn’t like to have your time and mind back? I’m not asking you to speak badly of your husband or kids. Let’s take it for granted that you’ve never cared about anything half as much, and couldn’t care about anything more. I’m not asking for the answer you want to give, or feel you have to. I know this is hard to think about, much less talk about. But honestly: you wouldn’t be happier alone?”
    “You’re assuming happiness is the ultimate ambition.”
    “I’m not. I’m just asking if you would be happier alone.”
    Of course it wasn’t the first time she’d confronted the question, but it was the first time that it had been posed by someone else. It was the first time she didn’t have the ability to evade it. Would she be happier alone?
I am a mother
, she thought—not an answer to the question being asked, and no more her ultimate ambition than happiness, but her ultimate identity. She had no lives to compare with her life, no parallel aloneness to measure against her aloneness. She was simply doing what she thought was the right thing to do. Living what she thought was the right life.
    “No,” she said. “I would not be happier alone.”
    He ran his finger around a platonically spherical knob and said, “Then you have it all. Lucky you.”
    “Yes. Lucky me. I do feel lucky.”
    A long few seconds of touching cold metal in silence, and then Mark asked, “So?” and placed the knob back on the counter.
    “What?”
    “So what’s your news?”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “You said you had news.”
    “Oh, right,” she said, shaking her head. “No, it isn’t news.”
    And it wasn’t. She and Jacob had been talking about thinking about looking for a