Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer Read Free Book Online

Jacob’s laptop in bed, Valentine’s Day) or muscling through the self-consciousness and fear of embarrassment, which usually led to big orgasms and no kissing. They still occasionally said things that, the moment after coming, felt humiliating to the point of needing to physically remove oneself to get an unwanted glass of water. Each still masturbated to thoughts of the other, even if those fantasies bore no blood relationship to lived life and often included another other. But even the memory of that night in Pennsylvania had to be withheld, because it was a horizontal line on a doorframe:
Look at how much we’ve changed
.
    There were things Jacob wanted, and he wanted them from Julia. But the possibility of sharing desires diminished as her need to hear them increased. It was the same for her. They loved each other’s company, andwould always choose it over either aloneness or the company of anyone else, but the more comfort they found together, the more life they shared, the more estranged they became from their inner lives.
    In the beginning, they were always either consuming each other or consuming the world together. Every child wants to see the marks ascend the doorframe, but how many couples are able to see progress in simply staying the same? How many can make more money and not contemplate what could be bought with it? How many, approaching the end of child-bearing years, can know that they already have the right number of children?
    Jacob and Julia were never ones to resist convention on principle, but neither could they have imagined becoming quite so conventional: they got a second car (and second-car insurance); joined a gym with a twenty-page course offering; stopped doing their taxes themselves; occasionally sent back a bottle of wine; bought a house with side-by-side sinks (and house insurance); doubled their toiletries; had a teak enclosure built for their garbage bins; replaced a stove with one that looked better; had a child (and bought life insurance); ordered vitamins from California and mattresses from Sweden; bought organic clothing whose price, amortized over the number of times it was worn, all but required them to have another child. They had another child. They considered whether a rug would hold its value, knew which of everything was best (Miele vacuum, Vitamix blender, Misono knives, Farrow and Ball paint), consumed Freudian amounts of sushi, and worked harder so they could pay the very best people to care for their children while they worked. They had another child.
    Their inner lives were overwhelmed by all the living—not only in terms of the time and energy required by a family of five, but of which muscles were forced to strengthen and which withered. Julia’s unwavering composure with the children had grown to resemble omnipatience, while her capacity to express urgency to her husband had shrunk to texted Poems of the Day. Jacob’s magic trick of removing Julia’s bra without his hands was replaced by the depressingly impressive ability to assemble a Pack ’n Play as he carried it up the stairs. Julia could clip newborn fingernails with her teeth, and breast-feed while making a lasagna, and remove splinters without tweezers or pain, and have the kids begging for the lice comb, and compel sleep with a third-eye massage—but she had forgotten how to touch her husband. Jacob taught the kids the difference between
farther
and
further
, but no longer knew how to talk to his wife.
    Their inner lives were nurtured in private—Julia designed houses for herself; Jacob worked on his bible, and bought a second phone—and a destructive cycle developed between them: with Julia’s inability to express urgency, Jacob became even less sure that he was wanted, and more afraid of risking foolishness, which furthered the distance between Julia’s hand and Jacob’s body, which Jacob had no language to address. Desire became a threat—an enemy—to their domesticity.
    When Max was in