yuvi zalkow

When my wife comes into the room and sees me in my underwear, with my $30 Lamy pen in my fist, and standing on my desk, she isn’t terribly impressed with me and my work habits.

My home office is the smallest room in the house, but it still feels like a lot to take in from ten feet above. I thought that my angst would weaken up at this altitude.

“Jesus, Yuvi,” my wife finally says, “you’re getting awfully desperate.” Julia shakes her head in that way that she can shake it, and then reaches up to smack me on the ass in that way she can smack me.

“Not only that,” she says, “but your underwear is torn in the back. Why won’t you throw them away? They’ve been with you three times as long as I have. No wonder they’re torn.”

“Hush!” I say. “I’m trying to work.” And my wife heads for the kitchen to make herself a BLT.

She has never been supportive of my creative process.

She is also what my mom would call a real gentile.

From the kitchen, my wife asks me if I want a sandwich and I say that I do, but I beg her not to use mayonnaise or bacon. My words feel more profound when I’m standing on a desk, everything I say seems confident and proper, I wonder how many things I could get done from up here: ask for a bank loan, submit a book proposal, pray to my dead father, ask my wife to take off her clothes and dance the way she did that one time.

My wife claims that without those two ingredients a BLT is worth nothing. I ask her if she’d use the word bupkis instead of nothing. And when I don’t hear a response from the kitchen, I threaten that she’s too gentile for me.

And then she yells out, “Kush meer in toches,” which is Yiddish for “kiss my ass.”

I explain to her that an LT isn’t so far away from a BLT. It’s two-thirds complete I say.

This is when she comes back into the room. Her hair is gentile red and she has gentile freckles and she wrinkles her gentile forehead when she’s annoyed with me. Or when she’s worried about her brother’s health. Big issues and little issues all do the same thing to her face.

“You’re wrong,” she tells me from down there where all the mortals live. “You’ve destroyed the whole beauty of it.” It’s as if we’re talking about the Mona Lisa and not some absurd Protestant excuse for a sandwich. Imagine calling something beautiful that has neither pastrami nor rye bread.

But I agree with her and let her make me a BLT so that she’ll leave me alone. And then I come down from the desk to walk with the mortals.

I was the one who named her younger brother Shmendrik. Why else would a thirty-five year old man from Iowa have a name like that? In Yiddish, this means someone who is clueless. If I didn’t like him so much I would never give him a name like that.

Ever since my agent told me that I need to write a novel, that my short stories aren’t cutting it, that they’re fine as silly little perverse stories to go in silly little perverse magazines, but that they don’t add up to much, my writing has frozen up. What I’m writing these days is bupkis.

I’ve decided that I’m willing to lose three fingers and six toes for something to appear on the page. I’d take four toes off one foot and two off the other, so at least one foot would still have a majority of toes intact.

When I told my wife what my agent said, my wife made it sound simple. “So write a novel,” she said. And when I told her that I can’t write a novel, she said, “So to hell with your agent. Keep writing perverted stories.”

I hate how she makes things so simple. She’s always trying to solve my problems. My people don’t tend to solve problems that easily. We don’t even want to solve problems that easily. My people suffer. We’re experts at suffering.

“Oh, hush with you and your people,” my wife keeps telling me. “You’re no more Jewish than Soon-Yi.”