Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer Read Free Book Online Page B

counter.
    “How’s it going?” she asked.
    “It’s going,” he said, in precisely the way he most hated.
    “Progress?”
    “Yes, just not clear it’s in the right direction.”
    “Is there a right direction?”
    He wanted to say, “Just say, ‘You’re my writer.’ ”
    But he couldn’t cross the distance that didn’t exist. The vastness of their shared life made sharing their singularity impossible. They needed a distance that wasn’t a withdrawal, but a beckoning. And when Jacobreturned to the line the next morning, he was surprised and saddened to see that it was still great.
    Once, Julia was washing her hands at the bathroom sink, after having cleaned up yet another Argus shit, and as she observed the soap forming webs between her fingers, the sconce flickered but persisted, and she was unexpectedly overwhelmed by a kind of sadness that didn’t refer to or mean anything, but whose weight was punishing. She wanted to bring that sadness to Jacob—not with the hope of his understanding something that she couldn’t understand, but with the hope that he might help carry something that she couldn’t carry. But the distance that didn’t exist was too great. Argus had shit on his bed, and either didn’t realize it or couldn’t be bothered to move; it got all over his side and tail. While Julia scrubbed it off with human shampoo and a damp T-shirt from some forgotten soccer team that once broke hearts, she told him, “Here we go. It’s OK. Almost finished.”
    Once, Jacob considered buying a brooch for Julia. He had wandered into a store on Connecticut Avenue—the kind of place that sells salad bowls turned from reclaimed wood, and salad tongs with horn handles. He wasn’t looking to buy anything, and there was no upcoming occasion for which a gift would have been appropriate. His lunch date had texted that she was stuck behind a garbage truck, he hadn’t thought to bring along a book or newspaper, and every chair in Starbucks was occupied by someone who would finish his thinning life before finishing his thinly veiled memoir, leaving Jacob no place to go deep into his very thin phone.
    “Is that one nice?” he asked the woman on the other side of the case. “Dumb question.”
    “I love it,” she said.
    “Right, of course you do.”
    “I don’t like that,” she said, pointing at a bracelet in the case.
    “It’s a brooch, right?”
    “It is. A silver cast of an actual twig. One-of-a-kind.”
    “And those are opals?”
    “They are.”
    He walked to another section, pretended to examine an inlaid cutting board, then returned to the brooch. “It’s nice, though, right? I can’t tell if it looks costumey.”
    “Not at all,” she said, taking it from the case and putting it on a velvet-lined tray.
    “Maybe,” Jacob said, not picking it up.
    Was it nice? It was risky. Did people wear brooches? Was it cornily figurative? Would it end up in a jewelry box, never to be seen again until it was bequeathed as an heirloom to one of the boys’ brides so that she could put it in a jewelry box until it was one day passed down again? Was seven hundred fifty dollars an appropriate price for such a thing? It wasn’t the money that concerned him, it was the risk of getting it wrong, the embarrassment of trying and failing—an extended limb is far easier to break than a bent one. After lunch, Jacob went back to the store.
    “Sorry if I’m being ridiculous,” he said, returning to the woman who had been helping him, “but would you mind putting it on?”
    She took it back out of the case and pinned it to her sweater.
    “And it’s not heavy? It doesn’t pull on the fabric?”
    “It’s quite light.”
    “Is it fancy?”
    “You could wear it with a dress, or on a jacket, or sweater.”
    “And you would be happy if someone gave it to you?”
    Distance begets distance, but if the distance is nothing, what is its origin? There was no transgression, no cruelty, not even indifference. The original