by Yael Hedaya
“Okay,” Shira replied feebly, “but he has to be smart.”
“Of course he’s smart. Would I set you up with a dumb guy?”
“But he’s not brilliant, is that what you’re saying?” Shira could already taste the rejection, and it was not as sweet as it had been when she was younger. But not bitter either, just bland.
“He doesn’t read philosophy.”
“Me neither, but does he read books?”
“I don’t know what he reads, I’ve never asked him.”
“But you’ve been to his house; have you ever looked at his bookshelves?”
“No, but he has books. I’m sure I’ve seen a few books there.”
Eitan suggested they meet at his place. He was sick of cafés and pubs, he said, adding, “But if you’re uncomfortable with that, we can meet wherever you like.” She wondered if he was a cheapskate but agreed, and just to be safe she arranged for them to meet on a Saturday afternoon, before dark, so the meeting wouldn’t have any romantic undertones.
When he opened the door for her, she saw the snacks he had prepared on the coffee table in the living room: a dish of sweet pastries, a plate of borekas, a bowl of cashews and pistachios, two bottles of beer, and a bottle of white wine, still sweating from the fridge. He said he didn’t know what she liked; there was also some orange juice. The coffee table was so loaded with good intentions that for a moment it seemed as if it were all these refreshments that had been waiting for her rather than Eitan, who stood next to her shyly and asked her to sit down. She was already imagining this man, who had pretty eyes and strange hair, rushing to the store after their phone conversation and buying food for the date, along with the weekend newspapers that were arranged in a pile on the floor, and she hated herself because, instead of enjoying the refreshments laid out on the table for her, she was seeing her host buying them, and it was not him she was seeing but his endeavor, as if it were a separate human being—one she didn’t like.
She sat down on the couch and put her bag on the floor. He asked what she wanted to drink and she asked for coffee; she regretted it immediately—the other drinks waiting on the table looked suddenly abandoned. She said she would actually like some beer instead, but Eitan said he’d be happy to make her some coffee, and he was going to make some for himself anyway. He said there was instant and Turkish, and she said instant would be great, and he asked if she preferred a mug or a cup, and she said it didn’t matter. He went into the kitchen and emerged a few seconds later, asking, “Are you sure? Because some people have preferences.” She said that as far as coffee was concerned, she had none, but to make things easier for him, she said, “I’ll have a cup.” He went back into the kitchen and came out carrying a tray with two cups of coffee and a little dish with flower-shaped biscuits with jam filling, covered with powdered sugar, which reminded her of her childhood and made her smile.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Nothing. I used to love those biscuits when I was little.”
Eitan looked at them worriedly. “I don’t know why I bought them. They just looked good. There are other things if you feel like it.”
Shira leaned over and took a biscuit. “No, I love these.”
She ate two biscuits and sipped her coffee, and he asked if it was all right, and she said it was great and could she smoke. He said he didn’t smoke but it didn’t bother him, and he looked a little disappointed. He went into the kitchen again and came back with a huge glass ashtray that looked like crystal. The ashtray must have belonged to someone else, perhaps the previous tenants, perhaps his parents, much like the old china cabinet in the living room; behind its glass doors Shira noticed a set of the Encyclopedia Hebraica and a book of photographs from the Six-Day War.
Eitan sat down opposite her on an old armchair, leaned forward, and took a biscuit. He held it gingerly between his fingers, and when he put his hand down on his knee a little cloud of powdered sugar scattered over his jeans.
He was thirty-four, four years older than Shira. He was a computer programmer and was very excited, he told her, when their common friend had told him Shira was a writer. He had always admired creative people, he said, and had always wanted to write. Shira asked why he didn’t, and he said it probably wasn’t enough of a burning passion with him, and besides, he had no talent. Shira asked how he knew that if he’d never written; she could already feel the first tinglings of the aggression she sprayed like tear gas in the faces of men she found either very smart or not smart enough. Eitan replied, “I just know.”
“I haven’t really written yet either,” Shira said.
“But you will,” he asserted. When she asked how he knew, he said again, “I just know,” and he really did, in much the way that he turned out to know other things about her. Two weeks later, when they slept together for the first time, he knew what she liked and that she was surprised because she was expecting it to be bad. And in the morning he knew to tell her, “I know I’m not your type,” and he knew it would make her look at him differently, because there is something winning, even for a moment, about someone who amazes you in bed at night and in the morning tells you he knows he’s not your type. He knew everything he needed to in order to form a relationship and stay in it long enough to gather more knowledge, but he never managed to compile all that knowledge even into the frame of a puzzle, while to Shira it seemed she had finished his entire puzzle within seconds. The more he tried, straining with loving violence to force the wrong pieces together, the more he hurt them both.
But that Saturday afternoon, among the overwrought refreshments and the restrained conversation, something normal developed between them.
Eitan told her about his old girlfriend, who had left him two years ago and got married in the meantime. “And how about you?” he asked. He was referring to her past, and she didn’t know what to say, because she knew her past wouldn’t be a past until someone became her present. For five years now, since she started studying at the university, she had been having an affair with a guy who was having three such affairs at the same time. Idan had studied history and was already a lecturer now and kept complaining that he didn’t want an academic career. He was good-looking and brilliant and awful in bed. Every time he slept with her he led her to understand it was the last time—not just with her but with them all, all the other women whose existence he never hid from her. He told her about his other women as if she were a disinterested party—as if he himself were a disinterested party. He was sick of everyone wanting something from him, even sex, because there was no warmth to speak of. “I’m a cold person,” he claimed. His love of himself was enough for him, until he felt like celebrating something or needed consolation, two situations that were identical for him. Then he would phone Shira, or Ravit, who was an eighteen-year-old dancer, or Karin, a married pediatrician, and say, “I’m depressed.” Then he would ask, “So, what are you doing tonight?” Shira didn’t know what the other women said, but she always replied, “Nothing.” She assumed Ravit worshiped him and that he himself was in love with Karin, and from what he told her she knew that the dancer played hard to get, and the doctor was unavailable anyway, and she didn’t know exactly who she was in this quadrangle, which seemed more like a pyramid to her, with her at the bottom. When she asked herself what she saw in Idan and what the other two saw in him, she had no answer. She knew, in fact, that the question itself was irrelevant; there are those, like Idan, who tend to take and accumulate—loves and crises, homemade dramas, and people like her—and there are those, like her, who tend to give and lose in silence.
Even now, as she sat with Eitan, who kept holding the biscuit between his fingers and looking as if he had forgotten about it or perhaps regretted taking it, sensing that if it crumbled, their entire afternoon would disintegrate, Shira felt she wanted to lose him. The generous refreshments and the perfect hosting seemed suddenly like an attempt to distract her from what he was incapable of giving, and she was impatient to get home and phone Idan an
d ask how things were and hear him complain that he was busy. “I’m beat,” he would say, as he always did when he didn’t want to see her. “How are you?” he’d ask, and she’d say she was fine and would be about to ask him if he wanted to go see a movie, but he would quickly say, “So listen, let’s talk later, I have to make some calls. What are you doing tonight?” She would say, Nothing, and he would say, “Aren’t you writing?” She would say she wasn’t and would ask, “So what are you doing tonight?” He would say he didn’t know; he might watch TV or read some articles or maybe go to sleep early because he was exhausted. She would ask if he wanted to meet, and at that second Idan would have a call on the other line, and even if he didn’t there would be the air of a bothersome third party between them, and he’d say, So we’ll talk later, but they wouldn’t.
Idan always pretended to be interested in her writing; when they met, he made her swear she’d let him be her first reader. When she gave him a few pages she’d written, he left them sealed in an envelope on the backseat of his car. A few months later, on the way to a party, she leaned over and took the envelope and said, “I’m taking this back, ’cause I’ve changed everything now.” He had said okay and asked if she had a cigarette.
Eitan asked what she was thinking about and she said, “Nothing.”
“You look as if you’re someplace else.”
She smiled. “No, I’m completely here.”
“It’s embarrassing, these dates.”
“Yes, kind of.” She thought about other blind dates she’d had, and about a few one-night stands, and about Idan, and they all seemed like a terrible discord in her life—or perhaps not discord, she now thought, but part of her routine, like this afternoon.
Eitan looked at her as she floated away from him on the couch, and when she took another cigarette out he quickly leaned over, took her lighter, and lit it for her. She smiled and thanked him and imagined what he would be like in bed. He asked if she wanted some more coffee, and she said, “Why not?” even though she was already planning to leave. He got up and went into the kitchen, happy to have a task, and she looked at the clumsy ashtray and thought: He’ll be bad. She heard a glass shatter in the kitchen, and Eitan hurried through the living room to the balcony to get a broom and dustpan. She asked if she could help, and he said he was used to it, he was always breaking things; not a day went by when he didn’t break something. He went back into the kitchen. She got up and followed him and he said, “Don’t worry about it,” but she stood in the doorway and watched him sweep up the fragments and gather them into the dustpan with one expert sweep. When he bent down, his shirt climbed up and she looked at the small of his back. He had a nice skin tone. She said she also broke things all the time. As he knelt, he looked at her standing at the door, smoking, and said, “You don’t look like you do,” and now in his voice there was something less effortful. She asked what someone who broke things looked like, and he said, “I don’t know, maybe more clumsy.” She was flattered because she was clumsy and broke things all the time. She thought about Idan; although she had been sleeping with him for five years with a regularity dictated by him, she had never seen him break anything. They were always in the living room in front of the TV or in bed; the kitchen did not exist in Idan’s life, and the kitchen was her favorite place.
She examined Eitan’s kitchen, which was long and narrow. It had a little table with two folding chairs, and on the table was a white tablecloth with a print of two black dogs, and salt and pepper shakers, utility bills, and crumbs. The old cabinets were painted yellow and blue, and there was a half-covered pot on the stove with a ladle sticking out. Eitan filled the kettle and took another cup out of the cabinet, and Shira asked what was in the pot.
“Chicken soup. Are you hungry?” She said she wasn’t, but she was always curious about what people were eating, and he said he was too. “I always think everyone else is eating better food than I am.” She said, Me too, and suddenly they had something in common. She wondered if he was also constantly hungry like she was, and she went over to the pot and lifted the lid and peeked in. Eitan said, “It came out pretty well.” She asked who made it, and he leaned on the counter and said, “I did. Are you sure you don’t want any? I’ve got some crackers as well.” His voice now had a tone of seduction, and Shira smiled and said she’d like some crackers, without any soup, and Eitan took a glass jar out of one of the cabinets. He opened it with a pop and gave it to her, and she took a handful. He put the jar on the counter and said, “Take as many as you want. I have more.” He threw a cracker into his mouth, and when the water had boiled he made her some coffee. She leaned against the counter and ate one after another of the crackers, watched him go to the fridge and lean down to get the milk, pour it into the glass, put it back into the fridge, throw the teaspoon into the sink, and turn around, holding the glass, ready to go back into the living room. But she didn’t want to go back, she wanted to stay in the kitchen—she no longer saw effort but just the movements of his body, and she was attracted to him. There was something so clean about him, as if he had just come out of the shower, unlike Idan, who reeked of cigarettes and smoke. She suddenly noticed the biscuit lying on the edge of the counter, and she was happy for him because he’d finally managed to get rid of it, and she said maybe she would try a little soup after all.
( 6 )
After they broke up. Eitan would call her every so often and ask that they meet and talk. She usually refused, saying it wasn’t a good idea to reopen wounds that hadn’t yet healed; she meant his wounds, because she herself did not feel wounded at the time. Sometimes, when he insisted, she agreed, and he would turn up at the new apartment she’d rented on Borochov Street.
They talked about the good reviews her book got, and Eitan said how happy he was for her and asked if she felt different now that she had accomplished what she’d always wanted. She said she didn’t, that she probably still hadn’t grasped the accomplishment, and that perhaps in fact there was no accomplishment. He said he understood her, that the truly great and critical things in life were difficult to grasp; he meant their separation. They sat in a kitchen where they both felt alien, and she thought Eitan looked strange in her new landscape, like a beloved armchair or bureau that suddenly seems smaller in a different space.
During the first weeks after the breakup, they had a few sexual encounters that were full of guilt and blame, and in the mornings Eitan would get up and leave with a look on his face that said he could not understand why he had to go. On every morning they both wondered, separately, how to say goodbye: with the kind of kiss they had at night, or with a little kiss of the kind the morning dictated, or perhaps a symbolic caress, because a handshake was out of the question. All this made the doorway partings a sad circus, with Eitan leaning in to her face and kissing the cheek turned to his lips, or Shira embracing him as he stood frozen, his arms at his sides between hers, and the second he acceded and lifted his hands to hold her face he encountered an elbow accidentally raised. This went on until the great separation abruptly swallowed up all the little ones, and Eitan stopped calling.
The novel was the kind of love story she wished she could have. A man and a woman meet one night in the ER, after being injured in separate motor accidents. They both have only scratches and bruises, but as they wait for hours for a doctor to examine them, they have a long slow conversation—a DNA conversation, she called it, like two children showing each other cards from some collection and discovering they both have the same ones.
She started writing the book when she and Eitan moved in together. It happened quietly, without warning: One morning, after having their coffee in the kitchen, Eitan kissed her, promised to cook dinner, and left for work, and Shira sat down at the computer and started to write. It happened the next morning too, and the next day, and went on for three years, with a continuity and naturalness that seemed strange and even slightly disappointing after so many years of planning. She had always pictured the moment it would occur as a dr
amatic instant of shock, but the writing was not dramatic or shocking—it did not change her life but simply became a part of it, shirking the great responsibility with which it had been saddled.
Every morning, after he went to work, she felt she was betraying Eitan, because the story she was writing was about her but not about him. When she gave it to him to read—he always waited impatiently for pages each time she finished a chapter—he was impressed by her writing and sometimes, in bed, before he fell asleep, he hugged her and said he liked her characters, that they reminded him of her and himself.
They lived in an apartment with two bedrooms, one of which was her study. Every so often she worked on translations she was given, but most of the time she wrote, riding a long wave of lack of sensations, which was sometimes pleasant and sometimes scared her. Eitan worked twelve-hour days at an IT company in Herzliya, and when he came home he sprawled on the couch and asked her to come and sit with him and tell him what she’d done all day and how her work was progressing. She told him, but in her mind she always conducted other dialogues, more interesting ones, with a different man whom she didn’t know. When she finished writing, she realized that the novel was, in some ways, her farewell letter to Eitan.
The confidence she had then that she’d done the right thing—confidence she now thought she’d never again have about anything—was the fuel that drove her in the months following the breakup. She was busy with the novel and its success: she gave interviews to the press, made occasional appearances on TV, and closely followed her book’s position on the bestseller list. One day, a few days after her thirty-third birthday, which passed without the little gifts Eitan used to scatter around the apartment to stretch her birthday out over a whole week, her book climbed to first place.