by Yael Hedaya
He wondered what she thought when she heard Dana’s childish voice on the message they had recorded two years ago and never bothered to update—Hi, we’re not home, leave a message and we’ll call you, bye—in the cheerful squeak of an eight-year-old, which might give a stranger the impression that he’d phoned a very busy household, in which his call was one of many, and that the parents would return it at some point after they had finished their thousand daily tasks, and in the background there would always be a television blaring and children screaming and a blender or food processor running and a dog barking—so many lies in one short message.
He didn’t want to go to the gallery, but he wanted to see her. This intensity scared him, but on the other hand there was something normal about it—as if they were old friends and it was natural for them to see each other so frequently. Still, he decided to wait two hours before returning her call, so as not to sound too enthusiastic. While he killed time on the balcony, he wondered what to tell Dana, because he felt he owed her an explanation; he had hardly ever gone out at night for the last few years. But what explanation could he provide? He could tell her the truth, but the truth was too vague and unclear even to him, so he decided to give her the momentary truth, the one without any further meanings: Shira, Rona’s friend, had invited him to an exhibition. She didn’t need a babysitter anymore, did she?
A little after two o’clock, before Dana was due back from school, he dialed Shira’s number. “Hi,” she said, when she heard his voice. “How are you?” He said he was fine. “So do you feel like coming?” she asked, without wasting any time, as if she feared that small talk might distance them from a meeting.
He said, “Yeah, why not? But what is it exactly?”
“It’s the opening of an exhibition by some press photographers. Someone gave me an invitation. It’s something to do with Tel Aviv. I didn’t get exactly what the subject is.”
“Sounds interesting.”
“I’m not sure. There’ll probably be all kinds of celebrities there. Another reason not to go.”
“Come on, let’s go, we’ll see some celebrities. What time does it start?”
“Eight. Should I pick you up, or do you want to pick me up?”
“I’ll pick you up.”
“Then I’ll wait downstairs at eight, so you won’t have to look for parking. My street is a nightmare.”
“Mine too,” he said, and lingered for a moment.
“So I’ll see you later?”
“Yes. At eight,” he said, and they hung up.
That was simple, he thought, and the simplicity insulted the turbulence of the past twenty-four hours. Where did this leave the Friday-night dinner? Yesterday, while he was reading, he had made a mental shopping list, trying to remember where to find fresh asparagus, wondering if he should go by the butcher and ask him to keep him a few choice cuts for the weekend. His reading was accompanied by the aromas and sounds of frying, by thoughts of place settings and which wine to serve. What did it mean that they were meeting tonight? Who knew what would happen between them by Friday?
He decided to cook Bolognese sauce to spoil Dana, both because he felt guilty and because he was looking for something to do for a couple of hours. He thawed a packet of ground beef in hot water, and as he stood in the kitchen sautéing it, crumbling it forcefully in the pan with a fork, he felt so nervous and restless that he turned the gas off, locked the front door and left the key in the lock, went into the living room, rolled the blinds down, put on The Doors, whom he used to worship but hadn’t listened to since he was a student, sprawled on the couch, and, to the sounds of “Strange Days,” masturbated quickly, roughly, surprised at an erection which, he felt, did not belong to him at all. His head was void of fantasies or pictures, void even of words. He came with a moan that he stifled out of habit—after Dana was born, Ilana and he had learned to be quiet—and then he got up, washed himself off in the bathroom sink, buttoned up his pants, pulled the key out of the door, went back into the kitchen, and turned the gas on again. He kept on listening to the CD, as if it were playing in a different apartment.
When Dana got home, they sat down to eat and he told her in an incidental way, as he twirled spaghetti on his fork, that he was going with Shira to an exhibition that evening.
“Awesome,” she said.
“What do you mean, awesome?”
“It’s about time you went out. You’re always sitting at home like some old woman.”
How quickly your daughter became your mother, he thought, like a sophisticated machine programmed to start operating on a particular date, and that day had arrived.
“And I think you can also start going out with girls,” she said.
“What?” he asked, slightly stunned.
“You heard me.”
He tried to kid around. “Are you trying to get rid of me?”
“This really isn’t a joke, Dad.”
He felt as if it weren’t him who had abandoned her over the last three days, but she who had abandoned him. Her eyes pierced him over her plate of spaghetti, her eyes that were his eyes, because everything else was Ilana’s, except for her build: a mold made from the two of them that was neither Ilana nor himself.
“I’m just going to an exhibition, I’m not exactly going out with Shira.”
“Pity. I think she’s lovely.”
“She is lovely, but that has nothing to do with it.”
“Now you’re just trying to change the subject,” she said, and got up to put her plate in the sink. “Are you done?” She pointed to his plate.
“Yes,” he said, and reached for his cigarettes.
“And you smoke too much.”
“It didn’t used to bother you.”
“It doesn’t bother me now either, but you can barely get up the steps.”
“That’s because I’m an old woman.” He smiled at her, searching her eyes for the little girl who used to love his jokes.
“Very funny. Your lungs are burnt out.”
“What’s up? Have you started working for the Cancer Prevention Society?”
“Stop it, Dad, it’s not funny.” She turned to him, and he saw her fat little tummy peeking out beneath her sweater and he wanted to pinch it, as he used to do when she was little, but he knew he couldn’t do that now and perhaps he’d never be able to do it again.
“Did you know that a girl in my class’s mother died last month from cancer?”
“Who?”
“You don’t know her.”
“Breast cancer?”
“No, liver.”
“Wow, that’s fatal. You don’t get over that.”
“Lung cancer is also fatal,” she said.
“That’s true.” He stared at the lit cigarette in the ashtray.
“But I want you to know that I’m not against smoking at all.” She went back to washing the dishes.
“You’re not?”
“No, I’m going to smoke too.”
“You will not smoke!”
“I will, but not like you. I’ll smoke like Mom.”
When she washed the dishes she looked painfully similar to Ilana: the way they both arranged the dishes on the drying rack, with the plates at the right end and the pots and bowls at the left, glasses and cups on the lower part—he had no method at all—the way they first soaped all the dishes and laid them on the counter and then rinsed them all—he did exactly the opposite, wasting water, soap, and time, they claimed—and the way their backsides danced as they scrubbed.
“Dana, sit down for a minute. I want to ask you something.”
“What?” she said with annoyance, sure she was about to be dragged into a serious conversation.
“Nothing. I just want to talk to you about your piano lessons.”
“What about them?” she asked, and went on scrubbing the frying pan he had burned.
“You don’t really enjoy playing the piano, do you?”
She was quiet. He could hear her trying to make up
her mind.
“Come on, leave the dishes for a minute,” he said. “Come and sit down.”
“I’ll just finish this pan.”
“Dana?” he said, and lit a new cigarette.
“What?”
“You don’t have to pretend you like playing, and you don’t have to pretend to be happy that I’m going out with Shira.”
“I’m not pretending.”
“You are.”
“I’m happy that you’re going out with Shira.”
“Are you really?”
“Yes.”
“And what about the piano?”
“I don’t know,” she said and put the pan on the rack, but she didn’t turn the faucet off, as if there were still dirty dishes in the sink.
“Turn around for a second?” he asked softly.
“I don’t want to,” she said, and used the little squeegee to wipe the water off the counter.
“Come on.”
“In a minute. I’m busy.”
He got up and went over to her and put his hand on her shoulder. He thought she had grown a little taller in the past few months, but he wasn’t sure. “Have you gotten taller?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, and he felt her shoulder shrinking away from his touch.
“I think you have. When was the last time your height was measured?”
“I don’t remember.”
Her shoulder, which was still small but had lost its birdlike quality, started squirming away from his hand and he turned her toward him and realized her face was covered with tears. He was surprised but not entirely, and lifted her chin, but she looked away so he hugged her. They stood that way, embracing, while she tried to reach back and shut the faucet off; when she couldn’t, he told her to let it go. She worried about too many things at once; she was too responsible. “What a responsible daughter I have.” He kissed her hair and turned off the faucet with one twist, and for some reason the word responsible brought on a new wave of sobbing. Only later did he remember that Ilana used that word a lot when she was trying to educate Dana, and there had been stubborn remnants of an American accent in it.
He rocked her in his arms and said, “Let’s take a break with the piano, okay? Take a vacation. We’ll tell Irma it’s temporary.”
She nodded into his chest.
“And for your information, I’m not really going out with Shira. Not yet, anyway.”
“But will you?” she asked, in a choked voice.
“Do you really want me to?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered.
“I know you don’t,” he said, and felt proud of himself for his sudden intuition, after three days of being so focused on himself and thinking he had forgotten how to be a father. “I don’t know either. We’re alike that way, aren’t we? We should be proud of it, like we should be proud of our beautiful eyes.”
“Proud of what?”
He released her from the embrace and wiped her eyes with the back of his hand. “Of the fact that we don’t know what we want. It’s hereditary.”
She smiled.
“So should I call Irma today?” he asked, and she nodded. “Did you wash the frying pan well, you lazy thing?” She nodded again, and he wrapped his arm around her stomach and squeezed her, ignoring the new rigidity that pushed his hand away from the puppyish softness.
( 17 )
She sat down in the Subaru Justy and smiled as she put her seat belt on, and he said, “You’re punctual.” She felt as if she had been caught red-handed in the act of being prompt. She had been ready at seven-thirty, so she sat watching TV, planning to be a few minutes late. She wanted him to double-park or drive around the block and wait for her, but at seven-forty she found herself standing outside the building in case he was early, leaning against the fence, hugging her bag. He arrived exactly at eight.
“Yes, I’m punctual,” she said. “It’s a pretty serious problem.”
“Why? I think it’s great.”
“Because most people aren’t like that, and I always find myself waiting.”
“I know. I’m one of the people who are always late.”
“But you got here on time.”
“Because I made an effort. I didn’t want you to wait outside in the cold.”
“It’s not that cold,” she said, and thought about the chasm that stretched between the conversations she’d had with him over imaginary cell phones, and this one, which offered nothing comforting but rather a kind of banality struggling against itself.
“So where are we going?” he asked, and she took the invitation out of her bag and told him the address.
“Which way should I go?”
She said she wasn’t sure. “Down Allenby, maybe?”
“I’ll go via Yehuda Halevi,” he said. “So what’s up? How are you? What’s new? What did you do today? How’s life?”
For a minute, she thought she had got into the wrong car. This was a new man, this man with the small talk, neither the morose person she had met at Rona’s nor the one who had sat with her on the balcony and hypnotized her with his silence. He was cleanly shaven, his hair was wet from the shower and smoothed down on his scalp, and he had changed the flattering gray sweatshirt to a sweater with a diamond pattern that was too small for him and looked prickly. When she looked at him sideways, she couldn’t help comparing him to some of her worst blind dates, the ones who tried too hard and invested their efforts in the wrong areas: in the small talk that always sounded like a parody, in their dress, in an irritating cheerfulness, and especially in the way they tried to seem nonchalant as they drove.
Yonatan drove as if he were sitting on the couch in his living room and there happened to be a steering wheel and a stick shift in his hands. He sat with his legs spread, and the car, like the sweater, looked several sizes too small for him. How quickly one could go from attraction to rejection, she thought. From terrible longing to quiet revulsion, as if an automatic transmission were shifting the gears. He looked older, too. She tried to force herself to sound cheerful, but a sense of grief was taking over inside. She hadn’t done anything special today, she told him; the truth was, she had slacked off.
“Didn’t you write?” he asked.
“Not a word. You?”
“Me neither.”
“I rested a bit today,” she said. “My dad was in the emergency room yesterday.”
“Really? What happened? Is it serious?”
“Yes and no. He passed out in some deli.”
“Oh, no, that’s not good.” He honked angrily at someone who cut him off on the right. “Did you see that shit?” he hissed.
“Idiot,” she said.
“So what does your father have?”
“Exhaustion,” she said and felt as if the real conversation not only did not compare to the imagined one but was making a mockery of it—and not just of it but of her father, whom she suddenly felt she had to protect from this chitchat, from this date with his tight sweater and his flattened-down hair. “Never mind that,” she said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen with him.”
“Do you think I can park here?”
“Yes. I don’t think they ticket at this time of day.”
“You’d be surprised. On my street you get tickets at one A.M.”
“Really?” she asked, and was suddenly worried about her father.
“Yes. Well, the parking people are right down my street, to my horror.”
“Oh, yes, in that building by the square, right?” She thought perhaps she should call to make sure he was all right, because when she had called today at lunchtime to ask how he was, he had only answered after eight or nine rings and had sounded alarmed, as if someone were chasing him.
They got out of the car and walked toward a group huddled in the entrance to an old building. They were standing smoking and holding plastic cups with wine, looking hostile. “Come on,” he said, and put his hand on her back, possibly protecting her, possibly pushing her into
the stairwell, which was crowded with more people, leaning against the walls and the handrails, chattering.
She felt that, as usual, her choice of clothes had been wrong, that in the black miniskirt she hadn’t worn for years, and the black polo-neck pullover, she looked as if she was trying too hard, as if it was right for her to hang out with this man in the green sweater with yellow diamonds, as if she deserved it. From the second they walked into the building, she lost interest in the exhibition and thought only of the moment when they would leave. As they made their way up the steps to the second floor, she hoped he wouldn’t linger too long over the works of art, which in any case were blocked by the crowds. She hoped they could go and sit somewhere empty, quiet, unfashionable, and talk as they had talked the day before yesterday on the balcony, so she could restore the passion she had felt for him, and the compassion—not the kind from this evening, which had turned to scorn.
Restore the passion. She contemplated the words as she pressed against Yonatan’s back while he tried to squeeze into one of the rooms. You could restore a ruined building, an injured body, a connection, anything built out of parts, but passion? Then she noticed that although there was barely any room to move in the room they had entered, he had still managed to light a cigarette and was holding it loosely between his lips, and he suddenly looked like a cross between an Italian movie star and a complete nerd. Someone pushed her from behind and her nose banged into his woolen sweater, which smelled like something from childhood, and she felt like wrapping her arms around his stomach so he could lead her inside like a train engine. But more than anything, she wanted him to turn to her and say he wanted to leave, that it was hot and suffocating and crowded and he was claustrophobic and you couldn’t see the art anyway—and she suddenly felt his hand reach back and feel around for her own, and his hand changed everything.
She held it hesitantly at first, but the deeper they went into the room, toward a wall hung with small black-and-white photographs, the more she felt like someone to whom this hand belonged and that it was giving her a sense of belonging to the crowd, which looked as if its only purpose was to be a breathing lump exhaling foreign bodies. When they finally reached the wall, they stood side by side, looking at the pictures, with their fingers interlaced simply, wholly, and her clothes became sexy again, as they had been when she tried them on at home, in front of the mirror, all afternoon. Yonatan was interested in the photographs. He examined them seriously, making comments to which she responded without hearing what he had said. Here and there he waved at someone with his free hand, and she smiled at people she knew, but around her everything became a hum, one picture, because all her sensations, all her thoughts, all her plans for the future—everything was focused on their interlaced fingers.