“Slept late again?” I ask.
She nods and raises a hand to shade her face from the noon sun flooding the glass. “Can I copy your notes?”
I don’t bother to keep the irritation out of my voice. “This was an important review session.”
“I’ll bet it was.” She smiles blandly. “I was out late last night with Yoram.”
“So I guess you and Orit both need my notes?” Orit has missed so many Sunday classes that I would rib her for taking American weekends, giving herself two days off instead of the Israeli one and a half. I would rib her, that is, if she and I were still friends.
“No.” Michal yawns. “Just me. Orit never studies. I don’t know how she manages, but she always does fine.”
I shrug: It makes no difference to me whether Orit wants my help.
We walk past the cafeteria and out the swinging doors toward the rock garden at the center of a stone-paved plaza. “I thought you didn’t think Yoram was anything special,” I say as I set my backpack on a bench.
Michal takes her lunch out of her bag. “He’s cute. And he likes to dance with me.”
“Anything else?”
She pauses, considering. “Hell no. But we’re having fun.” She chuckles, but I don’t join in. I’m thinking about the way Gil held me when he came home yesterday afternoon.
Just because I missed you, he said. Isn’t that ridiculous? I’m an idiot. Just because I missed you so much, I came home from work early. You scare me, Maya. Why did I scare him, I needed to know. Because I can be more open with you than with anyone else I’ve ever met, that’s why. Because you’re misguided enough to love me. As I groped for a reply, I blushed hard. All my years of dancing, I realized, hadn’t prepared me for the weight of one admiring gaze. Whoo whoo! I mimicked his Israeli accent. He stared at me. Uneasy with his silence, I tried again. Whoo whoo, I sang out. Is that scary enough?
We poured our laughter into each other’s eyes.
“I guess I just don’t see the point,” I argue aloud to Michal, who has eaten half of her sandwich and is eyeing the other half.
“Don’t see the point in what?”
“In going out with someone if, you know, you’re not all-the-way about him.” I pull my lunch out of my backpack.
Michal is looking at me. She drops the remainder of her sandwich into its bag.
I busy myself with my lunch, wishing I hadn’t spoken. When I raise my head Michal is still watching me. “The difference between me and romantics like you”—she doles out the words as if laying bricks—“is that I don’t look for some guy to be my whole world. Or try to be some guy’s, for that matter. Orit was right.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Michal smirks, but her eyes water. She speaks rapidly, as if afraid of her own spite. “‘Oh, Gil will tell me what to do.’ ‘Gil is always right.’ ‘Gil knows best.’ ‘No one else can understand Gil like I do.’”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” My voice is hollow.
“Maybe I’m just sick of this high-and-mighty shit, that’s all.”
My sandwich tastes like dust. I force myself to chew.
There is a commotion across the plaza; a lecture has let out and dozens of students exit the buildings. “Who for soccer?” one student is calling. A group detaches and moves down the broad steps; high overhead, a ball spins against the pale blue of the sky.
Michal blows her nose into her napkin, then winks at me. “Hey,” she says.
I say nothing.
“Hey,” she repeats, and I know that this is her apology. I watch my hands fold my lunch bag into neat squares, smaller and smaller. “How about those lecture notes?” she says.
I give her my notebook without a word.
While she copies, I think about the question I was going to ask but now won’t. I wanted to know whether it’s very unusual in Israel for someone to have no dealings with his family. Every Israeli I’ve met spends Friday nights with grandparents, Saturdays at the beach with cousins. But Gil has told me he never sees any of his father’s family. And last night, when he hung up the phone after only a few terse responses, it occurred to me that he never goes to see his mother, although she lives in Jerusalem.
“That was your mother, wasn’t it?” I asked him.
“Unfortunately,” was his reply. She had called a few times since we’d moved to the apartment, Gil told me when I pressed him. His face tightened as he spoke of her. She was always calling him, but he didn’t see the use in talking anymore. All she wanted to do was hassle him. He was sick of her distorted stories and half-truths, sick of her accusations every time he did something that reminded her of his father. And he’d told her so. Any contact they’d had since then had been from her side.
“When did you stop calling her?”
“February.”
“Just-before-we-met February?”
Gil’s mouth clamped shut. Right away I regretted pushing. Shouldn’t I understand this kind of family quarrel, after all?
When Michal has finished copying, she runs the tip of her pen slowly up and down the wire of her spiral notebook. “Orit misses you, you know?”
“Yeah.” The whisper is not what I intended. “Will you tell her hello for me?”
Later, when I sleep, I dream of rain. I am in a house with paper-thin walls, and outside the grass is thick and cool. A soft rain is falling, sweeping closer every minute. At last it blows sideways against the walls. My head resounds with its patter.
I wake feeling light and expectant, as if a gentle hand has passed once over my forehead and I am awaiting its return. The clock reads two thirty-five a.m. Beside me, Gil breathes evenly. I lie without moving. I imagine that I am in my old house, in White Plains. My parents are both here, my mother is well, she tells me something I cannot quite hear.
The sound of sweeping rain has not disappeared along with my dream, although now that I’m awake it’s quieter, and more tentative. Moving with care so I won’t disturb Gil, I kneel on the mattress and look through the window. Outside, the heavy sheath of the palm tree rustles again. The dead layered fronds, hanging like a beard below the new growth, lift, sway, and shimmer with each sustained breeze. Here, so far beneath the clouds passing across the Jerusalem night, the wind dips down to touch every building and treetop and stone. The fronds rustle once more: a silvery hush just beyond my window, like a promise being spoken.
Night tests my watchfulness, hut I am strong and do not sleep. These stones and I remain awake beneath the high moon. I must forget the weariness in my own bones and learn stony patience. At last the sky pales, this neighborhood wakes. Daylight taunts my burning eyes.
She is afraid of me, the American is, you can see it in how she looks at me. As if I am the animal behind bars, and she, she the foot soldier come with gun to stare before setting such trapped things free. Today when she tromps up from the garden I am in the stairwell. My key falling through my fingers so I have to bend and bend again to pick it up, her feet stamping closer. The key at last in the lock, but she arrives before I can turn it.
I flatten myself against the wall as she passes so I won’t touch her, and she pauses to gawk. If she’s searching for a number on my arm she’s a clumsy monster, all of them clumsy monsters, doesn’t she know not every camp tattooed. But being American she has no intelligence, despite so much intelligence.
She opens her mouth and speaks a strange Hebrew. “Good afternoon,” she says.
I close my eyes. Press against the wall. If I am very, quiet, she will soon not be able to see me. I will become a shard, I shall fall away like a dried-out husk. Americans cannot see what is silent. Soon I will vanish and then she will vanish as well, to her American tasks.
It is working. I hear her turn away, I hear the pat of one hand on the rail. But there is no sound of shoes on stairs.
“Are you all right?” From only a few paces away, she addresses me.
My eyes closed, the voice scalds my brain. I feel tha
t I have shaken my head. I open my eyes and she is still there, her face a pale floating thing. Only this time it is shimmering, merging with other faces, and I cannot understand why this American is wearing the mouth of Feliks, the eyes of Halina. Laughing eyes, mouth. The hair, the hair Lilka. The eyes, mouth, Karol? I do not know what to do with her face, it swings and sways before me. I stare at it, I strain to read its message, the message I have awaited. I draw ragged breath, I attend with all my strength.
But now it is only the girl again, the American, the soldier with gun, the girl with flat footsteps and no knowing about things that everyone knows, numbers and burning and waiting for rain.
The key turns in my hand, turns in the lock, and I fall through a doorway into stifling dark. I shut the door behind me, and years pass before I hear the American walk away.
Gil steps into the apartment, drops his bag to the floor, and stands without a word. Gradually his gaze passes down the hallway and falls on me, sitting on the living room sofa.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he says.
The soup I heated for our dinner waits cold in the darkened kitchen; it’s been more than two hours since I turned off the flame. I am holding a book whose first page I’ve read half a dozen times.
“Bad day, huh?”
“Bad day?” Gil’s speech is so clipped I have trouble understanding him. “A very bad day, you might say.”
A breeze ripples the lace curtain that divides the living room from the balcony. I watch the moths clinging to the outside of the curtain, drawn from the dark street to our lamplight. I wait for him to speak again.
“It’s not that I’m complaining,” he continues in the same curiously tight voice. “It’s only that Roni is trying to back out on his promise to give me a show. It’s only, Maya, that I ask for a fair shot in life. And no one wants to give it to me.”
He moves into the living room and sits on the other end of the sofa, just out of my reach. He doesn’t speak. I shift closer to him and touch his shoulder, and he flinches.
My voice is reasoned and gentle. “Honey,” I begin.
“No English,” he mutters, and buries his hands deep in his hair. Staring at the square of tile between his feet, he curses with quiet ferocity. “The bastard. The damn bastard. He thinks the world should fall at his feet just because he was a pilot. Says he was looking up my records and wants to know why I didn’t discuss my Profile 21 discharge when he hired me.” Gil stands and begins to pace. His Hebrew thickens, accelerates. “Says he’ll have to think about whether I should be representing the gallery. And am I certain I can manage the strain of preparing an exhibit?” He moves with his hands clasped viselike, across his forehead. “Son of a whore.”
I watch him pass from the center of the living room to the verge of the balcony, then retrace his steps.
“What’s a Profile 21?”
“A Profile 21?” He spins on his heel and regards me for an instant, then resumes his progress across the floor. “A Profile 21 means you couldn’t hack it. A Profile 21 means even if you tell the truth, no one needs to listen anymore. A Profile 21, Maya”—he slows, and his next words are a cruel jeer—“means nobody loves you.”
He stands in the center of the living room, absolutely still. His eyes are closed. He lowers his hands.
I walk to his side. Words of consolation and curiosity offer themselves simultaneously in my mind. I place a light hand on his shoulder.
He jerks away from me and then the back of his hand smashes into my cheek. The floor tears out from under my feet and I fall against the drawing table behind me, first with my shoulders, hard, and then with my head. My weight knocks the table off balance. I grab for it clumsily, as if I might save it from toppling.
It hits the floor with a slam. Gil’s sketches are scattered across the tiles. I lie on the floor, too, a burning sensation on my face.
The room is quiet. Close to my shoulder is a drawing of two boys dancing. Their faces are hidden, but their ink sidelocks swing with the motion of their dance.
I lift my head and look at Gil. He is facing away from me. With a few long, angry steps he reaches the entryway. He hesitates at the door; then he unlocks it and is gone. The door stands open behind him.
Carefully I rise and walk to the entryway. I close the door and lock it. Then I unlock it, remembering that Gil might not have his key.
I sit back down on the floor with the sketches around me. I do not disturb anything, to the right or to the left. Watching the moths flutter and land on the curtain, I sift Hebrew words. The right combination, I am certain, will explain this.
What I want to say is, I didn’t mean to make you. What I want to say is, You shouldn’t have.
What I want to say groups and scatters around me. I know that something very important must be remembered, but I cannot think what it is. I listen for his footsteps, and the possibility that he might not return makes my heart knock in my chest.
In Purchase in December, Ina said that the director was counting on me for solos; he couldn’t understand why I’d suddenly stopped coming to rehearsal. Ina knew I was busy with my preparations to go abroad, but didn’t I miss hanging out with the troupe? Didn’t I miss hanging out with her? Besides, the dance director said he’d take me back. “And girl,” Ina said, “even if you’ll never have a dance career with that ankle, you’ll sure look sweet on that stage. I’ll try not to be jealous.”
My face throbs with heat, but I don’t move to get ice.
Today’s date is July thirteenth. The Purchase semester is long over, and I realize I don’t know what the troupe has planned for the fall. I’ve lost touch with everyone from school. I will write to Ina and ask. I will call Ina and ask. I will call her and say, Please let the director know I’m coming back to dance. I will tell her, I miss you, too.
I gather myself, checking my body for damage.
It occurs to me that I may have done something wrong. That I must have. There’s no other explanation.
Then it occurs to me that my mother, who fights to protect people who are victims and can’t help themselves, would be ashamed of me lying here on this floor, doing nothing to help myself.
So I rise. I cross to the bathroom and I lean over the sink and douse my face with cold water. I straighten, and pat my skin dry with a towel. Then I aim a gaze at myself in the mirror. I take my makeup bag from the cabinet.
Years of performing have left me with enough makeup and enough know-how to hide any imperfection, at least until a show is over and the audience gone. Standing before the mirror, I choose to leave the mark on my cheek untouched. I erase the lines of fear around my eyes, disguise my pallor with blush. As I evaluate my reflection, I experience a sense of control I haven’t felt since those lonely, punishing hours so long ago in the studio. I am an old man, I am a janitor, I am a dancer, I am whatever I decide to be. I am all right. I know I must have made a mistake, which Gil will explain just as soon as he explains his own mistake. Because I’m sure of one thing—it was a mistake. If Gil loves me, he can’t mean to hurt me. That wouldn’t be love. I don’t think that would be love.
So what I need to figure out is only one thing: Has he stopped loving me?
When I’ve finished, I put away my makeup and return to the living room. I wait. I am patient and calm. If only Gil will come. Soon. If only he will step into the stairwell, climb to our apartment, bearing his affection in outstretched hands.
It’s more than an hour later when the front door opens. I’ve dozed on the couch, my fingers laced into each other so tightly that for a moment I can’t unlock them.
He is crying. I stand and, as he stares at me, I wait. His eyes linger a long while over the mark on my cheek. Then he stumbles toward me. He embraces me until my neck aches. “I love you,” he says, and I am crying hot tears although I don’t know why. Then tell me you never meant to do it, I want to say. I’ll believe you.
He lets go of me, pulling back to look once more. There are shadows under his eyes an
d he blinks in the light, but he’s smiling at me as though he knows some wonderful secret. He takes my hand and leads me around the apartment, turning out all the lights until every room is dark. When he pulls me toward the bedroom, he is tender. He kisses my shoulders, my neck, my ears, and the sound of his kisses shuts out everything else. Seating me on the bed, he kneels to undress me. With each piece of clothing he looks up, and his expression asks, And this? And this? and each time I nod faintly, watching him work. He undresses himself in silence.
I can see his eyes shining in the darkness as if he never wants to stop looking, looking and looking at me, as if he is scarcely restraining tears of joy. He is sorry, he does not have to say so because it is in every touch. Tell me you never meant to do it, I want to whisper, but he doesn’t read my mind. He loves me, this he tells me once more. And the gentleness in his fingertips promises everything. He loves me, I explain to myself; he didn’t mean to hurt me.
When he moves on top of me there is no sound other than his breathing and the hush of his skin sliding against mine, and when he comes to rest he is a pulse beating inside me, the heartbeat of a small frightened animal.
It took me too long, too long to see. But now I understand, and happiness fills my heart and makes each heavy task lighter.
I have read the first sign.
All week long they told me. Prepare. Flitting through the shutters of this apartment that I have closed against the sunlight. Prepare. Feliks Lilka, Halina. Prepare, they urged me. But I, I did not know. I did not see. I followed them about the room, I bumped my shoulder on furniture and scraped my knee on the floor, but they would not tell me where to look. For her signs.
And then, a night of swift breezes and cats wailing and American fighting upstairs. One crash and one set of footsteps down the stairwell, these things made two; the sound of one sink running made three. Later, the stifling of an American sob made four, five, six. My hands filled to brimming with this new information. Why should an American girl cry like that?
From a Sealed Room Page 14