All I Love and Know by Judith Frank Page B

version of Social Security. He put his hand on his pained heart. Maybe he was romanticizing her, but she seemed to understand how much he felt like an outsider.
    â€œWon’t you check up on us at all?” he asked. “We’ll need a lot of checking up on. We’re a big mess.”
    She nodded without smiling. “Sure I will,” she said.
    IN THE LIVING ROOM, Daniel was listening to talk of revenge. They just don’t want peace! They don’t understand peace. The same old words. Ilana’s father and the principal from Ilana’s school were huddled together, comparing the moments each had known that Arafat was not a viable bargaining partner. For Yaakov it was Camp David, where Arafat was offered a state on a silver platter and walked away from it—Daniel could have uttered the exact cliché before it came out of Yaakov’s mouth. But the principal, an overbearing and pompous man with a knitted kipa , whom Yaakov clearly deferred to, clucked and shook his head; naturally, he had known way before that point. Daniel heard from other conversations that the army was already engaged in a retaliation operation called Righteous Sword. It made him miserable.
    He looked around for Matt and saw him out on the balcony, talking with the social worker. He knew how to make himself at home; Daniel never had to worry about that, which was a big bonus in a boyfriend. Matt would come home from parties where he’d known no one, and report things to Daniel about his friends that Daniel had no idea about. He watched him now, holding a cigarette away from himself so the smoke wouldn’t get into his hair, and nodding as Shoshi spoke earnestly to him. His hair was shaggy—they’d left just before he was due for a haircut—and somehow looked beautiful; he looked most beautiful when careless about his appearance.
    The familiar sense of strange marvel that he was with a man like Matt came over him now. Daniel had always imagined himself with someone more like Jonathan, who was moderately good-looking and with whom he shared a love of George Eliot and John Donne, and who, when they left a movie together, always had a corroborating opinion of it. Matt’s judgments were very strong, but always a little weird. He judged the performances of the actors in movies, instead of the narrative or the images.
    But for all of Matt’s love of crappy movies and reality TV and the same hunky movie stars every other gay man in America had a fetish for, he had excellent instincts about fairness and social justice. Unlike Daniel, he had grown up as a pretty queeny kid, unable to conceal his difference from the other boys, and that had forced him to hone his ability to sniff out piety and hypocrisy, and the violence underlying them. Matt was a political animal. He woke up and read the paper cover to cover; he read political memoirs and contemporary books about politics as avidly and indiscriminately as he did the memoirs of movie stars. His favorite person in the whole world was Bill Clinton, whom he called Shakespearean.
    If Matt understood these conversations, he’d rip them apart with indignation and incisiveness. But, Daniel wondered, was that even what he needed? Even thinking about it made his hackles rise.
    He looked around the living room at the sober conversations, checked on his parents to see whether they needed any translation help. They were sitting stiffly on the couch, ignored by the other mourners either because of the language barrier or because the guests couldn’t face talking to Joel’s mother. Lydia had her gracious, attentive social face on—her game face, Daniel thought, and it broke his heart. He went and perched on the edge of the sofa next to her, and she reached up and rubbed his arm. A small group of people from Joel’s work was gathered in the corner talking to the reporter, who seemed like a decent enough guy. He had asked Daniel about what Joel was like as