Free All I Love and Know by Judith Frank Page B

to take them both right now!”
    â€œNo, really,” Daniel said, laughing.
    â€œNo,” Joel said, “we’re not worried about that.”
    THE GUY BEHIND THE counter at the makolet did a bewildered double take when he saw Daniel, who murmured, “His twin brother.” The grocer told him that he participated in his sorrow, the Hebrew way of expressing condolence. Daniel laid milk and bread on the counter, stood pondering the different kinds of coffee on the shelf and hesitantly selected one labeled for a French press. Before paying, he stepped back outside to pick up a paper from the newsstand. The front page of Ma’ariv made his heart jump. There was a picture of Matt, handsome and imperious, his face wrapped in dark glasses, his hand on Daniel’s back. It had been taken outside the airport; the rest of the family was huddled with the social worker, only the backs of their heads visible. He picked up a copy of the Jerusalem Post , which ran the same picture, only beneath the fold, and went back in to pay.
    As he got into the car, the driver’s seat already hot in the morning sun, he thought about his prickliness, his lack of generosity, around Matt these days. An ethic of rigorous self-examination had made him ask himself over the years whether he had just jumped at the chance of having any boyfriend, living as he did in a town that was a mecca for lesbians—a town that posted on the municipal parking garage a sign reading Northampton: Where the coffee is strong and so are the women —but something of a wasteland for gay men. Over and over, he had come to the position that while Matt wasn’t the man he’d expected to love, life sometimes sent you something wonderful you’d never imagined. Now all he could think was that, given the choice between Joel dying and Matt, he would have chosen Matt to be the one to die. It was a thought that had come to him more than once, and its randomness, its sheer primitiveness, bewildered and horrified him. How could you think that about the man you loved? What did it mean about the quality of his love for Matt?
    When he returned home, Matt was up, sitting with Lydia at the kitchen table, eating a piece of toast. Daniel felt his heart hurtle toward him in compensatory love and remorse. “Check this out,” he said, tossing the Ma’ariv onto the table. Matt looked at it and his eyes widened. “Shit,” he breathed.
    â€œWhat?” Lydia asked. He turned the paper toward her and she studied it for a moment. “You look like a movie star caught by paparazzi,” she said.
    Matt flushed. “What does the caption say?”
    Daniel stooped over the paper. “ ‘Television personality Joel Rosen’s family arrived at Ben Gurion Airport from Newark, New Jersey, yesterday, en route to identifying his remains.’ ” His finger dropped to a headline under the fold. “Wait, there’s a little story here about Joel and his show. There’s apparently going to be a profile of him in the Friday paper.” He looked toward the guest room. “Where’s Gal? Still sleeping?”
    Matt nodded.
    â€œWe’re going to have to get her up for the shiva,” Lydia said.
    Sam came in wearing chinos and a white shirt, his eyes bruised and hollow-looking. He peered down at the paper on the table and frowned. “Is that Matt?” he asked. He bent over, squinting, then looked up. “Look, Matt, you made it into the newspaper.”
    Matt looked at Daniel, who looked up from the paper and gave him a shrug. “I didn’t do it on purpose,” Matt said lamely. He was thinking how bummed they must be to have his be the face of the Rosen family.
    Daniel’s fingers were running under the lines of a story in the paper, his lips moving. He tsked, suddenly irritable, and looked up again. “These profiles of the dead,” he said. He read, “ ‘Aviva was always smiling,