Accidents: A Novel

by Yael Hedaya

Yonatan chuckled and said, “Oh, it was for your dad?”

  “Yes, and you said you wouldn’t have given it to me.”

  “Way to go,” Arik said.

  Rona said she was surprised. “Very ungentlemanly of you.”

  Yonatan said again, “Guilty as charged.” After all, the evening had begun with a lie, and now he felt the lies becoming part of the menu and was afraid he would no longer be able to enjoy the meal, because with each bite he would taste a little lie.

  Arik said that after the age of forty our brains stop working and we don’t remember anything. “I meet people on the street and they talk to me and I have no idea who they are,” he said. Yonatan smiled at him but felt embarrassed and turned to look from Shira to Rona, who was stirring the pot and looking at them, smiling to herself. Then he looked at his daughter, who was busy chopping a red onion, sniffling and wiping her eyes on the sleeve of her sweater. He thought of how in a few years she would have him over for dinner at her place; he would find himself calling her up on a Friday evening, hoping she would invite him over so he could spend the evening with her and her children and her husband, with whom he would conduct clumsy small talk, like his conversations with his brother-in-law. With one ear he listened to Ruti and Arik arguing about the price of bread, Dana looked at him with teary eyes, and he smiled at her and was struck by the alarming thought that his son-in-law might be a young Arik. He heard Ruti say she loved bread stores, to which Arik replied that it was all a scam. “As if we even have a culinary culture. Look what’s happening on our roads.”

  “What does that have to do with it?” Ruti asked.

  “It has everything to do with it! We’re barbaric. Fundamentally, we are a barbaric country, and no amount of ciabattas and focaccias will change that.”

  “We’re not barbaric. Not all of us.”

  “But most are,” Rona said, leaning with her back against the counter, sipping her wine and watching Shira, who seemed disconnected from it all, distant.

  Arik said, “Let’s ask the writers what they think; they’re supposed to be our watchdogs.”

  Yonatan turned to Shira and said, “I believe that’s the role of the media, actually.”

  Arik said, “And what are you? Aren’t you the media?”

  Yonatan kept looking at Shira and said, “Not at all.” He wanted to form an alliance with her.

  “Well, what are you then?”

  Shira said, “I don’t think we’re even we—there’s no we here.”

  “Exactly!” Yonatan exclaimed.

  “We’re too preoccupied with ourselves to be able to talk about ourselves in the plural.”

  Yonatan said, “Yes, that’s exactly it. We’re too busy hating ourselves.”

  Rona protested. “Here we go again with the lack of self-confidence.”

  Shira looked up from the ashtray to Yonatan and said, “Self-hatred is a daily condition for us.”

  “Yes, precisely.” He smiled and felt it was important for him to agree with her now, because he felt guilty about denying their meeting in the bread store.

  Rona said, “Don’t tell me you hate yourself too. You’re a little too old for that sort of thing, aren’t you?”

  Yonatan looked at Shira and said, “You’re never too old to hate yourself.”

  “And just what’s wrong with loving yourself?” Arik asked. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing, it’s just less interesting.” When he looked at Shira he wasn’t sure if she agreed with him. She was staring at the table, her fingers caressing the shiny wood.

  Ruti said, “Our son, Gilad, has this self-hatred thing going on now. He’s sixteen.”

  “He has a parent-hatred thing going on too,” Arik said. “Is there any more wine?”

  Rona quickly put another bottle in front of him and said, “How is Gilad doing? Why didn’t he come?”

  “He does his own thing on Fridays,” Arik replied.

  “But he said thanks for the invitation,” Ruti added.

  Rona ladled soup into bowls and said it was an experiment, a new recipe, and Yonatan said it looked great and asked what kind of soup it was. “Sweet potato,” she replied, and sat down next to him. The girls sat on either side of them. He passed the bread basket around, and when he offered it to Rona she grasped his hand and squeezed it and said, “I’m glad you came.” He felt embarrassed again, because it occurred to him that perhaps, when she had stood at the stove watching them, she had somehow seen in him the entire path he had taken that evening, from the challah, in the bag on the table in his kitchen, to her kitchen and her soup—one taste of which confirmed what he had already known: that it was wonderful—a path that was twisted and paved with lies. Her hand, which still held his, was very warm. She looked at Dana and said, “We dragged your dad here by force today, didn’t we?”

  Dana nodded and sipped her soup quietly.

  “Making out like he’s some busy guy, your dad.”

  Dana smiled, and he wondered who had taught her to eat so delicately, because he always wolfed down his food. He put his spoon down in the bowl and wondered if his daughter knew, or at least guessed the truth, and whether after they had put the phone down half an hour earlier, she had imagined him scurrying about the apartment happily, looking for his wallet and keys, putting his coat on, bounding down the stairs and taking the shortcut from Bialik to Hess Street in a jog, but then slowing down his steps so as not to seem too enthusiastic, and even standing for a moment on the corner of Allenby to smoke a cigarette before coming into this beautiful, comforting house, reeking of cold and cigarettes and lies. He put his hand on the back of her neck, as part of the dialogue he had been having with her in his heart, but Dana flinched and said, “Stop it, Dad. You’re strangling me.”

  Shira thought Dana resembled her father. She liked her. Shira and Dana were both regular guests here, and sometimes, although they were separated by more than twenty years, she felt as if there were no age gap at all, and they had both been annexed to this house for the same reasons, except that the girl didn’t have to pretend she had other options. She looked at the stuffed veal and at Rona. As Rona carved the veal expertly into thin slices, she leaned over Yonatan, who shrank back so as not to get in her way, but she still rubbed her arm against his shoulder every time she cut a slice.

  Ruti put her hand on her stomach and said, “Wow, I’m stuffed from the soup, how am I supposed to eat veal now?”

  Arik said, “You’ll eat it like a champ, I have no doubt.”

  Ruti said she had tried out a recipe for sweet-potato soup last week and it hadn’t come out this well. “Gilad said it looked like camel vomit.”

  “Yes, and tell them what he said afterward, your son,” Arik said. “She asked how he would know what camel vomit looked like.”

  “What did he say?” Tamar asked.

  “He said he’s been living here long enough to know,” Ruti said, and the girls burst out laughing. “Why is it that everything you make turns out incredible and everything I make is a catastrophe?”

  Arik sighed—“Here we go again”—and smiled at everyone as if he were proud to present their show. “What do you think? You think only you authors hate yourself? My wife has a patent on self-hatred!”

  They were in their late forties. Ruti was Rona’s best friend, also a therapist, and Arik was CEO of a telemarketing company. Shira watched them teasing each other; she liked them. Then she looked at Yonatan. What did he think of them? Was he measuring his level of belonging to this conversation much the way she was? She wondered whether he would also have preferred to be less self-aware at this moment, less aware of his observations and gauging, whether he missed a certain naturalness that always seemed so close and yet unreachable. So this is Yonatan Luria, she thought. She had heard a lot about him from Rona and had wondered if Rona was interested in him. She had asked her once, but Rona had said, “No way. He’s lovely, but he’s problematic.”

  She tried to conquer the attraction she felt. H
e seemed disheveled, but there was something soft and clean in his dishevelment. His brown curly hair, peppered with gray, his long thin face with slightly sunken cheekbones and hazel eyes, the faded green jeans and gray sweatshirt he wore, with a white T-shirt poking out from beneath the collar, and mainly his movements, clumsy and lazy—all these gave him a shy but confident look, full of contradictions. Or perhaps, she thought, it was not his appearance but her gaze that was full of contradictions.

  She thought, So this is Dana’s father. She saw him taking her in, too, and could tell he knew that, more than listening to Ruti and Arik’s play of couplehood, they were listening to the tense silence that had closed in on them. She told herself it was a dangerous invention, to think that he was connecting with her in the same way she was connecting with him, from that injured and arrogant place, from the loneliness that searches for potential partners, because perhaps she was wrong and he was actually entirely present at this meal, not partially, as she was. He leaned over and asked if she was working on anything, and she was glad he had removed himself from Rona’s arm as she passed around plates piled with slices of veal alongside dried fruit stuffing.

  She said, “Not really. You?”

  “Same.”

  “I’m stuck.”

  He smiled and said, “Me too.”

  She tried to overcome the attraction he aroused in her again, because she wanted his same to be expanded. She wanted him also to say, I’m not writing because I’m restless, I’m here to escape the restlessness and I can’t; and I look at you and wonder if you’re here for the same reasons. And she wanted to say, Yes, exactly the same reasons; let’s go.

  “I’ve been stuck for a long time,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  “Is it driving you crazy?”

  “I don’t know if it’s driving me crazy,” he said, suddenly more moderate and calmer than she, cautious with his choice of words. “But it makes me restless. You know that feeling?”

  “Absolutely.” She wanted to say, Let’s not talk about writing. She said, “I know it well.”

  “So you know what I’m talking about.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “You look a little restless too.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded and she wanted him to say, I also tend to fall in love in an instant. He said, “Yes,” and she thought that in fact every time she had fallen in love it had only been in retrospect.

  “Is it so obvious?” She remembered how Eitan had always been surprised to discover who she was.

  “To a well-trained eye, it is.”

  She thought of how she had fallen in love with Eitan only after someone else moved in with him. She said, “I thought I was hiding it so well,” and her attraction to him was suddenly flooded with a sense of nakedness.

  “Why hide it?”

  She felt that although her clothes had been peeled away she still wanted to keep undressing, and she said, “Habit, I guess.”

  “I know that habit. It’s a terrible one.” She wanted him to say, I look at you and I see your restlessness and it is the most attractive thing I have ever seen. But he leaned back in his chair and said, “Shall we eat?”

  She felt embarrassed when she saw how completely absorbed he was in his food, with a look of delight on his face that had nothing to do with her, with their conversation. Now he was the one who grasped Rona’s hand and said, “Amazing!” “Really?” she said. He nodded with his mouth full. Then he shook his head from side to side and said, “Simply amazing!” He turned to Dana to see if she was enjoying the food too, then turned his attention back to his plate. Shira tasted the veal, which really was amazing, but she couldn’t delight in it the way Yonatan had, because she felt betrayed—not by Yonatan, who was eating like a famished soldier home from basic training, nor by Rona, who sat next to him, casting a maternal look first at her daughter, then at his daughter (that’s the look, Shira told herself; that’s the look I don’t have)—but by the automatic, childish, indefatigable hope, the hope that does not even know what it wishes for but always finds an anchor of air to hold on to: the hope that ruins the moment because it always skips beyond it.

  Yonatan ate three slices of veal, then wolfed down the potatoes au gratin and served himself more and more of the fresh asparagus, which was one of his favorite things and which he never bought for himself and Dana, not because it was expensive but because he thought asparagus would be wasted on the kind of meals he made, coincidental meals, cooked quickly and eaten in haste, except for the few occasions when he grilled steaks. I haven’t made steak for ages, he thought to himself, and made up his mind to get some asparagus the next time he bought them. He took some more, and reached out his fork to the big dish of veal, and speared two more slices.

  He saw how much Dana was also enjoying the food and made a note to get the recipe from Rona. He would take the opportunity to ask her how she cooked the asparagus, and on Friday he’d go to the butcher’s and buy a breast of veal and would cook up a meal like this. Maybe he’d start inviting people over too, and in time their house would become the kind of house that invited people and cooked for them. But whom would he invite? he asked himself, and he scanned the list of possible guests. Rona and Tamar were on the list, although that would seem almost too familial. He could invite Nira and Zvi, but he didn’t want to. He wanted to invite Arik and Ruti and Shira, but that would be ridiculous; they weren’t his friends. In fact, he wanted to be Rona, and he took another helping of veal, and piled some more potatoes on his plate, and was sorry to find that the asparagus was gone. He poured himself another glass of wine.

  Ruti and Arik continued their argument, and although they were starting to bore him, he was relieved that he could be quiet, thanks to them. Every so often he asked Dana if she was enjoying the food, and Dana nodded and smiled with her mouth full. He could see that Shira kept looking at him from the other side of the table, and he briefly felt the pleasant shiver of someone targeted for observation, someone who is somehow being flirted with, although it was hard for him to say how, because her look was both attentive and disconnected. It reminded him of his own—that, at least, was how he perceived his look from inside.

  Ten years ago he could have told himself with certainty that she belonged to the “depends on the circumstances” category. There was something wild about her; her hair, for example, was somewhere between curly and wavy and looked like the hair of a child who has just got out of bed. And her face appeared slightly angry and dreamy. When she got up to help Rona clear the table, he saw that she was fuller than he had thought, or perhaps the corduroys made her look broader, and the way she walked revealed a certain self-consciousness and lack of confidence, the walk of someone who would prefer to remain seated. He liked that.

  He couldn’t decide if he was attracted to her. He lit a cigarette and focused on Arik and Ruti but kept following Shira out of the corner of his eye. The categories he used to assign to women had long been erased, or perhaps had merged into one indistinct category, which was related not to attraction so much as to fear, because, since Ilana’s death, the first thing he saw in women was not their face or their breasts or their backside or their legs, but rather his own reflection in their eyes.

  * * *

  He recalled the first woman who had hit on him, a few months after he was widowed. He met her in a home-improvement store, where he was looking for bookshelves for Dana’s room. She walked around the store behind him, pushing a huge shopping cart, and he suspected she was deliberately following him. Every time he turned around she was there, and her cart, like his, was still empty. Finally, he stopped and asked, “Can I help you?” as if he worked there.

  The woman said, “Yes,” and told him she didn’t really know what she needed but she wanted to build a closet.

  “Then you need the lumber department. Come on, I’m going there anyway.”

  “I’d love to. I’ve been following you anyway.”

  He smiled and kept going,
and heard the wheels of her cart rattling behind him. A pleasant shudder went down his back, and when they reached the lumber area and the woman studied the planks of wood and the shelves, she said she couldn’t be bothered after all, and that it would be easier just to buy a closet.

  “I’ll never be able to put a closet together myself, I can hardly hammer a nail,” she said, leading Yonatan to believe that she was alone. For a moment he wanted to volunteer to build the closet for her, but he didn’t know how to do it either; he could barely put up shelves and didn’t even own a drill. The woman said, “I need a man to help me,” and Yonatan suddenly felt both impotent and aroused.

  “I need a man to help me too,” he said. Alarmed at what he had said, he explained. “I have two left hands.”

  “So where does one find such a man?”

  “I imagine they hang around this type of store,” Yonatan said, and they both laughed.

  “I’m Idit. Pleased to meet you.”

  “Yonatan.”

  They shook hands—hers was a little sticky from holding the shopping cart handle—and they pushed their empty carts around the massive store and chatted. When they went out to the parking lot together, Idit asked if he wanted to get some coffee somewhere. He said he did, and she said she thought there was a café in the area but not a very nice one. Yonatan said he didn’t mind, so they went into the nearby mall and up the escalator, and this time he stood behind her and found himself staring at her behind and sensed her embarrassment. She turned to him and smiled, and tried to stand so that her back wouldn’t be facing him, and he still kept staring at her behind. There was something weak about it, and he noticed the two lines her panties made in the thin shiny fabric of her slacks. The escalator moved slowly, and Yonatan felt his penis rousing a little in his own pants and grew alarmed; he turned away to look at the stores above them and at the domed glass roof. Idit said, “Here it is. I think it’s on this floor.”

  By the time they got off the escalator he had managed to subdue his threatening erection, and they sat on two lawn chairs beneath a striped umbrella. A ray of sun shone through the dome and illuminated Idit’s face, which he now saw was covered with a thick layer of makeup; her mascara looked very sticky in the sunlight. They both concentrated on the menu and Idit said, “What do you feel like?”