by Yael Hedaya
A woman who was standing on the balcony, which was also full of people, shouted Yonatan! and he looked away from the photos to see who it was. When he saw her, he whispered to Shira, “Oh, no.”
“Who is that?” she whispered, putting her lips close to his ear.
“Just a journalist. Her son goes to school with Dana.” The journalist called his name again, Yonchik! and waved excitedly. He said, “Should we go and say hello for a minute?” and she nodded and hoped he wouldn’t let go of her hand, and he pulled her after him, paving a way for them again through the crowds until they were spat out onto the balcony.
“Hi, baby,” the journalist said and kissed Yonatan on both his cheeks and wiped her lipstick marks off them with her fingers.
He said, “Ziva, this is Shira. Shira, this is Ziva,” and they both mumbled Pleased to meet you. Yonatan asked if she was going to some meeting, and Ziva went into a tirade about having to pay for equipment for the nurse’s room and said she had already alerted people in the media and there might be an item about it on one of the radio magazines. A new kind of happiness flooded Shira when she saw Ziva’s eyes piercing their joint hand, which swung between his right thigh and her left.
She remembered how Eitan liked to walk down the street with their arms around each other and hold hands in cafés or at friends’ houses, and how she always got out of it and said she hated people who touched each other publicly. And now it turned out she was one of them.
She suddenly heard Ziva’s excessively curious voice. “So what do you do, are you also a photographer?”
“Shira is also a writer,” Yonatan said, and she felt his fingers tighten around hers.
“Oh, really? Do you write for the paper?”
“No, I write prose.”
“Well!” Ziva said. “I see you two are cut from the same cloth, aren’t you?” She looked at Yonatan. “Be a sweetheart and give me a cigarette.” And suddenly the grip let go and his hand reached into the back pocket of his pants to take out the pack. He offered one to Ziva, then to her, and lit both of their cigarettes. After taking a puff or two, Ziva lost interest in them and hurried over to another acquaintance she spotted in the room. “So I’ll see you at the meeting, Yonchik?” she shouted back to him, and he nodded and waved.
They stayed on the balcony, which felt more pleasant than the room but still was crowded with people, and Shira wanted to suggest that they leave but she didn’t dare, so she said, “Sounds mysterious, this meeting.”
“It’s nothing mysterious. Just a parent-teacher meeting.”
She looked at his hand, which now gripped the old wooden handrail, and envied little kids for the way they were able to arrange hugs and hand-holdings: the way they took the hand they were interested in and put it in theirs, or attached themselves to a parent sitting next to them on the couch by lifting the parent’s arm and wrapping it around their shoulders, expecting with innocent and demanding certainty that the adult would know what to do. As he stared into the street she thought she would like to have a child with him. The thought shocked her, not only because he was the first man she had ever wanted a child with, but because she herself had never thought about children the way she did now, on this balcony, which, she thought, needed only one more person to come out before it collapsed.
Once, a few months before she broke up with Eitan, her period was late. At first they joked about it, as if it was obvious that she couldn’t possibly be pregnant, not because they were careful but because it was impossible for a new life to begin precisely when their relationship was dying. Then Eitan started asking, “What should we name him?” and she said she didn’t know, it didn’t interest her, but he would still suggest different names, for girls and boys, and said he would prefer a girl. She thought it was typical of him never to consider the possibility that this child, boy or girl, would not have a name, because she would have an abortion. She had been late before, but this time it was three weeks. Eitan pressured her to have a blood test, even use a home pregnancy kit, but she refused, convinced she was pregnant but unwilling to know. They had sex all the time those three weeks, sometimes twice a day, mostly at her initiative; she hoped it would make her miscarry. Eitan accepted enthusiastically, because he thought their relationship had been saved. And one morning, after he went to work, she opened the medicine cabinet and took out the home pregnancy test he had bought for her at the pharmacy a few days before, read the instructions over and over at the kitchen table, until finally she went into the bathroom, peed on the stick, placed the test on the floor, and walked out.
She went into the bedroom to get dressed, sat on the bed, and stared at the running shoes he wore for his evening jogs along the beach, one facing right and the other left, and thought maybe she wouldn’t have an abortion. Then she walked quickly down the hallway, opened the bathroom door, and looked from above at the stick, which only had one stripe. At first she laughed with relief and almost called Eitan at work to give him the good news, but her body suddenly felt empty. That afternoon she got her period. She went to see a movie on her own, and when Eitan came home in the evening and went to the bathroom, he saw the box of tampons she had left open on top of the toilet like a message for him.
( 18 )
The diamond-patterned sweater, which he had decided to wear for a change during a moment of foolishness and which had now become a torture device, reminded him of the cold winters of his childhood, when his mother would dress him in clothes she had just taken off the laundry line in the yard, some of which were still damp and held the remnants of a chilly Jerusalem night. The wool sweaters were agonizing.
He stood on the balcony, staring down at the crowd, and felt himself perspire and prickle as if the rows of woolen stitches were a beehive; for the first time in his life, he felt fat. He glanced down at his stomach, and it seemed to be swelling in front of his very eyes, threatening to unravel the sweater. His hips too, which had never been a problem, and which on good days seemed muscular and trim, now looked spindly and odd in his jeans, which were fairly new and still stiff. The only thing that reminded him of his former more comfortable self were his green Chuck Taylors. He wanted to go home, change his clothes, and start over again.
Shira, standing beside him, looked too fashionable for someone like him, too casual, too sexy in her black clothes. She saw him looking at her and asked, “What?”
“Nothing,” he said, and after a long pause he said he thought they’d done their bit for the local art scene.
Relieved, she said, “I agree.”
“So should we leave?” he asked, and she quickly broke away from the railing and this time she led him, paving a way through the crowd until they emerged from the building as if out of a vacuum and got into the car. She asked if he wanted to go and have a drink, and he said, “Yes, we could do that,” forgetting how uncomfortable he was. “So where should we go?” he asked, once they had started driving, and she said she didn’t know, she didn’t get out much, and he said he didn’t either. “All those places are pretty disgusting,” he said, as they drove north on Allenby.
“Which places?”
“You know, the ones everyone goes to.”
“We could go to my place then,” she suggested. “I still have some beer in the fridge.”
He said nothing, and she grew alarmed.
“What?” she said.
“We could also stop and pick up a six-pack,” he said, and she felt relieved.
“What for?”
“I feel bad, I’ve been drinking all your beer.”
“Nonsense,” she said, but he stopped at the kiosk where they had bought cigarettes on Saturday—their kiosk—and got out of the car and asked if she wanted anything.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Cigarettes?”
“No, I have some.”
“Nuts or something?”
She laughed and shook her head and watched him as he pointed to the stainless steel vats, went inside, and then came out with a six
-pack in one hand and, in the other, a plastic bag full of brown paper bags, a pack of cigarettes, and two candy bars. As they drove to her apartment she felt that things were far simpler and easier than she had feared, and the desire to have a child was replaced by a simpler and easier desire: to take off his ridiculous sweater, which she had actually started growing fond of for its woolliness, its Jerusalemness, and to sleep with him.
He sat down in the armchair he liked and, after she poured the nuts into little dishes, he asked where her CDs were. Feeling like a high school student, she pointed to a little wooden box beneath the bookshelves, and he got up, sat down on the floor, and started rummaging through the box. He was disappointed by her meager collection. She had some excellent recordings of classical pieces he liked, and a few wonderful jazz albums, but the selection seemed random, careless even, compared to his own.
“Find anything?” she asked, leaning over him. “I don’t have that many CDs.”
“No, but you have some good ones. What do you feel like listening to?”
“Whatever you feel like. You’re the guest.”
He pulled out a Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto album he hadn’t heard for years.
They sat across from each other in the room, which was lit with a yellow-orange glow from the floor lamp in the corner, sipped beer, reached out every so often for a handful of pistachios or cashews, and listened to Astrud Gilberto encouraging them in heavily accented English to fall in love, and Yonatan scanned the room over and over again and thought it was perfect. But soon the satisfied purring he could sense in his heart was disturbed by a shiver of the kind that runs down your back when you see something frightening or touching: What he saw was himself, lounging in an old armchair with his thin thighs touching each other and his new circumstantial potbelly rounding out each time he leaned forward to grab some nuts or toss the shells. It was a picture of his toadish unphotogenic self, moments before he had sex of near-historical dimensions.
He tried to fight it, but the effect gained rapid force, because now when he glanced around again, the room looked ridiculous, like a Hollywood set for a cheap love scene, and Shira too, as she sat across from him with her legs crossed on the couch and smoked and smiled at him when she saw him look at her, was suddenly a temptress, just as pathetic as he was. Attempting to calm himself, he reasoned he was simply misreading the situation: the golden light, which had a presence as thick as perfume, came just from a lamp, and the music, which he had chosen himself, was simply the backdrop for a conversation between friends. Shira was an attractive, talented woman he had met. That was all. And she was possibly the first woman he had met whose restlessness and sadness intrigued him so much that he wanted to explore them from the interior, to turn her inside out like a piece of clothing that, something told him, had similar stitches to his own.
“There’s such tension in the air,” she said suddenly.
“What?” he said.
“Tension. Don’t you feel it?”
“A little. I don’t know. What kind of tension?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, what? Tell me.” He tried to simulate subtlety and maturity.
“We’ve been sitting here for how long, fifteen minutes?”
“Yes. Something like that.” He was glad to grasp onto the minutiae. “So what?”
“I don’t know. Never mind.”
“We’ve been sitting here for fifteen minutes and what?” he asked.
“Nothing. It’s just … I don’t know. Nothing.”
“We’re shy like two little kids,” he said, and lit a cigarette.
“Like two little adults,” she said.
“Two big kids.”
“Do you want another beer?”
“Are you having one?”
“I haven’t finished this one yet.” She held up her bottle. “But I’ll get you one.” She got up and went to the kitchen, escaping the odd moment that stood between them, hoping it would dissipate by the time she returned. But Yonatan got up and followed her, as if he knew, as she did, that the kitchen was a safer place, that the tension, which had now turned to embarrassment, would not catch up with them there. “Would you like some coffee instead?” she asked.
“No. I’d like another beer actually, even though I’m kind of in love with your coffeepot.”
“Have you bought one yet?”
“No. I haven’t had time.”
“My ex bought it for me,” she said, and handed him a bottle. They went back to the living room, and he sat next to her on the couch.
The CD finished and she got up to change it, but he grabbed her hand and said, “Leave it,” and pulled her to him. She stood opposite him as he sat there, her knees touching his, her hand in his, her stomach at his eye level, motionless, waiting. She tried to concentrate on his hand, an old acquaintance, tried to restore the confidence it had infused her with earlier, at the gallery, but now she didn’t know what to do. They were no longer surrounded by a crowd from which she needed to protect herself, in front of which she could show off. There was no road to chart, no noise or suffocation, only silence and the claustrophobia of their awkwardness. She stood still, as if she were standing on a land mine.
He imagined himself lifting up her sweater and gently kissing her stomach. He saw himself grasping her ass with both hands and pulling her closer and closer to himself, until she put her hands on his shoulders or on his head, pushing and pulling him. But then he clearly saw the other things that awaited him, as present as her waiting body: the awkwardness that would follow, worse than the one they had just endured, the moment when he bent down to pick his clothes up off the floor, knowing he would take even less time to get dressed than he had to undress. He saw the afterward as a photomontage of this moment, of the room, of the furniture and the objects that would look different, and he disliked it and could already picture his walk home, to Dana, who was probably sprawled in front of the TV now, watching something stupid. He saw himself going to sleep, his body relaxed but his mind racing, and above all he saw himself getting up tomorrow and not knowing whether anything had changed in his life—he had never conducted such a harsh negotiation with himself over sex—and his definite sense that no, quite the opposite: that his routine had been shuffled like a deck of cards but it was still the same routine and it might now seem, at least for a few days, longer, less bearable.
“I’ll get up,” he said. “I saw a CD there before that looked interesting.” He leaped off the couch, bypassed her body planted opposite him like a road sign, and leaned over the CD box.
He drank his second beer from a safe distance, standing by the bookcase. He pulled out a book every so often and leafed through it, asking if she’d read it and what she thought of it. Her answers sounded impatient, and he thought she was hinting that she was tired, that it was time for him to leave. He sipped the last of his beer and put the bottle down on the table. “Great table,” he said. “If you ever want to get rid of it, keep me in mind.”
“I don’t think so,” she said dryly, staring at the floor.
“Okay, I’ll get going,” he said, and she got up from the couch, where she had been curled up within herself while he had perused her books.
As she walked him to the door, he thought perhaps he should say something about the steaks, set up a time, but he said nothing because he no longer knew if it would even happen. He suddenly felt as if he had already given up what he had been hoping to achieve by hosting the meal, and at the door he said, “Bye, then, and thanks for the invitation.”
“What invitation?”
“To the opening.”
“You’re welcome,” she said quietly, and they lingered a moment longer between the open door and the stairwell, which had the same smell as his own stairwell.
He sniffed and said, “Someone was frying something here tonight.”
“Yes, they’re always frying things here. It’s a frying sort of building.”
“Bye, then,” he said, and ran a f
inger over her arm.
“Good night,” she said, and closed the door after him.
As he walked down the steps he sensed relief, but when he got into his car he was overcome with a sadness that was so sudden, so familiar, that he sat motionless for a few moments, staring at the key in the ignition.
* * *
When he left, she suddenly felt very alert, as if over the last few days she had been snoozing in a hammock that Yonatan had been rocking and now she had tumbled to the ground. She looked around the room, which was dotted with leftovers of what had happened between them and what might have been: his cigarette butts in the ashtray, the beer bottles, the CD case. His rejection revealed itself to her in the tiny details. She knew the signs, especially the flight, the way he suddenly got up to go home as if prompted by some secret universal cue. Idan used to do it sometimes. They would be sitting in a bar, drinking, touching each other under the table, and just when she thought he was drunk enough, he would call the waitress and order the check, and when they went out into the street he would say he was beat—that was his favorite expression, “I’m beat”—hail a cab, kiss her on the cheek, say, “Good night,” and disappear.
She cleared the bottles and dishes off the table and thought perhaps she had only imagined the tension between them and that moment when he had grabbed her hand and said, “Leave it.” Or perhaps she had not imagined the tension but had misinterpreted it, and when he had told her to leave it, he had actually been trying to tell her to stop making plans around him. She shouldn’t have mentioned the tension, she thought. That was the turning point; that was where it all went wrong. On the other hand, she reasoned, a little fatalism wouldn’t do any harm. If something was supposed to happen, it would, with or without her slips of the tongue.