Accidents: A Novel

by Yael Hedaya

  After a few years together, every time they had bad sex there was the consolation that next time would compensate for it, although they no longer needed the compensation. Even so, they always both tried harder the next time, which came sooner than usual, sometimes even the same night or the next day. But the last correction never came, and it left him bitter for many months, longing to compensate her and himself for his miserable morning performance, for having pressed up against her back and felt her sleeping body tense up, drowsy but full of willingness. Without caressing her, without kissing her, without touching her, he had entered her while she was still half asleep and felt he was hurting her; he knew he would always remember the way she turned her head toward him and opened her eyes and then closed them immediately in pain, because a ray of sun that shone through a crack in the blinds lit up her face, and she said, “Good morning,” and reached around to caress him. But he grabbed her hand and put it back, and wouldn’t let her touch him, and did not answer when she asked him something—he couldn’t remember what she asked for a long time—but moved quickly inside her, with strange matter-of-factness, and looked at her cheek with its pillow creases, and came and pulled out quickly, not because he was afraid of pregnancy but because he felt guilty. Ilana turned to him and smiled, fully awake now, and he lay on his back and looked at the ceiling and felt that another man had just fucked his wife, and she took his hand and placed it between her legs, and that other man, the stranger, who was a bad lover, let his hand lie there like a stone while his wife squirmed beneath it. And that man wished she would come already because he wanted to get up and pee, and every movement of hers distanced her from him, from his paralyzed hand, and finally—Yonatan didn’t know how he had allowed the man to abuse his wife that way—she climbed onto him and pressed her thighs against his, and rode him until she came, lonely and tired, uncharacteristically silent, as if she didn’t want him to know, as if it were none of his business. She got up and hurried to the bathroom, perhaps because she didn’t want to see his face, and a few minutes later they met in the kitchen and he said good morning and kissed her cheek, and she asked him to wake Dana, and they both acted as if they had just woken up.

  A few weeks after she died, when he was lying in bed alone, with his hand, motionless, in his underwear, he remembered what she had asked when he had been moving inside her. “Is it good for you?” She had never asked that before—she had never had to—and the question echoed in his mind like a terrible accusation.

  The thought of sleeping with a different woman frightened him. He knew he would have to invent a new, conciliatory sexuality to suit his forty-five-year-old self. Each time a sexual memory was erased from his body, it simply made way for a fresh dose of fear: Who would be the man who would sleep with this woman? What kind of man would he be? How much of a stranger? He was terrified by probability that the next time would be self-aware, postmodern—like the literature he couldn’t stand—perhaps it wouldn’t be sex at all but a paraphrase of sex, even a parody. He could imagine mocking himself and his own performance and feeling guilty toward Ilana, convincing himself that he was guilty of nothing, constantly anxious about his erection, which had never betrayed him before but would probably start now. And when he came, if he even did—and he had no idea if he would come in a condom with the new woman; it had been more than ten years since he’d seen a condom—he wondered what would come out of him, whether it would contain the baggage of everything he’d been through all these past years, whether bitterness and stifled tears or relief and happiness, or perhaps just great nothingness. The more he considered it, the more he understood that he was distancing himself from the moment when he would lose his second virginity, this middle-aged virginity.

  * * *

  Now he felt a little short of breath as they walked upstairs like two old people: he was huffing because of the cigarettes and Dana, half a flight below him, grasped the handrail tightly and dragged behind him as she wheezed a little; perhaps she was also angry at him for walking so quickly and leaving her behind.

  He asked if she had had a good time at Rona’s, and she nodded, and he said, “You feel very much at home there.”

  She didn’t know what to say, because she was afraid to hurt his feelings, so she said only, “Yes. I like it there.”

  “Rona really is lovely.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Tamar too, she’s a great kid.”

  “She is.”

  “It was nice tonight,” he summed up, as he locked the door behind them and threw his keys on the kitchen table as usual. They took their coats off and Dana hung them up on the coatrack in the hallway, the one she had needed to stand on a chair to reach only a few months ago, which also held two scarves and a girl’s wool hat, from much colder winters.

  He sat down at the kitchen table and lit a cigarette. “Put some water on,” he said, and Dana filled the electric kettle. “I really feel like mint tea, all of a sudden. It’s too bad we don’t have any mint.”

  “We could grow some on the balcony.”

  “That’s an excellent idea.” He yawned. They would never grow mint on the balcony. They weren’t those kinds of people; he wasn’t that kind of man. Then he asked if she was tired, and she said a little and asked if he was going to write now, and he said he would try. Yes, he would try. He wanted to be a man who grows mint on his balcony.

  “So are you going to sleep?” he asked, and she nodded and filled a glass with tap water and stood leaning against the counter, sipping it. “Should I tell you a story?” he joked, because they had given up that bedtime habit long ago, and she smiled at him cynically. And yet each night an accounting occurred between them, a forceful report of what they had done all day and what they had thought and felt, and tonight, more than usual, they both knew it was time for a new story.

  ( 5 )

  That night, Shira dreamed about her father. They were talking on the phone. She had just come back from overseas (when she woke up, she couldn’t remember where she had been) and had called, expecting him to complain about how hard it had been for him while she was gone and to ask her never to go away again. But her father sounded unusually excited and vibrant, except that his speech was garbled—it sounded dim and slow, like a record played at the wrong speed. She tried to figure out what he was saying and was able to extract a few names of medications out of the jumble of words. Some were familiar, the pills he took, and some were new, but their names made sense, and then suddenly he became lucid and asked her to come and eat fish cakes with him. She wondered where the fish cakes were from and who had made them, but before she could ask, her father declared, almost joyfully, “I got the most awful case of jaundice.” She was overcome by a wave of fear, because at that moment she remembered she was pregnant, only in the third or fourth week, but still pregnant, and her father asked when she would come and she said she wouldn’t come at all because she was afraid he would infect her and the fetus, and in fact, she thought, he was supposed to be setting the table for three … and then she forced herself to wake up.

  She lay in bed, and the relief at waking gradually mingled with sadness over the loss of being pregnant and having an excellent excuse not to eat with her father—dreamy moments in which her priorities were clear, nonnegotiable, and she had not even a single pang of conscience. She knew that in a few hours she would visit him, as she did every Saturday, and they would sit quietly together for a couple of hours, and occasionally they would exchange a few vague words, and the apartment would have the usual air of disease—not jaundice, but something gray and nameless—and before she left she would go into the kitchen and empty the fridge of everything that had gone bad in there over the past week, and when she left she’d throw the bag into the trash can—as if she were putting a period at the end of a sentence—until next weekend.

  She went into the kitchen and filled the pot with water and coffee and put it on the gas stove. Then she sat at the table and waited for the bubbling to signal that she should ge
t up and turn the heat off. Every morning, the bubbling sound echoed a different mood: Sometimes it sounded like lava rushing to the mouth of a volcano, and sometimes like stifled laughter or a stomach rumbling. This morning it was the coffee’s aroma, rather than its sound, that got her up, and when she poured it into a mug she realized she had been cut off from herself for a few moments, cut off from the usual stubborn morning rituals. How rare are these moments outside of time, she thought, and how pleasant.

  When she sat down at the table with her coffee, her father’s voice started echoing in her mind again, asking when she would come. But now it was no longer a record playing too slowly, as it had been in the dream, but a scratchy record, and the knowledge that her father, like her, was awake now, so early, and that many other elderly people were awake, made her sad. A ten-minute drive separated them, separated the house she had grown up in—which was now his house, and where nothing remained, of her or of her mother, and which a sour density had now overtaken, like a weed—from her rented apartment, with its warmness and airiness, not the beauty or the stability of Rona’s house, but still: something healthy.

  She imagined her father dipping a sesame cookie in his instant coffee, as he had always done since she was a child. She thought of the cheap instant coffee he liked, and how he always rejected the jars of imported coffee she brought him. She tried to impose a better quality of life upon him, as if finer coffee could somehow tip the scales on which her father stood, thin and fragile and yet so heavy, with her on the other side, jumping up and down with the things she brought him: foreign architecture journals he wasn’t interested in, books she had read and liked, the onion bread he sometimes ate, and jars of imported instant coffee, which always remained sealed on the top shelf in the cabinet, the coffee turning to a lump behind the tempting label. She sipped her coffee, seeing before her his freckled hand—which had remained strangely large in comparison to his shrunken body—dipping a cookie in the cup as if it were fishing. She thought about the crumbs she always found at the bottom of his cups when she washed them, the way they disgusted but also fascinated her, as if they were crumbs of her father, bait at the bottom of the sea.

  She tried to reconstruct the dinner at Rona’s, as if the replay would compensate for the bad dream, and wondered what Yonatan was doing now. She wondered if he was awake yet, if he was one of those people who slept late on Saturdays, and if Dana was tiptoeing around the apartment so as not to disturb him. Maybe she was asleep and he was awake. When Shira looked at the clock she realized it wasn’t even eight yet and assumed they were both still sleeping, unaware of her stealthy infiltration into their lives, into their as-yet-unbegun morning.

  She took the coffee over to the computer, sat down, even though she knew she would not be able to write a word. Her first novel no longer seemed relevant, as a book or as a fantasy. She wanted her next book, if she could ever write one, to be completely different, even contradictory. She started typing the day’s first lines with the usual hesitation. Although she didn’t yet have actual characters, she knew this book would also involve a man and a woman. She thought she should make up a woman’s character that was not an invention but an enhancement, and perhaps also a simplification, of herself, the character now sitting at the computer or perhaps somewhere else, somewhere similar in the desperation it inflicted. Where would she locate the new character? Where was she sitting now? Perhaps on a bench in Meir Park, a park weighed down with so many of her steps. Perhaps in a café or in a car, or perhaps the character was still asleep in bed, and soon she would shake her shoulders gently and help her wake up into her banal morning, both their mornings. The fingers flitting over the keyboard were suddenly alive with desire, and she was filled with great admiration for this character about to be born: she herself. This was the moment when she said goodbye to Aya, the protagonist of the last novel—who was the woman she had once hoped to be—and created a new, still unnamed person.

  She thought of Aya, how she had loved her once and had tried to promote her interests, as if she were her agent. She remembered how easily she had fitted the character of Uri to her dimensions. From the moment he was born on the screen, he was a twin, identical to her, as if she had been turned inside out like a shirt. Perhaps that was why it had been easy to write their story. She realized she had never written a real man (or a woman either), and the love story she had written now seemed fake, especially the scene of their meeting in that ER, with their instant love and their DNA conversation. Nonsense, she thought, there’s no such thing, and for a moment she thought of reconstructing Rona’s dinner on the screen, along with Yonatan’s silence and her own, which suddenly seemed like the most profound conversation she had ever had with a man.

  She walked around the apartment restlessly, as she always did when ideas came to her. During these moments, which had become rare, she would jump up from her chair as if something had burned her, go in and out of the kitchen without knowing what she was looking for, put a load of laundry in the washer or go down to the store, turn the TV on and then quickly switch it off, feeling guilty about the wasted time, and go back to the computer. She liked this agitation because it contained excitement and optimism to which she might have been afraid to admit, as if this inspiration, always sudden, was a pipe that could leak or burst at any minute and so needed to be handled gently.

  She glanced at the clock and saw it was ten and thought, He’s probably awake now, and maybe he’s also trying to write. She put the coffeepot on again, wanting to keep sitting in the kitchen and missing him, but she thought, I should be missing my writing, not him; who is he anyway? And why him?

  She went back to the computer with a cup of coffee, an ashtray, and a pack of cigarettes and started quickly typing an encounter between a man and a woman. They were still nameless; she didn’t want to give them names yet. There’s plenty of time, she told herself; they may not get names until they fall in love. The scene was a dinner at a mutual friend’s. But how could they fall in love? And was there any justification for their existence if they did not?

  She wrote for almost two hours, until the phone rang and her father asked when she was coming. “Soon,” she told him softly, distracted. She went back and finished their first meeting, which concluded not with desperation but with hope. Then, still distracted, she got dressed, returned the coffee cup and the full ashtray to the kitchen, and when she went downstairs to the street and got in her car, she was sorry, for the first time in a long while, to leave the computer. She started driving north, and the streets were quiet Sabbath streets, and she drove slowly and turned the radio on, and the songs were Sabbath songs, but the Sabbath struck her as less interminable than usual.

  ( 6 )

  “What do you want to do today?” he asked Dana, who was sitting on the balcony, leafing through the newspaper.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you make any plans with Tamar?”

  Dana shook her head. “Are you going to work?”

  “Yes. I think so.” But since waking up he felt like getting out of the house, away from the restlessness that had stayed with him through the night. “Do you want to go somewhere?” he asked hesitantly, as if afraid of rejection.

  “Where?” She looked up from the newspaper.

  “I don’t know. We could go and have lunch somewhere, sit at a café.”

  “Are you hungry?” she asked, and suddenly she sounded like Ilana, because she had used that same tone of voice, interested and yet indifferent at the same time.

  “A little. You?”

  “Also a little.”

  “So do you want to?”

  “Where should we go?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s go out and see where we feel like sitting.”

  “Okay.” She put the paper on the floor. “I’ll get dressed, then.”

  “Me too. I’ll meet you at the door in five minutes?” He tried to pump some enthusiasm into the outing, which seemed already to have exhausted them both, and they each dis
appeared into their rooms.

  He changed his socks and underpants but put on the same clothes he had worn the day before, which had been tossed on the floor, leaving off the undershirt because it was warm outside. Then he went into the bathroom, looked in the mirror, and tried to decide whether or not to shave. Brown and white stubble covered his chin and cheeks. Dana came in and stood beside him while she brushed her teeth. “What do you think, should I shave?”

  She glanced at his reflection, reached out to touch his cheek, and said yes, he was prickly.

  “Later, then. When we get back. I can’t be bothered now.” He put deodorant on.

  When they went downstairs, Dana wearing her cousin Michal’s old clothes—a pair of red jeans and a pink sweatshirt with a print of white clouds—she told him the clothes were a little too small for her, and he said he’d buy her some new ones. “I gained weight,” she said.

  He was filled with sadness because she spoke like an older woman in miniature, and her voice sounded like her mother’s again. Sometimes, before they went to sleep, Ilana used to stand in their room in her underwear with her back to him, turn her head back, pat her bottom, and ask if she’d gained weight. When he looked up from the newspaper or book he was reading in bed and mumbled no, she would sigh. “Liar.”

  “I want pants like Shira was wearing yesterday,” Dana said.

  “Shira?” he asked, because although she had haunted him all night, she had appeared in his imagination as a nameless entity. “The one who was at Rona’s yesterday?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was she wearing? I don’t remember.” But then he recalled the orange corduroys, which he had seen before.

  “Corduroy pants, kind of wide ones.”

  “Oh, yes.” He wanted to say, They might make you look fat, but he kept quiet. Maybe if he had been her mother he would have said something, but maybe not. Dana had very few years left to be a child, but she would have plenty of years to torment herself over a couple of extra pounds. And she would have good friends—Tamar, for example, who would probably be tall and thin, like the father she didn’t have—to go shopping with her and look her over when she came out of the fitting room and twist their faces and shake their heads and veto the purchase because it made her look fat. And there would be men she would face, at nights, in a room lit only by a reading lamp, and she would show her back to them with a shy, flirtatious half turn and ask if she’d gained weight, full of hope that they would lie. “But it’s almost spring. Isn’t it too hot to wear corduroy?”